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Introduction
While many publishers choose to focus on making their games fun and attractive to everyone, there is something to be said for games that focus on historical accuracy and attention to detail. Many RTS titles today just give you a Battle Royale, hand-picking a few select cultures with sufficient technological and cultural differences, and pitting them against each other in an all-out battle to the finish. If you can't find nations that work for you, then just make up your own. Heck, that's what Blizzard did with Starcraft.
On the other hand, sometimes it can be useful to tie past history in the experience. World War II has often been the background for many such a title - The Normandy invasion, the crossing of the Sudetenland and the Rhine, the siege of Leningrad...all of these are epic battles that are often the focus of both turn-based and real-time strategy games. Many of these scenarios are American-centric, however, and it comes as no surprise - Many of the developers that publish these games are themselves American. Strategy First has their own experience in this realm, having been the driving force behind World War II Online.
There are, of course, many other periods of interest with which can be adapted into strategy titles. One often overlooked is the period known as "The Three Kingdoms", named such because of a book written by Luo Guangzhong in 1350, chronicling the strife between the nations of Wei, Wu, and Shu-Han. "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is a historical artifact and a treasured piece of Chinese history, as it details the forming of the empire which led China's development through the next millennium and beyond, ending with the Qing Dynasty in the early 20th Century.
Strategy First has teamed up with Chinese software developers Object Software to bring the epic tale to the common man. How did they fare? Read on to find out.
Background
After failing to find a really good synopsis of the Three Kingdoms period (Including the manual and documentation of the game itself, I elected to go ahead and whip up a brief summary of my own that hopefully helps to clear up some of the questions I had during the game. Part of the problem with the documentation of Chinese history is that it's mostly written and translated by the Chinese, so part of it gets lost in the translation. As a general disclaimer, I have not studied Chinese history and therefore I may certainly be misunderstanding or reading into things more than I should, so take the following summary with a grain of salt.
As mentioned before, the Three Kingdoms period (180 AD to 280 AD) encompasses the attempted rise to power of three generals: Cao Cao, Liu Bei, and Sun Quan. There aren't exactly any lines to be drawn here as to who was good and who was evil - All three men were highly ambitious and wished to unite the states, yet each had their own loyalties and interests to serve. China at the time was in a highly vulnerable state, as the many wars preceding this period had decimated the lands and population of China, and the people were in desperation. At the end of the Han Dynasty, the last emperor had ordered his lands split up into separate states and ruled by regional governors, in that smaller management of the countries might bring them back into stability. Cao Cao, the ruler of the Wei state of the north, had a sizeable army ready at the time of the recession of the Han empire, and established himself and his loyalists as the new Wei dynasty.
Cao Cao was a bloodthirsty monarch who used trickery and deception to take down many of his competing heads of state, attempting to promote his emperor Xiandi to the throne. Xiandi gave up the throne in 220 AD, requesting Cao Cao's son, Cao Pei. Cao Cao was responsible for the renewed settling of the banks of the Yangtze and the restoration of much arable land that hand previously been destroyed in prior wars. He formed the state of Wei and raised a massive army that easily outnumbered the combined forces of Liu Bei and Sun Quan, and yet suffered an overwhelming and humiliating defeat at the Battle of Chibi (Red Cliffs) in 220 AD.
Liu Bei was a famous statesman and descendant of the Han Empire. He followed in his father's footsteps in trying to revive the glory of the Han Empire by establishing the State of Shu-Han (Han of the West), following its ordered split into states by the last Han emperor. Liu Bei relied heavily on the advice and assistance of Zhuge Liang, who was also known as Zhuge Kong Ming, or simply Kongming. Kongming was the orphaned descendant of an important statesman of China, and was driven out of his homeland as a young boy by Cao Cao's marauding armies. When offered the assistance of Liu Bei, Kongming's life once again had direction, and he proved himself to be a brilliant military strategist, employing many tactics and tricks that made the Trojan Horse look like child's play. He was later referred to as "The Hidden Dragon", the first in a long line of people who would wear that title, later being drawn upon by the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".
Sun Quan was the rising warlord of the Wu state, and the last remaining warlord to challenge the validity of Cao Cao's rule. Sun Quan had similar motives to Cao Cao, but refused to resort to the same measures Cao Cao had taken in order to accomplish his objectives. Sun Quan's father, Sun Jian, had been killed in battle against Liu Bei's father, Liu Biao. Sun Quan set aside his feud with Liu Bei to form an alliance and overthrow Cao Cao, but later resumed his quest for vengeance and killed Liu Bei, since Liu Bei's defeat also stood between him and the throne.
