lucian
Reviews
Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition (Windows 3.x)
the only game of foreign policy
The Good
That's it! Finally a good simulation of making decisions in the real world.And it's quite old:made in 1990.
In the beginner level,you only have to push the turn button and you usually win ,by not scoring negative points on military and political interventionism.However,if you decide to see this masterpiece at it's full potential,you have to play in the Multipolar world,where every turn countries are invaded by other minor powers and you have to restrain your allies,while questioning USA's decisions to send 100000 troops into Iran or military aid of 2 billions to China or another 5 billions to Israel.
The worst thing you can do is messing with the playground of the other guy(unless it's an unsignificant African or Asian country) ,sending troops in foreign countries outside your sphere of influence(even in friendly Iran or Iraq) ,or plotting coup-d'etat's-that usually triggers a lose-lose scenario like...
I protested to US action to aid China with 100000 troops and escalated into DefCon4 crisis ,where if I backed down I would have lost 5700 points of prestige in the world ,otherwise..BOOM!
Each country had a point value attached to it ,ranging from 1(Burkina Faso) to 500?-1000(China) .You can influence and gain these countries by sending troops ,supporting the gov or the rebels with money or troops,establishing treaties,threatening with sanctions,imposing embargoes,destabilizing and overthrowing the government through coup-d'etat.Be carefull though! If you're USSR(I always play them:) and China is a communist superpower allied with the Americans, you cannot destabilize it ,so the best bet is to cut trade relations and wait for them to come to their senses(that happened in 1995 in my last game...changing score from 235 USA to 123 USSR to -260 USA to 480 USSR!)
I only won once or twice at each level...if you're unsure about what to do...remember this:never engage crisis over minor African,Latin American or Asian countries,it's not worth it.Always play nice and swell.
The Bad
The game lasts only 8 turns!!! So,what was supposed to happen in 1997?The end of the world as we know it?
There's a lot of statistics for each country,but it's unclear how the number of phones in Romania affects policy.
You have to have ,actually,a great sense of who's who in the world ,otherwise you'll never understand why Syria in sending troops in Iraq to help the insurgence against Saddam.
The Bottom Line
Finally, a game worthy of Popeye,the sailor man (our president:)
By lucian on October 2, 2016
Sword of the Stars (Windows)
The best 4X game since Master of Orion 2
The Good
That's an absolutely fantastic game ,set in realistic galactic conditions. There are 4 unique races ,each having a unique way of travelling:
-the Humans have discovered nodes in the 4-D continuum, which lead ,through 5-D space, to another 4-D point ,making travelling between those 2 points much faster ;but they can only travel along "node lines" ,and in a single jump ,making power upgrades critical
-the Dragons(Tarka) employ a standard "star trek" hyperdrive engine, which delivers them slowly across the galaxy
-the Dolphins(Liir) have found a way to propel giant ships,filled with water environment ,through microscopic teleportations, delivering them faster across empty space and slower near planet masses
-the Insects (Hiver) move slowest of all races, but they have instant-teleporting gates, making "zerg" attacks very simple
The combat is in the best 3-D environment I ever seen! Everything is alive from the missiles hitting and turning around ,to the ships having crews inside and experiencing partial destruction of their inner or outer hull sections
The ship design is streamlined and easy to use ,though strategically complicated to use :each ship has a command section (standard,assault,hammerhead,deep scan...) ,a mission section( armor,barrage, transport,deflectors...) and an engine section( fission,fusion ,antimatter and their improuvements).You many add armor and improuvements ,such as suspended animation for the colony section ,to each section
You have to employ different mission ships on your attacks: -a tanker ship for resupply -armor ships for attacking -barrage ships for destroying sattelites -scouts for deep scans -deflector ships for screening the entire fleet from enemy attacks -colonizer ships for re-colonizing the enemy world after you wiped out its population -refinery ship for refining fuel along the route -assault ships for quickly exterminating population centers -gate ships (if you're a Hiver) for establishing teleport gates -mining ships for mining minerals and improuving the planet,after the conquest -command ships for fleet control -and ,finally,repair and salvage ships The loss of all ships from a mission design severely hamper your fleet.Your inability to withdraw ships to the last lines and promote battle ships only to the front lines severely reduces your chances for victory.
All these come in 3 sizes:Destroyer, Cruiser and Dreadnought ;each having different mission sections.In it all ,it's a huge tactical game; and it looks beautiful.
