After finishing Retold, I was curious to compare it to the 10-year-old Extended Edition and try out the Tale of the Dragon expansion that was made for it. I now see why Tale of the Dragon has a 33% rating on Steam and wasn't included in Retold. It's really terrible. I'm four missions in and haven't enjoyed any of them. It seems like they wanted it to be extra challenging, so they made it so that the AI sends unending waves of enemies from multiple directions to attack you very early on. That forces you to devote many of your resources and peasants to building towers, walls and military units just to defend yourself, then run your small army back and forth to deal with each wave, then take your peasants away from resources again to try to repair those towers and walls before the next wave hits. Sometimes, the missions don't even allow you to build walls, and I've yet to be allowed to train a monk to heal my besieged units. At least two of the mission objectives were even just "survive the onslaught until X." It feels more like I'm playing a tower defense game than an RTS, and not even the good kind of tower defense. It's just not fun. There was probably no fixing it, either, because the issue is mostly in the mission design, so I see why the Retold folks didn't bother trying and are just doing a brand new Chinese campaign DLC, instead. I'm looking forward to that. I'm not sure if I'll even finish Tale of the Dragon.
Edit: I finished it. When I read that there are only 9 missions and I was almost halfway through, I just ploughed on. There were two decent missions in the last 5, so it got a little better, but not much. It's still a bad campaign that isn't worth playing.
