Banners & Crowns

About Banners & Crowns

Banners & Crowns is a turn-based medieval strategy game, developed and published by EDOBGames, which is played on a living low-poly isometric map. The world begins hidden by white clouds and every unit you send out lifts them to reveal cities, resources, and rival kingdoms. The game is available on Windows 10 and Windows 11 (64-bit) on Steam, which it is currently in Early Access on, as the developer's stated reason for doing so was to collect feedback on AI balance, difficulty, and season pacing before the final version. The current build is said to be playable from beginning to end, including the full campaign, skirmish mode, daily realm, and royal treasury.

The central loop is built around exploration, expansion, and survival, as you found cities, research technologies, raising armies, and deciding how to deal with your neighbours as friends, tributaries, or targets. Eight kingdoms share the same land, each with their own ruler, favourite troop type, and national perks. The playable realms include the Peacemaker's Aldoria, the iron fortress of Valmere, the orchards of Sylvane, the merchants of Oakhaven, and Kharn's raiders, plus three rival kingdoms you encounter during play. Each kingdom has a different model for their ruler and a different set of advantages that change how a campaign or skirmish plays.

The four seasons are the game's most distinctive mechanic, with spring healing your units, summer being the season for marching, autumn doubling the harvest, and winter freezing rivers, opening routes that were previously impassable, thinning supply lines outside your borders, and being a hazard for any unit still standing on the ice when it melts. The seasonal cycle dictates when to attack, when to consolidate, and when to retreat, and forces you to plan around the calendar rather than treating every turn the same way.

Heroes provide a persistent progression layer, as your hero gains levels and skills which are carried from chapter to chapter in the campaign, which gives the nine-chapter storyline a sense of continuity. Each kingdom's ruler has their own model, favourite troop, and perks, and the hero system is tied into the broader combat layer rather than existing as a separate RPG bolted onto the strategy map.

Diplomacy is a full system rather than a token gesture, as you can now meet the other kingdoms, sign peace for eight rounds, form alliances, send tribute, or seal a pact with a royal marriage. Breaking your word damages your honour which implies consequences for future negotiations. Combat makes use of walls, sieges, and flanking, pikes stop cavalry, walls protect cities, catapults ignore walls, and units that surround an enemy hit harder, providing a rock-paper-scissors logic which rewards composition and position rather than brute numbers.

Random events keep campaigns from settling into a routine, as plague, bandits, mercenary companies, travelling fairs, and bountiful harvests can all change your plans from round to round, forcing you to react rather than execute a pre-planned build order. City building goes from hamlet to walled fortress, with farms, mines, lumber huts, fishing docks, markets, infirmaries, roads, and bridges to develop your realm.

The Modes and features cover a substantial amount of content for an Early Access title. The Campaign includes nine chapters with briefings, objectives, and star ratings, ending with a conquest of the entire realm on a huge map. Skirmish lets you choose your kingdom, pick or randomise your rivals, set the map size from tiny to huge (up to 8 kingdoms on a 30x30 map), and have four difficulty levels. Daily Realm gives every player the same seed for the day, which is a common feature in strategy games for comparing runs. The Royal Treasury lets you spend earned glory on sixteen permanent boons, and the Kingdoms section is an encyclopaedia of the eight rulers with their lore and strengths. The game also includes adjustable object sizes on the map, an optional classic 2D map, autosave every round. It is a single-player experience with mouse and keyboard controls.

System requirements are modest, with the minimum being Windows 10 (64-bit), a 2.0 GHz dual-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, any GPU with WebGL 2 support (integrated graphics are sufficient on small and medium maps), and 1 GB of available storage. The recommended configuration is Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), a 3.0 GHz quad-core processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a dedicated GPU, because large and huge maps draw around 400,000 triangles. The game is a paid title on Steam, currently at a 10% launch discount during its introductory offer, and the developer has said there are no current plans to change the price when the game leaves Early Access.

Practical considerations for anyone downloading Banners & Crowns: the game is in Early Access and the balance of AI opponents, kingdoms, heroes, and difficulty levels is still being tuned, with the developer having specifically noted that AI opponents "tend to accumulate gold late in long games," which is an area targeted for refinement. The content is complete and playable, but the final version is expected to be a more polished and balanced version of the current build. The game does not support Simplified Chinese at the time of writing, and the Steam page advises checking the supported language list before purchasing. The map generation is pre-generator and shipped in the build, and the developers say that no real people's likenesses or voices are used. If you prefer to wait for a finished product, the Early Access period is expected to run for roughly 6 to 12 months, but the current build already offers the full campaign and skirmish experience.

Alternatives include Civilization VI and Civilization VII, for a broader 4X strategy game with a longer established history; Age of Wonders 4, for turn-based fantasy strategy with deep faction customisation; Songs of Conquest, for a turn-based strategy game with a retro-inspired aesthetic and kingdom management; Heroes of Might and Magic III, the classic turn-based strategy game that Banners & Crowns shares some design DNA with; Warlock: Master of the Arcane, for a lighter 4X experience; and Endless Legend, for a turn-based 4X game with distinct factions and seasonal mechanics. For players who want a focused turn-based medieval strategy game that uses a seasonal mechanic, diplomacy, and siege systems, and a complete single-player campaign in an Early Access build, Banners & Crowns is a promising option. Download Banners & Crowns from Steam for the current Early Access build, and follow the developer's updates if you want to see how the balance and AI evolve before the final release.