Commander: Conquest of the Americas
Preview
Conquest of some of the Americas
by Marko Susimetsä
previewed on PC
Manage your colonies (cntd.)
As the colonies grow, their spheres of influence will expand. Any raw resources, such as fur, cotton, sugar, that falls inside this sphere can be exploited by the colony. For example, cotton can be processed into cloth, which can then be further exploited by clothiers to make clothes. Since the variety of resources will be different in different areas of the map, you will have to choose what kind of colonies you will want to build in order to harvest as many resources as you can. You can have small colonies feeding resources to larger ones, or you can try to make each colony as self-sufficient as you can.
It is the Age of Sail
Having established a strong hold of the strategy of sea battles in their East India Company, Nitro Games is including many familiar elements to Commander: Conquest of the Americas. There will be as many as 14 different ship types in the game and you can once again engage in high detailed tactical battles with enemy fleets, taking personal control of individual ships or controlling them in RTS mode. But the number of ships you will be able to control is much higher this time: you can have as many as 15 ships on one side, making the largest possible battles pretty grandiose with 30 ships waging war against each other.
The ships are divided into different categories according to their use. The basic division is naturally between cargo and war ships, but an even more important division is made between coastal and high seas ships. Many battles during the era of colonisation were waged in shallow coastal areas where larger ships could not enter and thus it is great to see this distinction made in Commander: Conquest of the Americas. In addition, we assume that another distinction will be made between ships of the different eras, as an early 16th century ship will look very different from a late 18th century vessel.
The differences between nations also affect the ships of different nations. For example French cannons will shoot farther but do less damage, whereas British cannons will have shorter range but do more damage. This is clearly a generalisation based on the historical fact that the French used to train their ship crews with long-range shooting, whereas the British navy, because of Nelson, mostly, was known for their enthusiasm for close-range encounters.
A rival for Colonization?
The little that we know of the Commander: Conquest of the Americas sounds promising, but it remains to be seen whether this game will challenge the classic Colonization or not. The focus in Nitro Games' title will apparently be more on the sea battles as no word has been said of the possibility of land battles. Also, even though it has been said that you can be either friendly or hostile with the native tribes, more information will be needed before we can say how important the native American tribes will be in the game (admittedly, they were little more than window dressing in the original Colonization).
With the promise that East India Company showed us last year, we are pretty confident that Nitro Games' next game is worthy of more attention. The developers' promises of a more accessible and deeper gaming experience show that they are at least on the right track to make a big hit amongst the genre enthusiasts. But how big a hit? That remains to be seen.
