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Empire building, not destroying, drives 'Dawn of Discovery'

Building an empire, not destroying one, drives captivating, German-made 'Dawn of Discovery'

By Seth Schiesel New York Times News Service

A stylish, intelligent and captivating German game, Dawn of Discovery is the best new single-player strategy game I have played in several years. It will not satisfy anyone's inner warlord; if pillaging, bombing and grinding your virtual enemies into submission is your idea of strategic game play, Dawn of Discovery is not for you. But if building a grand, classical empire spanning the Occident and Orient sounds appealing, Dawn of Discovery, particularly the Windows version, is the kind of game that can occupy hundreds of hours over many years.

Dawn of Discovery is different from American real-time strategy computer games such as StarCraft and Command & Conquer in that it is about trading with other players and building up your mini empire, not crushing your enemies by force.

It is a real-time game, so the action unfolds as you play rather than pausing while you queue up orders and moves turn by turn. Yet it is different from and more interesting than most real-time games in two ways.

First, the problem with most real-time strategy games is that eventually they simply overwhelm the player with micromanagement.

Dawn of Discovery does a masterly job of allowing players to focus on the big picture of their budding empires while the scut work of moving goods around and managing trade routes can largely take care of itself. The player can dive into the minutiae at any time, but in general, if I'm going to take a beating in a strategy game, I want it to be because of a high-level strategic miscalculation, not because I didn't fine-tune my wheat production to the nth degree.

The other difference that distinguishes Dawn of Discovery is that although combat is the entire foundation of most strategy games, it is almost an afterthought here — a natural, organic, almost ancillary outgrowth of an empire's growing commercial power and appetite. The game makes it so hypnotically enjoyable to build a settlement from huts to town houses, to build churches and bazaars and spice farms and stone quarries, that it's easy to forget about the naval skirmishes.

In its intricate and well-drawn story line, Dawn of Discovery is anti-colonial. The player begins as a minor noble in what is called an Occidental empire and is soon tasked with establishing relations with and exploring the Orient. The Orient, with its gorgeous Middle Eastern architecture, is basically populated by the good guys. The bad guys are the zealous Crusaders from the Occident who want to exploit the Orient. Ideally, the player ends up defeating the bad guys and restoring peace and justice to the Occident.

Dawn of Discovery also is available for Nintendo's Wii and DS, but this is really a game with its soul on the PC. The story-driven campaign mode is wonderfully paced. Meanwhile, entire nights and weekends (not to mention cross-country plane flights) will inevitably be occupied in sandbox mode. For the thinking game player, those hours could hardly be better spent.