Besides,the strategic part is realistic:you have to build infrastructure on a planet first in order for the population to grow (at a rat-crazy 275%/year ratio) ,then terraform it ,so you stop paying huge amounts of money for maintenance each turn;then watch the population grow by millions each turn and getting ready to build ships. If you don't do this properly, your people will live a long time like in Romania,my country....
The Bad
The game seems to be unfinished,to put it lightly:
-no winning conditions: kill everyone else
-no fighters
-no ship capture, just destroy them
-no way of interacting with the other civilisations in the game, except for gifts and non-aggression pleads
-no planet capture, just kill them all and colonize ,using the remaining infrastructure
-no diplomacy
-no spying
-no trade
-minimalistic controls: no button for cycling fleets, for example
-graphic interface with no obvious controls
And the random events are too few.
The research 3-D tree is many times unbalanced ,casting a very difficult game, as you cannot defend properly or colonize in an efficient manner
The 3-D strategic map gets confusing at times,as it masks the names of the ships and planets from a certain distance,so you always have to rotate and zoom in and out in order to get your perspective
In the end ,you build your empire,colonize hundreds of planets ,research everything possible..then you ask yourself :"Now what?"
The Bottom Line
The next generation of TBS/RTS 4X games has started with this game.Although full of flaws,it describes a living universe in the future era of faster computers.
No more spreadsheet games! No more looking to a poor 2-D picture and try to imagine it's a tank or a spaceship.No longer painfully controlling each of your hundred worlds each turn! No more issuing building orders every other turn!
Now everything is in 3-D:even if is still primitive (wooden,single layer ships ) and ground combat is non-existent (Kerberos explained that it was too much for a player to control naval ships,aircrafts ,tanks and troops at the same time when the space battle was going on in the skies) it lays the foundation for future strategic games,who will no longer be a "niche" for only the smartest and hard-boring people around.
By lucian on September 20, 2006
Star Wars: Empire at War (Windows)
THe Galaxy is mine! All mine!!
The Good
Finally I have converted Mon Mothma to the evil side...I mean the dark side and I had long foreseen this.
MY forces were scattered through the tiny,dusty galaxy of 43 planets, but I have log passed over their incompetence of holding battles and supervised with my servant, Vader, all their operations; that the path to the dark side of the force!
Even if I got bored at some times, at destroying space stations and various cannons and people's homes, the price was finally paid off after 2 days of BitComet and another of crack finding. Now my mission has been accomplished.
I was never so satisfied since Rebellion first came with its 200 planets and diplomacy /sabotage model which unfortunately cannot be found here.Here lies the path to the dark side of the Force!
Truly this is the Galactic Empire! Truly the enemy is a rebellion and not another empire with ISD's alternate names.
The Bad
Well,despite the great realism of this game, great graphics, great feeling of Star Wars, there's still room for improvement: no diplomacy, spying is rather silly, no sabotage, few planet slots, so the whole thing still looks grossly diminished:
There are no fleets of hundreds of ships with tens of thousands of fighters, like in Master of Orion 3, no ship free-modeling, (after all, they had to respect the franchise), no complicated strategy options like in Call to Power, no hundreds of troops in a battle,just a few at the same time, deployed through the reinforcement points.
The computer cheats: he always knows the exact location of your troops, has no need of reinforcement points to deploy its own troops and if you choose to auto-resolve a battle, you will lose 5 times more than in actual combat.
The Bottom Line
The best Star Wars strategy game to date: with great realism, ships have accurate number of weapon mounts, the ratio is accurate (Death Star costs 20k credits, one Stormtrooper squadron just 52, which is made of 2*5 troops, so one costs 5 credits), troops are realistically overpowered over armor which can crush them, heroes are well balanced, a little bit too overpowered, though (in reality terms), but it cannot be compared to Rebellion strictly in strategy-smartness terms.
By lucian on February 26, 2006
Ascendancy (DOS)
A good, addictive space sim
The Good
This game kept me awake for days and nights, until finally I beat it on a very dense quadrant, peaceful galaxy, and playing as the Govorom (efficient planets, it's better to have a few quick shipbuilding planets than a lot of slow ones)
The aliens are creatively made, each one having a different ability: block starlanes, compress time, turn planets into eden, instant research, invulnerability for a day, infinite population, etc. This should give a different playing experience, but it doesn't, most of these qualities are worthless/unnecessary against the very clever AI.
