Divinity: Dragon Commander Review
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Conquest and Glory Divinity: Dragon Commander's gameplay is divided up into three parts. The first, I've already discussed, takes place on board the Raven, where you'll purchase upgrades for your troops, advance the story, and decide on matters of policy in your empire, such as whether to deport foreign criminals or allow same-sex marriages. Most of your policy decisions will have an effect on the various races of the land, whose approval ratings are tracked by frequent newspaper updates. The game leaves it up to you whether you want to try to keep the balance between all the races, or gain the favor of just one or two at the expense of the others; depending on your standing in the polls, you'll receive more money and recruits from their lands while you're fighting in them. This, to me, is moral choice done right: you'll frequently be asked to pick between what's "morally right" versus what's pragmatic during wartime, or just for society as a whole. Those questions are far more interesting than any old "good vs. evil" choices.
The second stage of gameplay is the strategic map. This one resembles a board game, with the land divided up into several provinces (both land and sea). Gameplay progresses in turns, and you'll have to make decisions on the strategic map to buy units, buildings, and invade enemy lands. It's here that you'll build gold mines to increase your revenue, send transports full of troops across the seas, or play special strategic cards that will provide temporary bonuses to you. Although things start out simply, as you move from map to map, the playing field quickly expands and it becomes very important to properly manage your unit distribution, and to know whether to attack or stay on defense.
When you do enter combat (by placing your troops in an occupied enemy territory) you'll have the choice to either have one of your generals or your army auto-resolve based on the combat odds presented. Or, you can elect to begin the third phase of gameplay, the real-time battles, by taking charge yourself. These battles are influenced by what you bring to them and where they take place on the strategic map. So, if you start the battle with a lot of Hunter units on the strategic map, you'll also start the real-time battle with a collection of them, and if you're fighting in land or sea you can expect to get an appropriate battle map too. This is further augmented by what sorts of cards you play before the battle - deploying mercenaries, special powers or penalties to the enemy can all tip the scales in your favor.
The real-time battles center around capturing various control points: building nodes and recruitment nodes. Capturing building nodes lets you create structures such as War Factories and Shipyards on top of them, and recruitment nodes allow you to build Recruitment Centers, which increase the rate at which you accumulate recruits, your primary economic resource in these battles. Each map has a maximum number of recruits to collect based upon its population, so battles won't last forever and you'll often want to be efficient in building your units and structures. Beyond these buildings, there's also a variety of turrets you can create, though I didn't find them too useful except for stalling enemy forces for a few seconds.
The units you can construct in battle are relatively stock-standard archetypes that you'll be used to if you've ever played a real-time strategy game before, but of course, they do at least have their steampunk theme to make them fresher. Troopers are your basic infantry unit who have a short, weak ranged attack, Hunters are medium units who are fast-moving and eat light-class units for breakfast, Shamans will heal and shield your friendly units, and Devastators are huge siege units that can fire from a great distance and do huge area-of-effect damage to units and buildings.
On the surface, these units and buildings are very limited; there's only about a dozen units in total, for instance, and they aren't all that exciting to use and are somewhat lacking in personality. Where things get interesting is when you start to purchase research upgrades for your units back on the Raven. By spending research points you accumulate over time, you will be able to unlock a variety of improvements and unique abilities for these units that can significantly change how you use them. For instance, Troopers can get the Spoils of War upgrade that allows them to capture enemy buildings, which is usually much faster than destroying them outright and more economical to boot, while Zeppelins can be equipped with Mustard Gas bombs, an area-of-effect denial ability. Even the relatively lowly Hunters can learn Teleportation to open up all sorts of sneak attack possibilities.
Once you get the upgrades going, the real-time battles become a lot more interesting, as your options for victory are much more varied. You'll begin to appreciate all the differences in your units, and rarely will there be a "better unit" to buy simply based on stats alone; instead the tactical applications will more likely sway your choices. Although I have read there were concerns during the beta about balance, I think those have mostly been worked out as now units are very well balanced against each other and battles tend to feel fair. However, the real-time battles are still the weakest part of the game. First, the strategy itself still isn't as unique and varied as what you would get in a full-fledged real-time strategy game. With only one "set" of units and no races shown on the battlefield, I feel an opportunity was missed for units from all races to appear, and be further influenced by your political choices. There are also no unique maps or special objectives to accomplish, which can make these battles a bit repetitive after a while. The AI is also a bit of a pushover in these real-time battles, and even buggy - for example, I occasionally witnessed it sitting idle and doing nothing for minutes at a time.
Look Ma, I'm a Dragon!
Of course, it wouldn't be a Divinity game, it seems, if you couldn't transform into a dragon, and Dragon Commander definitely lets you do just that. During real-time battles, you may sacrifice a small number of recruits to switch to "dragon mode", which lets you fly around the battle map and rain down fire from the heavens on your enemies. The controls are pretty much exactly the same as those used in Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, Larian's previous game, so if you played that one you'll feel right at home here. You simply use WASD to move about, with up-down and directional movement handed with the mouse; skills can be used from a hotbar at the bottom of the screen. Since you're also equipped with a jetpack, you can soar around the battlefield very quickly, but only for short bursts.
