Three Nations One of the main features of "Alien Nations" is the interaction and confrontation of three completely different nations. The Pimmons are cute little fantasy creatures with magic powers. The Amazons are pretty humanoids and the Sajikis are ravenous insects.

Building a Civilisation ALIEN NATIONS is an exciting mixture of "God game" and real-time strategy game.
The player selects one nation and begins with a small main building. Around this building, he constructs houses and specialist buildings. Gradually, a booming microcosm will develop, growing into a town.
Raw materials have to be found. Newly-arrived inhabitants are trained in the schools as masons, wood-cutters, researchers, etc. They are then able to play their part in the growth and expansion of their nation.Research is undertaken so that new knowledge and capabilities make life easier and more secure.
One decisive phase in the life of a new nation is its first contact to the other nations. Can they live in peace, allowing profitable trade to develop? Or will it come to war and have the right preparations been made? Diplomacy plays a decisive role in this.

Research, Trade and Diplomacy Research plays an important role in ALIEN NATIONS. The inhabitants start only with very basic knowledge. Only by committing sufficient resources can decisive matters like combat units, ore mines, etc. be used. Research is expensive and time-consuming, but can provide a life-saving new technology at a decisive moment.
With an increasing rate of urban and military growth, it gets more and more difficult to finance this by taxes alone. The one certain way of filling the state's coffers again is to trade with other nations.However, this causes certain problems. For instance, the traders and the trading routes must be protected. Declaring war on one's best trading partner should only be done when the coffers are bursting full. Diplomats make sure that the traders get a good deal.
Above all, they help keep the peace with one's neighbours, should that be what is wanted.

Contact with other Nations The interaction with the other nations is full of variety.
Each nation can produce items that for the other nations can be highly desired and highly priced consumer goods. This presents the player with difficult decisions.
It might be a good time to go to war with another nation, but this nation happens to be the best trading partner. If it comes to war, this income is cut off. Even in times of peace, enough soldiers should be available to protect both the towns and trading routes. It is not always possible to tell when a peace treaty might be broken. All military units have an experience system. Well-trained or veteran units are more effective than similar inexperienced units.

The World This planet is not only inhabited by three nations, there are also wild animals.
These are a useful source of nutrition because a large nation cannot only be fed on fruit. Hunters help bring a more varied diet and healthy nutrition.. The choice of location of the towns plays an important role in the game. Raw materials need to be close at hand, but there aren't any on the plains. Towns built close to hills have easy access to raw materials, but cannot grow so easily.

Building and Professions
Over 80 different professions and over 70 buildings (most of which have to be discovered through research) give much variety to town-life. Almost every profession has to be learned in a school. All buildings except for houses have to be manned.

The Towns The bigger the towns get, the greater the demands of the inhabitants. Eventually, the inhabitants of a town with no tavern will become unhappy and as a consequence unproductive. Then it will not be long until a cheap tavern no longer satisfies their needs.
When they do have a tavern, they will be happy, but will spend part of their time in it. What happens when the archer on guard duty is enjoying himself in the tavern when the enemy attack?
If too many of the inhabitants are unemployed, then the first criminals will start wandering the street. The police have to restore law and order and reintegrate them into society.
The player has to ensure that his town is maintained and grows. He has to keep his nation motivated and provide sufficient food and raw materials. It is important to conduct research. Trade routes have to be expanded and a net of diplomatic contacts built. Towns and trade routes have to be defended, and the army trained and equipped for war.

Enormous 3-D terrain

Heretic II, which plays from a third-person perspective, still controls a lot like a first-person shooter, but it's differently to the classic 3d person shooter, so it plays and feels like a great new kind of game. The world of Heretic II is a beautiful place to explore, based on the improved Quake II engine, you get expansive, detailed and good styled architecture that is amazing to behold more often than not. Even locations which are traditionally ugly and monotonus, like swamps and dusty old temples, look absolutely stunning in Heretic II, with fog and lighting effects subtly implemented to make such places look both real and fantastic. A crowd of appropriately dressed, appropriately sinister monsters populate each region, and all of them look great even if some look a little harmless at first glance. Best of all, they die in spectacular gouts of blood and gore, and you can even dismember the humanoid ones with your sword staff. The violence is accented by appropriate if somewhat subdued and nondescript sound effects and a correspondingly meek and understated musical score.

