Why does that one with the casino gnomes read to me like dialogue from Seinfeld
George: This casino is owned by the Gnomes
Jerry: The Gnomes?
George: The Gnomes, Jerry! Very small, very crafty!
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uhhh do you have any idea how to play this game? i’m earnestly asking lol
i’ve played it a few times since i got it in an EA bundle that came with our mac performa and unlike populous and syndicate which were instantly fun and addictive, i never had any idea whatsoever what to do in fucking PowerMonger
also you can barely fucking see, what the hell
also that sheep ‘baa’ sample
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You win each map by controlling the absolute majority of its population, which in turn you do by conquering their towns. You’re usually outnumbered but you can boost your soldiers’ attack power through having better weapons and being more aggressive, the 1-2-3 swords icons on the left that affect all your actions in some way. Usually it defines the strength of the action (like when fighting or taking food or enlisting soldiers) but sometimes it affects your troops’ mindset too (build something with one sword, you get tools and supplies, with three swords you get weapons). Being aggressive in combat gives you more strength but you’ll kill more of the villagers, which means less potential soldiers for later (plus the conquered town won’t like you much).
This plays into how you (or the enemy AIs) don’t have direct control over anything but captains (yours appear around your table, but they all exist on the map) so at first you’re gonna have to experiment and guess how different aggression levels/action combinations result in different verbs from your troops. Also you are your first captain, so if he’s killed, you’ve lost and you do need to be careful with that.
You need your army and towns to be sustainable, ie soldiers will leave if they don’t have food or if their morale is low (because you gave bad orders, which you can recognize by the tone of the “yeah” when acknowledging them), towns can’t grow without food, etc. On the flipside, on a map with towns you can’t reach and conquer, it would be possible to outgrow them by managing your own towns well.
Like many other Bullfrog games though, as soon as you’re on the same map as an active enemy AI the road to victory (which I only really got a couple years ago) is to play super aggressively and fast, usually by conquering and emptying towns from everything as fast as possible to build a huge army, meeting the enemy in a bloody battle which results in their captains’ death, then disbanding and rebuilding your population if needed against a now passive enemy.
The campaign goal is to reach the lower right end of the map and conquer it, so you don’t actually need to complete all 500 maps, more like 60 or something.
It’s the first game with texture mapping I’ve ever played, and a foundational game for Bullfrog, and not just because the 3d engine would go on to power all their 3d games. Like, Populous had the idea of the god game and indirect control but it’s Powermonger that truly established the idea of the open world with roaming people who each have their identity and occupation (which they actually do, like you can see fishers go fishing and peasants tend their fields), and animals (baaa) and ecosystem and stuff. It had lots to examine, although it wasn’t really actually deep (or maybe more like the depth wasn’t useful). Syndicate would then graft the open world city on that, with car jacking and indiscriminate mowing down of citizens.
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I really want to play Powermonger now. I really enjoy playing Populous and this sounds exponentially more convoluted. I like that.
god i love all of this, every bit of it but i struggle with the most basic stuff like
what do you do? like what does the mouse cursor do when you click on things? what do the buttons mean???
lol, i should read that manual!!!
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That one guy in the room nobody likes
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