The defining part of real-time strategy games is that they’re in, well, real time: your troops and civilians constantly move and frequently need your guidance. As battle descends you invariably find yourself jumping around the map, fighting fires and trying to keep track of a dozen things at once. The frantic quality of the experience can be overwhelming, but is also what makes these games a lot of fun.

Music has to be sensitive to the player’s frame of mind during the final “all-out carnage” phase of the game, as there’s less attention available for melodic detail and counterpoint. I tend to go broader and bigger during these moments, in contrast to the more peaceful early phases of the game. This week’s music selection from the Empires Apart score is a good example of this approach.

Each nation in Empires Apart has its own musical theme, evoking its cultural character as embodied in the game. (Picking a country here is a little like picking a race or class in a traditional RPG, with resulting abilities and audio-visual trappings.)

The Chinese melody, accompanying the early phases during which the player’s town is built, suggests the bustle of commerce and the ingenuity of ancient technology. I tried to preserve the lyrical pentatonic quality of Chinese folk music, as well as some of its instrumentation, while giving it the forward-direction appropriate for gameplay.

Yikes, it’s been nearly a month since the last Cue of the (so-called) Week. Sometimes the work of writing new music circumvents the sharing of old music.

Or in this case, not that old. This week’s cue is another selection from the soundtrack of the newly-released game Empires Apart. (Now available via Steam!)

Here we have another of the national faction themes, this one for ancient Arabia. I gave the central melody to the duduk, a mideastern woodwind with a distinctive, sinuous sound.

Ah, the early stages of a war game. The mood is optimistic. We haven’t yet heard the blood-curdling screams of onscreen avatars (and real-life players). For the civilization-selection phase of Empires Apart I wanted the music to feel expansive, forward-looking, and a bit mysterious. The second half of the cue is a positive spin on an arching melody that will reemerge, in more dire form, in later battle music.

The title above is a bit of a cheat, since in Empires Apart this music represents all meso-American cultures rather than strictly the Aztecs. (Tenochtitlan was the famed Aztec capitol, constructed on Lake Texcoco.)

This battle cue uses percussion and winds to evoke a sense of location, and orchestral strings for continuity with the game’s overall narrative.

Empires Apart, launching this month, is a real-time strategy game that revisits the genre with beautiful stylized visuals.

RTS games start peacefully, as the player begins constructing a town in a relatively unsettled natural environment, then pass through phases I call “bustling society” and finally “all out carnage” as other players get involved.

I wrote this track to accompany early gameplay for players who opt to participate as the French. The music draws from European folk traditions and makes use of instruments such as the mandolin and dulcimer.

Sometimes the flow of a film requires a very short musical cue. These are surprisingly tricky to write. An entire scene may be emotionally defined by one musical phrase, which creates pressure to come up the exact right one from countless possibilities.

Usually when writing micro-cues I reprise a fragment of existing musical material. However, for the moody driving scene from the film Craving Greatness I came up with a standalone theme just for that moment. In retrospect, I wish I could have made it longer!