ECTSWarrior Kings Hands-On

The settings for recent real-time strategy games can largely be split up either into dystopic futures or high-fantasy realms. Warrior Kings makes a distinctive departure from the latter because it has an early medieval setting inspired by the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Warrior Kings' gameplay is simiarly focused on the mechanics of the medieval economy.

Outside your stone keep lies a village where peasant farmers grow the game's simplest and most central resource - food. Food is grown, stored, and transported via vulnerable supply lines back to your base. Food will always be a limiting factor, and your troops in the field are as susceptible to hunger as are the peasants that support your economy. Building windmills is a key means by which to increase your harvesting efficiency, but to support large armies, you'll also need to store up a sizable reserve of food. The game's other resources include gold and material, which are treated similarly as in the Age of Empires series - although those games' wood and stone resources are treated as the single "material" resource in Warrior Kings. Interestingly, a number of a map's gold mines will be hidden from view until a player develops the surveyor unit, which should make for land-grabbing opportunities in the late game.

Warrior Kings takes a unique approach in its tech tree. All players start out with the same primitive dark ages units, then develop along three main branches - technological, holy, and evil. Each branch has a distinct method of advancing: To build gunpowder units such as bombard artillery and gunner infantry, tech players need to build windmills and universities. Holy units such as the inquisitor (who can dispel demons) and the monastic knight are unlocked by developing a faithful populace - your peasants must attend church, so placing centers of worship near your villagers' paths is essential. The evil branch is especially twisted: To get access to powerful demon units, you must build a "wicker man" - a large hollow statue - and sacrifice a number of your peasants and herd in a giant blaze. There will be six to eight endpoints at the top of the tech tree, and reaching one will depend on how you mix development between the three branches.

The missions in Warrior Kings combine questing with strategic and tactical objectives. The single-player game takes place on maps large enough that they're reused over the course of several quests given to you by characters you encounter in your explorations. The tactical component of the game is fully developed. The game features five formations: line, column, orb, wedge, and skirmish, in which ranged units fire and retreat when the enemy troops close the gap. To encourage formation use, units in formation share hit points, and formations can automatically support and guard each other. Black Cactus has designed combat to balance pikeman, archers, and cavalry, so you can expect quite a bit of tactical maneuvering as players attempt to bring the right combination to bear.

With the debut of Warrior Kings, Sierra has announced that it has formed a European arm, dubbed Sierra Entertainment, to work with developers on this side of the Atlantic. It is expected that the recently announced Ground Control expansion and other projects from Massive Entertainment will be published under this new label.

Warrior Kings is currently in alpha, and Black Cactus expects it to be complete next spring.