What is Dragon Commander? Dragon Commander is a mishmash of several genres. It combines a 3D RTS, with a Risk-style world strategy map, and RPG elements in political decisions.
What’s the story of Dragon Commander? The game is set in the magical and technological heyday of Rivellon, over a thousand years before the events of the Divinity series. This was a time when Maxos was alive and well and the Dragon Knights were flourishing. You play a young human Dragon Knight, the son of a King who was murdered for opposing a new “one god” religion, championed by the Empress Aurora. The prince now must lead the races of the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Imps, Lizards, and Undead against Aurora.
What do you do? In four words: Emperor, Strategist, Commander, Dragon.
You are an
Emperor who must make tough political decisions balancing the conflicting wishes and goals of your wife, your generals, and your council of advisors, consisting of 5 different races that make up your allies and your conquered territories. You rule from your flagship,
The Raven.
The council of advisors represents five political archetypes: conservative capitalists (Dwarves), smug libertarians (Lizards), fundamentalists (Undead), amoral technologists (Imps) and liberals (Elves). Being the ruler of an empire means that you’ll have to make choices and compromises based on politics to achieve the best result you can. Sometimes there are certain bonuses to your army or favorite generals that you want, but can only get from taking a position you may personally dislike. Piss off a race too many times, and some of the territories you control may revolt, denying you of their manpower and gold, unless you place some of your units in them to quell the rebellion (but tying the units down).
Your generals direct the forces in battle, and have unique skills that can be unlocked through your choices.
Every decision you make will affect your standing with the council members, your wife, and the various races as a whole. It will increase your standing with some races, and lower it with others. You will often find yourself making choices you may personally disagree with to reap the benefits on the battlefield.
Early on, you will have to choose a princess to marry, either Elf, Dwarf, Lizard, or Undead human. Each of the princesses has their own storyline and goal. Sometimes fulfilling the princesses goal goes against what their race desires – for example, Ophelia the undead princess desperately wants to be restored to life, which would greatly offend the other undead, who enjoy their existence as it is.
Upgrades are researched between turns. They have a certain gold cost and take a number of turns to research, but if you want you can spend extra gold and get the research finished faster.
Certain decisions can unlock new upgrades for units. No faction has any unique units, each side uses the same 13-15 base unit types, but each unit has at least 4 possible upgrades, many of are mutually exclusive and which will drastically alter the way a unit acts. For example a bomber could be altered to drop mines instead of bombs, making it useless for targeting enemy bases, but excellent at defense against ground units. It’s impossible to get all the upgrades, so you need to decide what you want your army to do.
Some of these benefits take the form of cards. There are at least three types of cards: Political cards, which can be applied to maps in the strategy part. Dragon cards, that offer extra powers for your Dragon form, and Mercenary cards that add extra units to the field for one battle. Cards can also be obtained from certain structures on the strategy map.
You are a
Strategist who must decide which territories to attack, and what each territory should focus on to support your war effort.
You build factories, taverns, mines, and research institutes on territories you control, move your troops around, and apply any “political” cards you wish. Once you’re done, you hit a button to finalize your moves, and hope that you guessed what the enemy will do, because only after both sides are committed do you see what the opponent has done. Battles on the strategy map can be auto-resolved if you choose, and victory will be calculated based on the number of troops and bonuses on the territory, or if not, you can personally command the individual battles in the real-time mode.
Each unit type has a certain number of movement points on the strategy map, which is how many spaces (countries) you can move them. This is why building factories and other unit producers closer to the front lines is important. There are transport units that can be used to move units faster than they can on their own.
I think each country will only let you have one building on it, but I’m not sure. Wizard Tower buildings give you Dragon skill cards every turn. Factories produce units, Gold mines increase the revenue from the country by 50%, Shops will let you buy cards, Academies decrease research cost, Taverns give you mercenary cards, the Parliament gives you strategy cards for managing the political side – like to make a country immune to attacks and invasions for one turn, or destroy an enemy factory, or build a factory for no gold cost.
You are a
Commander, who directs the individual battles in real-time, directing air, sea, and land units to defeat the enemy and accomplish your objectives.
You don’t start the battle with a base and resources to gather. What you start with on the map is based on the units to be found there in Strategy mode, any mercenary units from the cards you chose, and whatever starting point you get. Some or all of the regions in the RTS mode are said to be about 400 x 400 km2, or the size of Oblivion.
There is no Starcraft style base building. Buildings are erected on preset capture points which let you build certain types of buildings on them. Each building costs a certain number of recruits to build.
Recruits are the only resource on the map, and they’re acquired by building recruitment centers on certain points. Each map uses the population cap from the Strategy mode, so you know going in how many recruits you have available. There’s a catch, though – the population is shared between all players on the map, and once it’s depleted, it’s depleted. It is not advisable to just sit back and build up forces, you should aggressively expand or else you’ll get overwhelmed.
The idea is that a map should take only 10-15 minutes, 30 at the most, which makes sense given how many maps there are!
If you win, there is a formula to calculate the survival rate of your units, to see what it translates to once you return to the strategy map. Basically, if 60% of your units survive, you’ll get 60% back on the world map. A suicidal strategy might end up with you defeating the enemy, but you won’t have much left over to move to the next country on the world map.
It’s not game over if you lose in the RTS mode (unless maybe if you lose the territory with your capital city), you can keep playing and try to take it back.
You are a
Dragon, who can join the battlefield yourself, delivering carefully placed blows to the enemy force.
The Dragon form is powerful, and can turn the tide of battle quickly by judicious use of its skills and abilities. Your Dragon can be set to one of four general roles: Good at direct combat, good at support, good at sabotage, or average in all areas (but not good at any particular area).
If the Dragon dies in battle, there is a cooldown until you can respawn, but you can bypass it by sacrificing some of your recruits.
Switching between dragon and RTS mode is done literally at the press of a button, letting you zip into combat from any nearby friendly units, deal with what you wanted to deal with, then zap back into the RTS mode.
Who’s making it? Larian Studios, the team behind the Divinity series (Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, Divinity 2)
What does that thread title mean? This game presents a lot of scenarios based on real life political debates. Larian looked at various political ideologies and translated them into the game. Specifically, the title refers to
something the head of Larian said in an interview:
What platforms is this going to be released on? It’s being developed primarily for the PC at this time, although a console port is not being ruled out. There may not even be support for a controller at all. That makes sense given that RTS’s lend themselves much better to the drag-select abilities of a mouse than to controllers.
What’s so special about this game? This game is built around
Choice and Consequence.
Gone are the canned dialogue animations from Divinity 2. The recording sessions for the voice-acting used motion capture at the same time, so each live actor’s performance will end up on-screen.
There are no pre-made missions. The length of the single-player campaign depends on your choices on the strategy map.
Will there be multiplayer?
Yes!
Multiplayer doesn’t have the RPG-lite political decision part, but it does have the strategy map and RTS phases. Multiplayer matches are 2v2. Each player selects 5 cards to use – three are visible to all players, two are kept hidden. There are also upgrades that can increase the number of cards that are hidden. In multiplayer, any enemy dragons appear as team-coloured stars if they’re not in sight, and if they’re in sight, they have a team-coloured trail.
Larian is thinking of adding a special team mode so that one player can control only the Dragon, while the other handles the RTS parts of the deployment.
