Seven Kingdoms

Seven Kingdoms made departures from the traditional real-time strategy model of "gather resources, build a base and army, and attack" set by other RTS games. The economic model bears more resemblance to a turn-based strategy game than to the traditional "build-workers, and harvest-resources" system in games such as Command & Conquer, StarCraft, and Age of Empires.

The game features an espionage system that allows players to train and control spies individually, who each have a spying skill that increases over time. The player is responsible for catching potential spies in their own kingdom. Inns built within the game allow players to hire mercenaries of various occupations, skill levels, and races. Skilled spies of enemy races are essential to a well-conducted espionage program, and players can bolster their forces by grabbing a skilled fighter or give one's own factories, mines, and towers of science a boost by hiring a highly skilled professional. For instance, having a skilled Persian general can make capturing and keeping a Persian village much easier.

Commercially, Seven Kingdoms was overshadowed at launch by competing real-time strategy titles such as Age of Empires, Total Annihilation and Dark Reign. Writing for CNET Gamecenter, Allen Rausch reported that the game was "buried" by the large number of releases in its genre at the time. The game was particularly dwarfed by Age of Empires, according to T. Liam McDonald of PC Gamer US, who placed part of the blame for Seven Kingdoms' sales on its "indifferent ad campaign and weak graphics."

However, both Rausch and McDonald noted that Seven Kingdoms had attracted a dedicated fan following by 1999, at which point Rausch wrote that it had sold "fairly well". In the United States, the game sold roughly 35,000 units by November 1999, according to PC Data. Global sales of Seven Kingdoms, its expansion pack and its sequel surpassed 200,000 units by 2000.