Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries

Overview

Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries as a concept is similar to most other real-time strategy games: you build things, you create an army, you fight things in order to conquer the whole map. It does adds some elements to this, however, such as the Fryhtans and Scrolls of Power.

Gameplay

In Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries , different goals can be set depending on the individuals play style. A game may end, for instance, either when all kingdoms are defeated but one, all the Fryhtans are defeated where the winner is the person with the highest battle score, or the person with the highest economy or total score within a certain period of time.

Difficulty is customisable with many settings concerning amount of kingdoms, whether Fryhtans exist, whether the computer is aggressive, the amount and accessibility of resources, amounts of treasure for the player and computer, whether there are (and the frequency of) random events such as earthquakes that can damage all civilisations etc.

The bulk of time spent on Seven Kingdoms will be sent keeping people happy, and building things so that the empire can grow. Fundamentally, it works on these principles:

• A building can contain up to nine people. People are required to run any building or there will be no progress.
• Towns only have a certain amount of people in them. If you want more people, you need to take over an independent town.

The buildings that can ordinarily be created are:

• Tower of Science - This is for research. Each tower of science can only research one thing at a time, though having more than one research the same thing will speed it up.
• Mine - Can only be placed over a resource, and will collect that resource.
• Factory - Processes the resources the mines farm. If it's not connected to the mine, it will not receive any resources.
• Inn - Random skilled characters tend to travel the world through inns. They can be recruited, so it's worthwhile to watch them for skilled workers.
• Market - For trade between kingdoms.
• War Factory - For building the technology researched at the tower of science/bought from other kingdoms.
• Fort - A place to train troops. One will be looked after by the king, the others by appointed generals. Without somebody at the head of the fort, nobody will learn.
• Harbor - For building boats.

The player is responsible for looking after their own units. They can train from their town(s) people of a specific profession (for example a construction worker to build places, or a spy). People left alone in the town may wander off into one of the player's professions naturally provided the building is connected to the town, too.

As well as this, the notion of loyalty is very important. If an individual person reaches a certain level of disloyalty, they will abandon your kingdom and fight for another. This normally happens by a long period of neglect, and honours may be given to raise their loyalty level. Individuals from settlements the player has overthrown are particularly likely to be disloyal, and will sometimes rebel anyway and attack that town.

Interacting With Other Civilisations

Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries uses a fairly basic system of diplomacy. There are friendly and unfriendly means of diplomatic action:

Setting a

trade treaty

allows for trade between kingdoms and keeps them neutral towards eachother. A

friendly

treaty means that the two kingdoms will not fight eachother. An

alliance

is the same as a friendly treaty, except the other kingdom is often more demanding, such as asking you to sell them research or to declare war on somebody with them. When in a friendly or allied status, the player can ask to be sold food, can offer or demand a tribute, or offer to purchase the opponent's throne.

The player can also

declare war

on any kingdom. Doing so will terminate any type of positive relations, including a trade treaty. They can also choose to

surrender

their kingdom if they wish to do so.

Fryhtans

When choosing to play a game with Fryhtans, the player can choose to set them to being defensive and only attacking when their lair is attacked, or being offensive.

Fryhtans are a separate, unplayable race who present a challenge to fight. Lots of wealth can be accumulated from beating even one place of theirs, along with the Scroll of Power for whatever race the player is playing as.

The Scroll of Power allows creation of an extra building. When created, villagers need to worship at it. When a certain amount of worship has been done (there is a bar in the bottom indicating the process), a God of that civilisation can be summoned and can perform certain actions, particularly useful in defeating enemies. It can be summoned with any level of worship, but it remains longer depending on how much worship was performed.

Minimum System Requirements

• Windows XP / Vista
• 1.8 GHz processor
• 512MB (1 GB recommended)
• 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended)
• 2GB HDD
• Mouse
• Keyboard