The Fertile Crescent – Spotlight

To cut right to the chase, I’ll say it now: To my delight, The Fertile Crescent is a real-time strategy game with a proper little belter feel to it. Early access means that this Mesopotamian romp through the land of pomegranates is far from epic, and you’ll see pretty much everything it has to offer within a few hours of play time. It’s been five years in the making, and it shows like Hammurabi’s majestic beard.

To put it plainly: Wield Interactive’s RTS tribute to the classics of two decades ago is a compact, cheerfully high-saturation love letter to the genre. A lot of its Steam page uses the phrase “inspired by,” and there’s no denying that the 1997 strategy game Age of Empires was a major influence.

You may think I’m biassed because Age of Empires 2 is one of my favourite games of all time. Of course I’m a little biassed because that’s just the way it is with liking things. TFC, on the other hand, impressed me from the moment I left the title screen, and I’ll admit that a degree of indirect nostalgia helped me get into the game.

After playing my first game and thinking about it for a few minutes, I realised something was wrong: Pixels, I see now. There you go. Greetings, fellow mesopotamians. Building a town centre is something that can be done. Done. Now that they’re basically screaming at me in fruit tree visual language, let’s send you over there to get some food while you two lads over here chop wood. Let’s build a house there because there’s no more room for people. Please, scout, allow me to right click you on the mini-map so that I can look around. Yes, that’s right… mm. The similarities to Age of Empires are undeniable, aren’t they? What a pity, then… This is the first time I haven’t added any new villagers! When was the last time you pressed that button? What’s going on if it’s not here? … *plopping sound*… They’re geniuses, for sure.

My friend, the town centre queued up and produced its own villager. Even if that doesn’t sound all that impressive, please bear with me. Since AoE’s play-procedural chassis is built around it, it’s truly game-changing.

A quick primer on the competitive aspects of AoE2 is provided below. As your village grows, so do your resources, and so do your chances of winning. Consequently, if your town centre is ‘idle’ (not producing villagers) while your enemy’s town centre is not, you are losing ground to your adversary. Your starting town centre must have zero idle time, and this means having to constantly interrupt what you’re doing in order to manually queue villagers. To play at any level of competitiveness, you’ll have to learn to do this over and over again throughout the first half of the game. It’s a complete and utter waste of time, but you soon come to accept that this is simply the way things are.

The Fertile Crescent features a swath of farmland and a cluster of buildings.
Automating villager production has made TFC both more realistic and less exhausting than AoE, since humans will fuck regardless of what god wants them to. You’ll have a lot more mental space to think about strategy if you don’t have to worry about the town centre all the time.

Obviously, it extends beyond villager automation. Military units, for example, can be put on a waiting list even if you don’t have the resources to produce them right away. Consequently, you won’t have to wait for the number next to a picture of a log to tick up by ten before you can click on a picture of an archer again.

As a general rule, TFC strives to relieve you of as much menial work as possible, based on the premise that the player’s job shouldn’t include any decision-making at all. And as ridiculous as it may sound, in the world of real-time strategy, that’s a real innovation. Despite the fact that RTS games test a player’s strategic thinking, they also tend to bottleneck success behind a player’s ability to click a lot, in a lot of different places, quickly. By and large, TFC avoids this problem.

small town in a fertile plain of grass and sandy soil
Fortunately, it also provides you with a wealth of strategic options to choose from. Decisions about resource management predominate, and this is where AoE deviates most noticeably. Probably the most obvious clue is in the game’s name. It’s all about food production and consumption in the Fertile Crescent. The historical context of a strategy game is usually just that: historical context. The game’s mechanics are completely separated from the game’s atmosphere. On the other hand, TFC pulls off the feat of running a ruleset that thoughtfully mirrors the history it is interacting with.

Human civilization’s rise can be traced back to the development of food surpluses and the adoption of a more stable farming system. The more time people have to think about more efficient ways to produce food, the greater the food surpluses will become as a result of the abundance. Finally, if there is enough spare food, you can afford to eat professionals such as soldiers, clergymen, bellends with hats, and so on.

TFC models this in a way that appears to be simple on paper, but is actually quite complex. In order to produce more villagers and researchers, the more food you have on hand (there are other bonuses too, I think). Food requirements increase as the number of villagers grows. It’s also necessary to first divert the population to harvesting non-edible resources, and then hire blokes who will happily consume the fruits of their labour without ever having to work on the farm. Hire priests for faster research so that you can get bronze weapons ahead of your opponent. Priests are like Jabba the Hutt, sitting around thinking and scarfing wheat like he’s Jabba the Hutt, and they truly opened my eyes to the beginnings of human urbanisation.

The Fertile Crescent has warriors traversing a sand-covered landscape.
TFC doesn’t have a lot of features, so don’t expect a lot of breadth. Only one map type, for example, and a single civilisation are available so far, with a small enough roster of buildings, units, and technologies that you can see it all in a single half-hour session. Crucially, the resource modelling in the game allows for a plethora of different but equally viable approaches to the game’s strategic dilemmas.

One is a horde mode in which your expanding settlement must fight off waves of bastards spawned on the map’s edges, while another is called skirmish mode and pits players against a single AI opponent on the map. When you first start out, the skirmish AI is solid, but as you gain experience and master the game’s mechanics, I believe you’ll begin to notice flaws in the AI’s behaviour. In any case, even on the easiest difficulty settings, I’m having trouble defeating the cheating bastard horde AI. At least I’ll have a challenge for the foreseeable future.

In a forest in the Fertile Crescent, archers pursue prey with their bows.

There’s a good chance that the fact that TFC lets you construct a military settlement in so many different ways will lead to an exciting multiplayer experience.

If I’m being completely honest, I can’t see myself playing the current single-player content for more than a dozen games or so, at least until new content is added. Multiplayer, on the other hand, is completely different. When it comes to building a military settlement in TFC, there are a number of different ways to go about it. This could lead to an exciting multiplayer situation where players have to figure out what their opponent is going to do before devising a plan of their own to counter it.

AoE2 multiplayer has a fair amount of this big-picture strategy, which is why I grew to enjoy it. That is why I eventually came to… not love it, but there is also a lot of “who can follow a rigid build order the fastest, therefore spaffing fifteen knights into the enemy town centre and instantly win”. It’s going to be interesting to see how TFC develops any kind of meta.

I can only hope that the situation progresses to that point. Even though TFC’s early access multiplayer has a lot of potential and is running smoothly in terms of matchmaking and connection, actually facing an opponent is an extremely rare occurrence. Unfortunately, there are only a few people on the servers, and I believe the majority of multiplayer games are taking place on Wield’s Discord server at this time. However, if this game receives even a fraction of the attention it deserves, it could change everything. On that note, I encourage you to grab a pomegranate, sell a bunch of copper, and give it a whirl.