Saturday, September 1, 2007

Globulation 2

To be a good RTS game player you have to be good in micromanagement as well as commanding your nation as a whole (macromanagement). This is true for most RTS games. Although some game titles focus on micromanagement and other on macromanagement, micromanagement exists to make things more difficult and unreal.

When I say that things became more unreal I mean that you can control every single unit that you own. That never happens in reality as units are not stupid robots that will always do whatever you say. And when I say that thing became more difficult with micromanagement I mean that you have to spend time to control individual units instead of focusing on your strategy.

Thankfully some guys decided to make Globulation. The first Globulation was shareware and had many features missing compared to the Globulation 2 which is free software.

Globulation 2 makes micromanagement unnecessary because tasks are automatically assigned to units. You only have to set a number on every building that indicates how many units will have to work there. Then the unit will start transferring goods to this building when it is needed. Some building also have other settings. For example the Swarm, which is the building that created buildings, accepts some values that indicate the ratio between different unit that it produces (eg: 1 soldier/2 scouts/4 builders).

Another unique but very realistic characteristic about this game is that you do not collect resources. The units simply take them directly from the nature to the place that they are needed.

You may wonder how you can attack the opponent without the necessary micromanagement. Flags are the solution to this and to other things as well. A war flag for example attracts a number (you set how many) of soldiers of a specific level (you set that too) into a radius around it (guess who sets that...). There are other flags too but I am not going to say anything more.

The DRAWBACK: there is no sound effects. Nice, comic-like graphics, nice multiplayer, nice AI (try to play against Nicowar) but no sound effects. If you can make some sound effects then please do and send them to the game developers, it's a pity for such a nice game to be mute. There is some music but I prefer turning it off and listen to some Blind Guardian instead. ;-)

Click here to go to the official website of Globulation 2. There you can find anything related to the game: tutorials, the game manual and of course the game itself.

Here is a video of a game:

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