A new team of programmers are apparently intending to take over this project,
but being realistic I don't expect it will ever see the light of day. Here's
the original preview:
At the start of the game the player will start with a basic wooden castle, with only enough features to train very basic soldiers. As they progress through the levels they will obtain more powerful castles which can train very powerful mounted knights. Each level in the game will have a different map and a different set of completion goals.
The player can add new buildings to their settlement, such as blacksmiths to upgrade the strength of their warriors swords and armour, a stable to obtain mounted knights. Some of these buildings will be separate buildings on the map, others may be added internally to the castle. The list of buildings so far is:
Castle - Trains all warriors
Farm - Provided food for all warriors and workers
Workers yard - Trains workers, builds roads and bridges
Wood mill - Allows harvesting of trees for archers weapons and buildings
Quarry - Allows harvesting of stone for all buildings
Mine - Allows mining of gold from the earth
Blacksmiths - Allows upgrading weapons
Stables - Allows training of mounted knights
Infirmary - Allows you to heal wounded troops
Heavy armoury - Allows building of siege engines (Catapults, Ballistas etc.)
Ship yards - Allows you to sell unused food and to import mercenary soldiers
Shrine - Allows you to train druids, with healing powers
Temple - Allows you to train Mages, with destructive majik powers
The temple is an upgradeable building. In it's initial state it Mages can only cast quite basic spells, upgrading the temple will allow them to obtain greater powers to the extent that they can summon demons to fight with you.
The game is completely non-user dependant, ie the computer will continue to move it's players in the background, it does not need to wait for the user to do something ( a pause feature will be supplied :) ).
The display used in the game has not been decided on, we would prefer to use a fairly high-resolution screen mode such as 640x480 (VGA) but this may not be possible due to restrictions in the market. The game will feature high quality 3D rendered graphics where appropriate. We will rely quite heavily on digitised sound, for battle sounds, unit acknowledgments and building sounds.
Due to the amounts of data that will be used for graphics and sound two versions of the game will be produced. One will be supplied on floppy discs and will include limited sound and only still graphics for the intro/end sequences. The second version will be supplied on a CD-ROM and will include much high quality sampled sound at both 8-bit and 16-bit quality for those which can use it. It will also include 3D rendered animation sequences for the introduction and end sequences with full colour graphics for use on Risc PCs and A7000s.