The Tech tree is 3-D, zoomable and rotatable. Each node may have multiple roots and multiple children - technologies are creatively diversified and scientifically believable.
The research through the discoveries made at buried alien sites is rather unbalanced. You may end up having a very powerful weapon/shield/artifact, but a weak power source - rendering it unusable in a given ship (all your ship power may never be enough for that hyperwave nullifier). Some weapons do not require power, and there is no relation between weapon strength, power used and the tech level.
There's a graphical representation of power used/produced when building ships, instead of plain numbers. Each ship is unique in its design, making easier to correct errors. There's no way of telling how a device will precisely work (i.e. range, strength, power used) in the field.
Combat is well-made and AI is competent. Lots of times I saw it making a retreat or blocking the starlane to its systems (even though you can't tell what the effective range of your weapons is.)
The Galaxy looks huge because of the very restrictive starlane system. Often, you'll spend hundreds of days marching through them and finally arrive in a system very near to your home planet (but the AI forgot to place a starlane between the stars).
It's fun to use your special power when it finally arrives (after 150,68 or 83 days)
The Bad
It's very, very, very boring after you set 7-10 colonies to get reports EVERY day about finished constructions. Some have free pop, others don't, to go there and instruct them to build another facility on another coloured area
So, you automate most of the planets and concentrate on 1-2 to grow and become ship-builders, only to see that all the other planets filled up with lots of missile launchers, surface shields and orbital shields, so you have to scrap all obsolete facilities and let the AI to build modern ones. Later you see that the very clever AI again filled them all with obsolete/unnecessary tech on the wrong colour tiles and forgot to expand population.
So, you got a ship,right? Filled with lots of starlane engines to make the painful assault on the enemy located at the END of a very long array of starlanes. But the AI slips some ships through the lines and occupies some of your less-defended, new worlds. So your new ships get scraped because of the loss of star systems.
In order to win, you need only to hold 2/3 of the quadrant OR all alien home systems. In a very dense galaxy this will take thousands of days.
If you have the antagonizer AI and play in a hostile galaxy, aliens will get allied with you. Park some of their ships in your systems, make a force build-up there, roam the galaxy in search for undefended planets and then declare war.
When building ships, the AI NEVER uses shields and has a good preference for obsolete weapons and devices.
The Bottom Line
Good classic space game, has a good feeling compared to Master of Orion (1, 2 or 3) and realistically-made physics, technologies and time scale (if you consider each day equal to one year, actually).
There is lots of micromanagement, the AI behaves strangely and it takes a lot of patience to win.
By lucian on November 24, 2005
Star Trek: The Next Generation - Birth of the Federation (Windows)
The best Star Trek game I've ever played
The Good
That's the game I dedicated at least 5 years of interrupted gaming, downloading last mods from various sites,messing with them, making my own..
The flavor , despite all its drawbacks, of this great game is that every major culture depicted here:Federation, Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians and Ferengi has some unique attributes which makes every game experience unique.
If you play with no races, you have to expand, while strengthening your army; if you do, Federation gets an unfair advantage due to diplomatic appealing to all races(except a few) , Romulans are good too.
But the greatest gift is that every major power can be associated in all its unique aspects with a civilization on Earth: United Federation of Planets is ..you guess who, the Klingon Empire is the Japanese Empire, the Cardassian Union is the Soviet Union, the Ferengi are the Israelis, and the Romulans , I can guess who...
Federation are good diplomats and make a lot of money from diplomatic relations, but their ships cannot be compared with the Romulan ones:)); they are also a bit skew when declaring war..always do nasty things to provoke a declaration of war.
Romulans are the most straight-forward when it's about war or peace, they have the greatest network of spies(the name :Phoenix is well given) , are also good in diplomacy with a few races, make little money and are the best in fleets, as their ships may cloak when needed, making surprise attacks a necessity.
Ferengi make the most money of all:just sign a peace treaty with them, and they'll know instantly the location of your worlds and set trade routes without yours or minor races permission; only war can prevent that. They also have the fastest ships, with the most numerous torpedoes
Cardassian are ruthless: always take advantage of weaker races and impose force labor upon them .For them, diplomacy is just words and their ships have the strongest hull of all, making planetary bombardment a nuisance(only hulls count there) .
Klingons are the best warriors: all their ships are armed with the most numerous beams, they like attacks in high number , but are also weak on rear part. their Diplomacy is rather good and may convince through unequitable statements minor races to join them (Vulcans like them,too!)
