Hall Of Banners Is A Different Game Under Its Total Conversion

This is the entry that forced us to think about what a second score even means. Moorland Reach with its mods is recognisably the game that shipped, improved. Hall Of Banners under its conversion is not the same game at all — the map is the same, the art is the same, and essentially every rule has been rewritten.

We nearly declined to score it. What decided us was that the conversion is what the overwhelming majority of the game's remaining players actually play, and a publication that reviews the version nobody uses is not being rigorous, it is being pedantic.

The shipped game and its forty-turn cliff

For its first forty turns the base game is genuinely good. Provinces have distinct outputs, the levy system forces real choices between fielding an army and keeping your fields worked, and the diplomacy screen presents information clearly.

Then the compounding starts. Trade income scales with the number of connected provinces rather than with anything that constrains it, so the fourth conquest funds the fifth twice over. By turn ninety we had four times the income of every other faction combined and the campaign had become an administrative exercise. We finished it. We did not enjoy the last sixty turns of it.

What the conversion changed

Three systems, rebuilt from the configuration layer up.

The economy. Trade income now scales with route length and is capped by the administrative capacity of your capital, which must be expanded at a cost that itself scales. The runaway is gone: at turn one hundred and forty our income was roughly twice the second-place faction rather than four times the field.

Diplomacy. The base game's opinion value became a set of five separate relationships, each with its own decay, so a neighbour can trust your borders and distrust your succession simultaneously. This is more complex and it is the change we would least want to give up.

Units. Every one of the sixty-three units was re-costed and most were re-roled. Heavy infantry are no longer the answer to every question, and the levy troops the base game treats as filler have a genuine place in a line.

The documentation is the surprising part

The conversion ships with a change log of roughly ninety pages explaining not merely what was altered but why, including the arithmetic behind the new trade formula and a record of two earlier attempts that were abandoned.

We have read the base game's own patch notes for the same period. They are three sentences per update. A volunteer team has documented its design reasoning more thoroughly than the studio documented the original, and anybody who has tried to work out why a strategy game does something will understand how unusual that is.

Ninety pages of design rationale from a volunteer team, against three sentences per patch from the studio. The conversion is better documented than the game it modifies.

What the conversion does not fix

The battle interface is untouched and remains poor: unit cards are too small to read at a glance, the formation controls require three clicks for a manoeuvre that should take one, and there is no way to queue orders. The conversion team have said this is outside what configuration can reach, and we believe them.

Siege resolution is also unchanged and still resolves too quickly, which under the new economy matters more rather than less — a well-defended capital should be a genuine obstacle and it takes four turns.

Why grade A rather than A+

Text-based rules, a stable configuration layer, and eight updates in two years without breaking the conversion once. That is very good.

It is not A+ because the interface and battle logic are compiled and unreachable, which places a hard ceiling on what any conversion can achieve here. The best mod for this game cannot fix its worst screen, and that is an architectural decision rather than an oversight.

The two verdicts

As shipped, 6.5. Forty good turns followed by a hundred of administration. A well-presented strategy game with a broken economic curve at its centre.

Converted, 8.6. The same map governed by rules that hold up for three hundred turns, with a diplomacy model better than most games ship. Held back only by the compiled parts nobody can touch.