Divinity: Dragon Commander Preview

PC Gamer has put online a preview for Divinity: Dragon Commander, which previously appeared only on the magazine version of the publication. Here's a snippet:
In puny man-form, players live aboard their flagship. It's here you'll be able to pore over the game's continent map and plan your next assaults into enemy territory. It looks like fantasy Risk, as Fahrang Namdar, the game's lead designer, pushes his small stack of unit counters over to face a slightly larger stack of unit counters this one topped with a little red skull icon. Fahrang has a chance to play cards from a collection before the fighting starts in earnest: these act as buffs for his troops, or his own character in dragon form. He selects a card that lets him lob a set amount of fireballs (nukes), as Fahrang calls them and steams into the real-time battle mode.

Fahrang's little stack of units translates into a small fleet of hovering airships in Dragon Commander's battle mode, all golden and studded with steampunk propellers. His AI opponent's army is smaller, but the continent map's skull icon has become a destroyer: three times the size of the next-largest airship, it's a slowmoving menace to an unwary armada. It's this that Fahrang, in dragon form, heads straight for. A jetpack might seem superfluous for a sinuous sky-beast with a 70ft wingspan, but it affords Fahrang a burst of speed that lets him get around the back of his foe's fleet. He burps out one of his nukes and peppers it with follow-up fireballs, quickly taking it down.