The diplomatic universe is dynamic: you can have the most loyal races being subdued through bribery or covert action to desert you and join the enemy the other round. Also, the peoples behavior representation is very good: Romulans are the most cheerful of all with regard to gov performance, but secretly wish a revolution (that's why they encourage revolutions on occupied planets), while the Federation guys are the most critical, especially in the newspapers:))
I can speak for hours about what a great simulation of the world we're living is this Star Trek Universe(remember it's history? first Klingons attack Federation,then they join them in the fight against Cardassians, they are defeated by the Borg...all history here)
The Borg invasion is very real: every system with more than 200 people gives birth to a new cube, every system below to a sphere (yes ,they have too! they are called:Borg Scouts).Fortunately , every turn only half of the system pop is wiped out (or kidnapped) , until the 10-mark is reached
The Bad
Well, it's an old game(stating the obvious:(() -the graphics are silly(not in the combat area), you have few options, the galaxy is so small, you have to colonize at least 60 % in order to win(or kill anyone else), most systems are so small they are useless
And the biggest problem is the excessive micromanagement: you have to give building order to all 40 systems you control each turn(that's a real headache). Speeds are limited to int numbers(so if you have a fleet of Warbirds flying at 1 square per turn and a few Battlecruisers flying at 2..all thing moves at 1)
Fortunately, if you download the real trek mod and combine it with the planet mod and the buildings taken from the ultimate mod, you'll get an interesting game, who can keep you day and night in front of your screen: that's because systems are big(even 500 people systems are common) , small ships are 20-30 times cheaper than big ones(destroyers vs cruisers) , which gives alternatives in the case of small systems(be careful , though:one Romulan cruiser wiped out 74 Ferengi scouts and destroyers in just 2 turns!!) and, of course, you have that lovely +1000 intel buildings(and others similar in effects)
Happy Romulan domination! (I only play these guys..matter of ..birth)
The Bottom Line
A great simulation of the world today,gives many testing options and it's so funny!(when you know what you're looking at)
By lucian on October 1, 2005
Master of Orion 3 (Windows)
A great empire management game
The Good
I've played MOO3 some time ago, with only one opponent in a huge galaxy, just to learn the effects of my decisions, because it's really complicated stuff beneath the simple interface..and finally, after one night of efforts, I had over 400 planets, with tens of thousands of ships, most of them, if not all, of obsolete designs and a score of 13(?)millions (after finding all Xs).
This is not a game in which you are the big daddy controlling every aspect of life, like a pharaoh who has a dream and decides to build a great city in the desert...no, the civilization itself makes the right (or wrong) decisions about where to expand (even if you might prefer not -so- close to the enemy), what and where to build (hey,where's my piggy farm on that breadbasket planet?!) and what races they like or not. (Please, do not alienate my Sakkra allies!)
The only big decisions you make are in 4 fields:
-
Diplomacy: You decide who gets what treaties, what are the technologies exchanges, if you want to be at war or not, who are your allies.
-
Development plans! Yes,you heard right...the odd, ugly DEA interface where you can make HUGE differences about whatever your empires is discovering new tech, building infrastructure, address starvation problems, or worst...resource shortage.The Biggest plan you can make is on "All planets". My setting is usually: "primary:blank", "secondary:infrastructure" and "tertiary:research", then on crisis situations you can fill the Primary objective with mines or food or military(colonization vessels included!). It's quite pointless to be more specific, but you can try to be, for the fun and experience of being the Big Brother.
-
Military design: Even if it's an automated feature which is highly recommended, I also recommend to delete your transport early in the game, as well as military bases, in order to allow the AI to concentrate on building colony ships (and set auto-colonization on, this will remove a headache of always knowing when your ships are ready and put them on active duty). It's a great idea to build smaller IF (missiles) ships, which get ready early on, when needed, then continue with larger carriers and finally, short and long range beams. In this game, missiles are your best friend for dealing with aliens, but in order to defeat the Antareans, you have to use exclusively carriers (about 20 armadas will do the trick). Always obsolete (but DO NOT scrap) designs in which you have too many ships, because the very poor AI tends to build less expensive models exclusively, almost.
-
Tech: Early on,concentrate on getting mines better, after that, usually invest in Physics and Energy. That can make a huge leap over your competition.
