Commander - Conquest of the Americas

Conquer the New World.

Take charge as one of the many European powers aiming to conquer the New World. Starting from 16th century, you can choose from many different nations, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Founding new colonies and then making them thrive is key to success. In order to accomplish this, you need to manage and optimize resources and production in your colonies, before transporting the goods to other colonies or back to Europe. Rival powers and Native Americans can prove to be allies or enemies, depending on the your decisions. Hostile fleets engage each other in highly detailed tactical level. You can command your ships in RTS fashion or take direct control.

Certainly one of the most successful game genres besides shooting games is definitely strategy games, and adding the period when pirates ruled the seas you got one crazy combination. This is not the first game released by Nitro games in this genre, so they don’t lack in experience in this type of genre, and they certainly proved it with this game. The game is set in the 16th century and you are given the option of controlling one of seven European forces and all of them have one cause, to exploit everything there is in America to its max. Use your trading skills and warfare skills to become the most superior force in trading but also as a feared opponent. Like said the game start in the 16th century to be exact from 1500 to 1630, and will certainly give you enough play time to enjoy it to the max. One of the basic and probably the most important characteristic of this game is colonizing. Colony management plays an important role, as without a few key buildings to keep up morale (such as Church, or Theatre) the people will become listless and apathetic about producing more goods for sale. For some missions in the American outpost you need to transport people from your home port to the outpost. One of the first things I noticed when starting to play this title was just how much effort has been put into trying to make the game inviting and helpful to players who may have not tried a title such as this before. Most of the games presume that you have been already acquainted with this genre, while this game doesn’t do that. It explains especially on the first levels all the game basics almost unnoticeably. Now back to the game, we already mentioned setting up colonies is a priority, but you just can’t leave them like that, you must also create traveling and trading routes between the colonies and other places. There are also Native Americans, and they can be approached in two ways. One way is the friendly, which means constructing certain structures for them and they will help too, but on the other if you provoke them, attacks on your outpost are definite and you will lose soldiers and resources. As the years tick by, four advisors (royal, economic, military and religious) will offer various missions that will keep you in favor if completed. Complete these missions and you gain the favor of the advisor, fail or ignore these missions and they lose confidence in you. If one of your advisor's looses all confidence, then the game ends. Some of the missions will be almost impossible to finish but not all are necessary just most of them. After a couple of years have passed you can get pretty gammed with all the traffic going around, and that’s where a very useful tool comes in. This tool allows you automatic use of all the traffic and trading between your stations and don’t have to click on the route every time. But you must be careful when sending your ships with the cargo. They mustn’t go alone; at least without some battle ship escort or you might find yourself in heavy losses. As your game progresses you will have to create new colonies just like in the beginning of the game, but this time it is to expand the empire even further. But you cannot just build a colony where ever you please. There are predetermined sites for building colonies and each and every one of them gives a different product such as tobacco, gold etc. Of course you’ll be fighting with the rest of the empires for the best places for colonies. There can be diplomatic trading and solutions to some problems between the empires but sometime it’s not just worth it as the trading can cost you more than a war. Graphics look superb in this title, with excellent water effects, great textures and surprisingly low load times. In keeping with Nitro's philosophy on less experienced players the interface is very well done indeed. Hovering over anything will give you a nice simple tool tip explaining exactly what it is the button or option does, and the layout is simple and bright.

Commander - Conquest of the Americas

2013-01-01

Platforms:
shareware
Developer
Magnetic Scrolls
Publisher
-Unknown-
Genre
Tags
shareware games strategy rpg

Conquer the New World.