I can't say its very often that I have a really good feeling about an RTS game anymore. For the most part, they all start to blend together into a giant ball of futuristic robots and machine guns rattling at each other through a haze of retarded AI, defense building contests, and micromanagement of resources. While all of the conventions of a RTS can't be eliminated by definition, they can be changed around a little bit in order to put a little more excitement and strategy back into your life.

It’s fair to say that nothing is off the table. Battle Realms is a world not just a game and lots can happen in that world. GamingPH: What are your future plans for Battle Realms? Ed Del Castillo: Step 1 is to reintroduce it to the world. Step 2 is to update everything to today’s quality bar. Beyond that, the sky is the limit.

Summary: State of Mind is a futuristic thriller game delving into transhumanism. The game explores themes of separation, disjuncture and reunification, in a world that is torn between a dystopian material reality and a utopian virtual future. State of Mind is a futuristic thriller game delving into transhumanism. The game explores themes of separation, disjuncture. When mind and machine become one – what will remain of humanity? Berlin, 2048 – The world is on the brink. Lack of resources, illnesses caused by polluted air and water, crime on the rise, war. State of mind metacritic.

And just may have found the answer in their upcoming Asian themed fantasy real time strategy game.We've had our eyes on this one for a while not only for its interesting style, but for some of the ideas that the game is introducing as well as what always promised to be some balanced but unique factions. At this point the game is near complete with only minor bugs and balancing issues in the game itself and of course, the localization of the game into 8,000 different languages. Ever heard a samurai scream in Swahili? Yeah, neither have we. And no, its not really being translated into Swahili.With the game so near release, the team decided to have us down to their offices in Thousand Oaks for another look at the game and a chance to get some pointers from the testers that know the game backwards and forwards. What resulted was a pretty solid look at almost all of the units in the game, including some of the heroes.

Each of the sides in the game has a lot going for them and will require different tactics for success. And tactics are a must in a game like this one where pumping out mass amounts of units is virtually an impossibility so each unit becomes an important part of your overall strategy. Gone are the days of rushing in with guns blazing and expecting to annihilate the enemy. Forces can be recovered at a pretty good rate and resources are pretty much inexhaustible.

What this approach brings the game is a need for refinement of strategy and expert tactics used to lure the enemy into situations that are advantageous to you. Yeah, I'm pretty much getting my ass kicked all over the place, even by the computer, which is actually pretty damn efficient and takes different approaches to executing your demise.We've already gone over a ton of the details, which you should check out in the, so we're going to focus on what is new and give you a look the beautiful animations and fights in the six gameplay movies, new trailer, and tons of new screens below in the media section. After the nice tutelage in the game mechanics and some tips on what buildings do what and what units are useful for what (very basic here as evident in my style of play), I got a chance to play a bit of multiplayer. This is certainly where the game looks to shine the most and was also where the focus lay during the design process. Their philosophy of requiring multiplayer to be complete before the single player game is evident in the balance of the sides.

For instance, the Wolf Clan is composed of big burly fellows that have a quicker population rate, but they're a little slower and stupider for their lack of culture and technology. The Lotus are the creepy necromancer types with warlocks, teleportation towers and more magic then you can shake a stick at. Which is exactly what the Serpent and Dragon clans are likely to do as their armies are built around more conventional Japanese themes with samurai, archers, musketeers, and spearmen all making the rounds. While those are the clans at their base, they each have a bevy of unique units. Each of course have the 7 units that can be created through sending troops into the various training halls, but each has special units built outside the domain of the basic buildings.

Most of these extras are extremely costly but also extremely useful and cost yin or yang points, which means you'll have to get out there and fight.The yin and yang points can only be gathered by getting into fights. All of the upgrades at the training halls as well as some of the special units and hero units will come with the cost of these yin or yang points. So in order to get more powerful, you'll have to fight.

