.

[sigard]

.

 

[Parsifarka]

Rise of Legends

 

[Kabas]

Warlords Battlecry series
1. 4 types of mines(gold, stone, metal and crystal) your hero and commanders must claim and fill with workers for extra income. Forgot if whose are finite but you can also destroy them for resource denial.
2. It has few missions in which you're not allowed to build a base, the third game has a bit more of these. In the second game it's mostly events like "drunken dwarfs are attacking your province!" or "A fiery demon challenges you to 1-on-1 duel". Some hero classes like merchant are focused entirely on base building.
3. The last third game have 17 races to choose from

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Battle Realms

 

[coldcrow]

War Wind 1&2. I forgot if there was resource mining or not, though.

 

[Space Satan]

Dark Reign

 

[Lovecraft's Ghost]

Help codexia!

At the turn of the millennium there was a small British game development studio based in south London consisting of defectors from Eidos that made a severely underrated strategy game that could, if it had gained traction, rivalled Creative Assembly. The same year Medieval: Total War was released with its sprite graphics Warrior Kings went gold. Instead of completely striking out against the conventions of the genre, such as base building, resource collection and so forth, they made the same journey to grand battles as the Total War series without dropping these fundamentals. It had large maps, units that were controllable individually but that they player was able to group into large formations, height being even more important than in Total War, fully 3D graphics with a completely rotatable camera and a branching singleplayer campaign. As per your requirements there are resources that run out, such as lumber and stone, but also farming that is an attractive target for shutting down economies.

Black Cactus
Interview - we talk to Black Cactus about their impressive looking 3D strategy game Warrior Kings

Hidden away in a dark corner of Sierra's stand at ECTS 2000, far from the flashing lights and explosions of Tribes 2 and the ill-fated Dreamcast port of Half-Life, was a 3D strategy game called Warrior Kings. At the time it was looking fairly crude, but the promise was certainly there. This year the game was back at ECTS in a more complete form and was looking impressive enough to grab our unofficial "game of the show" award. We caught up with developers Black Cactus to find out what they've been up to since then...

Making The Game
"At ECTS 2000 we really only had a first pass engine and some of the graphics, the basic movement and formation movement code and some very simple game mechanics", Black Cactus admitted. "In the year between our first and second ECTS events, we've made a game!" Although it has only recently been transformed from a tech demo into a fully functioning game, Warrior Kings has actually been in development in one form or another for a few years now, with the first elements of the design being laid down at Eidos perhaps as far back as 1996. "We started with a design spec that was written by Dave Morris, author and game designer. To a certain extent, everything that's been added to that original spec has been inspired by games that the other designers have played." It's no great surprise to discover that Ensemble's hit medieval strategy game Age of Empires is high on that list. "Charlie Bewsher, the Lead Designer, and Steve Bristow, designer and project manager, spend a lot of time playing RTS games, and certainly the Age of Empires series are games that we've spent many happy hours playing. Total Annihilation and Command & Conquer are up there too. When we brought the other designers on board - Nick Ricks (Bullfrog), Andy Trowers (Bullfrog, Lego) and Mike West (Pure) - their own personal influences were assimilated too. I think there are a lot of influences in Warrior Kings that go beyond RTS games; Zelda has always cropped up in conversations about the RPG elements of the game, certainly in terms of structure and storytelling. Beyond that, there are many films and books that have crept in too."

All Change
The last year has also seen a change of publisher. Just nine months after unveiling the game at ECTS 2001, Sierra unexpectedly dropped Warrior Kings, saying that "the title will not fit into the current 2001 release schedule and strategy". Fellow French company Microids soon snapped up rights to the game, and although (or perhaps because) they are a much smaller publisher, Black Cactus seem to be happy with the move. "I'd say that Microids are much nearer to a developer's perspective than Sierra", they told us. "Our producer Jean-Francois Roy is an ex-designer and has really helped move the game forward and infected the team with his enthusiasm. We've got a much better sense of 'making a game' rather than 'producing a product' since we've been with Microids." The game has certainly come together well in the last year, and the version which we saw in action back at the beginning of September looked to be fully playable. "By ECTS 2001 we had got the engine finalised, pretty much all of the basic game mechanics functional and the majority of the campaign complete. Since then we've primarily been working on balancing, completing the campaign and adding all the nice polish like camera paths and so on."

