For one player, his or her screen will look like any recent real-time strategy title. Savage has multiple zoom levels, courtesy of its well-developed 3D engine. Like most real-time strategy titles, there are workers and resources that must be gathered in order to produce more units and structures that will fuel the battle against the other opponent. Most of the maps in Savage are quite small. I think if you put these maps in other games, they'd be considered arena size, but the longer build and upgrade times make up for it, preventing you from accessing advanced weapons, including siege ballista and catapults easily.

The controls themselves are fairly intuitive. Most of the game is played from a third-person, behind-the-back perspective. For ranged weapons, you'll be put in first-person view, but there's never a way to stay in a certain view. Rather than making the game disjointed (top down for strategy, first-person for projectiles, third-person for everything else), it actually gives the game variety and keeps the experience fresh. If you want to mine, you simply walk up to a mine and start hacking away at it. If you want to repair a building, you use the same melee weapon to hack away at the structure. Savage's developers have apparently kept it simple.

Another clever thing the developers did was not to rely entirely on the humans to do everything. Often you'll find in games like Battlefield 1942 or Tribes, nobody ever wants to do the rear guard actions and handle the logistics. Here, at least you can count on up to ten workers to carry out the commander's bidding. That way, if your game isn't large enough or if you need all your human players out on the offensive, you still have workers who can carry out the menial tasks. Don't expect too much intelligence from these guys though, the commander's interface is spartan; completely decrepit of the amenities found in recent titles like Rise of Nations. You won't know if your workers are idle and they won't automatically prioritize and assign tasks to themselves. That, of course, is not the whole point of the game.

Building on the chat features in the game, Savage offers commanders the ability to set waypoints and assign objectives to human players and workers alike. I really liked how clear the objectives were to the human players when the commander assigned tasks. A compass arrow at the top pointed me in right direction. The compass also has space to indicate what the commander has issued you to do, and usually there are some on-screen identifiers to help direct you. If you need to attack someone sneaking in behind enemy lines, you'll find that the commander's top down view will give you superior intelligence in manning defenses. In larger games, the commander can delegate some of his authority to officers on the field, further adding to the scope of the game.