And let it be known that
The Nations is definitely a slow-paced game. It's not your standard RTS; it takes almost all of its cues from the
Settlers series of games, down to the various groups with their little differences and the de-emphasis of combat. Instead,
The Nations concentrates on getting a working economy going, with a large number of different products and various methods of getting new and better ones that are more useful for your people.
Basic gameplay is simple, and you can get a basic grasp on what's going on by running through the short tutorial. The basic idea is that you click where you want to build a building, and a foreman will come up and start working on it. Runners will deposit the raw materials needed to construct the building as well. They also do the rest of the 'movement' in the game, hustling goods from the storehouses to the taverns, from the lumberyards to the places that need the planks, and so on. You train the various types as you need them, although you're always limited in numbers by the growth of your population. Each 'day' in the game passes, and your babies grow up to be teenagers, quickly becoming viable adults who can hold jobs and get married, having kids and propogating the cycle.
Because of the emphasis on flow and structure instead of simple unit-swarming, there's a lot of micromangement to be done in this game. You have to make sure that you have enough lumberjacks and stonecutters to get the raw resources you need, then you have to make sure that you have enough runners to get the goods where they need to go. Along with that, you need to produce food, provide housing for the adults, and even build houses of worship for them to go to and pray. The interconnections of the game are elaborate, and it takes some time to figure out the best way to finagle it to do what you want.
You see, like in Settlers, you can't select most of the 'units' in the game. Instead, they're autonomous, going about their business and doing their jobs without any real say-so from you. The only group of units that you can select are the warriors, who you use to attack enemies. The rest are run by simple AI. You can set preferences on various buildings and locations--chop these trees down first, make sure to get the lumber from here, don't walk out to this well--and so on, but it's more SimCity and less Warcraft II.
There are three sides that you can play as--the Amazons, the Pimmon (a sort of goofy blue species) and the Sajiki, who look like big bugs. Each have their own unique things that they can do, but the core gameplay is identical for all three sides. There's one campaign for each side, along with a number of skirmish missions that you can play against the AI or with your friends in multiplayer. The AI is scattered in its ability; it has a habit of building useless structures when it should be doing everything it can to defend from your attacks, but it's competent enough.
There are some frustrations. The translation is definitely weak, with a large amount of weird grammar and even some German hanging around (fur with an umlaut instead of 'for' in a few places, f'rinstance). And, more frustratingly, the campaigns aren't cumulative; after spending hours developing a city in a plotline, I don't really feel like re-researching all of the stuff to make the city again. Grumble.
