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Ever wanted to take a step back in time and alter the history of a large continent? Well, American Conquest will allow you to do that, by taking command of a nation and battling for the land against eleven different forces. The game charts the history of America right from when Columbus first arrived, meaning that one of the first missions you'll encounter is to build a settlement and protect yourself from hostile natives, and this is all done through the use of peasants. Although they might sound useless at first, peasants in American Conquest are very resourceful people, who will allow you to construct all kinds of buildings, as well as do important tasks such as harvesting food, cutting down trees for wood and mining gold. For the first level, you'll notice that the natives are getting quite inquisitive, and since you only have a small number of Halbertmen to protect you it's a good idea to build a Fort. Once built, not only are your men inside protected, and meagre peasants can be trained in the art of combat, but you are also able to construct a Dwelling which will allow you to make more peasants (we won't go into this process in too much detail).
Although early on the game will give you a lot of the resources you need to fulfil each mission, soon you'll find that the food, wood and gold are beginning to run out, and this is where the genre's traditional 'resource management' ideas come into play. Resources are available in limited quantities on each map, and to extract them you first need to construct the relevant building, and then assign peasants to work there. Wood is the game's basic resource, and can be easily obtained by building a Wood Store and then assigning peasants to cut down any nearby trees. Food is slightly more difficult, since it requires you to build a Mill, and then plant crops and wait for them to grow before letting your peasants harvest them. To extract the game's most valuable resource, Gold, you need to first build a Blacksmith's House, and then construct a Mine on the site where you think Gold is present. Mines are limited to only certain positions on each map, and only some of them will contain Gold. Assigning more peasants to extract a particular resource will increase your income, although there is a maximum that will limit how quickly you can accumulate a certain item.
However, the best bit of Cossacks was its massive, realtime battles, and American Conquest is no different. Throughout the game, thousands of units from many different nations will collide, providing some pretty incredible battles, and even with the screen filled with action the game manages to keep an impressive frame rate. Up to 16,000 units can be on-screen at any one time, and if you thought some of the stuff in Cossacks was good, wait until you see the natives in American Conquest, which attack their prey in massive numbers. Despite the large number of units at your command, controls are still kept pretty simple, with a context-based system that only shows the options available to you, and icons which allow you to control a group's attack strategy and formation with a click of the mouse.
The maps in American Conquest are pretty huge, and very detailed, with rivers, trees and cliff-faces all present for your units to tackle. The game also encourages you to use the natural environment strategically, by choosing caves as hiding places, hills to get a height advantage and rocks to hide behind and protect your units with. The game also features a random map generator, which can be extensively customised to allow you to choose how rich the land is with resources, which climatic zone the map should be from, and what land type will be used. This should prove ideal for the game's multiplayer modes, where up to seven players can battle over a LAN or the Internet, since no-one will have the advantage of being familiar with the map.
My only concern with American Conquest so far is in its similarities with the Cossacks games. While the scenarios have changed, the graphical style is still very similar, and the gameplay also owes a lot to its predecessor. There's no doubt that this will be an in-depth and impressive strategy title when it's released next year, and fans of Cossacks should find this just as good, but it remains to be seen how big a leap forward this makes from the other titles.
Marc Hull
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