YMMV / Lords of the Realm 2

• Game-Breaker:
  • Armies consisting solely of macemen can defeat everything other than archers well protected by terrain and/or pikemen. Even if you're outnumbered, the enemy army usually contains a large group of peasants, which fall like a hot knife through butter against macemen. And even in sieges, though macemen are vulnerable to archer fire, they are also fast, so can move out of an oil cauldron's fire attack faster than pikemen can, resulting in fewer casualties if you are quick enough to respond. They are also the cheapest units to produce, so are easily replaced.
  • Back in its multiplayer heyday, abuse of the Good Bad Bugs below could be very game breaking. If veteran players didn't want a farce of a match where the map was flooded with one-man armies, the only other option was to play honorably and not abuse the bugs.
  • A great way to passively cripple the AI is when you're in a state where you don't care about conquering any more land, send small armies out to pillage their villages and destroy their fields. This will severely lower the morale of citizens in that land to the point where they will revolt against the lord who owns it. As there's very little a lord can do to appease those people, they will lose the land. Since the rules to win are that only one lord remains standing, not that he or she has to conquer everything, this makes for a cheap strategy.
• Good Bad Bugs: There are several:
  • Normally you can't create an army of less than 50 men. However, if you try to garrison a castle that can't hold your entire army, the game allows you to split the army in order to provide troops for said castle. You can send 1 troop (or even zero!◊) in there, then select the castle and have the 1-man unit exit. A literal One-Man Army isn't very useful in combat, but they are extremely useful in destroying enemy fields, villages, and economic areas such as blacksmiths.
  • If you want to delay an enemy force either because you're attempting to have a castle built in time in the county, or so a bigger army can arrive to deal with them, you can use a smaller army to bait them. The enemy army will always move to where your army's location is at during the beginning of each season. If you're quick enough, you can move your army away from that spot, and the enemy army won't move again until the next turn. Repeat until you can get a relief army to take them on, or get a castle built in time for them to siege and throw their army away against your defenses. Keep in mind if you do Save Scumming, they can move again, so be prepared to move your unit again or it'll be forced to fight them.
  • If the enemy lords are using small armies to destroy enemy fields, you can use Save Scumming to allow them to destroy several during one season. After they move over a field to destroy it, save the game, then reload it immediately. If they can still move, they will move onto the next field. Doing this allows the enemy to cripple each other so you can defeat them more easily. However, keep in mind this also means you have to spend time rebuilding said destroyed fields if you take it over shortly afterwards.
  • Save Scumming can also be used to get replies from nobles in the same season, rather than waiting until the next one.
  • If you own at least 7 counties, raising all of their taxes to 50% causes their happiness to go into negative numbers, such as -160 happiness, and eventually rollover into high happiness, about +120. This results in counties being happy about being taxed extremely high. Though they will be unhappy one or two turns, when you go into the next turn, they will be extremely happy again. Useful if you want to build up a lot of money quickly, and see weird results from it.
  • You normally can only have a max of 1500 men in an army, and if you try to combine a larger force, the game won't let you. However, there is a Loophole Abuse in that there's no limit on how big you can conscript an army with in a county. When you disband an army, normally they go back to wherever they are from, such as "An army from Italy" going back to the Italy county. However, if you split them up, the split-off unit will usually say something along the lines of "An army from Aliens", or "Here be Dragons!", or "Barbarian tribes". This means that whichever county that army is in when disbanded, will join the population in that county. So if you split up, then recombine several thousand man armies in one county, then disband them all, said county's population can suddenly spike to several thousand. You can then conscript an army from that county, which will then have several thousand soldiers in it. Useful late game when you want to auto-calc siege battles against larger castles, or just destroy small enemy armies with your mega-army of 6000 soldiers.
  • The game assumes that if you're upgrading a castle, you already have a fully-operational version of whatever castle is one level below what you are upgrading to. If you order your peasants to start work on a Wooden Palisade, then to start work on a Motte and Bailey, all the way to a Royal Castle, you will be able to defend your county in a free Stone Castle.
  • Pausing the game while dumping boiling oil on your enemies produces two odd and very useful effects. Normally, when dumping boiling oil you choose a direction and it creates a line of flame. When the game is paused, you can choose unlimited directions; when the game is unpaused, the flame will fan out in a devastating wave. Also, while the flame from a standard boiling oil lasts a few seconds and fades, boiling oil dumped while paused creates a permanent 'killing field' that will continue to kill besiegers until they leave the area. Careful placement of this effect can quickly turn the tide of a battle.
• Scrappy Mechanic: There is almost no way to take over a neutral county peacefully, even if you have a 1500 strong army of knights and they can only muster 100 peasants, they will insist on fighting you. This is a royal pain in the ass as you end up wiping out a large proportion of the county population which cripples the county's production for several turns while they recover.
  • The sole exception is if the county has a very small population, such as less than 25 villagers. More than likely you will automatically take over that county when you move your troops to the town center. However, if the population is that low, chances are its lands are in ruins, with little to no food, and the people's health are likely average or sick. If there isn't a merchant standing in that county, rebuilding it will be really tough if you didn't send supplies to the county beforehand, so don't be surprised if they kick you out shortly afterwards due to low happiness.
• Sequel Displacement: Admittedly, the big "2" in the title is a hint, but the second game was far more popular. You'll notice that Lords Of The Realm is still a red link.