Dragon Throne : The Battle of the Red Cliffs

Publisher: Strategy First
Developer: Object
Genre: Historic Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: Mar 26, 2002
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Blood, Violence
Number of Players: 1-8


Object Software's Dragon Throne: Battle of Red Cliffs is the sequel to Fate of the Dragon. Both are real-time strategy games that take place during the legendary Three Kingdoms era in ancient China. Like Fate of the Dragon before it, Dragon Throne is a strategy game that uses somewhat simple 2D graphics and has full speech in Chinese. And like Fate of the Dragon, Dragon Throne is a decent enough game, but there are better real-time strategy games that you can spend your time and money on.

As you might have already guessed, Dragon Throne also sounds pretty much the same as Fate of the Dragon. The original Fate of the Dragon had two language options for audio speech: English and Chinese. Dragon Throne has only Chinese speech, though you can choose English subtitles. The game's voice acting is quite good, but unless you're fluent in Chinese (or attempting to learn the language), you'll probably end up ignoring it entirely. As with Fate of the Dragon, Dragon Throne's synth-instrumental soundtracks combine traditional Chinese folk music with more upbeat rhythms. The music is well suited to the game, though it isn't particularly memorable.

Does Dragon Throne also play the same as Fate of the Dragon? Yes, it does. In both games, as with most other real-time strategy games, you must recruit peasants to build a base of operations, then create an army to crush your enemies. And Dragon Throne more or less has the same base building and combat as the previous game. You recruit peasants to build houses to increase your population limit, farms to grow food, barracks to create soldiers, and mechanical workshops to build siege engines--it's all quite similar to other real-time strategy games you may have played. As in Fate of the Dragon, your infantry comes from training peasants at a barracks. The one interesting new feature that the sequel has is that soldiers can revert back to peasants in times of peace. In other words, instead of having soldiers standing about idly in times of peace, you can assign them peasant work. This occasionally comes in handy during longer campaigns, in which your armies have to travel long distances to fight and will gradually run low on strength (provided by food and wine, which your peasants can produce or carry in slow-moving supply wagons). So, the new feature simply allows you to build a new base of operations so you don't have to walk all the way back home to replenish your strength.

Minimum System Requirements
System: PII 266 or equivalent
RAM: 64 MB
Video Memory: 8 MB
Hard Drive Space: 240 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: PIII 800 or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 300 MB

Screen Shots

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