A game begins with about half a dozen provinces comprised of tiles, many useless, but some with resources like farmland, pastures, or forests (ie: timber).

It's not some fully abstracted rate of generic income or influence, it's the sum of all the tangible resources at your disposal, and whatever profit you can generate with them. Portugal has no province with a tin mine? They can't produce bronze without buying tin from elsewhere, perhaps even from you - or you might try to cosy up to whoever's selling it to shut the Portuguese out of the market. If France has a province with coal, you know they can mine it and produce steel, or choose to sell it. You can see everything an empire is on the map, and almost everything an empire does has a tangible purpose. And as dry and dull as that may sound, it makes for a far better game than most, with a much more grounded atmosphere. While this all sounds like a fairly typical 4X game, Imperialism rather broke the mould, not least by being almost entirely about infrastructure and economics rather than stacking bonuses and multipliers atop one another. This effectively introduced a new opening chapter to the game, as empires race to explore and either conquer or assimilate their choice of tribal nations, and only then return to Europe intent on carving up the minor powers, before finally turning on each other. Imperialism 2 added to this with several innovations, most notably by starting 300 years earlier and adding the New World, filled with new and precious resources, and the tribal nations doomed to fall to European guns and/or mercantile exploitation. Naturally then, the general idea is to devour the helpless neutrals until you're strong enough to directly challenge another empire.Īlong the way there are armies to build, technology to research, diplomacy to conduct, and above all, infrastructure to plan. The former are weak, insular, and static, while the latter are, well, imperialistic. In the original, you assumed control of a major European power on a turn-based map, alongside half a dozen neutral 'minor nations', and another handful of rival powers. It's always tempting to describe unusual strategy games in terms of hybridisation, and as an economic game about conquering neutrals in order to splat rival superpowers, Imperialism 2 invites a line like 'Lords of the Realm crossed with Colonization'.

Released in 1999 by Frog City Software, both it and its 1997 predecessor are far more obscure than they should be. Just plain solid, highly playable strategy games. Not insanely complex, not gigantic in scope, not a danger to your circadian rhythm or those 'social life' things I've heard about. Lately, it's regular old historical strategy that's felt the neglect. Look, I'm not bashing the genre - I had to quit Crusader Kings 2 cold turkey as it took over my life - but when things become fashionable in games, we really overdo it, and something always gets lost in the desperate pursuit of the zeitgeist.

Imperialism 2 diplomatic vctory