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Continuing to grow into quite a fantastic little free real-time strategy game, The Fertile Crescent has gone through a few visual upgrades lately.

The Fertile Crescent is a Real Time Strategy game set during the Bronze Age in the Ancient Near East.

Inspired by the rise and fall of Bronze Age civilisations, you must manage the delicate balance between food surplus and the maintenance of your army.

These upgrades are mainly for how your units on the field look when upgraded. Like certain other games do, when you upgrade units they will now be visually different to show this. Giving you an immediate and handy look into how your enemy is doing and vice versa. So now you will see units change art when you upgrade to copper and bronze, a Bowman's bow visually changes when you research Composite Bow, sound effects were added for constructing buildings and also the Scout/Javelinman idle animations were redone to help see the difference between other units.

Some other units also had a few animations re-done, they said aim with all these little graphics and animation changes are to better help players see things at a glance as you often need to react quickly in an RTS. The AI was improved on its aggressiveness, the team colour shader was improved, AI defenders will no longer start moving back to guard position if there are still enemy units nearby, a bunch of typos in the text were fixed and plenty of bug fixes.

Additionally, they've enabled Unity Analytics which is something to be aware of. They say it's to get error reports and get statistics on games played/completed and so on so they can see where to focus their effort. While I don't mind such things usually, especially for an in-development game, there's no in-game option to turn it off currently. Update: They disabled Unity Analytics for now.

Such a sweet RTS that really does give a feel of classic Age of Empires with a new twist thanks to the way you need to stock up on Food. Challenging, can be played offline against the AI and online against others. Pretty amazing it's still free really considering how good it is.

You can find The Fertile Crescent free on itch.io.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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4 comments

BlackBloodRum Feb 12, 2020
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I need to try this game!

I used to love AoE, I'll be showing my age a bit here, demo, daijyoubu lol

I remember it distinctly most for it's online side, Internet Gaming Zone (Anyone remember?).

Although, back then the most popular strategy, myself included was to build as many archary camps in one big long row, fields and town centres as you could before the other guy.

Then just outright outright spam your enemy with horse archers and other military as fast as you could while generating hundreds of archers in a row while your others die and kill then just keep going... oh good times!😂

Perhaps I should play it a little differently these days. 😂

Spoiler, click me
Back in the day, you could play online with the demo version of the game, or if you're smart, a pirated version, which their gaming zone happily allowed without any checks or problems
Liam Dawe Feb 12, 2020
Quoting: BlackBloodRumI need to try this game!

I used to love AoE, I'll be showing my age a bit here, demo, daijyoubu lol

I remember it distinctly most for it's online side, Internet Gaming Zone (Anyone remember?).

Although, back then the most popular strategy, myself included was to build as many archary camps in one big long row, fields and town centres as you could before the other guy.

Then just outright outright spam your enemy with horse archers and other military as fast as you could while generating hundreds of archers in a row while your others die and kill then just keep going... oh good times!😂

Perhaps I should play it a little differently these days. 😂

Spoiler, click me
Back in the day, you could play online with the demo version of the game, or if you're smart, a pirated version, which their gaming zone happily allowed without any checks or problems
Internet Gaming Zone, now that's something I've not heard of in a long time. I remember it well from my early years online trying to play games with it heh.
Phlebiac Feb 13, 2020
Is it just me, or does it need a broader color palette? Everything looks washed out...
Liam Dawe Feb 13, 2020
Update: They disabled Unity Analytics for now.
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