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Ancient Wars: Sparta

The opening demo of AW:S shows massive armies and huge battles between three great civilizations during the Classical era: the Greeks, the Egyptians and the Persians. If you're expecting a massive strategy game in the vein of Rome: Total War though, think again. The man behind AW:S is Torsten Hess of Settlers fame, and while AW:S isn't quite as unique or nearly as cute as Settlers, it stays similarly down to earth. You train, equip and control individual soldiers and hero characters, and rarely have more than a few dozen troops at once.

Like most current RTS games, you have to support your army by building a base. The maximum number of troops you can have is limited by your food production. Other than food, you need two harvestable resources for your war effort: gold and wood. These follow the design pioneered by Warcraft all the way back in 1994: gold mines have a limited and preset amount of gold in them, and timber is similarly an exhaustible resource. This sets a deadline that will eventually break even the worst stalemate - when resources run out, one side is bound to lose the war of attrition. This has the unfortunate side effect of making games much more predictable. Luckily, there are a few features in AW:S that sets it apart from the majority of RTS games: outfitting your units individually, capturing weapons and equipment from the enemy, traps and an emphasis on unit formations and positioning.

Unlike typical RTS games that have preset units with possibly an upgrade option or two, AW:S lets you outfit your troops with any combination of weapons and shields that you see fit. You create unit templates with a base unit type and any equipment you have researched or collected, and the price and combat effectiveness of your unit depends on your design. Since you can equip your troops with weapons captured from the enemy, looting weapons and shields can get give you a nice boost early on, or whenever money is tight. After you crush an enemy attack, you can wrench their weapons from their cold, dead fingers, recruit a cheap attack force using those weapons, and strike back! Just imagine your opponent's dismay in multiplayer games.

AW:S lets you fortify your base like most other RTS games but its traps deserve a special mention; you can set traps to hamper the enemy and bolster your defences, and they are not to be overlooked. You'll quickly found out how effective they are after running head first into a few in the single-player campaign missions. A spike trap is the typical affair that features pointy poles that poke into feeble flesh, while a rock trap can crush an enemy force under a rock slide. When a rock trap is triggered, boulders roll down a hillside and flatten enemies, triggering nice ragdoll death animations.

Once you have built some fighting troops and grouped them together, you can order them to a formation (column, line or free) and face them in a certain direction, much like the Total War series or Company of Heroes. This, along with a selection of defensive, guard and aggressive stances, makes it easy to defend breaches in walls and protect your archers behind melee troops. The formations are excellent in their simplicity, and give you much better control over the fighting. While there's a lot of micromanaging elsewhere in the game, tactical command is very streamlined and easy.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Units and Missions

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