Believe it or not I had my first game developer's meeting on Sunday morning with JD and Iain McNeil from UK based Slitherine Software. You might be familiar with Slitherine as they have released quite a number of historical strategy titles in the last few years for the PC. They have concentrated their efforts on the Greek-Roman-Spartan erea of history with Legion, Legion II, Legion Arena, Spartan, Chariots of War and Gates of Troy. On Sunday the two McNeils showed me two upcoming titles that are both a big departure from their previous releases (they declined to give us screenshots, saying that the games were too early yet to release any media)

The first game they showed us was Commander: Europe at War, a turn based hex grid Europe based WWII strategy game that Slitherine is developing with the help of some third party team members. Ok, we know that you are thinking "Another WWII title...." but the folks at Slitherine really want to make this game a bit different than the norm. For one thing, they want to make the tech tree for creating new units different. For example, you could concentrate on create a lot of tanks but that will keep you from developing other technologies for other units and weapons. Terrain will also play a part in the game. Open land works for tanks and vehicles but mountains and forests favor infrantry units. If you play as the Nazis you can choose to invade countries like France and the UK before invading Poland but that might bring the US into the war sooner than expects. Your army's morale is also a factor. Nazi troops are well trained at first but as the war goes on you may find your army unit's getting smaller and forced to use less well trained soldiers which can impact their morale and therefore their ability in battle. Of course there will be Internet, LAN, E-Mail and even hotseat multiplayer support. Commander: Europe at War is due for release this September via digital download.

The other upcoming Slitherine game isn't due out until spring 2007 but it looks even more interesting. Arena Warriors is the developer's first foray into the fantasy RTS genre with some RPG elements thrown in. The game has two races. humans and Orcs, who are at odds with each other but a third unrevealed race forces both of them to deal with this new threat. Arena Warriors already looks pretty good even at this early stage of development, using a 3D quest map to show how the player can go through the storyline in a non-linear manner, keeping your persistant army as it grows and develops. Slitherine plans to have a lot of custom touches for your units in the game as you not only can customize the look of each unit but also equipment them with different kinds of weapons and shields. Units can also be upgraded (that's the RPG element). The brief in game battle I saw on Sunday was still early (and running on a not-too-quick laptop) but watching the human and orc armies face off Braveheart style looked very promising. We look forward to seeing a future version of the game before its release.

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