Siege & Ambush At Sorinor & Walls Of Rome: A series of games very similar to each other. The screenshots look almost identical. And all the games are quite similar in fact They're all pioneers of the RTS genre. That means much action is in them. But in contrast to current titles, the strategy- component is stressed. This becomes clear when you discover that you can give orders to your army when the game is paused.

Siege is set in a medieval fantasy world. As the name suggests, you have to either defend or conquer a castle. There are hundreds of scenarios but not too much maps. Depending on the difficulty level you can have more or less units at once.

The number of possible actions is really impressive. The all-round units are engineers who can (if they have the right equipment of course) do almost everything, e.g. deploy ladders on the wall or pour boiling oil on the attackers. But they can't survive without protection by proper soldiers. Again there is a sheer unlimited number of different ones.

Although the goal is always the same, Siege is the best of the three games. It's just a load of positive stress. The best situations are the close ones, e.g. when your walls are about to fall, you'll probably start shouting at your reinforcements to move faster!

Ambusch at Sorinor takes place in a similar fantasy world, but apart from that it's quite different. This time you're the commander of a group of mercenaries. Six different clans who fight each other offer you assignments. You can work for all of them. But your payment depends on how much they like you. And if you've just fought against them, they won't. A really cool concept!

There are two kinds of missions: offensive and defensive ones, i.e. ambushes (blocking a trade route, killing some passing creatures) or prventing ambushes. You have to recruit new soldiers for each mission. So there's no unit developement.
This game also has a comfortable map editor, very simple to use.

Walls of Rome is almost the same as Siege. Again you have to conquer or defend fortresses. But this time in a historical context. But for some reason it's much less fun. I can't really explain why, but this is by far the weakest part of the series. I didn't really enjoy playing it, it's here only to make the selection complete.

These classics by Mindcraft were very innovative for their time and they are still. I've hardly ever seen such deepness in RTS games!


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