The game's most interesting feature is actually its city management. As in most real-time strategy games, you have to harvest various resources to construct buildings and buy units and upgrades. However, some raw materials must also be turned into finished goods. You get timber and iron by sending out workers to gather them, but corn and meat are harvested at farms. Once you build a farm, you send laborers inside and task them as farmers or pig raisers. Farmers then automatically plant fields, while pig raisers create pig farms. Workshops are then used to convert these into wine and food. Thankfully, this process is all automated. Gold is the final resource and is gathered through taxation, not by laborers.
Every minute or so in the game, you automatically gain gold from the people. The number of laborers and soldiers you have actually has no relationship to the city population, which continues to grow at a regular pace throughout the game. The rate of taxation can be adjusted to get you more gold from your people, but doing so has consequences. If you tax the people too much, their morale will drop, which may result in an exodus of your city or even a riot.
Like SimCity, Fate of the Dragon has natural disasters, which include plagues, droughts, locusts, earthquakes, and banditry. These disasters have both direct and indirect consequences, like destroying actual buildings and depleting resources or decreasing city morale. You can give relief to your people in the form of gold and corn, or you can make sacrifices at the temple, which then ameliorate the effects of the disasters. Sacrifices are another of the more distinctive features in Fate of the Dragon: You can build temples and make sacrifices to the gods, thus gaining special bonuses for brief periods. Other types of sacrifices can double production, heal the hit points of all your troops in the game, increase food production, and more. However, to access these more powerful benefits, you need to create a sacrifice officer.
Creating officers highlights another aspect of gameplay: heroes. No Three Kingdoms game would be complete without a strong emphasis on the heroes of the time. Thus, in Fate of the Dragon, you can recruit various famous generals for your cause. In combat, they act as elite troops and gain more hit points, attack power, and special abilities, like the use of healing and defense spells as they kill units and earn experience. And when they're not in combat, they can be appointed to official positions. Much of the late-game abilities available in Fate of the Dragon can be accessed only when you have the four various officers: science officer, public security officer, sacrifice officer, and public affairs officer. For instance, to research the highest upgrades and siege engines, you need to have a science officer. To keep your population stable and in line, you need to have a public security officer. And to make diplomatic treaties with other warlords, you need a public affairs officer. Heroes are important, but you have to keep their loyalty in check by rewarding them. Each hero has a loyalty meter that can only be kept at 100 percent by giving them honorific titles or money.
There are many resources and goods you'll need to keep track of
Fate of the Dragon stands out from other real-time strategy games with its greater emphasis on its strategic layer. The added complexity in the resource gathering is interesting without being overwhelming. The supply needs add an extra consideration to the combat. And the disasters, sacrifices, and heroes are also interesting. However, the game still has its fair share of problems. The tactical gameplay is pretty shallow, and despite the strategic considerations, most battles will devolve into mob fights, as in many other real-time strategy games. Moreover, Fate of the Dragon does a poor job of explaining some of the less obvious aspects of its gameplay. For instance, there is no explanation in the manual, tutorial, or help files as to exactly how much food or wine each unit consumes. While the tutorial does a fairly good job of teaching you the basics, it doesn't go into how to appoint officers, exactly how to replenish troops when they're out of supply, and so forth. You will definitely need to read the manual to get into Fate of the Dragon, and even then, some questions will be left unanswered.
Ultimately, unless the historical Chinese context interests you, you'll find that Fate of the Dragon is just another real-time strategy game with a few original features, but with nothing really outstanding to recommend it. However, if you're interested in the old Romance of the Three Kingdoms games or the time period itself, you'll likely enjoy the game--mostly because it's one of the few of its kind.
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