The Hero Corvus is in the spotlight all the time, therefore he was created to look very detailed.
He can walk, run, crawl, sneak, roll, climb and swim but most impressive is to see him fighting. The focua in Corvus' arsenal is his sword staff, which he'll power up to terrific potency over the course of his quest. He has several slick moves with this weapon and can even pole-vault with it to make larger and difficult jumps. The brunt of his ranged weapons are magic spells, including fire- and lightning-based attacks, and worse. Corvus has also other tricks up his sleeve: the Storm Bow, whose magical red arrows create deadly thunder showers;a Hellstaff, which fires energy bolts at a furious rate; the Phoenix Bow, whose ammunition explodes in the image of its fiery namesake. All of these can be powered up temporarily by means of the Tome of Power, which makes the attacks even more spectacular.

While it was a single-use power-up in previous Heretic games, the Tome is now a persistent item that requires defensive mana for its effects, which also fuels several useful defensive spells. From the meteor shield, whose shimmering green boulders wait in orbit and lash out at your enemies, to the fearsome morph ovum that turns your enemies into henpecked shells of their former selves, the defensive spells are as impressive as the main arsenal. Using offensive and defensive abilities in proper conjunction all while dodging enemy attacks is the key to Heretic II, and although it's a similar enough feel to your typical first-person shooter, it's hardly the same. Certainly the third-person perspective gives you a better sense of dodging enemy attacks, but the camera, which only rarely obstructs your view, does in fact inhibit some of your peripheral vision and makes it difficult to detect enemies attacking from the flanks. Corvus has a lot of moves in his repertoire, and most of them are useful, but altogether he moves a little sluggishly compared with your typical first-person action hero, especially while sidestepping. Still, he could run circles around Lara Croft any day, and a simple, even amusing tutorial will help you get acquainted with how he operates in no time. Heretic II fixes most every shortcoming the series ever had, in large part by returning to the Heretic formula rather than following the Hexen tradition. Although Hexen and its sequel each offered three character classes to choose from, the same resources could have gone into making a single, far more interesting protagonist. That's what Raven did with Heretic II, whose hero packs so much firepower that you won't soon find yourself getting bored using the same old magic tricks. Better yet, the levels are finely paced, with ammunition and mana in rather short supply such that you'll have to be conservative with your attacks, even as new weapons, spells, and power-ups are introduced with perfect timing. The levels are large, cohesive, and intuitively structured, and you even get nicely acted in-game cutscenes during and between them. You can travel back and forth between certain areas in a throwback to the Hexen and Quake II hub system, but much like those other games, the hub system doesn't work all that well. It's just not much fun to have to backtrack, even if you do face new enemies on the way back, but it is a convenient means of increasing the length of the game. Searching for keys to locked doors or pushing three buttons in sequence isn't much fun either, and you'll be forced to do such petty tasks occasionally, but never in excess. If there's any real fault to Heretic II, it's in the name - this game is in a league above its predecessors, and although it continues the original's plot and holds over many of its weapons and items, it mustn't be regarded with the kind of prejudice its predecessors might evoke. Otherwise, sure, the game suffers from a bug or two, level load times aren't insubstantial, the third-person perspective thing isn't exactly revolutionary, and altogether the game isn't very long (although it's worth replaying cooperatively). Occasional areas in Heretic II can be frustrating either because they're difficult or because they're confusing, and as a deathmatch game, it isn't as fast and furious as Quake. But one look at the game, one taste of any of the weapons it places at your disposal, and you'll forget all about the little things like that.