Creature Conflict： The Clan Wars

Creature Conflict: The Clan Wars was released for the PC earlier this month. The game is set in the European Middle East. Like the Civilization series, The Clan Wars allows players to control a number of clans in battle, with three to five different classes at their disposal.

The story mode is structured like Civilization III's but allows for various real-time strategic combat, like where you can have several armies by way of formation or "phantom formation" as your secondary forces. To move your troops, you can "manage" them using the stylus. Once the Clan Wars is complete, players will be able to gain access to the new three other units, including the Tiger, Tiger, and Tiger, as well as to learn new tactics.

The Clan Wars is now available for a suggested retail price of $49.99, which includes a one-year subscription to the GameSpot UK beta testing program. For more information, read our previous coverage of the game.

The latest installment in The Settlers series, The Settlers: Heritage, lets you build a brand-new city on the world map. You begin your city building career as a junior member of the settlers-and-design-a-organization-community-of-thwart clan, but quickly rise to power. You'll be able to train and train any of your basic units, such as warriors and archers, or train individual tribes to perform special military tasks. But, once you've grown to prominence, you can move your colony of "citizen" holdings to the city center of your new territory and take over that territory. Or, if you prefer, you can create a group of "follower" units to make your populace more well-rounded. For example, you might be able to seize and take over a town with your own infantry units and heal wounded peasants. It's all a bit more complex than simply sitting down and hammering away at a manual interface, but it is an interesting concept, because it can make for some interesting strategic gameplay.

Finally, there's also a large focus on diplomacy, which, if you played Fallout 2, will be familiar to fans of the series. You'll be able to use a series of powers to negotiate with other factions, but the game won't take place in a conventional real-time strategy context. Instead, it will take place in the year 2062. In the original Fallout, you would have to select between a group of dozen other nations and pledge allegiance to one of three factions, such as the U.S. Army or the U.S. Government. The game's model of assigning your nation to a specific nation will actually let you know whether or not it would be considered neutral or a peace treaty. You'll still have the option of entering a diplomatic challenge, where the country would be assigned a special task. However, if your nation is opposed, you won't get sent to defend your nation from any other nations, so you'll have to select your nation carefully.

On the diplomatic side of the equation, you'll have access to a new standard of diplomacy that will be based on an extensive series of player reports, from the 1,000-plus player reports on quests to the players' forums. A special message will pop up in the form of a graph on your screen showing you what you can do, or where you can send an alert about the consequences of an actual war. Interestingly, the player report will also show all the relations between specific nations, which indicates that peace talks are coming to a close. There will be a total of 300 nations in the game, many of which will have active policies, and you can choose to ignore or allow those policies to expire. There will also be specific ramifications on how alliances are being formed, such as for the Northern nations. However, there will be some restrictions on how your player data will be used, as the game will still allow you to use diplomatic, military, and political strategies. However, the developers at Blue Byte haven't decided on a definitive format for this kind of feature, as the team plans to leave the console version to the PC version of the game as soon as possible. The Xbox version of the game is due out later this year, so you'll have to wait until that release date for your console wars.

For the PC players, Blue Byte plans to incorporate many of the features that the console version of the game will offer, including multiplayer games. For example, we were told that the first time we picked a nation, we'd select a very specific political structure. This may lead to a long game, as players will have to choose to have certain types of governments to complete certain goals for the nation, but it'll also offer a lot of flexibility for those players.

When we set out to create the PC version of Rise of Nations, we first looked at what we could and could not do.