This is one of the best games I’ve ever played.
As a brief summary of the game:
Imagine a cross between the resource gathering of the Age of Empires, the management of SimCity and the strategy of Civilization.
You start out with a country or Flagship, and must colonise islands and defeat players.
The main mechanic in the game is resource management. You create houses for peasants to move in, and must satisfy their needs; Food, Drink, Company and Faith.
As these needs are met, the peasants will advance to citizens, patricians and finally noblemen.
The needs start out very simple. The food is fish, the Drink is cider, the Company is a market, and the faith is a chapel.
As the populace grows, the get more needy. Citizens want spice, better clothes, and tavern for entertainment.
These needs grow more and more, until noblemen want about a dozen things, each of which require resources.
The raw resources are generally grown in farms or mined/gathered from a resource spot. These resources then need to be refined (often with other resources) into the final product.
One of the problems is that an island only has so many resources, the resources aren’t always on the same islands, and almost certainly aren’t where the people are.
Added to this is the separation between north and south. The north regions are european, and contain those sorts of resources (wheat, hemp, hops, trees), while the southern islands are more middle eastern, containing spices, quartz, indigo, dates.
Also, the only people who live in the southern islands are the “nomads” and “envoys”, who have different needs to the european people, so you end up managing two different populations.
Some of the resources required for the northerners can only be found on southern islands, such as spice, quartz and indigo, which are used for food, glass-making, and book-making respectively.
This requires you to set up trade routes, and creatively use the islands’ fertilities, raw materials and trade routes.
To sum up the resource section, you will likey need the following to manufacture a single piece of glass:
- a Warehouse
- a Luberjack’s hut
- a shipyard
- a stonemason
- an iron mine
- a coal burners hut
- an iron smelter
- a toolmaker
- a hemp plantation
- a ropemaker
- a quartz mine
- a forest glassworks (to make potash)
- a glassmaker
- As well as enough patricians, with all the lower classes needs satisfied to unlock the above!
The rest of the game is comparatively simple. The only real-time-combat is on the open sea. Land battles are carried out by moving camps of troops within range of other camps of troops and attacking.
You can also manufacture war machines to aid in the effort. This is the area of the game i spent the least time in. There are also things like natural disasters, pirate attacks, and small quests (take x of y to point z, mostly).
The primary system to the NPCs is “honour”. You gain this through achieving tasks, doing quests, and trading. You can use honour to unlock additional resources for trade, and unlocking the southern architecture. You use it like money, trading “x” honour for whatever it is that you want.
There are also items, that can be used to strenghthen ships, increase storage or efficiency if a resource, or change the fertilities of an island. Most of these items are bought with honour, though you can find some by destroying enemy ships.
This game takes a long time to do much in. The “easiest” premade scenario (“Get 5000 population, 2000 nobles, and $150,000″) took me eight hours to complete. This is partly due to my lack of experience, as i used this scenario to learn about the game. The game, however, knows it takes a long time, as it tells you every two hours to take a break, with pre-recorded messages (“You’ve been playing for two hours, how about a cup of coffee?”, “You’ve been playing for 6 straight ours. It’s a pity we can’t give you a medal for it”). I personally love the messages, and think its a great system, one of a only a few I’ve seen, and one of two that remind you in the game (as opposed to loading screens), and the only one with actual voice messages, rather than text on the screen/in logs.
The only problem with it (perhaps) is that it doesn’t reset the counter after pauses/menus. So I might have a break at the 4 hour mark, pause it, come back and in two hours get a message that ive been playing for six. While this allows me to hear new messages, its also a little inaccurate.
You won’t mind spending hours in this world though, as it is spectacularly beautiful. The models are superb, the animations for the townsfolk and all of the resource making are incredible, the trees sway in the wind, and the seas, Oh! the seas. The sea is the most realistic rendering I’ve seen outside of big budget movies, and it even puts some of them to shame.
Surprisingly the graphics, while superb, aren’t a computer-stopper. My rig (3Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4Gb DDR800, nVidia 9800GT, Windows 7 Pro 64-bit) handled it in 1920:1200, at full graphics and 8Q anti-aliasing without a hiccup, though 16Q dropped the framerate a bit, I didn’t notice a difference in quality.
The game is in full 3D, as expected in this day and age, and will let you view the world from any angle, which is very well managed.
The music, while nothing spectacular (mostly generic civ-music), suits it well, and is in no way “bad”, just not quite as breathtaking as some games.
In short: If you like managing resources, building empires, or making trade routes, this game is for you.
