Dawn of Discovery sort of flew in under the radar for me, as it’s a German developed real-time strategy/city-building game that was released on the PC, Wii, and DS. I’ve been spending time with the DS version myself, and have come to the realization that this is perhaps the best real-time strategy or city-building game I’ve ever played on the DS. It’s the first game that I’ve sat around for hours mindlessly playing while my wife shops, and the first game that I’ve played on my train commute to work everyday that makes me sad when I’ve arrived at my stop. If you have any sort of interest in RTS and city-building games, you should look into this gem.
The premise of the game revolves around settling into various islands on the map and expanding cities for people to move in. As you do this, you’re competing with other opponents as well to ramp up your cities with natural resources, gather income from the citizens, and produce military that allows you to engage your opponents. The story mode itself is probably a dozen hours long, and does an amazing job of teaching you the game.
The city building part of the game revolves around “upgrading” your citizens. Lowest level citizens require a church, food, and milk to be happy, so you need to construct a church within a radius of the citizens’ homes, and farms to supply food and milk to the people. In turn, they provide you with taxes. Once all requirements for the basic level are fulfilled, these citizens “upgrade” to the next citizen level, who have higher item difficulty needs such as clothing and the need to be near certain buildings such as a guesthouse. Each citizen level (there are five total) provide higher and higher tax amounts, which behooves the player to run an empire that keeps all of its citizens happy at the highest level, so in turn income from taxes flow in.
Since the game is island based, the player must sail ships (constructed at a shipyard from the wood resource) to expand on new islands, meet important people and nations, or even hunt for treasure chests over open waters while avoiding pirates.
Remakably, the DS interface works very well, allowing you to play the game with just the stylus and selecting on the screen. It also makes me wonder – if it’s this good of a game on the DS, how good can it be on the Wii and the PC? Note that the Wii version is the same price as the DS version: only $30. While the PC version is the definitive home version and has the best polish of the three, its $50 price tag and DRM make the Wii version quite a viable option.
