A dose of history
From the makers of Cossack comes a new real-time strategy game- American Conquest. This is a GSC Gameworks offering that gives you detailed gameplay, massive battles and educates players with its historical depth. Spanning an enormous amount of eight historical campaigns filled with a total of 42 missions for the single player mode, you will find yourself immersed in North America from its birth to its independence.
Being Chris Columbus
In the game, you will start by traveling as Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1813. The campaigns in the game comprise Columbus’ Voyage, Pizarro’s Raids, The Seven Years’ War, Tecumseh’s Rebellion, and The American War for Independence. In some of the campaigns, you will be able to play on both sides of the conflict. You could be playing on the side of the British to quell any rebellion by the Americans or in a later campaign, play on the side of the Colonists and fight against the British.
Interesting missions
Most of the mission types consist of capturing enemy bases, building bases and attacking, defending your own base for a certain time limit, locating allies and exploring territories. There are enough variations of the mission types to keep the game interesting.
Units in the game are such that one soldier represents one soldier, meaning that if you have one troop with 40 soldiers, you will see 40 tiny soldiers fighting. If you have a massive battle, you will see a massive number of soldiers on the screen doing battle for you. Hence, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of troops fighting on screen at any given time.
Boosting morale
Like most Real Time Strategy (RTS) games, it is of paramount importance to have a good mix of melee and range units fighting for you. Each different troop has a different weakness that you need to complement by using another class of troop. Therefore, a good mix of troops is a key factor in fighting. Morale is another important factor and you can deploy standard bearers to maintain your morale.
You will find that you need an immense amount of troops just to fight one single battle. Capturing a building can take upwards of 50 soldiers and fighting major skirmishes could take up to a couple of hundred soldiers. So it is quite a treat to see hundreds of individual units at a time fighting on screen.
Poor AI!
Unfortunately, the AI in the game needs some reworking. Instead of building a massive army of troops to attack you, the computer just sends out endless streams of troops to harass and attack you. While it hampers your building efforts, it will hardly bring your empire down. It’s more of a nuisance than a danger to your empire. Also, your own troops will mindlessly chase and hunt down the enemies all over the map if you do not set the unit to stand ground. I lost quite a number of troops this way when they decided to chase the enemies all over the map and ended up dead when they faced a large number of them, especially near enemy territories.
Harmless wildlife…not
Wildlife is a constant treat to your own people too. They are pretty aggressive and powerful. Do not write off a deer as harmless as even these doe-eyed creatures will sometimes come out of the woods and attack your troops. Beware!
Entertaining and educational
Even with its couple of flaws, American Conquest still has most of the ingredients to make a good RTS game. It is unique enough, and most RTS fans and history buffs will find it interesting enough to give it a shot. On top of that, it also features a map editor, which means that fans of the game are likely to be setting up websites and giving their own custom made map a chance to be played. Now isn’t that awesome?
INFORMATION ABOUT THIS CONTENT:
Originally posted: khabal.com (LINK) (ARCHIVED)
Date of publish: 01.04.2003
Author: Shawshank
Language of publish: english