In recent years, real-time strategy games have really tried to get away from the basic formula of collecting resources, building a base, hiring an army, and crushing your enemies. And strategy developer Infinite Interactive is planning to take a similar approach with Seven Kingdoms: Conquest, the next game in what many strategy fans consider to be a very highly underrated series. Lead designer Steve Fawkner explains what we can expect from this upcoming strategy sequel.

The next Seven Kingdoms game will take place across world history, from Egypt to the Space Age.

GameSpot: It's been five years since Seven Kingdoms II was released. That's an awfully long time between chapters, isn't it? Why the decision to revisit the series after all this time?

Steve Fawkner: I think that [series creator] Enlight was really just waiting for the right time to continue the series. Seven Kingdoms II was such a brilliantly intricate game, that a sequel three or four years ago might easily have resulted in a simple port to 3D and would've sacrificed some of the depth that made it a classic. Now, with five or more years of hardware and software advances, we feel that we can really take the game to a new level and provide a whole bunch of fresh ideas, in much the same way that the original Seven Kingdoms game was full of new ideas.

Some of the things that impressed me with the original Seven Kingdoms games were all the new ideas that found their way in there. That's one of the reasons that we have called this "Seven Kingdoms: Conquest" rather than "Seven Kingdoms III"--it is definitely a child of the Seven Kingdoms franchise, but it's not a clone of what has gone before. It's got its own definite identity.

GS: Tell us about the new additions that Conquest will add to the series. How will the gameplay evolve from the previous games in the series?

SF: We set four goals for ourselves when we were designing the game: ensure that we included, in some form, all of the very cool things from previous titles; make the game much more story-driven, rather than feature-driven; really tone down the micromanagement that was present in previous versions, because that is definitely the way that modern real-time strategy games are progressing; and most importantly, we set out to provide a unique little twist to every standard real-time strategy feature (harvest, build, produce, and destroy), so as to set the game apart from both its predecessors and its competitors.

For example, the harvesting of resources is quite unusual. Rather than the traditional "peasants in the mine" approach, or the "conversion of resource points" approach, we opted to tie it into the general gameplay. Human sides gain resources as a natural progression of expanding and building their civilization, whereas demon sides gain resources as a natural progression of burning things down...humans build, demons destroy.

What surprised us most is that the decision to drive the game design from the story (something we have not really done before) has had such a strong and positive effect on the game. Our basic story is simple: thanks to a greedy Egyptian Pharaoh, demons have been able to invade the earth every 1,000 years. But that story has really shaped the design--instead of Seven Kingdoms that have no logical links between them, we have seven ages of man, each 1,000 years apart, and each involved in some integral way with the demons' plan. We also have the seven realms of demons, each with their own personality, skills, playing styles, and roles within the story.

GS: What's the division of labor between Enlight Software and Infinite Interactive? What is each company contributing to the project, and why the decision to team up?

SF: Infinite is responsible for the game design, programming, AI, level design, story, and music--all of the things we had a lot of experience with in our previous Warlords Battlecry series. Enlight, on the other hand, has been focusing on providing the massive amount of artwork and 3D models required by this monster of a game. They have also provided us with a 3D engine, which both companies have been adding to as the project has progressed.

GS: Infinite Interactive has a long history with the Warlords Battlecry series. What lessons has the team taken from that series to apply to the new Seven Kingdoms game? Can we expect to see any specific features or ideas from those games put to use in Conquest?

SF: We really want to treat Seven Kingdoms: Conquest with the respect and attention it deserves. We specifically set out to make sure that it was not just Warlords Battlecry 4.

The humans will expand their holdings by building, while the demons prefer...a different approach.

However, having completed three real-time strategy titles now, and with more than 15 years of working on strategy games in general, we are able to bring a lot of important experience to help us with Conquest. For example, our general game design principal involves the AI programmer from day one. He gets an automatic veto over any feature in the game that he thinks will cause trouble (so in some ways he's the boss!). If any feature breaks the AI (and therefore the single-player experience), he just has to raise his hand and we immediately look for another way to provide a similar play experience. We've found that this is one of the secrets behind our powerful AIs.

GS: How long has work on the game been going on? What stage is the game at in development; what's being worked on at this point?

SF: The game has been under way for about 16 months now. We are in a late alpha stage of development. What that means is that all of the major game features are in and working, but we're still tinkering heavily with minor systems, such as trade and espionage. The campaign is also well under way, although one thing we've learned is that the later you leave a story in the development cycle, the better that it is, since it is able to take best advantage of the game's final features.