tribal trouble

Most of my game time lately has been dedicated to real time strategy, in an effort to gather material for what will likely be another article. After playing Darwinia, I tried out another 2005 IGF award nominee: Tribal Trouble. Though to compare the two would be unfair; where Darwinia is too self-conscious about smashing genre conventions, Tribal Trouble is more of a real time strategy game in the traditional sense. As a result, Tribal Trouble comes off as a considerably more playable game. Even if it is a little too straightforward.

Tribal Trouble uses a fully 3D engine, and the game's minimalist interface adopts enough genre standards to keep the learning curve quite low. The principle of the game is simple enough: you are either the Natives or the Vikings fighting for the control of a series of tropical islands. Battles are fought over small expanses of land, and the bases are almost always close together. Missions will involve rescuing fellow Natives/Vikings, killing off the opposing faction's chief or destroying their base. The unit models are exaggerated and cartoon-like, dovetailing with the game's playful theme.

The game itself isn't very revolutionary, but I was drawn to the subtle innovations it introduced to base building and army creation. The first structure that has to be built is the Quarters, which produces more of the standard Peon unit. The cool thing is that once I selected the structure to build, the peons I started the map with dash off to begin cutting down trees and recovering the materials to build it. The Armory is the next structure that is required, which creates weapons and trains warriors. Though you don't create "new" warrior units, you simply train existing peons to become warriors, and equip them with constructed weapons. But there's no explicit resource collection required. The Armory menu allows you to select the amounts of materials you want to collect, the types of weapons you want to build and the types of warrior units you want to train. All materials are collected automatically, as long as you have peons to do the work. The trick early on in the game is to keep building a pool of peons who will be collecting materials, and have an amount left over to create warrior units. As long as the Quarters is still standing and there are a few peons inside, you will continue to receive peon units. It's a very streamlined system, and allows you to focus on the action at hand.

Since the island maps are so small, it's often a fight for resources at the beginning of the game. Once you've built up enough of an assault force, you send them over to the enemy base to attack. Indeed, the strategy is overly simplistic, but it offers enough of a challenge in the way that you're constantly balancing resource collection, warrior training and launching attacks with the same pool of resources.

Tribal trouble may not break any new ground, but there's still something to be said about the unpretentious gameplay that's offered. Especially when compared with big-budget RTS titles that can easily be reduced to the same principles of total annihilation.