![]() Armies are allocated to you at the start of each campaign (numbering in the thousands), and it takes a certain level of tactical prowess and organisational skill to manipulate such huge forces well. It certainly has a historically accurate and original approach to the genre, although this is often at the expense of gameplay. The problem is that if you have as much interest in America's war-torn heritage as, say, a Canadian, the game quickly degenerates into a mindless click-fest around fields, searching for foreigners to bayonet. We can certainly see the appeal of Divided Nation: all of the historical battles are there, the uniforms and generals are authentic-looking, and even the maps are topographically correct. Nevertheless, GSC Game World has decided to drag us by the knees through a standalone expansion for its 19th century war game American Conquest. In fact, we've seen drunken scuffles outside The Pig Fancier's Arms of a Friday night that would make a more compelling backdrops for an RTS game. Now Let's Face it, the American civil war was not the most interesting of conflicts for a game. The problem is that there are so many great RTS games for PC this one struggles to live up to many that came before and after it. The game is technically fine enough and the AI puts up a decent challenge. Not to mention things like horse artillery and field fortifications which add to the scale of battles.Īs far as the actual gameplay goes, I feel that what we have here plays it pretty damn safe. The game also gives you a ton of new units to play around with as you wage war to. ![]() Being able to take part in the Battle of the Alamo was certainly awesome. The game gives you four nations in The Confederacy, The Union, The Republic of Texas and Mexico. I must admit that they went all-in with this expansion. While this game may not be as well thought of as games such as Civilization and Total War to name a couple. You also have a random map option where you can play on your own map or back in the day, you could download one. You can play a single mission that lets you jump in and play on through ten well thought out missions. Keeping You BusyĪs well as the campaign mode American Conquest: Divided Nation has other things for you to do as well. ![]() Still, the setting alone made it something I actually wanted to play all the way through. The game has a very “historic” feeling about it, but it lacks the cinematic flair that other real time strategy games have. I for one, am very happy with the direction ES chose to go.Here you get to play the role of a general in the Civil War and try to lead them to battle. So, to do that you have compromise somewhere, so ES chose to minimize issues by reducing the population cap. If your going to sell millions of games,you have to design games that can operate on the older, less powerful systems as well. Yes, newer computers are miles ahead of the stuff available in the mid-90s, but you can't just design games to play only on the latest technology/systems. The thing that made ES's games, the AOE series, so much more interesting and fun was the combining of the micro and macro aspects of the different games available, at the time they introduced their first game. They remind me of the "brain dead playing" mentality that was required to play early generation games like "asteroids", fun at first but very repetitive and boring after awhile. They seem so impersonal,"slash and crash" and lacked the ability for the player to be creativity and become engrossed in the game. Just build monster armies and bang on each other. Personally, I don't care much for the massive armies games. ![]() I recognize your issue wasn't so much the natives as it was the use of massive forces/civilizations. Don't you think modern PCs are powerful enough to support large armies in games? Why the handicap? I still dream of a future AoE which will offer a huge standing army. Since AoE-III came 2 years after AC, I thought that a player would get more than 200 population, but it didn't happen. You could have 2000+ strong army there and also big maps. Now, American Conquest had specifically that! (note that I am definitely not trying to promote AC in any way - just a remark for discussion). ![]() I had expected (wrongly) that one of the things the next AoE sequel would have, among others, would be an extension in population limit, because I felt larger armies make the game more flexible - you would deploy some regiments in defence, some to attack, and some as backup. You see, I feel that AoE-II The Conquerors was the best in the series (others may differ on this). But I think I didn't articulate my views properly. Your point was right on the button - agree that both games are bound to have similarities. ![]()
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