Before Golgotha, the Crack dot Com studio, founded by Dave Taylor, a native of id Software, managed to mark only by the platformer Abuse. Golgotha was announced in 1995 under the promising motto “all the best from C&C and DOOM“. Golgotha differed from the usual real-time strategy in that in each mission the player got control of a supertank (it was called that), which was his embodiment on the battlefield. At any time, you could switch to first-person view and personally lead the troops into battle. But the rest of the units were not directly controlled. The maximum available is to point the troops in the direction of movement, and then all the hope is only on AI.
As we can read on Wikipedia about the plot:
The game plays in the fictional future of the year 2048 AD, where a global nuclear disarmament and the coincidental murder of a beloved American archaeologist leads to an American military incision on Iraq. Which, in turn, elicits a European military power play and begins World War III. The commander of the American force sent to invade Iraq questions his mission. With no suitable answers, he abandons his country and takes his troops on the quest for truth. In the try to recover what really happened at Golgotha they discover a supernatural conflict behind a veil of political discord.
There is even a demo mentioning:
The last released demo, version number 5c, was playable in Windows. It supported both software rendering and 3dfx Glide-based 3D cards. The demo included two levels, one based on Switzerland and one based on Cairo. The Switzerland demo level was the more complete one. In addition to this, the demo also had a non-interactive demo level that showed the terrain rendering capabilities of the graphics engine.
The game itself was three-dimensional, which was very daring for strategy at that time. This ruined the game: due to the problems with the engine, development stalled. In the meantime, the developers’ money came to an end, and in 1998, Crack Dot Com was forced to close, having previously released the game’s source code, graphics and textures for public access. If you wish, you can finish it yourself.
Links to the materials:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050212090058/http://jonathanclark.com/golgotha/
http://liberatedgames.org/game.php?game_id=35 (This one is from Igromania article, but its for sale now. But I put it here for just in case.)
Some information is taken from «Игромания» magazine, 03 (114) 2007
Here are some additional screens. You can add them to the post. Thanks
https://www.unseen64.net/galleries/golgotha-additional-screens/
Thank you!
Tried to get the demo to run with nGlide and dgVoodoo, but had no success. It runs, but with severe graphical problems. Will have to give it a go on a vintage system down the road.