Interviews

Seven Kingdoms’ Steve Fawkner sets his sights on Conquest
By Michael Lafferty

“It plays at a nice fast pace, removes a bunch of resource micromanagement and also provides the ambassadorial system to enable all manner of new strategies.”

For 6,000 years, humans and demons have been slugging it out - building, destroying and then doing it all over again. The race that emerges victorious will have to rely on a number of things – including strategy, deviousness and adroitness in combat. The game is Seven Kingdoms: Conquest, a PC release from Enlight slated to hit store shelves in the fall. 

Conquest is the continuation of the real-time strategy series that began in 1997 with the first release, which was developed by Enlight and published by Interactive Magic. Since then, the series has seen Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries (1998, Interactive Magic as publisher) and Seven Kingdoms II: The Fryhtan Wars (in 1999 with Ubisoft as the publisher). The Conquest telling of the tale begins in Egypt in 3,000 B.C., and pits humans against demons in a societal race for dominance.

Steve Fawkner, the game’s designer, took time to speak with GameZone about Seven Kingdoms Conquest.

Question: Seven Kingdoms Conquest takes place over a long time period. How does that translate to in-game time?

Steve: The storyline of the game takes place over 7 Ages, with a 1,000-year gap in between each Age. Every individual battle is played within a given Age, so as I start the storyline my first battles are in the Early Bronze Age with Egypt, Sumeria and Akkadia. Then the storyline progresses 1,000 years to the Late Bronze Age with Babylon, Assyria and the Hittites, and so on…

So as you can see, the time period influences what civilizations you find within a battle, not the actual length of the battle itself. Of course, for fun, we will have a number of skirmish battles available outside the campaign where you try out things like the US Marine Corp vs. Anu the Dragon God of Babylon!

Q: Do players unlock new technologies through following research threads over time, or is there a quick return on research implementation? How does the game handle civilization advancement and resource collecting? Will players have to micro-manage this aspect of the game or does the AI take care of it, or are players given the flexibility to do as much or little as they wish?

Steve: Technologies are learned in your cities and the various sites surrounding them. Technologies are quite different in each age and provide a number of unique strategic options within a time period. For example, early civilization can make many advances in food gathering allowing them to gather the sizeable forces of troops they need to wage war, whereas future-age technologies focus on things such as laser targeting to improve the effectiveness of smaller number of elite troops that they possess.

Resource collecting is mostly automatic and is tied to the core gameplay, which really lets players focus on their chosen strategy and not have to micromanage 3-4 disparate areas of the game. For example, humans gain gold automatically from their cities, they increase this gold income by gaining more cities, making allies, building farms, learning food-tech; basically it is build, build, build if you’re a human player. Demons, on the other hand, gain resources via the destruction of things, so humans vs. demons turns into this lovely little game where the humans are trying to create new stuff and the demons are rushing around the map defiling it, corrupting it and generally tearing it down.

Q: Explain the different races that players will have the option of playing as. Do they have individual strengths and weaknesses? How is their story integrated into the game?

Steve: There are 7 Ages of mankind and 7 Realms of Demons.

Mankind moves from the Early Bronze and Late Bronze Ages, through the Iron Age, the Roman Age, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age and ends up in the Future Age in 3000 AD. To begin with, we rely on Gods, Priests with Magic and Heroes, but as time progresses, these things are taken away one-by-one and replaced with more powerful troops who command awesome technology. The Mechs and Hovertanks of the future age are devastatingly powerful, but also devilishly expensive to create.

Demons on the other hand have a number of quite distinct realms all with unique skills, spells and special attacks. There are the Realms of Beasts, Nightmare, Serpents, Fire, Ice, Shadow and Plague. Along with a group of common units, each of these Realms has one unique greater demon and one unique lesser demon. In the course of a battle, a demon side will only produce a few greater demons, but these things are easily capable of taking on a human city by themselves, they’re nasty!

Q: How have you managed to find a balance between the magic system and technology that evolves throughout the course of the game?

Steve: As the game progresses, magic slowly vanishes from the world (well… almost). The technology that replaces it gets more and more powerful. I can’t give too much more away with divulging some of the storyline here.    

          

Q: Will the game have online components? Will there be quick game modes for those who do not have a lot of time to invest in an initial sitting?

Steve: The game will be playable online via Enlight’s game matching service.

This really is quite a quick game – I think it is ideal for folks who only have half an hour to play. Although some of the huge maps with many cities will take quite a bit longer, your average-sized map in Seven Kingdoms Conquest is a fast-paced and brutal affair that delivers maximum fun without a lengthy and tedious build up of forces.

Having said that though, I don’t want to give the impression that there is little chance for strategy because that’s not the case at all. Our ambassadorial system and magic system, and unit abilities will reward careful thought and good sound strategic gameplay.

Q: What elements set this apart from other titles in the RTS genre? How will the level editor work and will players be able to share mods?

Steve: We’re finding that Seven Kingdoms Conquest has quite a different feel to it than our competitors’ games. It plays at a nice fast pace, removes a bunch of resource micromanagement and also provides the ambassadorial system to enable all manner of new strategies. Now victories based on good diplomacy (or vile treachery) can certainly occur – it will not just be the player with the most troops who wins every time … some crafty political maneuvering by experienced players will have those troops fighting against their owner if he’s clever.

The map editor is very full-featured; we’ve used it to create all the maps for the skirmish and campaign modes. Maps can easily be saved out and exchanged with other players.

The game is extremely mod-friendly also. Much of it is written in Lua, and this will all be exposed so the mod-community can even add new features to the game if they wish. 

Q: This title uses a new graphics engine. Was it developed specifically for this project? What does it allow you to do that other (existing) engines would not allow you to do?

Steve: The graphics engine for Seven Kingdoms Conquest has grown out of another engine that has been used in a some other games by Enlight, but it has been thoroughly optimized to handle an RTS game. 

The greatest feature about it so far is definitely the number of units it can handle in real-time, which is vital to our early empires such as the Egyptians. It is also very up-to-date in its general feature set with all manner of pixel and vertex shader effects.

Q: You have heroes, elemental forces and greater beings playing a part in this game. How do players earn the support of these beings and will they be able to control them, or are they AI driven?

Steve: The human sides can produce heroes and greater beings. They are limited in number though, so you need to look after them! These special troops require that you spend “Reputation” points to bring them into battle. Reputation is resource just like gold and players need to decide whether to spend it all summoning heroes and gods or whether to spend it on promoting their regular troops into positions of power.

Reputation is gained either through certain diplomatic actions or by defeating enemy troops.

Demons, however, gain elemental forces by producing a full set of six portals around their lair (an expensive but worthwhile task). Elemental forces are extremely powerful spells, and it is highly recommended that if a human player ever sees a Demon Lair with five or six portals, that he expend a bit of effort trying to knock one or two down.       

Q: Speaking of AI, in a single-player campaign, does it evolve as the player becomes more proficient, or are the levels incrementally tougher?

Steve: We have a number of AI levels, so players should be able to adjust the game to suit their abilities. However, the campaign starts off with some very easy scenarios whose purpose are to allow you to learn the game. After that they ramp up to something a little more challenging.

 

 



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Seven Kingdoms: Conquest (PC)