Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries

If you want run this game on W7 from GOG, you must setup Compatibility mode : Run Windows 98/ Windows Me Disable visual themes Disable desktop composition Disable display scaling on high DPI settings

Seven Kingdoms is one of my most liked strategy games. It's a real Good Old Game. In this game, your villages are very important. You can train units (like construction workers or spies) from a village. The player must have many unit types on the map, but also must have many peasants in the villages, because they supply food for your people. You must be very kind to your people, because if people in the player's kingdom aren't loyal to their king, they may betrayal him and join an another kingdom. As you can see, your people are your most important „resource” in Seven Kingdoms. In the original game (without Ancient Adversaries) there were really seven kingdoms, but in this version there are ten of them. At the beginning of the game, you only have one village, a fort, and your king. First, you may train soldiers with your king, but if you don't want to fight, there are other goals, like acquiring an amount of population. There are some greater beings in the game. These are special units: each of them has a great power, the Greek phoenix, for example, can look into the enemy's forts or other buildings. If you want to summon them, you must fight with the Frythans - they are enemies without villages but with lairs. It can be quite hard to defeat the defending frythans, but if you slay them, you acquire gold, Scroll of power (it enables the Seat of Power building, where you can summon the greater being) and gain reputation (with higher reputation, independent villagers join your kingdom). In Seven Kingdoms, there is also a great diplomacy panel, where you can do a lot of things, like offer to purchase food, to send aid, to request a technology, etc. There is also research in the game, if you finish a research, you can build a weapon, like ballista. Seven Kingdoms is not a casual RTS game - you don't have to collect resources to build a building. You have only one resource which you must use: money. If you want to train a unit, or you want to maintain it or siege weapons, you have to own a lot of money. Of course, your leaders and some other kinds of units need their salary, so they use money, too. The game has only a few drawbacks. The graphics are old, but still passable. There could be more weapons in the game, as there are too few now; however, that's not a big problem, at least there are some. In conclusion, Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries is something which gamers who like strategy games are very advised to buy, because this is awesome. With a good built-in tutorial, all gamers can understand the basics, so everyone can play it, and I think this is a great deal - such a fantastic game for only $5.99 is that.

This is a fantastic game, being built off of Enlight's previous title's engine (Capitalism plus) this game has a very robust economy system. There is an open-source release of this game, however, note that the music is NOT included with the open-source version of game, source code, etc. So consider that when you decide whether to buy this or get the open-sourced version.

I remember when I first bought Seven Kingdoms it came with a copy of Graham Hancock's book Fingerprints of the Gods. It was an appropriate free gift for while Seven Kingdoms has nothing directly to do with Atlantis or any lost civilization, it does place familiar cultures in a kind of mythical prehistory. You can play as either the Mayans, Greeks, Japanese, Chinese, Persians, Vikings or Normans and conquer the known world. And that's where the fun begins. You begin the average game with just a single village of your chosen nationality and a fort connected to it containing your king which you can name after yourself if you've got a gigantic ego like I do. From then you must utilise your people to mine raw goods, manufacture, go to war, pray, make weapons of war, or farm, depending on what the situation requires. The key to expanding is capturing neutral villages who have not yet pledged alliegiance to anyone. The first thing you must do is build a fort connected to the village with a general ideally of their own nationality. The resistance of the village to your rule will slowly begin to decrease but you can speed the process up in a number of ways such as paying them off, slipping a spy in there to sow dissent or simply attack the village until the population surrenders. Of course doing the latter will have a dire effect upon your reputation which upsets your people and makes other independant units less likely to join your Kingdom. Of course there are other Kingdoms trying to do the exact same thing as you and while you can trade, make friendly treaties and even form alliances with them, war is inevitable at some point. To fight wars you of course need soldiers. Troops are placed under the command of a General or your King and the higher his leadership the faster your troops combat skill will increase and the more effective they will be when fighting alongside him. There may even be a future General in the making in one of your forts so it's wise to keep an eye on who is showing potential for leadership. Of course if you're in a hurry you can always build an inn or two and recruit mercenaries which come in all nationalities and trades. Beware also that every unit in your Kingdom has an individual loyalty which may slip if you feel you do not acknowledge their achievements enough. Bestowing honours upon them is sometimes required. Then there are spies which you can sneak into enemy Kingdoms to sabotage production or research, to become soldiers or if you're lucky even Generals. Then there are the Gods which will also reward you if proper devotion is shown. Each nationality has their own unique temple of worship and God which can be summoned if there has been enough prayer. These Gods all have different abilities which can give you a massive advantage in certain areas. Of course just because you choose to play as one nationality doesn't mean you're restricted to them. You're free to expand in any way you see fit and this might include bringing additional races into your fold and utilising their unique soldiers or perhaps even their unique God. The game contains several scenarios but the randomly generated maps with their wealth of customisation options is where the fun is at. Really, any attempt to explain all that is great about Seven Kingdoms within a sane word limit is doomed to failure. Perhaps it is enough to say that I bought this game in 1998 and I still to this day play it regularly even though I've played every other strategy game you can think of. The Ancient Adversaries expansion pack which is included in this GOG download was really a standalone game. I remember ripping a page out of my Seven Kingdoms manual and sending it off as proof of purchase to obtain it for free. I still have that manual sitting beside me. Ancient Adversaries added three new nations, the Zulu, Mughal and Egyptians and the ability to play on snowy maps. Nothing significant but it certainly made a sweet cake all the sweeter. In short, if you've never played Seven Kingdoms or its sequel then you're missing out on what is quite simply the best RTS game ever made.

In 23 years of gaming, this is *still* my favorite RTS game.