Polish
That polishing is taking longer than anticipated though. When Sierra first announced that Warrior Kings wouldn't fit into their 2001 release schedule we were a little surprised, as Microids insisted that the game would still be released in November as had originally been planned. As it turns out though Sierra were right, and Microids recently revealed that the game's release date had been pushed back from November to February 8th. "We could have released a game in November, but neither we nor Microids really want to release a game, we want to release the game", Black Cactus explained. "The extra time is for us to really polish what we've got. It's not about completing features (and certainly not adding them), we just want to get what we already have absolutely nailed." Certainly it seems more sensible to release a polished game in the February lull than to rush it out and get lost in the flood of new titles in the run up to Christmas, and the three months delay gives more time for meticulous testing. "There's no substitute for time spent testing. We don't want to be releasing patches while the game is hitting the shelves and, at the end of the day, we're not in a mad rush. We expect our relationship with Microids to last a while yet and we've got sequels on the starting blocks already."

Bells And Whistles
One area which should particularly benefit from the extra testing and polish is the unique multiplayer support. Most real-time strategy games have a peer-to-peer networking system, but Warrior Kings will feature a full Quake-style client-server system for online and LAN play, meaning that you can host games on dedicated servers. "The software is client / server and any machine can be the server, including a client without any performance issues. We have limited the number of players to eight, but this is only to do with distinguishing between opponents. Even with ultra high quality monitors and graphics cards we found it difficult to clearly identify more than eight player colours. We are also presently talking with a game hosting company to offer the normal lobby and league tables etc." Multiplayer isn't the only strongpoint of the homegrown engine which powers Warrior Kings, and Black Cactus are justifiably proud of it. "It's full of bells and whistles, and we believe it is the most advanced 3D technology used in a real-time strategy game. But we are not hooked on the technological aspect of the game engine, for us it is a tool. There have been many games in the past and there will be in the future that have excellent technology but no gameplay. For us the important thing is the game, so even though we have a world beating 3D technology, we prefer to focus on the game." And next week that's exactly what we will be doing, as we talk to Black Cactus again about some of the gameplay elements that make up Warrior Kings, including character development and experience, the multiple paths through the game's single player campaign and the importance of sieges and economic warfare.

Three Kings
Testing and play balancing is no doubt being made more complex by the game's three "alignments" - Celestials, Pagans and Renaissance technocrats. Instead of forcing players to pick a faction from the menu when they start the game, Warrior Kings has a more flexible system where your actions determine which units you gain access to and how you progress through the campaign. "The player will build certain structures that open up and close down paths in the tech tree; for example, a church will open up the Celestial side and close down some of the Pagan side. In the single player game there are also several decisions the player makes that affect the story path he follows. You can react differently to challenges you come across, changing the story and your race, making each play through a unique experience. It is really up to the player how their race will develop along the paths." "There are three main alignments, but also in-between paths, so it's possible to share certain elements of different alignments. There are cut off points so once you select you can not go back again, but that is there for positive gameplay, to keep the game moving forward. We think this approach gives the player a huge amount of extra strategy to play with during the game, and players will really have to keep an eye on how their opponents are developing."

Are You Experienced?
It's not just your technology and alignment that develop during the course of the game either. "Units gain experience though combat, and we hope that this will bring an additional edge to the game - will I sacrifice my elite units, or should I use cannon fodder?" Of course, this isn't the first time that somebody has implemented experience for units in a real-time strategy game, but it could prove more important in Warrior Kings than other games because of the scale of the battles. "Our maps are very very big, many times larger than in any other real-time strategy game you have seen. These maps are divided up through the use of missions, alliances, quests in search of technology, magic or new unit types. Many traditional 'upgrades' are made available through the narrative as quests or tasks, which is a refreshing change from your average RTS. You keep all your units throughout these large maps, and you're going to need them." "Now between these maps it's a different matter; you keep key units, like the hero Artos, but the idea of each new map is to offer a new set of challenges rather than just more of the same. Most levels start with very few units, around twenty to forty. Some will require you to create an economy, some will have fully developed economies and some will have you sending raiding parties to your opponent's carts and villages, stealing food to supply your army. So to allow you to carry your whole army from one map to another would cause the player all sorts of problems if the make up of his army was not suitable for the tasks at hand, and we feel it would deflate the player if he thought he had to replay the whole of the last level just to get an army of a certain type."

Siege Artillery
Black Cactus "have been sceptical about the reduction, or even removal, of the economic aspect of real-time strategy games", and as such your economy is vital in Warrior Kings. Economic warfare and raiding can be just as important as frontal assaults, which "opens up a whole host of strategic and tactical options" according to the developers. "We hope players will be able to use the terrain and fortifications to get their armies into almost unassailable positions, but that's no good if your opponent is ravaging your farms and starving your army. Resourses gathered at your farms do not enter your global stocks until they are carried to your city. So if your opponent cuts you off from your villages you are in deep trouble as you will not be receiving food and other resources." This also means that sieges play a big role in the game. "In a lot of games if you want to attack an enemy's building you just send any type of unit up to it and it hacks away at the building until it's destroyed. Now, in Warrior Kings when you start to besiege a city the first thing that happens is that the city gates will be closed by your opponent. Our city walls are strong and no amount of tapping at them with a knight on horseback will bring them down, so it's time for the siege weapons. Trebuchets, Manganels, Bombards, Battering Rams, these are all big specialist weapons designed to knock down city walls and major buildings. Now in the meantime, if you have been sneaky, you would have rolled a few Siege Towers up to the walls at the other rend of the city, and would by now have your troops pouring from the siege towers into your opponent's city causing mayhem."

