Rival tribes and roving wildlife will put a serious dent in your progress if you don't baby-sit your base with a large contingent of troops both patrolling outside buildings and defending within. And those attacks will come and catch you off-guard, even on the lowest difficulty setting. However, there are simply so many improvements to choose from that you won't know where to spend your time and money, and only experimentation on the battlefield and potentially humiliating attacks on your home base will allow you to separate the necessary improvements from the luxurious. If not, you have multiple difficulty levels to choose from until you find the right one that challenges you without frustrating you. All of these come at a not-insignificant cost and take time to complete, but you'll usually have plenty of resources to go around and will be able to regain what you've lost. In a fort, you can train your troops to give them combat and defense bonuses. The windmill, for example, will enable your peasants to dig irrigation ditches to improve crop yield. Structure building is the usual branching tree of increasingly complex and expensive needs, and each building will offer an improvement you can purchase that relates to it. The peasants won't really get out of the way or attempt to defend themselves, and will be completely helpless when building a structure. The town will also have to be covered from all angles, and not just from enemy troops, but from wildlife as well, which will wander in periodically and cheerfully slaughter your peasants while they go about gathering wood, reaping wheat, and other resource gathering. If that occurs, you'll need a hefty contingent on the ground. If you place a couple of those well enough, you can hold off a steady stream, but not an organized force. While most structures just allow you to fire from the windows, the forts and fortresses have cannons, which are great fun for cutting down advance clusters. You'll also want to build up defenses inside the buildings, otherwise they can be captured just by walking into them. You'll have to have plenty of extra soldiers patrolling around defending town, instead of being able to just pop out a bunch when someone comes knocking. This is time-consuming in the thick of battle, because you have to make the peasant, take him over to the barracks, and then train him. You have to buy some peasants and then train them. Like some other recent RTSs, you will not be able to create soldiers from scratch, though. You'll also get a smaller bonus if you're near your headquarters.Įach unit has a maintenance cost, and in keeping with the realistic theme, that resource is primarily food, which you'll also need to create new units. The flag-bearer and drummer also triple your men's morale, which gives them bonuses for attack and defense. However, this seems arbitrary, when all you should need are some well-trained troops and a few officers.
With those two key players, you'll be able to organize the above groups into separate formations for protection, wedging and flanking. Thankfully, they're not too difficult to handle, if you have a flag-bearer and drummer. You'll be managing an obscene amount of troops and juggling melee fighters with riflemen, archers, cavalry, cannon and more. And with up to 16,000 units per map, you'll need all the space you can get. At 1024x768, you can scroll up to 30 times from side to side and 20 times from top to bottom and not be looking at the same part of the map. You'll get the original American Conquest which includes over 40 missions in addition to the expansion's 25 Five new colonizing nations to play, including the Russians, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands new units and huge map. If you're looking for an RTS with more depth than the usual cycle of gathering resources, building structures and throwing armies at the enemy, you may want to take a look at Fight Back, but there are a few caveats to be aware of.įirst, though, let's talk about the sheer content. It's also a "stand-alone expansion pack," so it basically uses the same engine-but it adds a messload of new content that doesn't require the original American Conquest to play.
American Conquest: Fight Back is an RTS, but with a weighty dose of strategic complexity and historical depth. Although the design of the retail box makes this look like a patriotic wargame, it actually goes much deeper than that, thankfully.