Dragon Throne chronicles the exploits of these three figures of history, and does so with very in-depth attention to detail. Unfortunately, it's that detail that sets it back in most of the other departments, and prevents this game from being just that - a game.
Gameplay
If you've played Age of Empires, then you'll generally feel right at home. Dragon Throne has very similar gameplay mechanics, with a few twists thrown in. Dragon Throne takes the large amount of tweaks to the theme presented in Age of Empires II and The Conquerors, and integrates them well. For instance, your peasants don't stand around idly if there's nearby work to be done. If there's an empty field nearby that needs to be farmed, a peasant will go ahead and meander on over to get to work. Also, you can assign multiple peasants to do structure building, and nearby idle peasants will wander over and help out. In theory, this should help simplify things for you. Also, as was the case in the Age of Empires II expansion pack, your farmers will automatically plant new fields and construct new pig farms as needed.
Another new touch to the game is the idea that there's little difference between a laborer and a warrior. As such, you can create laborers, but when you need to build an army, send those same laborers over to the barracks, and they'll shortly be trained to fight. You can later send those same warriors back to the barracks and convert them back to laborers. As an added plus, whatever experience bonus the laborers had beforehand will transfer across to his warrior class, so if you have a farmer that has been working outside for two years, he'll be a stronger warrior than some laborer that hasn't even seen a month under the sun.
Unfortunately, while simplicity exists in such touches, it's utterly blown away by many of the other features of the game. While it is a novel new concept that you can swap laborers for soldiers, and vice versa, it becomes more troublesome when you have to selectively manage waypoints to generate new soldiers without having your harvesting suffer. And harvesting is really critical in this game. You can't just send soldiers out on a sentry mission and have them stay put for months on end - They'd eventually starve and die. Thus, you need to transport supply wagons with them so that they have food and wine with them at all times. Why a soldier *requires* wine, I won't venture to guess. Anyway, that means that you wind up having to spend a lot more time than ordinary managing your troops if you're trying to lay siege to an enemy establishment.
Furthermore, food and wine can't simply be collected. They're derived resources - You must first chop wood to create laborers and build structures. Then you must build fields and pig farms and assign laborers to them to collect corn and meat. Finally, you must build a workshop (Workshop? Why not a "kitchen" or somesuch?) to convert corn and meat into food and wine. The ratio of production depends on how many laborers you assign to what roles. For instance, in the farms, you can have up to five laborers per farm, split between fields and swine herding. Each is pretty straight-forward - the fields produce corn, and the swine, um..."produce" meat. The workshops, however, use different ratios of corn and meat to produce food or wine - Both are used in either case. This makes resource management a bit trickier, as running out of corn will stop production of both food and wine.
Also, you don't mine gold or anything along those lines. Instead you tax the population. Changing the tax rate would theoretically alter the morale of your troops and laborers, but this didn't happen to me. I just cranked up the tax rate and got more gold, period. That doesn't seem to make sense. Furthermore, you have to pay to train troops, but then you're making troops out of your indentured servants, so why are you paying them again? It just doesn't seem to make too much sense.
Finally, we come to the art of battle. Or, rather, the luck of battle. In the first mission of Liu Bei's campaign, you're trained in using Siege Ladders to assault the walls of another province. Unfortunately, due to the perspective of the castle images, you don't know right away that there's actually ramps that let your soldiers go from the castle walls to the inside of the castle. My soldiers spent about 10 minutes standing on top of the walls before I realized that they could enter the city that way. And if you don't have Siege Ladders, you can pretty much hang up on the idea of assaulting a city - the soldiers will all most likely have bows and they will tear an army apart that's three times their size. In general, without the provided plot devices given (like the "gift" of a supply cart in the same mission), assaulting castles is damn difficult, if not downright impossible. And be damned sure you don't take any of your important leaders with you when you go into battle - They're sometimes hard to differentiate between your other troops, and while they have skills and spells that your other troops don't normally have, *every* mission will mandate their survival, and woe betide you if one of them falls - The whole mission is instantly and ungratifyingly failed.
And finally, unit upgrades are...strange. I can see how cock-fighting would help to increase the speed of peasants, since they'd be chasing the little buggers around. I fail to see how "Five-bird show" increases troop defense, or how "Mount Tai Troops" would increase troop offense. To be blunt, the labeling of the skill tree is just silly. Object says that the skills are designed to be authentic to the period of the Three Kingdoms...but I say that's a load of hooey - This is just poor translation/localization.
