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Ata is a description of the American Civil War for the PC and was made
as a tribute to the old classic North & South by
Infogrames. Basically Ata
is a 2-player turn-based strategy game with a grain of
action, where you, the commander of either Union or Confederate army, attempt
to conquer the continent of America and slay your enemy.
The beginning of the development of this game dates back to 1998. Ata was
later released as freeware in fall 2000 after nearly
three years of intensive work.
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In Ata you get to choose which type of campaign to play. Your
options vary from free arcade campaign to five different
historical situations, one to correspond each year of the Civil War. You can
also play saved games. Saving is automatic and takes place
between turns.
The number of armies under your control varies from one to three, depending on
the campaign type and the current situation in the game.
Once you've established a solid foundation by conquering sufficient number of
inpedendent or enemy states, you're start receiving gold supplies.
Recruiting troops is essential to your victory, as is keeping your economy
balanced. Ata has a powerful trading system, which allows
you to hire, fire and exchange troops between your states and armies. Your
troops also require their montly salary, so losing
resources in battle or by leaving your states unguarded may turn out to be
extremely critical later on.
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In Ata there are three types of army units: footmen, cavalry and
artillery. Footmen have are versatile in terms of momevent as they can walk and
run in every direction. Equipped with rifles, these blue or
grey coated men can prove quite deadly if used wisely.
Cavalry can only ride forwards or stop for a short while, but they are fastest
of all units in the battlefield. Men on horses carry swords
and though they like to avoid face-to-face contact with footmen, they're were
effective assaulting the flanks and against artillery.
Artillery can only move their cannons vertically. Because of their heavy
equipment, their movement is also very slow, thus they're so
vulnerable against cavalry. These troops are able to inflict massive damage
upon the enemy if they get a direct hit. Also, if you're
unfortunate, you may as well sweep away your whole team of footmen with one
well-aimed cannonball.
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Ata is originally a DOS-game, but has reportedly been run successfully
in many different versions of Windows. In fact, the
recommended system for playing Ata is at least a Pentium 150 MHz -class
computer, 16 MB RAM and Windows 95 or better. Some people
with newer computers have reported problems with videocard compatibility, but
unfortunately Ata is no longer being updated, which also
means that there will be no patch available to fix those problems.
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Ata is considered one of best freeware games in numerous media.
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