The Europeans employ military might with their cannons, guns, and massive warships. There are two main types of factions: Native American and European. The real difference lies in the types of factions.
As in American Conquest, differences between the similar factions are negligible beyond graphical origins. Generally, the game has everything you'd expect from combat of the actual time period.įight Back adds five new factions to American Conquest: Germany, Russia, Alaskan Haida, Portugal, and the Netherlands. If a lot of your troops die, nearby friendly units tuck their tails between their legs and run away.
Cannonballs ricochet off the ground and tear through formations like a hot knife through butter. It's hard to suppress a smile when you see dozens of enemy warriors drop from a single volley of musket fire. The combat can be realistic and exciting, which may come as a surprise when you consider the weapons of the time. Soldiers can join formations to become better organized. Morale is important because troops will run away and become uncontrollable if it drops. Not only do they move and take orders as a single unit at that point, but the units get a combat and morale bonus. If you expect to win any large-scale battles, you'll need to organize troops into formations by using officers, drummers, and standard bearers. Trying to control thousands of troops in the 1700s was surely no easy task, and the same applies to Fight Back. The resulting battles can be spectacular, even if the graphics engine isn't exactly state of the art. You can field armies of, literally, thousands of individual troops. This leads to perhaps the greatest part about American Conquest: Fight Back. You can have hundreds of pikemen, musketeers, archers, and other warriors in a matter of minutes. It's very easy to take advantage of an unprotected enemy flank by sending a cavalry into someone's base to capture their entire workforce. The enemy can also capture buildings by sending troops into them.īoth of these aspects mean that you need to protect your base from all angles. They'll go down after receiving a few cannon volleys, or they'll catch ablaze after a few fire arrows. The buildings themselves are relatively weak. So if you want a third fort for building more troops, expect to exponentially pay more resources for it than you did for the first one. You can build a base, but each subsequent building of the same type costs you more resources. Resources are practically infinite, but you need to protect your workers because the enemy can easily capture or kill them. As in most RTS games, there is resource gathering and base-building in American Conquest, but AC's got its own spin on them. The unique RTS elements found in American Conquest are a refreshing change of pace from other real-time strategy games, though they're reminiscent of Ensemble's Age of Empires series. The core mechanics of the game haven't changed, which is a good thing. Once again you receive a history lesson before each mission. As before, however, the strategy, combat, and even history lessons are excellent. Unfortunately, it will probably be overlooked again. American Conquest: Fight Back is a stand-alone expansion pack that returns to the same setting. It's a time period that hasn't been heavily explored by real-time strategy games, which is rather unfortunate since the history is interesting. Part of this could be blamed on its setting, as American Conquest takes place in the Americas during the 16th to 18th centuries. American Conquest was released earlier this year, and even though it is a great strategy game, it met with little fanfare.