Complexity For Dummies
All of this might sound a little complex, especially when you consider that there can be hundreds of soldiers in a battle. Luckily then Black Cactus are determined to "give the player easier ways to do things", instead of relying on the kind of rapid-fire clicking found in most real-time strategy games. "Most RTS games reward the player by giving them more things to do, more units to control and more buildings to monitor. This is all OK if you have nimble fingers on the keyboard and mouse, but if you're basically not fast enough then you lose. In Warrior Kings, once the player has mastered the basics we try to help them by making it easier to do more complex things. So, instead of getting into a mouse clicking frenzy we allow the player thinking time to develop strategies and tactics." "The formation system is one of those elements. Once you have a group of eight units of the same type you can put them in a formation, and you can have up to 64 men in a single formation. You can now control the formation in the same way you would control a single unit. Formations will route find just like a single unit, and if they come to a narrow pass they will just flow through it. You can also link formations together to form armies, or set formations to follow or protect other formations. So now you can control thousands of units in the same way you would normally control one unit." Exactly how this will work in practice remains to be seen, but with Warrior Kings now due for release in early February we shouldn't have to wait too much longer to find out whether our pick for Game of the Show at ECTS 2001 can live up to its initial promise.

There was also a stand-alone expansion or sequel titled Warrior Kings: Battles released a year after the first game that solely focused on the skirmishes and the AI players while adding more content, such as hybrid factions between the main three ones of the original game. Both titles are available over at GOG on sale at the moment.

 

[JarlFrank]

It's Bulgarian fantasy Age of Empires.

The first two missions are without a base but from that point onward you usually get one.
It feels perfectly fine in difficulty until that mission where you have to build up defenses against an enemy army. First you try to build a bunch of towers and recruit units until you hit the unit cap, and think that's enough.
But no.
You need to spend all the resources you have on building towers because the enemy army is just THAT huge.
That will set the expectations for the rest of the game.

At least your hero units can level up infinitely, no level cap, and become army-killers on their own.

 

[Aemar]

Rise of Legends

Also Rise of Nations.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Original War.

- Base building : YES
- Three civilization : Soviets, US and ... NO SPOILER.
- Several resources : Oil, crates, nuclear, energy
It depends on the definition of "finite / infinite" : Crates spawn from time to time, so at a given time there may be none on the map, and then suddenly some are "dropped" somewhere on the map and all players rush there to get them first.

 

[Gregz]

Total Annihilation

 

[Carceri]

Weren't the resources infinite in TA, my memory is a bit fuzzy? Nevertheless, that was one hell of a rts.

 

[Ba'al]

I want to write Seven Kingdoms and Cossacks 1, but am not remembering if those check all the criteria marks. Can anybody confirm? Those were fun in the past!

All resources in Cossacks are infinite.

 

[adddeed]

Empires Dawn of the Modern World.

 

[80s Stallone]

Paraworld

 

[Reggin Backward]

Rising Kingdoms, highly recommend that game.

 

[Justinian]

Act of Aggression. I've only played skirmish, but I'd imagine most campaign missions involve base building since it's a c&c style RTS (but with 3 resources instead of 1).

Circle Empires & Circle Empires: Rivals. No real campaign, all missions involve base building. Map is divided in circles you conquer with armies you built. Has 3 resources (food, wood and gold). You pick a leader and they determine bonuses & which units you have access to.

 

[laclongquan]

Warzone2100 is out. It only has one resource: oil.
Majesty, then. You must build your town/kingdom every start.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Empires Dawn of the Modern World.

This is the Empire Earth spiritual succesor of sorts? If the resources work like in EE, they are near-infinite. Don't play EE. It's not as good as you think.

Battle Realms was mentioned, I think there's just 2 or 3 resources if memory serves, but one of them (rice) can be replenished. Man, I have to play these games again. To the GOGcave I guess.

 

[Arrowgrab]

Earth 2160. Three resources (metal, crystal, water), three factions, each of which uses two of the three resources. (Plus a "secret" faction you get to play a few missions with at the end of the campaign.) You do have base building in most campaign missions, though there are some exceptions. Sci-fi. Sequel to Earth 2140 and Earth 2150 (which is awesome, but only has a single resource.)