This game has not been designed to support defensive games, even though some creative and useful watchtowers have been added.This was the first time that I really had to sit down and watch some of the ideas that have been thrown around for the last couple of years come to life. Each of the units has several different attacks that they can employ. The first and most obvious attack differences occur in the ranged units (read: anyone that enters one of the ranged unit training buildings). Every ranged unit has their primary ranged attack but will change to hand to hand combat instead of sitting dead in the water after being rushed.

The change is fluid, and while the ranged units certainly aren't up to snuff with most of the hand to hand bruisers, they can hold their own, especially in groups.The idea that some units will be more susceptible to different types of damage is also apparent in the results of battle and now a helpful cursor change has been implemented to help your battle decisions. Normally after a unit is selected and the cursor is passed over an enemy unit, a sword will appear showing that you can attack. Depending on whether the unit you have selected has a good chance against the enemy the color of that sword will change with gold meaning an advantage, silver meaning neutral, and bronze meaning a disadvantage. Hopefully this will turn out to be a useful feature allowing for better-planned strategies. I can already envision gamers' heads churning for new and creative strategies, as they will undoubtedly emerge with all of the different abilities available. Perhaps the most interesting part of this is that when in battle, you'll never know what special abilities each of the units you're fighting possess until you see them used.This also marked the first time that we've gotten to see the single player game. And thanks to the near finished beta that we also received, we had the chance to play through some of the missions in the game.

The missions seem to be built in like you would normally find in a game like this with seek and destroy missions, defensive battles, and the rest of the like. The story is held together through cutscenes rendered through the in game engine and will follow the rise of Kenji, whether that be good Dragon Clan or evil Serpent Clan (depending on how you act in the first level), and his exploits to gain back control of the land he abandoned following the death of his noble father. The missions structure is actually non linear giving you a choice where to take the battle first. I'm not too sure yet how much difference when you go where will make, but it adds an extra bit of choice to the mix.So while my strategies so far could make Jerry Jones look like a good leader and decision maker, it looks like there's a lot of room for growth and creativity here. Of course, I'll have to wait for the final version to see how things end up, but signs are pretty positive for Liquid's freshman effort.

Now scroll down to the media section and check out all of the new movies and screens available for your viewing pleasure.- Dan Adams. May 17, 2001E3 2001 UpdateWe actually just visited Liquid Entertainment's office in Thousand Oaks back in April, so I wasn't really sure whether to expect vast improvements or not. Fortunately for me, the game has actually improved quite a bit and is really shaping up into something that all RTS fans will get a kick out of for a variety of reasons, most of which are already in the so I'll skip by that for the sake of my sanity.Changes have been made in the areas of both graphics and gameplay. The last time I saw the game, there were a lot of filler graphics and some that just weren't in period. But the game is about to go beta in a week, everything has been put into the game with its art.

Consequently, the world is looking much more alive. Trees now populate the world making some pretty lush forests. Trees become transparent when your units walk under them, making it much easier to command them. Birds fly from trees, frogs swim in the water, bats haunt the swamps and there are some little flies.All of the clans are now in as well with appropriate animations and skins applied as well as all of the battle gear and whatnot. Right now, all that really needs to happen on the clan side is a lot of balancing to make sure that the game plays like its should.Line of sight has also been implemented and from what I've seen, it looks to actually hold a significant advantage over many RTS games out there at the moment. Repeat after me, 'The high ground is good.' Single combat has also been improved to include footwork, which means that when two units come together in combat, they'll circle around each other while fighting trying to get the best position for attack.

This gets limited when there are a bunch of units together because of the lack of good 'ol elbow room. Units can't overlap each other and so only have so much room when in a crowd.Basically, I can't wait until the game has been balanced enough that they're willing to send us a beta. Has some stiff competition this year with the crowd of RTS games at the show but is showing that it is ready to throw down with the best of them and give them all a run for their money.- Dan Adams. April 5, 2001It's been a while since we've gotten to see Liquid's Battle Realms up and running.

