Each of the factions has light, medium, and heavily armed warriors. Sadly, one of the most interesting features also causes one of the game's worst problems. Constructing a new home base can be cost prohibitive as well as collecting gold can take a serious amount of time. It still can be a chore collecting the things when workers have to run halfway across the map to your home base. Not only does collecting these items make build times shorter for the units that use them, but also makes them much less expensive. The only way to speed up incredibly long training and upgrading processes is to gather the weapons and shields of fallen enemies in order to add them to the build queue. Constructing an army can take a painfully long time. While some of the missions are paced fairly well, like one in the middle of the Egyptian campaign where you ally with Lybians, many of them are ponderous in their progression. Most of the units have only a standard attack without any special moves or formations to make gameplay more unique. If you've got some ranged units and some melee units, that's about as complex as you can get. There are very few real tactical strategies used when making your way through a map. Each of the campaigns comes with a variety of missions but all of them devolve into simply massing units and attacking.
Unfortunately they're compressed to hell and back and look terrible when playing on decent sized monitor. The stories in each campaign are told through pre-compressed cutscenes that use in-game assets. The game presents three campaigns following the Spartans as they unite and then fight the Persians, Egyptians as they struggle to gain a life out from under the crushing boot of King Xerxes, and finally the Persians and Xerxes rise to power and ambition. The conflict between the Greeks and the Persians of this time has become legendary thanks to the famed battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans (in reality they were accompanied by a couple thousand more troops from around Greece) held a narrow passage against an army of Persians nearly one million strong. Even one of the most interesting ideas in the game that allows players to outfit their own armies with different types of weapons and armor suffers because of the lack of focused units with purpose.Īncient Wars: Sparta takes place during the period of Xerxes and Leonidas. Combat is dull and devoid of many of the tactical trickeries that we see in many other real-time strategy titles and the campaigns, while occasionally interesting, don't provide a consistent stream of entertainment. This is a game we've all played before in virtually every aspect. Unfortunately, the recently released Ancient Wars: Sparta isn't going to help promote much fascination with the time period.
Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor P.With the release of the movie 300, Spartans rekindled a glorious (if warped) life in the general population's imagination.
Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood PC Game.Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI PC Game.Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers PC Game.GRAPHICS: nVidia GeForce 7900GTX/ATI Radeon X1900XT with 256MB memory or higher SOUND: DirectX 9.0C compatible sound cardĬPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz or AMD Athlon XP 3000+
GRAPHICS: nVidia GeForce 6600GT/ATI Radeon X800 Pro with 128MB memory or better
OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows Vista*, 2000 or XP (Admin Rights Required)ĬPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz or AMD Athlon XP 2400+ Most have to be researched before equipping them to the soldiers. There are 8 slots for customization, and a variety of weapons and shields. Before building a unit, the player must choose which items are to be equipped to that unit. All infantry (excluding heroes) are built either at the barracks or archery range. Heavy infantry (hoplite, immortal, Pharaoh's guard) are heavily armored and slow, but are deadly when used as melee. Medium infantry (spartiate, noble, mighty nadsez), are medium armored and are good as both ranged and melee. Light infantry (psiloi, kara warrior, nubian mercenary) are lightly armored and fast. Collected weapons have no cost when building a unit using that weapon. But the player can also steal the opponent's weapons when his warriors die and leave their equipment on the battlefield.
This, however, makes each unit relatively expensive. The player has the ability to research and create weapons personally to equip his warriors with.