''Ashes of Empire'' was a 1992

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produced by Mirage, released for the Amiga and

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compatible operating systems. It was a follow-on, although not a sequel, to the earlier games '' Midwinter'' and '' Flames of Freedom''.

Gameplay

The player is a member of a fictional UN/

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...

-type organisation (CSR) to recruit followers across various CIS-inspired republics being threatened by a powerful neighbor. The mechanics of the game are similar to the earlier ''Midwinter'' game, although the player is able to use a selection of land and air vehicles to travel around. Combat is

real-time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

, with the player maneuvering to engage the enemy vehicle(s). The overall aim of the game is to pacify each of the CSR's five Republics - Ossia, Ruzakhstan, Belokraine, Moldenia and Servonia. From the preface by

Mike Singleton Mike Singleton (21 February 1951 – 10 October 2012) was a British video game designer who wrote various well-regarded titles for the ZX Spectrum during the 1980s. His titles include '' The Lords of Midnight'', ''Doomdark's Revenge'', ' ...

: "In Ashes of Empire, you well find echoes of the real world and, I hope, echoes of how delicate a task it is to bring peace and prosperity to lands where there is, at the moment, only hardship, bloodletting and misery".

Reception

The game was reasonably well-received but not commercially successful, mainly due to the dry nature of the subject matter and the level of detail included in the game. '' Computer Gaming World'' in 1993 stated that ''Ashes of Empire'' was a logistical game that "truly breaks new ground" but "reveals major weaknesses", with game-play that was "plodding and devoid of any intense challenge". The magazine approved of, however, the "truly fresh gaming experience" and "interactive education and thought puzzle which is highly topical in today's changing world", and concluded that "this type of game needs several generations of development s a viable genre... It's about time, though, that a games like ''Ashes of Empire'' took the first, important step".

References

{{reflist 1992 video games Amiga games DOS games Mirage Technologies (Multimedia) Ltd. games Strategy video games Video games developed in the United Kingdom Single-player video games