Europa Universalis

Europa Universalis, developer Paradox Interactive's ambitious strategy game, will be released in early 2001. It will add a new campaign, multiplayer support, a new 3D engine, and several new technologies and subclasses to its empire-building strategy.

The new features are the unique combination of a new campaign setting with new technologies and gameplay elements. The new campaign will take you to the barbarian-influenced country of Haakon or as the early years of the Imperial Age, during the war with France. Each campaign will have its own distinct, well-known leader, which you can choose to lead. The game will feature "advancement" mode, which will let you play through the era without the intervention of any previous generation.

The new "meta-conquest" system will let you play the beginning and end of a particular chapter of a game and do a succession of tasks to keep the progress from over to your next playthrough. You'll receive multiple scenarios that will be split up depending on how well you perform. The scenarios will be set in different eras of history that will reflect different regions and new technologies, and they'll also have different combat styles and advantages. In addition, each scenario will have specific challenges that you'll have to complete to progress. For instance, you may want to use certain buildings to attack and defend cities, or you might want to push them into a territory that is actually protected by a certain faction. The game will feature more than 15 different unit types and environments that will be different from one another, but the goal is to keep you hooked.

If your player dies in battle, his or her health will gradually deplete, as will his or her remaining soldiers and units. That means that if your player dies in battle, his or her health will slowly deplete. The game's concept will have you fight against other players as you seek to recover an item that you previously lost. Basically, you can expect to play the game in five difficulty levels--hard, normal, hard, and heroic--so that you can get into a variety of skirmishes, including boss battles. Your character will not only have lots of health and his or her own resources, but he'll also have access to more powerful weapons, armor, and even items.

For those looking for a single-player campaign, you can also expect to see a cooperative mode, where two players can team up to go through the game together or you can also pit your party against AI opponents. One player can control a squad of four soldiers, and another can control a squad of up to four different soldiers. When playing the game online, there will be a number of different options for multiplayer matches. The game will let you and up to three friends work cooperatively, as you will use the various computer-controlled teammates to complete a variety of different objectives. You'll find that the online experience in the game will actually play much more like that of a traditional action game than it does in an RPG. The AI in the game will be more balanced, because you won't be competing against computer-controlled opponents, but rather you'll just play a game of "tactical hacking and slashing" that requires a lot of thought and technique. For example, one player can hack an enemy's computer-controlled body and then take control of it for an encumbrance.

There will be plenty of multiplayer maps to play on as well, so you'll be able to choose from a pool of 15 multiplayer maps that you can play on. In addition to the standard deathmatch game types, you'll find deathmatch, team deathmatch, and king of the hill game types, and you'll even be able to race in the monster capture and defend game types. King of the Hill will also offer a zombie-centric game type that will have you defending a base and using a variety of weaponry to take out the undead.

King of the Hill is currently scheduled to ship this fall.