Actually, it's almost been a year now, so you can understand my excitement at being able to travel down to Thousand Oaks, take a look around Liquid, see the game up and running, and talk with Ed Del Castillo for a day about the ins and outs of a game that's quickly climbing up my 'gimme a copy or I might kill you' list. There have been quite a few changes since last I saw the game in its very early state. In fact, after showing it at E3, they tore it down and started building back the way that they wanted it to be built. The publisher Crave has taken a hands off approach to seeing the game working, which is why we haven't seen more working builds, but this also makes for a faster track to completing the game.

Instead of needing to build a working model and break it down every little while (which apparently causes a couple weeks of relapse), they have been able to build a sturdy and relatively bug free game. They are at the beginning of Alpha at the moment and have gotten to the point where they can have a new build every Friday. Consequently, during the course of my visit, I learned more about the game than I could hope to give you in a preview without turning it into a thesis, but I'll try to compress and not repeat the.One of the main things that Ed stressed during the day was the importance of a universe. The Battle Realms universe was built before the team really started to put the game together. This was done for a couple of reasons. The first, of course, is that the better the back story and the more complete the history in a project, the easier it is for gamers to sink themselves into a game and never look back.

Another is to give a bit of context for all of the crazy things that happen in the game and give reasons for all of the units and their uses for each of the clans. We went over the story to the game before, but Ed hopes that this game is just the tip of the iceberg for this universe. It's built up so completely that Ed already is kicking ideas around depending on the success of this game.The Birth of a Nation For the most part, you can read about the little things in that previous preview, but there were some new basics that popped up along with some little things that have been changed. One of the biggest things that I wasn't entirely clear on before was the use of peasants in the game and the affect that they have on the game as a whole. Peasants are your main resource in the game.

They are used to harvest rice, water, and are sent into training to make your fighting units. The thing about the peasants is that they are born from peasant huts via a birth rate, not a queue that you create to pump them out endlessly. The birth rate is also set on rate so that the more units you have, the longer it will take to birth a new peasant. You'll get them pretty quick at the beginning, but soon you'll only get one every few minutes.

There is no population limit, but the chances of ending up with a huge army are not great.What does this mean for the game? Focus on tactics and planning.

You won't have massive armies to throw at the enemies here but small armies of balanced units. You'll need to take the time to think about what you do with your peasants. Do you use them to harvest? Do you keep some around to repair buildings and stop fires from spreading? Or do you train them to be your army? All of these will need to be weighed to be successful.Balance is the Key Careful balancing of the units in your armies is a must for victory to be possible. When testing the game in their office, they pit the best StarCraft player that they had against one of their team that wasn't nearly as good in that game but knew the units in Battle Realms very well.

While the StarCraft player won every battle in StarCraft, the same tactics just didn't fly in Battle Realms. The guy that knew the units and their uses backwards and forwards beat the StarCraft guru 3 out of 4 times with one of the game ending in a draw due to a bug.Each of the four clans in the game will have several different units. Peasants are sent into training halls where they are trained in a specialty. From there, they can send the units into other training halls or keep them as they are.

If you do send them into other training halls, they will come out a cross-trained unit. An example for the Dragon Clan would be the Samurai that was sent into the Archery Range, the Training Hall, and the Alchemists Hut. He is the top of the rung for the Dragon Clan as he was trained in all three halls. This creates a nice variety of units that will have multiple attacks and uses. The Samurai has attacks from all three taining halls. He has a ranged attack, which will be used first as would happen in real life, a melee attack when units are close enough, and an alchemist ability.Diversity of Units Within Units Not only are there several types of units available to each clan as well as the opportunity to put them on horses, but there are also several modifiers that will make these units unique from others within their unit type. All of the armor, innate abilities, techniques, and battle gear will be important and useful enough to make each of the unit types equally desirable.Damage, Base Stats, and Armor There are six different damage types that go into the game that will affect how a unit reacts.

