Games: Kingdoms Reborn

You ever play Civilization? Remember the Workers units, the ones you'd send out of your capital city to erect tile improvements? A farm here, a port there, a railroad from here to there.

Kingdoms Reborn takes the worker units, gives them their own game, and turns it into an RTS.

In Kingdom Reborn, you're building a little empire of busy workerbees. They need certain resources stockpiled in their homes. You direct them to cut down trees, build farms, put down roads. The "town life" aspect of this city builder is toned way down; your villagers are essentially automatons that need certain inputs stockpiled in their housing units. The game does a good job of forcing organic growth - production buildings can't be too far from homes, homes farther from the center of civilization don't upgrade as much (thus giving you less in taxes), etc.

I've always had a perverse joy in strip-mining resources from game maps. I spent many hours as a kid playing skirmish maps in Warcraft 2, with the express purpose of mining all the gold and collecting all the trees. This game tickles that exact itch in my brain. Territorial expansion gives you new resources to exploit, and progressing through the upgrade ages opens up even more resources, like deep sea fishing and oil.

There is a military aspect to the game I haven't touched at all, as I'm more of a peaceful guy when it comes to city builders, but given there's only a handful of military upgrades compared to the hundreds of economic ones, I'm going to guess it's more of an excuse to spend more resources than it is a deep strategic military game.