Battle Realms Preview

The game will have other appealing features regarding the interactive environment, like the unit's ability to walk through forests and use its density for camouflage. Though, if someone tries this, scared birds flying around can easily give away his position. If you see him in time, you can burn the forest down while the unfortunate adversary is still hiding somewhere in it. Be cautious though, these dangerous fires can grow and spread very fast, therefore you don't want to set fire to your own buildings by mistake. Nonetheless, thanks to the extended use of water (one of the game's most important resources) you'll be able to put the fire out in no time. If you're on a top of a mountain, you can sometimes find great rocks and push them downhill, towards the enemy units and buildings, compelling them to either move or just be squeezed like an orange.

Chinatown is it?

Cute little houses...

The basic resources will be: gold, rice (specifically Uncle Ben's), wood, and water. If you maintain all of these resources at a sufficient level, your population will be very pleased (and will naturally start...er...producing more of their own kind). Many peasants can be set to perform a variety of tasks around the town, from simple farming to extinguishing fires. You'll also have to look after the number of peasants you posses, because it will decrease once you start training them for fighting units. Controlling peasants is the basis of this game and it is something you simply cannot do without. An average peasant, in fact, can be considered to be the most significant unit in the game; besides harvesting, mining, and gathering wood they also become fully trained fighting units. A considerable innovation regarding unit training, comes with the option of using already trained units to learn more different abilities. Which means you can possess troops that are taught to be double-skilled, that can further be utilized for producing a third skill (nice one, I must say).

As for the unit's ability to mount a horse, it is somewhat similar to the way we saw in the recently released RTS game 'America' (my headache's coming back all of a sudden). Though, dismounting from a horse doesn't mean automatic death for that unit, quite the contrary, he will drop off the animal, get back on his feet and start fighting like a normal infantry unit.

The developers have put in more unit characteristics, which will allow them to carry out a diversity of moves and combat styles. Let's say you have a company of archers that were suddenly cut off from the rest of the battle unit and are left to fight on their own. You'd probably think they were toast since archers are known to fire arrows only; well you'd be pretty wrong here, cause when it comes to hand-to-hand combat archers lay down their bows and start using the additional martial arts skills they possess. Other units, like the pikeman will stick their spears in the ground and climb on top of them in order to extend the line of vision.

Liquid introduced the optional formations in order to enhance tactical possibilities in Battle Realms. The innovation doesn't lie so much in the default in-game formations, yet in the fact that you can play around with the formation editor that will be provided. This is going to give the player the opportunity to create his own pre-designed formation, which may prove to be quite an exceptional experience in the multi-player game mode (which, normally, offers a standard number of eight players in a single game).

Though the game won't be in a full 3D environment, the camera is set to have a certain, or rather, a satisfactory degree of zoom. Accordingly, the game features many 3D objects, amply detailed units, and numerous animated models in the background as well as some nice music and nice combination of sound effects (unique unit and character voiceovers).

Battle Realms will also include a rich and thorough world editor, which in addition, might have a campaign editor (it all depends on the time the developers will have). The editor is going to feature the possibility of creating buildings, units, and various terrain elements. For terrain making, the editor interface uses a standard Windows "brush" and paint program conventions and the camera will be intuitive and easy to use.

The game is scheduled to be released sometime this spring, then again if you're that impatient to see Battle Realms, Liquid has recently announced a demo version that will be out soon.