They are piercing, cutting, impact, fire, explosion, and magic. Every unit will have different reactions to each of these different types of damage depending on a few different things. Each of the units will start with a set of base stats that will be the building block of their life telling their attack, speed, stamina, and defense of the six different damages. All of these stats will be modified by various things for each individual unit making the diversity of units pretty great.Armor is the first of these modifiers. Different clans will have different types of armor that defend against different types of damage. For instance, the Wolf Clan has Shale armor that will protect them very well against magic attacks.

All one has to do is send a unit into an armorer type building where they will be upgraded to have that armor type. Not every unit will get the upgrade, just one at a time.Innate Abilities All of the units in the game will have some innate abilities attached to them as well that may give different bonuses to surrounding units, or see farther or other such things. The idea was again to reinforce the idea of creating a balanced army and not just upgrade all of your units into the most trained and powerful kind. For example, the spearmen is a basic unit, but one that is immune to a charge.

A charge attack would normally modify the attack rating up, but with the spearman, that bonus is nullified. Chemists along with having firepower also have the ability to heal quicker than normal units. They also can help the units in their area of influence heal faster. Cannoneers have the ability to intimidate other units which will take away their ability to run. And one of the cooler ideas was the ability of the healer units to seduce enemy peasants. This means that until your opponent realizes one of their unts has been seduced and rectifies the situation, you will see everything that unit does and will be able to take control of it at any time.

That includes if the peasant ends up getting trained. Just imagine doing that to a few peasants, having them trained, and then converting them during an attack. Lovely.Battle Gear The next on the list of customization is 'battle gear.' Each unit will have two types of this upgrade that will be taken from the 'shop' buildings except for the Wolf Clan where the Druidess will use a special ability to grant the upgrade to units. Units can only carry one of these upgrades at a time however. Ed suggested imagining that each unit had a one item backpack where you can control what is in that backpack.

An example of an upgrade would be that of the Dragon Warrior. He can gain the Chi Shield. This will immobilize the unit and slowly drain his stamina, but will also make him invulnerable while the shield is activated.

Think on that one strategists. Your opponents will never know what abilities your unit has until they are used during the game making them think on their feet and try to have counters for all attacks.Techniques These are more along the lines of upgrades that you've seen in other RTSs. It will work for all of the units as it is considered 'extra training' and would pass along as word of mouth through the unit types.

These techniques are abilities that can be used in the field for a certain cost of stamina. Yin and Yang points are used in the researching of techniques. Yin and Yang points are earned through battle so that you won't be able to just sit back, defend, and upgrade all of your units until they are perfect and then attack.Death From Above One of the things that the team really wanted to bring back into the mix was useful watchtowers.

Ed complains that when playing most RTSs, he just runs his units past defenses into a base to destroy peons and buildings. Armies wouldn't normally run past other armies to kill the peons of a base in a normal attack, so they have implemented some special abilities for watchtowers that should make them much more interesting than they used to be.The first of these is that all of them can be manned. And due to the height advantage and line of sight, sticking ranged units there makes them much more powerful.

But all the units will have a different bonus when in the tower. For example, the healers will have an increased range. Each of the towers will also have an ability that can be used to hurt whoever is attacking in brilliant ways. The Serpent Clan will have a mirror dish in their tower that can be used to blind units. This will cause them to disengage from whomever they are fighting, make them more vulnerable to attack as they can't defend themselves, and blind them. This is a temporary effect, but one that could seriously screw your opponent if done correctly.

Each of the clans will have different mechanisms like that in their towers with totally different effects that fit their backstory and style of play. Some will also have innate bonuses like the Dragon Clan's peasants will be stronger fighters when in battle under a watchtower.Of Monks, Ninjas, and Zen Masters The Tao plays a large part in the scheme of things in Battle Realms with the Yin and Yang having been torn apart causing the problems on the ground. Along with that deeper set of the story comes the Monks, Ninjas, and Zen Masters. These guys are set apart from the regular mortals and will join your side if you show that you serve their side.Monks are attuned to the Yang and are the natural opposites of the Ninja, which are attuned to the Yin. Both have special abilities and are very powerful fighters. Ninjas have the ability to move invisibly.

