Chronocracy innovates by bringing the RTS genre into a 2D-plane and dividing its campaign into bitesize, timeline-shifting sections.
The RTS genre has been waiting for innovation for a while now, and while Chronocracy certainly doesn’t solve all of its problems, it does repackage a lot of what makes the genre so fun into a new, exciting (and a little bit goofy) form. For a start, its campaign is wrapped up in a timeline-travel story, with you taking leadership of one of three factions of Niblets throughout their history, leading them against their rivals (or nature, or space invaders) to correct the timeline.
That change up of narrative and campaign is clever. It allows a scenario to simply be ‘reach x resource’ or ‘crush enemies’ and each of them comes with a strict time limit to keep you focused. It also ties in to a meta-base where you exchange metamaterials earned from winning for persisting upgrades – meaning that you can counter the increasing difficulty with that base, rather than the Chronocracy requiring an ever-expanding research tree and longer scenarios.
The biggest change, though, is the nice tucking away of the economy layer. In most RTS games your enemies can rush you and destroy your villagers, builders and workers quite quickly. When it comes to multiplayer this makes for a fun strategy, and part of the reason for ever-evolving metas, however, by tucking the economy layer away it means that Chronocracy can start your opponents off as both stronger than you and aggressive. That’s because warrior units cannot enter the tunnels and mines that provide you most of the resources that you’ll need – and the remaining resources (food and wood) have your workers tucked away inside and safe from quick, tactical raids.
You might think that all of this streamlining could leave things a little bit dull, but if anything it simply speeds things up. It’s instead kept lively by an incredibly dense research tree that is, in fact, perhaps a little bit too dense – often offering between six and a dozen choices to spend your resources on. These are largely small capacity increases or buffs to production, but if you start simply claiming every tech as you reach it then you’ll start to eat through non-renewable resources such as the metals. Accept a dozen techs that use iron and you might grind your war machine to a halt… focus too much on specific mining and your enemies might flood you.
Chronocracy spends a lot of its time looking like a game about silly little guys, but it’s actually a finely tuned strategy game about carefully watching and assigning numbers… with silly little guys. I first played it at Gamescom a couple of years back, but have since dipped into the demo more than a few times, I highly recommend that you do the same.
Chronocracy is in development for PC.
