further away from the player's main character they are, the longer it takes for orders to reach them. Food is the single most important resource in the game. Aside from friendly towns the player can also slaughter wandering sheep, barter food from neutral towns, or kill an enemy captain and pillage his food supply. Aside from manpower and food, towns can also provide equipment. Townspeople will occasionally make items but to speed things up the player can order an army to "invent" at a friendly town. Depending on nearby resources and what posture the army is set to (passive, neutral or aggressive), men will then go to work collecting resources and make items. As the more useful items can usually only be made in one or two towns on any given map these have great strategic importance. There is no micromanagement involved with equipment. Once an army is ordered to equip itself from a pile of equipment it is automatically distributed. If there are bows, swords, and pikes available, soldiers will pick them up in that order. As long as there are soldiers without any weapon in the army no one will pick up more than one weapon. If everyone has something then people with the least valuable weapon will have first pick and so on. The captain carries any excess equipment. There is no limit to how much a captain can carry, but the more he carries the slower he (and his army) will move. Expansions In 1991 an expansion pack titled Powermonger: World War I Edition was released, which changed the setting from the conquest of a medieval kingdom, to World War I. World War I Edition retains the core gameplay of Powermonger, but with more ranged weapons and war-machines. More expansion packs with different settings were planned depending on the success of the World War I expansion, but were never released. The unreleased expansions include a fantasy theme, Feudal Japan, and the American Civil War. The fantasy scenario was planned to have a magic system with the ability to create custom spells, and fantasy races such as elves and gnomes. Development The Amiga and Atari ST versions of Powermonger cost £29.99 in 1990, and were released in October 1990; the DOS version was released in 1991. Magazine advertisements for Powermonger quoted Peter Molyneux, who stated that the game is "Better than Populous". A 3DO version was planned