They also have the assassination ability that makes their first attack out of invisibility huge. Monks have the detect ninja ability as well as a leap ability that not only allows them to jump over obstacles that other units will have to travel around, but also gives them the chance to throw a powerful leap attack at their enemies.Zen Masters are along the same lines as the ninja and monk, but could not discipline themselves enough to totally leave the problems and realm of the mortal. These powerful warriors instead can choose to focus their energy on one thing and become the masters of it.

Four of these in the Battle Realms universe are brothers that decided to protect the Earth and therefore each focused on a different element. Other Zen Masters also wander the land.

In order to attract them, you will need to build a keep as that tells them that you are important enough to bother with. Each clan will have around 7 or 8 of these guys.He's Starting to Believe. As most of you know, the RTS genre has become a little stagnant with so many clones and lackluster games being unleashed upon the public with almost nothing new to show for them but a different crappy story and a few rehashed unit types with different names and faces. Battle Realms has a fully realized universe that not only has history but also rhyme and reason in a fantastic sort of way along with some incredible ideas for tactical combat.

It could be the fact that Ed Del Castillo is just so infectious with his excitement about the game, but I'm really looking forward to this one and all of its variety and possibility.- Dan Adams. Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough time to fully expound on all of the hinkfo that we gathered during E3 about Battle Realms, but have no fear, we're back to fill you in on all of the little details that will flush out this game into a piece of software that just may turn out to be a must buy. If you haven't read anything about this game yet then scroll down and read the E3 piece for the hinkfo not in this installment.The best place to start is probably the back-story. You will be playing the role of Kenji, a member of an old ruling house of the land, who has returned after years in exile.

With all of those years to think about his situation, he decides, like most of us would, that he needs to get back in there and whoop up on some people in order to take his rightful place as grand high pooba back.Along the way, you will run into some resistance because some people just don't take kindly to having their power usurped. These whiny little people include the Wolf and Lotus clans. The Wolf clan might remind you a little of Tal in his younger bearskin wearing college days. They are a brutal little bunch that like to eat with their hands and aren't exactly graduates of Emily Post's school of etiquette. The Lotus clan is more along the line of a refined if a bit creepy group of evil socialites. Ed Castillo described them as an Egyptian/Vampiric mix. The units that were available for show looked pretty slick and powerful like you would imagine that combination to be.

All of the clans will be available for use in the multiplayer game will definitely have at least eight players, with the possibility of twelve if they have enough time to implement it.At the beginning of the game, you will need to decide how it is you will be taking your land back. Will you be a nice benevolent leader, or will you crush all of those foolish enough to find themselves under your boot? If you decide to go the nice route, you will be part of the Dragon clan while the Serpent clan will be yours to command if you decide that you aren't such a nice Kenji after all.After you decide on which side of the fence you will be sitting, you will be thrust into what will hopefully turn out to be an interesting gaming experience that leaves a lot of stratagems open. The first and most prominent choices that you will need to make involve the resources of the game. Gold, rice, wood, and even water will be required for different actions in the game, but the main and most important resource is the peasant population. Each fighting unit that is produced in the game comes from a peasant that has been trained for combat and all of the resources also are harvested, mined, gathered, etc.

By the peasants. You can see how important the little guys are.The peasant population will be controlled by the birth rate. The birth rate is controlled by how many resources you decide to put into producing rice. Produce a lot of rice and you people will be healthy, well fed, and apparently pretty randy. All of the peasants that come out of the love shacks can be assigned to various tasks around your town. This is really where the strategy of resource management will come into play.

Like I said, if you need more peasants, you need to increase your rice production. The trade-off is that every time you train a unit, a peasant is used up which means that they won't be available for any kind of menial tasks. Peasants are also necessary to have around in case a building in your town catches fire (more on that later).Training the peasants will also incur additional costs in resources such as gold and water.

