Powermonger

Powermonger carries on the ideas of Populous but swaps the divine perspective for the role of a warlord without a land of his own. The player finds himself at the edge of a divided world, and his task is to gradually conquer one territory after another until no one is left to oppose him. Each map is a small region with villages, forests, sheep and headstrong inhabitants who have their own names, allegiances and occupations. No one here is just a token: the blacksmith can forge weapons, the fisherman brings food, and the farmer can be recruited into the army.

Orders are given through dispatched captains and a handful of basic commands: occupy a village, recruit, plunder, produce, attack. Everything else happens on its own, and the player watches his unit move across the countryside, watches supplies dwindle, and watches the mood of the inhabitants shift depending on whether he arrived as a liberator or a marauder. Food plays a key role, since a hungry army loses strength and scatters, so conquest is also a logistics problem. Inventions such as bows, catapults or ships gradually unlock and shift the balance of power. The whole landscape is rendered in a rotatable, tiltable isometric perspective that can be zoomed all the way down to individual characters, which was an impressive technical showcase in the early nineties.

The DOS version kept this fluid three-dimensional map along with a wealth of statistics on every inhabitant, but the controls are dense and the game makes no real effort to hold the player's hand. The sound design is restrained, and the atmosphere rests on a quiet, cold Middle Ages where wars are fought over sheep and bread. At the time, Powermonger was seen as an ambitious and technically inventive title that foreshadowed later real-time strategy games with a focus on supply lines. Today it demands patience and a willingness to learn its language, but the reward is a strategy game that, even after all these years, feels unusual and distinctive.