The strategy genre has not made much of a dent in the console world. Though older classics like Age of Empires and Europa Universalis are now finding their way to handhelds, console strategy has, for the most part, been left to planning out your franchise moves in a sports game or choosing which card to play in Yu-Gi-Oh. That seems to be changing, with a number of new strategy games on the horizon for the PS2.

One consistend exception has been the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. KOEI has been making these epic strategy/role-playing games since the late eighties. The original could be played on the NES. The new one, now number ten, is for the PS2 (as were seven, eight and nine) and it is getting rave reviews.

There was a time when KOEI made games for the PC. The games were, in many ways, precursors to the Total War series. Your leaders are much more important than they are in the Creative Assembly games, and you, as the player, take on a specific character and not a nation or faction. This means that there is a role-playing element beyond the simple conquer-thy-neighbor mechanic.

As a console-less person, I can only rely on the word of people whose opinion I trust. And they tell me that RoTK X is a great game. There has been some discussion of whether or not KOEI should try its hand at a Western historical theme. In their PC days, they took on Napoleon and the American Revolution, but have stuck with the great Chinese sagas for the most part.

Here in the US, certain historical subjects sell better than others and certain play styles sell better than others. Though a new KOEI game based on the Revolutionary war or the time of the conquistadors might sell better than the unification of China, it is often the battles themselves that seem to fascinate American history gamers. There are exponentially more games, for example, on individual Civil War battles than there are grand strategic games on the war. (This mindset could explain the durability of homemade war games and the comparative dearth of larger strategy titles.)

I just wish they would publish this game for the PC. I suppose that I can get a PS2 cheap in a year or so. Until then, I guess I’ll just cede this one piece of gold to my strategy deprived console brethren. After action reports and further comments welcome in the comment section, as usual.

Slitherine has announced a final round of beta testing for their Roman battle game, Legion: Arena. This one is aimed at testing the multiplayer component of the game. Sign up at Strategy First’s website.

Much to my surprise, a courier showed up at my door with a copy of Great Invasions, the latest grand strategy game from the mind of Philippe Thibaut. I was officially in the beta test, but I did a poor job of it since it coincided with a billion other things in my life. I think I made two posts on the beta forum and I haven’t played the game in six to eight months.

But, just the same, I get a copy of the game. In French.

Well, the box is French and the manual is French, but the game itself is installed in English. No word on any official US release for Great Invasions, but you can order it direct from its website or wait for it in British stores on August 5.

There is a new interview with Slitherine’s Iain McNeil at the RPGVault on IGN. It’s very informative on what we can expect from this title.

McNeil writes that Legion: Arena battles will be “over in two to 10 minutes, depending on the size of the forces involved.” This will make for very short battles, but is much longer than a typical Slitherine battle. In Spartan and its predecessors, you might get one to drag on to two minutes, but most ended pretty quickly.

The linearity of the campaigns is a little disappointing. A dynamic campaign that would allow you to meet the challenges of the mini-campaigns in slightly different ways depending on the results of the previous battles would be more interesting, but admittedly more difficult to program. Making multiplayer a “match game” sounds like fun, but is more likely bowing the fact that the individual battles themselves are so brief.

Even though the campaigns will only be Celtic and Roman, the availability of campaign opponents ranging from Spartacus to Carthage almost guarantees that their will be unofficial player created campaigns using these units before long. I give Legion: Arena two months before unofficial content starts popping up.

The presence of this interview on the RPG section of the site is a little surprising. Beyond the upgrading of units and possibility of customizing units, the step-by-step nature of the linear campaign means that there will not be all that much role-playing as traditionally understood. McNeil’s comparison to Diablo is intriguing, but I doubt that enjoying one will have much to do with whether one enjoys the other.

Legion: Arena should be available in the third quater of 2005. The decision of Slitherine to return to the Strategy First fold means that there is at least one SF game that I am guaranteed to buy this year.