Several different types of training buildings are available to your peasants. My night job. Specific ones will train your units into archers, swordsman, spearmen and so on. One of the really neat innovations to this training approach is that you can send units that you have already trained in one discipline into another building in order to make a double-skilled unit. You'd use this to make a new unique unit that takes both skills and melds them into something new.And you can even put him on a horse. This game is taking a different approach to mounted warriors wherein every unit has the ability to ride a horse. All you need to do is raise one at the stables and then tell one of your warriors to get on the thing. The great thing about this way of doing things is that your horse and soldier are considered two separate entities.

This means that when you defend against cavalry, you can take out the mount independently of the rider. If you take out the horse first, then you'll see it die and the soldier fall off its back. He'll then get back up with weapon in hand and ready to fight. This will also give you the opportunity to switch your units around from mounted to foot if the situation calls for it.The neat things about units don't just stop there however. Units such as archers won't be totally useless when they are attacked at close range. All units have melee ability and archers actually have special martial arts moves based around using their legs.

In fact, each of the unit types has separate animations and fighting styles, each with several different attacks that range in strength and speed. Each unit also has different rest animations, some of which will actually be beneficial to you. One of these is that of a pikeman who when at rest for a while will jam his pike in the ground and climb it to take a look around. When he does this, his area of vision will be slightly increased.Which nicely brings me to another very important part of the game - line of sight. Before I get into that too much though, I should mention that the camera at this time is mostly fixed with the ability to tilt and zoom in and out, but has no rotation option.

They are doing this so that you can focus on the combat of the game instead of controlling the camera. The default setting is the 3 / 4 view that you will recognize from the typical 2D RTS game.They are really going all out with the line of sight to make it very important to the strategy of the game. With the fog of war on, you will not be able to see around or on top of hills or any other type of obstruction.

This opens up all kinds of goodies and they were kind enough to give us a little peek at what kind of fun can be had. One neat little trick is the use of moveable rocks and boulders that can be rolled down hills onto unsuspecting troops or even into buildings. I don't know how many of you have been hit by a rolling boulder in your life, but damn that hurts. Another feature has to do with the forests. You will be able to walk through the forests in the game to spring surprise attacks on enemies that may be sitting close to tree cover because the units outside of the forest will not be able to see in. This doesn't mean that your troops sitting outside of the forest will be totally clueless as to troops moving through a wooded area. Your troops will be able to see the birds scattering from the trees as an indication that something is moving through that area.Of course, if you catch troops lurking in the forest long enough you may be able to play a nasty little trick on them and burn the forest down around them.

Probably not as it will take a while for the whole forest to burn, but it will be possible as trees are removable by chopping and burning. Trees aren't the only objects that can burn though. Buildings are also rather flammable (although the Lotus clan's buildings are a bit more resistant) so you can cause all kind of havoc in an enemy's town if he/she isn't paying attention.This actually brings me back to an area that I went into earlier. As buildings catch fire, you're gonna have to put them out.

You do this by telling your peasants to go fight the fire. This means that you're going to have to have some peasants and some water around. After you tell the peasants to fight the fire, they will start running back and forth from the well to the fire with buckets until the fire is stopped at which point you will need to repair the building.Formations will also be an important part of strategic battle. The game will come with some preprogrammed formations but will also come with a handy dandy formation editor.

This will allow you to set up custom formations and the AI that controls them just a little. Multiplayer action could definitely become a unique experience every time that you play as ingenious computer generals will undoubtedly be thinking up new formations to crush unwary opponents.All of this mixed with beautiful graphics, animations and sounds, should be able to immerse players in a game that will be very competitive with all of the big name RTS games when it is released. It is still about a year off from that point right now with plenty of work left to do including the implementation of the AI, which will be very exciting to see in action. Keep your eyes open for more hinkfo on Battle Realms as we are really looking forward to learning and seeing more about this game.- Dan Adams.