The orgy of power
The game screen is divided in a functional way and allows you to have everything under control with a few mouse clicks. The largest part is occupied by the strategic map, divided into regions, where the troops are located and where it is possible to observe the general situation of the territory. At the bottom left there is a mini-map with which you can quickly navigate through the represented area so as not to waste too much time scrolling the screen. Also in the same area there are some convenient summary tools that allow you to deepen the particular situations of the different regions, showing various graphic information directly on the map. By clicking on a territory, a horizontal bar located at the top of the screen will illustrate the conformation of the terrain, useful for understanding the level of defensibility and the possibility of making or being ambushed. The current and average weather conditions are also shown in the same bar.
the philosophy that holds Birth of America is to come up with a few clear rules without accepting compromises in terms of depth
The orgy of power
A small box at the top right shows the date of the current round and allows you to move on to the next round in order to make the decisions made on the field effective.
At the bottom is the events bar, where the events of the shift just ended are illustrated. By clicking on any unit on the map, this bar is transformed giving detailed information on the groupings and the general status of each selection. In short, from here it will be possible to manage the troops and decide their behavior on the battlefield according to the situations, all in a very intuitive way. For example, besieging a fort and staying on the defensive can mean months of siege without tangible results if not reducing the enemy to the limit due to lack of supplies, but choosing a frontal assault can prove destructive even in the case of large numerical superiority on our part. In short, each choice must be taken in a thoughtful way trying to take into account the different possible results and also evaluating how much the losses could affect the progress of the war: sacrificing men to take control of a strategic region can produce very different results depending on the overall performance of the campaign.
The siege
The main objectives usually concern the capture of one or more key cities. To do this, it is necessary to drag the troops into the region of the city to take it by force, taking care not to leave uncovered any territory necessary for the enemy to win. Moving troops is an extremely simple operation: just select them and move them to your destination as if they were a Windows icon. The CPU will then elaborate the route highlighting the time needed to reach the goal, taking into account all the possible variables (weather conditions, roughness of the terrain, difficulty of supplies, morale of the troops and more). When the troops are near the city, the actual siege begins, which is managed automatically following the general indications given by the player. Ending a turn, your choices will produce effects that, in the next turn, will need adjustments in your strategies. For example, if our men have managed to create a breach in the opponent's defenses, we will be able to select a higher level of aggression in order to take advantage of the favorable situation.
The artificial intelligence implemented by the developers is of the highest level. We can see that it was passionate strategists who put their hands in it because the computer was repeatedly able to surprise us with thoughtful decisions that put us in great difficulty, considerably increasing the level of the challenge. Not bad for a product that has certainly not been able to enjoy a multi-billion dollar super production.
High fedelity
The biggest flaw of Birth of America it is perhaps the excessive essentiality. As already mentioned, everything is perfectly functional, but sometimes you have the feeling of being in front of something sketchy. Some screens are difficult to read due to the amount of data they can compress in very little space, while other times you go in search of some more detailed information not bound to slow reading numbers. Visual information is also lacking in the game with the most important events not underlined. Maybe some extra animations would have been appreciated to show what happens in a battle or some quality static screens would have been enough to give the player some of that "aesthetic" satisfaction that should not be missing even in the most serious of games. In reality it is not so much the latter that we lack as the possibility of understanding what happened in the opponents' turn without having to go through dozens of messages at the beginning of the turn. In the early stages of campaigns or some scenarios not a lot of things happen and the operation is very fast, but in the advanced stages or even at the beginning of very complex scenarios, you can get to have dozens of different messages that take a long time to be disposed of, when it would have been enough to show a small representation of the event on the screen to make it known to the player. All this slows down the game turns a lot, making some phases long, which greatly limits the possibility, for example, of playing online if you do not have several hours available. Fortunately, there is the possibility of playing via email, an option in this very practical case that allows you to postpone a game over a longer period.
Another flaw is the irritating soundtrack. Between very low-level effects and a piece of music that could make even a Buddhist monk impatient, it doesn't take long to eliminate the sound by opting for silence or a personalized soundtrack of any other nature.
System requirements
The minimum hardware requirements are not at all expensive, even if the most performing systems will notice a greater speed in the processing of the CPU moves which, on older systems, can prove to be a long and rather tiring operation, especially in the advanced stages. Otherwise the game was very stable and never crashed, even after very long sessions.
Minimum requirements:
- Processor: Pentium 3 1,2 GHz or equivalent AMD
- RAM: MB 512
- Video Card: Any with 64 MB of DirectX 8.1 compatible RAM
- DirectX 8.1
- Disk space: 1.0 GB
- Processor: Pentium 4 1,8 GHz or equivalent AMD
- RAM: 1 GB
- Video Card: Any with 128 MB of DirectX 8.1 compatible RAM
- DirectX 8.1
- Disk space: 2.0 GB
- Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3,4 GHz
- RAM: 2 GB
- Video Card: NVIDIA 7800GT
Comment
A well designed and functional interface, an excellent level artificial intelligence, hours and hours of gameplay to complete all the campaigns and all the scenarios, the possibility to play online even via email ... in short, everything would be perfect if you were paid more attention to the visual part of the game and the speed of some operations. We are not talking about the graphic beauty itself, but about the lack of information that could help dispose of some delays and could attract even newbies more. Birth of America however, it is a game that we would like to recommend and that earns some points also by virtue of its extremely competitive price.
For
- Simple even for beginners
- Great game interface
- Long-lived and deep
- Technically poor
- The soundtrack is to be trashed in its entirety
- Some delays could have been avoided
The birth of a nation
Birth of America it is an old-fashioned turn-based strategy where substance prevails over all other aspects. The interface, a schematic map and a few icons designed in a functional way is all that the graphics sector has to offer, but don't be fooled: you understand the few rules of the game, what you see fades into the background and you are dragged into an excellent playful mechanism, perhaps not very suitable for the mass market, but with a very high class.
The scenario is one of the classic ones: the great wars of the late 18th century in North America where the well-known War of Independence started in 1775 and ended in 1783, is flanked by lesser-known conflicts such as those of the Franco-Indian War of the 1755. The start is without great frills, with some options to set, especially as regards the gameplay, and with the possibility to choose whether to face the useful and slender tutorial, whether to try your hand in one of the 4 campaigns or in one of the 12 scenarios available. The tutorial turns out to be a godsend given the lack of a paper manual inside the very poor package, where only the game CD and a black and white slip with the serial number have found space. However, there is a PDF version of the manual on the CD. The tutorial explains the interface and the movements of the troops, making clear the excellent work done by the developers in terms of simplicity: you will hardly find such a specialized strategy in which the interaction system has been refined to the point of allowing even newbies to "enter ”At stake without a steep and slippery learning curve like Pierpaolo's head (our editor-in-chief, editor's note). The philosophy that holds Birth of America is to come up with a few clear rules without accepting compromises in terms of depth. The result is a product that can be used immediately but which, as the hours pass in front of the screen, turns out to be more and more intriguing and never banal.
