MegaGlest (175Mb)
MegaGlest split as an offshoot from Glest early last year (you can find Glest posted HERE). It is of course heavily based on its parent Glest but has its own significant differences in comparison to Glest, having five new and additional tribes/races to play with. It’s a large 3D real-time strategy game and MegaGlest is indeed huge; in scope, gameplay and in nature.
You play in control of one of seven different tribes/races; Tech, Magic, Norsemen, Romans, Indians, Egyptians or Persians. The environs are suitably large too, though of various sizes. There are 14 different settings to play in, and you’ll find these to be very detailed, as are your unit models. The terrain features large plains and fields, with rivers, mountains, seas, or cliffs.
The game is about resource management, and the different factions have different needs, be this for energy, food, gold, housing, stone and wood as examples. Once settlements are established and being maintained well, you train units to fight and explore. The means to meet these resources may differ between factions.
Each faction has its own units and buildings, and unique abilities to that faction. Winning battles will depend heavily on your strategy as to where and in what strength you place your units, and how you use your factions’ abilities to your best favour and result. You won't get bored as there is always plenty to do and you will find combat against the game's AI testing!
There are of course similar commercial games, but usually you have to buy additional expansion packs to get new races and buildings, etc. With MegaGlest, as well as it being open source and free, you also get access to all of the tribes and their respective buildings! MegaGlest is a great alternative to lashing out on commercial expansion packs and part filling a hard drive!
My only (very small!) gripe is that Aztecs aren’t included (as yet!) in the main game. There are however a very large number of extra factions available as user mods (including Aztecs!) either through Wiki or the MegaGlest forum. Being user mods, these may differ in quality re: building and unit modelling detailing. Some scenario mods for Glest will also work with MegaGlest, eg The Three Towers scenario. You can get dwarves and elves as faction mods for MegaGlest too, so by combining scenario mods and faction mods, there’s a very wide choice of gameplay available! There are tileset (eg seasons,etc) mods and a large selection of additional maps available for added replay value. A map editor is provided to mod maps too. You can also customize tech trees for different combinations of units, resources and building availability.
MegaGlest is complete with tutorials and three beginner scenarios - these will be difficult enough for beginners, before proceeding to the main game proper! You can also play online as a multi-player game, and it’s especially suited to coop play. Stay around in the lobby for a while when you logon and there will be other online players! Or you can play against the game’s AI or friends over a LAN!
Offline and single player, you’ll be playing against your computer, again using the game’s AI. This AI may vary slightly if you play some of the custom mods. You can move your camera view position freely, and there are details such as real-time shadows and particle effects, transparency, lighting and fog 3D effects. MegaGlest also features many new tilesets, 2 more AI players and cross-platform multiplayer support. You can now even change the AI’s resource multiplier factor to make the game easier or more difficult to beat!
The graphics are excellent and there’s good music too. The scenery is great too, but it's the extensive game's mod options that really win the day for MegaGlest. It’s available for Windows and Linux, and the source code is available to use with other OSs.
By way of history, work seemed to have stopped on Glest in 2008, though a new Glest advanced games engine is apparently proceeding slowly. MegaGlest has gone forward with the emphasis on getting things working quickly, but it is still possible that the team split between Glest AE and MegaGlest might mend at some time in the future!
If you’ve tried Glest, I shouldn’t need to say more as this extends on from the best of Glest. If you haven’t tried either, then MegaGlest should be a major priority download!
All in all it’s a brilliant and extremely well worth playing hunk of a game in the very very best of senses!
Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tiQH7UV-5Y
Download HERE
