Unknown Horizons is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building. It is basically a game heavily inspired from the popular Anno series were you have to build, sustain and lead colonies into evolution.
The game is actually under heavy development, but it is already playable and very much enjoyable! For the time being, you can play the tutorial in order to learn how to play, a scenario for a more realistic story like approach, or a free limitless game on one of the many available different maps and the endless randomly generated ones.
You start the game as a company of sailors on a ship that must establish a settlement and explore and take advantage the untouched environment’s resources. Your technology is very basic at the beginning so you will have to start from chopping trees, hunting wild animals and building tents for your sailors to live in. After you successfully maintain a sustainable little society your settlement level will increase allowing you to build a more advanced set of buildings!
On the above screenshot you can see the level two set of buildings. These buildings include a school for your citizens education that must be built close to the houses, and a farm building that is the requirement for the fields to work. The fields that can be potato, wool, tobacco, sugar etc, are producing goods that are then delivered to the appropriate processing buildings. For example, Wheat Farms produce wheat that is delivered to the Mill building that uses wheat to produce flour and then the flour is sent to the Bakery building that will then produce bread for the citizens to eat, or for you to sell for gold!
All this “goods communication” and “resource interplay” that happens between buildings must be very carefully studied by the player in order to achieve to maintain a constant adequate flow of goods that will be used both for domestic consumption and for trading purposes. This may sound easy but believe me it is not easy at all!
What about the combat side of the game? Well…this is still not ready for you to enjoy. You can actually produce war ships that will fire cannon balls to other ships, and you can build defensive towers on the shore to protect your settlement, but the combat side of this game is just not ready yet.
Similarly not ready is the evolution tree. You can currently play Unknown Horizons till you reach level 4 which won’t happen in five minutes of course, but the two last levels that will bring massive new possibilities for this amazing game are not ready yet.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/6ikg7Wyil3k[/youtube]
The installation of Unknown Horizons should be a piece of cake for most of you as there are detailed installation instructions for every major Linux distribution available at the homepage of the game.
