I'm sure you've heard about this one before. Still in it's developing phase at Russian K-D Lab, it looks very promissing. I was allowed to play the game, assisted by Andrey Kouzmine; president of K-D Lab, who guided me through the game. As we got further in the game, he explained how an idea became a game.

Perimeter has it's origin in a game previously made by K-D Lab back in '98 called "Vangers". But since they hadn't got the proper technology back then, they kept the 'terraforming' to a minimum. Andrew was the one with the original idea of the terraforming concept which forms the basic principle of Perimeter. I'll explain the 'terraforming' concept later on.

When the game begins, you are the commander of a 'frame'; a sort of mothership, that contains a whole city. You have to settle on an alien world. The first thing you'll have to do is to egalise or flatten a random piece of land (=terraforming) and deploy your frame there. Then you set up and energy-building that extracts energy from the soil. With that energy-suply you can activate a shield, a sort of forcefield around your base. You can construct all sorts of additional buildings and with those, all sorts of units of course. The combat units of Perimeter are the top notch of nanotechnology. You can build regular soldiers, officers, technicians and lots of other units that are all combined in to squads.
But what's unique to Perimeter's units is that you can 'transform' a certain amount of various units into other units such as airplanes. You can also build trenches around your base so the enemy ground units can't invade you base unnoticed when your shield is down (this is where the 'transformer' nanotechnology kicks in). You can use underground torpedos to counter that tactic. When you launch such a torpedo the ground above the torpedo will rise, since such a torpedo can go under the enemy shield, it also raises the ground underneath the shield. Because the workers that make the shield work, by constantly sliding to the interiour of the shield, are crashing into the raised soil, the shield can no longer be maintained. But you can build defensive turrets inside your base.

The game also features environemental effects such as earthquakes, landslides, erruptions and even 'locals'. These locals consist out of several creatures, what kind depends on the world you are in. There are three sorts of locals; the spider- & air-type, who move in large groups and the zombie-like locals that pop out of the ground. There are also portals in the game which you can use to travel between different worlds.

The engine specially developed for this game can handle up to 1.000.000 polyglons (yes a million!) PER frame, which is unique for a RTS-game.

This game certainly looks like one of the most promising upcoming strategy games. Perimeter takes Real Time Strategy to the next level, or as K-D Lab likes to call it; "Real Terraforming Strategy"...