Of my three favorite strategy games so far this year, the top two were European. Darwinia is a British product and the flag waving Act of War is French. They are representative of a continuing trend in the genre. Europe is increasingly the source of our strategy games and the genre seems to be in decline in American development houses.

There is still, of course, the Microprose diaspora of Ensemble, Firaxis and Big Huge Games, but beyond the big three, there is Stardock, Stainless Steel Studios and little else. Mad Doc Software has done a bit of everything, including the recent Empire Earth II. Blizzard has put so much into the MMO basket, that there is little talk of another Warcraft or Starcraft. A quick browse of the E3 strategy lineup shows a major dearth of American talent.

Look at Europe. In the UK you have both Creative Assembly and Slitherine, both of whom do strategic games with a battle engine attached. The Germans tend towards economic development games and resource management titles (the Anno series, the Patrician games, etc.) Sweden has the reigning kings of grand strategy in Paradox Interactive and Eastern Europe has become the source of all kinds of resource driven RTS titles, led by Ukrainian GSC Gameworld, makers of the Cossacks series.

This coming year, German publisher CDV will publish Blitzkrieg II from Russian Nival Interactive and Codename Panzers: Phase II from Hungarian Stormregion. 1C has assumed the publication of many historical strategy games, becoming to Europe what Strategy First was for Canada, only with a much wider global reach. 1C has secured the European rights to Age of Empires 3 and will be the international distributor for XIII Century and Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is still a strong American presence in the wargame community, but the decline of that subgenre from the retail shelves means that its power in the strategy community is on the wane. You will be more likely to find a cut-rate Romanian WWII RTS or Anno 1703 at your local EB than the next large scale D-Day simulation.

The historical strategy genre is thriving in a dozen small houses in Europe and isolated to a few pockets here in the Americas. The consolidation of the game publishing industry in the US has meant that many publishers aren’t as willing to take risks on marginal developers in what is still seen as a niche genre (in spite of the huge mainstream sales of the Age and Civ series). If a US or Canadian publisher does want to take on a strategy title, it will usually be from a European developer where the costs are much lower than here.

Europe also appears to have a stronger market for these types of games. In spite of their blandness or finicky rulesets, both the Anno and Cossacks series have been huge hits in the Old World. Paradox first released Europa Universalis to huge audiences in Europe before trying the US market. Canadian developer Magitech has already found publishers for its Strength and Honor in Italy, Spain and Russia but has had little success in America.

Strategy games are still the biggest selling genre in America, according to the ESA, but that data includes The Sims – which is more simulation than strategy – and a plethora of tycoon games that really don’t fit into the historical strategy camp that grabs me. Without access to NPD data and similar data collection from around the world, it is hard to tell just how much of a market there is for my beloved subgenre.

On the Children of the Nile main page, Tilted Mill has announced that the city-builder will be included in the traveling Tut exhibit, Tutankhamen and The Golden Age of the Pharaohs.

This is great news for what was one of my favorite games from last year. I’m surprised that this announcement from Myelin Media hasn’t gotten more coverage, since it appeals to the whole “Games As Serious Stuff” thing that so many gaming pundits and journalists say they want. The Myelin deal with MTV over a poker game was deemed more newsworthy by IGN or Gamespot than the inclusion of a game in the most anticipated museum event since the first Tut exhibit.

How will the game be integrated into the museum display? That remains to be seen. (Any of you in LA able to help with this?) Most museum displays are little more than piles of stuff laid out on pedestals or behind glass, so a screen running Children of the Nile should blend in fine as just another artifact.

I hope that they do more with it than just have it running in the background and give this game the attention it deserves. A good friend complained that the lack of cartoony stuff (like Zeus had) made him less interested in the drab and “serious” looking Children of the Nile, and, as I noted in my review, you have to cast off a lot of your ideas about what a city-builder is all about. If you haven’t played it yet, Children of the Nile is available very cheaply from a number of online distributors and is more than worth whatever price you pay.