Customer Rating: 
Summary: An all-time classic
Comment: This may be the ultimate classic of its type. Any history of gamimg would have to give considerable prominence to this game. I have not played it in several years but I remember it with great affection. It dates from when Sierra was still producing memorable games. LotR III marks the point where Sierra began producing garbage. Avoid it.
If your computer will handle LotR2, buy it. It's not up to modern standards of graphics and complexity but you will not find more fun anywhere.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A medieval strategy classic - not to be missed
Comment: First off, let me just say that this is really great game. An original, fun, addictive, realistic, and stylish masterpiece. The graphics are a little bit outdated, but they were cutting-edge for their time and are still cool to look at. The gameplay combines real-time strategy battle action (a la warcraft) with management-style strategy (counties, army movements, castle building, farming and resource management, along with population and happiness). Both sides of the game are very enjoyable (although the AI and control of the RTS side could use some improvement. but it's still fun). What makes this game stand out most, however, is its atmosphere & setting. It is very original and unique, in that, despite its' medieval setting, it is very realistic, and you truly feel like you are a noble back in the 1200s. This is my favorite aspect of this game (an aspect that they obliterated in the sequel, sadly)- I am not one who shys away from historically-based games (like assasin's creed, and this), and this one captures that era masterfully. The european-medieval music that accompanies you in the background is some of my favorite videogame music to date. This is the game's intro, which should give you an idea of both the graphics and the feel and style of the game:
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[edit] - Ok, I guess you can't put links in amazon reviews. If you want to see it go to youtube and search for lords of the realm II intro.
So, just like starcraft, the fact that this game is old shouldn't deter you at all from buying and enjoying it. If you love medieval-related stuff, strategy games, management games, or just plain having fun, you should go get this.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Strat Ever!!!
Comment: This is the best game ever!
I have played it for thousands of hours, and to think, I bought it in 1996!
I have purchased and played hundreds of games over the last 20 or so years and this is the best, of them all.
It's in-depth and complex game play more than make up for it's ancient graphics.
I would gladly pay $100+ for a graphics updated version of my favorite game of all time! The $20 I spent on the original has paid for thousands and thousands of hours of entertainment, I played it yesterday! IN 2008!!! This game is 12yrs old and still rocks the house...
LOTR 3, which I was excited about for years and bought in advance, was terrible.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Best Lord of the Realm game
Comment: You may not be able to find a new copy anymore, but this one is worth hunting down. It's definitely the best out of all of the Lord of the Realm games. It contains both turn-based and real-time strategy elements. The turn-based portions are very impressive, but the real-time elements are not. The game is extremely easy to learn but still strategic and you can become very comfortable with it in an hour's time, so if you're still trying to make sense of the "Hearts of Iron" player's manual, this game is for you.
In this game, you start with one territory and seek to take control of all of the others. You must allocate peasants to various tasks such as farming, ranching, mining, castle-building, and blacksmithing. You must also recruit soldiers from your peasant population and you have to equip them with weapons which can be either made or bought. You must also worry about the tax rate. Income is very important, but high taxes (along with disease and lack of food) make peasants unhappy and they may revolt. Revolts can be easily dealt with, so it's usually beneficial to play with a heavy hand. You must also worry about diplomacy. It's good to keep a few rivals happy and to be aggressive to a few others. However, you don't get to fully control the diplomacy of the country since even rivals that you are good to are quick to backstab you. In addition to your rivals, you have to worry about other random events like droughts and disease. Overall, there are enough elements (this was a non-exhaustive list) to keep things strategic but not so much as to overwhelm the player and you'll keep tweaking your strategy. Personally, I commonly destroy my enemies' cattle and farmland and starve them to death, which makes taking over the county much easier, but it makes it harder to build it back up once you gain control of it.
When two armies go into battle, it is done in real-time. You have the option to auto-calculate results but experienced players will have better outcomes if they handle the battle manually. Unfortunately, the battles are short, the tactics are very simple, and there are no "races" so you'll be fighting very similar forces. Siege battles are kind of fun, but overall I was disappointed with the real-time elements due to the shortness of battles and lack of depth.
One of the nicest things about this game is the user-interface during the turn-based portions. They give you slider controls to manage things and they also provide you with all of the relevant statistics that you need. The interface is extremely intuitive. As such, you can probably learn the game easily without even reading the manual.
There are different difficulty settings, but I didn't find any of them too challenging. If you crank up the difficulty all of the way, you'll be met with a decent challenge; for expert players, the challenge may not be quite enough.
Overall, it's a very nice light strategy game. If the real-time elements had been more impressive, I would have given it five stars.
Note: Runs just fine on XP. Does not run on Windows 2000. I haven't tried it on Vista, but I have a feeling that it won't run. It is an old game.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This one takes me back
Comment: This was one of the first games I really loved (along with Master of Orion and X-COM). It's graphics were pretty good at the time, but it's turnbased gameplay was very addicting. I never finished the game back when I was in college, but I will buy a copy now and try to get through it in 2006. Should be quite nostalgic!
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