King & Country is to be a medieval war strategy game for Risc os computers. Unlike Exodus, King and Country will feature realtime rather than turn-based play. The game will support single and multiple human player modes with support for internet/ethernet multiplayer games nearly finished. In single player mode, the player selects one of two opposing armies and then plays through a campaign of 12 levels (with the possibility of one or more hidden levels).
Unfortunately, this project is at the moment on hold due to a number of circumstances beyond the team's control. We'll keep an eye out for further developments but don't hold your breath!
Gameplay:
In multi-player mode, players connect two or more computers together using serial cables, modem+phone lines or ethernet cabling and battle head to head, or co-operatively against the computer (or another team of humans). Special multi-player scenarios will be provided which have objectives (this is a feature we believe to be unique to King & Country ATM).
The game relies largely on realistic style warfare using conventional means but includes some fantasy elements to add some 'spice' to battles (not overdone as in WarCraft II though).
Planned units include:
Both single and multi player success reply upon successful management of resources (gold, wood and stone) which are harvested by peasants, in order to construct and maintain working bases and defences. All bases centre around the castle, which in early levels is small and weak but progresses to a mighty palace, for training soldiers and overseeing everything. Other buildings like blacksmiths, watch towers, temples and guard towers are added to provide defence and other services.
Technical:
At present K&C is only being developed to run on the Risc PC, support for slower machines with less memory etc. will be included as soon as possible (hopefully before release, or shortly afterwards). The game runs in an 800x600 screen mode with 256 colours, and as such requires 1MB+ of VRAM. About 8Mb of conventional RAM will be required. The game will probably ship on a CD ROM (or a huge collection of floppies).
The game uses a fixed update system locking the framerate and updating as many units and structures as possible each frame. This leads to
a very smooth and consistent fell to the game.
The networking is based on a client-server protocol so that if the game leader is running an SA RiscPC or RiscPC II then other players only using basic RiscPCs will still enjoy a fast game.
A map editor will be supplied with the game to enable creation of custom
multi and single player maps.
Introduction and cut scenes will feature high quality rendered video scenes and there's also a possibility of digitised video clips.