Graphics/Sound
Dragon Throne, unlike most other RTS games, doesn't need to bother with several different tilesets for different forces - Since all three forces are using the same people and the same units, all that they generally need are clothes of different colors to differentiate each other. Unfortunately, this also makes units harder to differentiate in single-player battle, as well as multiplayer mode. The character animations are reasonably simple - I would guess that each unit had no more than 50 frames, and that's only because the few animations each has have to be rotated depending on the angle that unit is facing. It's simple enough, but certainly not groundbreaking either. Also, the units and the unit portraits are so small, picking out a particular leader in a large group can be difficult. Thankfully, Dragon Throne uses tooltips to identify units you've moused over, and group-selections of units have their unit portraits sorted by rank - The important characters will, in effect, bubble to the top.
Dragon Throne does make use of some nice weather effects though...and the animations it adds to the backgrounds are nice. For instance, your army will be walking by a lake, and suddenly you see a fish splashing the surface. Birds will fly around overhead. Periodically you'll see rain and snow fall. It really adds to the feel of the game.
As far as sound goes, I can actually award a few points both ways to Object Software here. The music of the game has an authentic Eastern feel to it, while still carrying a modern sound, mixed with the feel of a full orchestra playing dramatic themes. There's not much variance in the music itself, but it's good enough that you probably won't get tired of it right away.
The sound effects, on the other hand...
Let's get this straight. This game is *not* "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". When I saw that movie, I was highly impressed at the emotion and expression that the director was able to preserve by opting not to dub over the actors' voices. Similarly to what many an otaku will tell you, the original voice dub is generally the best to stick with.
However, with Dragon Throne, I was constantly left grasping for straws. For a game to be released successfully in the US, it needs to be able to have players that can identify with it. I failed to ever identify with this game. While I have a significant background in the Japanese language, I frequently got characters and city names mixed up during the script of the game. Also, having unit responses in Chinese made things really difficult for me to manage. Thankfully, again, the game works around this by presenting stacking alerts on the screen for you to dismiss as needed, a la Dungeon Keeper. This, of course, takes away one possible method of alerting the player to events, meaning that he/she needs to take his eyes off what he/she's doing to observe the alert. All in all, most games rely on both audio and visual cues to present information, and the nature of this game makes audio alerts infeasible.
Furthermore, the execution of the script really plops the player down right in the middle of things in an attempt to be exciting. The results are far from that, however - the disorientation effect of having to interpret a story translated from Chinese without any of the backstory is just overwhelming. And finally, the voice clips varied widely in volume, and I was frequently reaching for the speaker controls whenever my troops were enthusiastically shouting during a script sequence.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Dramatic story
- GameSpy Arcade-compatible multiplayer
- Covers actual events of history with unrelenting precision
- Lots of documentation of Chinese history in the manual and on the CD
- Some new twists on the gameplay formula
Cons
- Those twists aren't always good
- Confusing story
- Unnecessary and unwieldy Chinese dub
- Unnecessarily high difficulty due to pacing and mission restrictions
- Poor presentation overall
Conclusion
Dragon Throne is ultimately a niche title in its current form. A valuable tool for teaching history, no doubt, and perhaps a game that native Chinese speakers can appreciate more than the American audience would. The gameplay flaws aren't severe - Ultimately what hinders enjoyment of the game is that it's just not compelling to most gamers. There are many more RTS titles out there that do it better and either dispense with the story altogether, or create one that makes much more sense to the target audience.
With a reworked script and several other tweaks, it might have been a good RTS title last year, but we've moved on since then. It's a decent game, but it won't grab anyone's attention either.
SLRating: 6/10
Score Breakdown
Story: 7.0
The story is truly epic and dramatic and stays true to documented history, but there's so much going on that it's impossible to keep track of *and* play the game.
Graphics & Sound: 6.0
Dub or sub...either way you're screwed. Graphics on par with Age of Empires II.
Gameplay: 6.0
Takes all the best components of the genre, but presents very little that's new, while overly complicating other aspects.
Fun Factor: 4.0
Why am I playing this game again?
Lasting Appeal: 5.0
With gameplay that turns you off from the get-go, the only reason I can see to play this game a second time is to try to comprehend the story.
Final Score: 6.0
Unfortunately, this game's most notable features are also its most notable flaws. Otherwise, there's nothing new to concern yourself over.