ParaWorld [PC]

If there's one thing that's been missing from RTSs, it's dinosaurs. Who doesn't want a dinosaur in his RTS? Dragons, yeah, we got plenty of those. But not enough dinosaurs. Paraworld to the rescue!

The basic fiction is a combination of vaguely historical empires with prehistoric creatures. What if the Chinese had strapped their primitive rockets onto giant lizards, Paraworld asks. What if the Vikings had wooly mammoths along for the pillaging? What if Arabian nomads put a little dude on the very top of a brontosaurus' head with a bridle to steer it? These are questions other RTSs are afraid to ask.

Each faction has a collection of standard human units: warriors, archers, spearmen, that sort of thing. But the factions differ dramatically by their cavalry, which is where the interesting critters come into play. The vaguely Viking style Norsemen get giant boars, woolly mammoths, and armored battle rhinos (not technically dinosaurs, but still). The Asian Dragon Clan get reptiles (almost technically dinosaurs) fitted with heavy weaponry like gatling guns and rockets. The nomadic desert-dwelling Dustriders get the conventional dinosaurs like the stegosaurus, brachiosaurus, and T-rex. The Dustriders also get trainers, each of whom is accompanied by his own personal raptor to send into battle.

Each faction has minor variations in terms of their resource gathering, but the real twist is resource caps. There's a limit to the amount of wood, food, and stone you can gather before your villagers stand around scratching their heads wondering where to put down these rocks, logs, and slabs of meat. This limit is far less than the amount of resources you need to "age up" and get better units and technology. So along with the usual barracks, farms, houses, defensive towers, and walls, each faction has to build storage space. It's just one more thing to balance in Paraworld's old-school take on resource management.

There is also a global pool of experience earned from killing neutral creatures and enemies. In addition to using this experience (called "skulls") to improve individual units, you'll need it for advanced technologies. And you'll need it to age up, so you'll have to send out a starting army to hunt neutral creatures, who will spawn from lairs (these lairs are almost like a fourth resource). Be careful not to disturb the allosaurus in the early game. Those guys are a great source of skulls, but they're going to be out of your league for a while.

Spending skulls to improve individual units isn't just a way to make them more powerful. It's also a part of army management. Paraworld's Army Commander, as they call it, is a unique way to control the size and composition of your army. You have a limited number of slots that determines how many units of each level you can have: 25 first-level units, 15 second-level units, 10 third-level units, three fourth-level units, and one fifth-level unit.

One thing this does is keep Paraworld from being a game about who can make the most and cheapest units to swarm over the other guy. If you've filled up your first-level block with villagers and spearmen, you're not going to be able to recruit any more. You'll have to move up to the advanced unit, who are higher level and more expensive. Or you can promote some of your first-level units to free up room. This creates tough choices about which units to put into your limted higher level blocks.