Saga Rage of Vikings



Saga: Rage of Vikings was a 1999 Real Time Strategy released by Cryo Interactive. It's set on a High Fantasy world during the time of the vikings. You can play as Humans, Dwarfs, Elves, Ogres, Giants or Centaurs, sometimes with more than one race at the time.

What makes Saga different from most games is that is somehow more realistic, fighting against many traditions of RTS. When you collect a resource, you should have somewhere to store it; when you want to get food, you must harvest it; when you build a place, you should move the resources to that place before starting the construction and (perhaps the most particular fact about this game) in order to gain new troops you must make your troops reproduce... that's right, you NEED to make your troops reproduce. One male and one female in order to obtain a new troop. Aside from some restrictions, all races can make new troops with each others, meaning that you can have a mixed civilization.

At the end of the day, Saga feels as much a Simulation Game as a RTS, which is great. One of the biggest problems this game has, and perhaps the reason why it can't be called a Simulation Game is that most resources don't respawn. No matter how slowly you extract them, once you extracted them, they are gone forever. This means that the game can NOT be played forever.

All and all, Saga was a great a game, which is not recognized nearly enough.

Not to be confused with the RPG games SaGa. --

This game provides examples of:

 * Baseless Mission: There are no bases in saga, but there is something similar. There is one mission where you should try to conquer the opponents with only ONE male dwarf. Remember that in Saga you need 2 troops to reproduce, so it's virtually impossible to do anything. Of course, later you gain more people.
 * Command and Conquer Economy
 * Cut and Paste Environments
 * Easy Communication
 * Easy Logistics: You must not feed troops or give them a place to sleep. Food and houses are only required for reproduction.
 * Enemy Exchange Program
 * Fog of War
 * Instant Militia/Worker Unit: All your troops are the same, wheter they are workers or soldiers.
 * Mighty Glacier: The giants.
 * No Recycling
 * Hero Unit: most species have a magic unit, except for the Giants and the Centaurs.
 * High Fantasy
 * Real Time Strategy
 * Ridiculously Fast Construction: may be subverted. Seeing how much it takes troops to reproduce or how short years are, it's possible that time is not 1:1. So, those 60 seconds we see our units constructing the house might be days in game time.
 * Resource Gathering
 * Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome: new troops are born as adults.
 * Units Not to Scale
 * Video Game Time