So, you cannot decide what and where to build, where are your colonies going to be, you do not always understand fully the new technologies(as IT IS in normal life), if you are at war or peace..but the great satisfaction to be the "invisible hand" beneath your civilization (and not just a lousy dictator) is unequal to all the other games I've played since.
The Bad
The very, very poor AI gets you mad: it's a game of colonization, mostly (and that's fully automatic in my games), you never get attacked, the other races are very polite and do not declare war except when you are a hated race by their people (in this case, as in normal life, you cannot change much, so you cannot choose your allies and your enemies).
Combat screen is fun to watch, but the game is too unbalanced on the advantage of missiles and fighters over direct fire(like in real life, maybe). The key is to equip your ships with early missiles and small fighters, but lots of them!(On my Leviathan carriers I have 100 squads of plasma fighters.)
Sometimes,d espite your great efforts, your viceroys forget to build farms, starving the whole empire (and have to go at DEA screen, the most important in the game), otherwise you set up some projects, but they all get ..-1 turns to complete! Otherwise you'll have mines on farming planets, exclusively, 3 to 4 military DEAs on one planet or more than one gov DEA.
And there are others, countless bugs (like setting Military defense as primary on new conquered planets and see the AI building ..Mobilization Centers!!! instead of shields and guns).
The only unrealistic detail is the ability to warp your ships across the galaxy at the mobilization centers.
The Bottom Line
That's a must if you want to learn how to rule a country in modern times, it also gets you into the diplomatic problems, like being unable to choose your enemies and your allies, despite your personal agenda.
It's a game I like and played it a lot. Even if tends to be boring in the beginning, you'll be rewarded greatly later.
By lucian on September 28, 2005
Star Control II (DOS)
Manic Miner in Space
The Good
That's the greatest space adventure game that I ever played. It has humor, great and weird characters, a huge galaxy to explore, and that feeling which keeps you day and night in front of your monitor.
You start in a nearly empty giant vessel, which you can fill with modules, and there's no penalty for selling them! At first, it has painfully low turning speed, but as you manage to mine more minerals, it gets near perfection.
You spend all time talking to aliens, discovering their stars, avoiding combat when necessary (you have to have good knowledge of physics in order to move your ship), remembering tips from the Melnorme (and noting them on a piece of paper) and others, planning your fuel strategy (because all riches of the galaxy are not enough to propel a single ship to the stars in hyperspace), gathering strange alien lifeforms and trading them for secrets to the Melnorme and trying to stay alive.
After all grand planning and solving diplomatic puzzles, the end is quite simple, just blow off Samatra, the Ur-Quan station, but you need a Dyarri to confuse their minds (be careful not to confuse your mind too!).
And the greatest fun is finding Rainbow Worlds and trading their location for 500 credits to the Melnorme. For this you have to figure out an arrow pattern on the galaxy map (and not spend your next month searching every star,planet and moon in the galaxy).
You have to complete the game in 3 years or the Kzer-Ah are moving to destroy every living species in the galaxy. (You can use to your advantage,there are many paths to victory!)
The Bad
Mine Sol, Mine Alpha Centauri..mine all Centauri, remember your last mining location and move to the next constellation. Get at least fuel money to reach that distress call! But for that you need 100 units of fuel, each worth 20 credits and the lowest mining point of a mineral is 1,then 2,3,4,6,10 and 25 (the rarest purple exotics).
So a planet full with common metals cannot propel your starship back home!
Luckily, the Melnorme sell fuel for just 1 bio-credit, but you have to stun all that weird creatures found only on green trajectories planets (biological planets).
So pack your gear and find the Rainbow Worlds first (a little bit of cheating), then fight the Umgah and get 1000 worth of credits from them, or...you can always use the "lander-bug" (actually, I doubt it's not intentional): if you sell your lander, you can actually sell it more (break the int number, negative is encoded 1 in the byte, which also means...well, big number) until you get the needed money for that fancy Shiva Furnace from the Melnorme.
If your not cheating or looking unto a walkthrough, then there are 3 possibilities:
-
you don't have a life
-
that's the only fun at no.9 hospital
-
you're not going to kill yourself ...yet
The Bottom Line
The best game in space that I ever played, it's not like the boring strategies like MOO3 where you can have...hundreds of worlds, thousands of ships in tens of designs, each .. it's the only game that kept me for 2 days and 3 nights continuously in front of my monitor, until my legs were unmovable and I saw beautifully rendered clouds through my ..ice lens. (it's quite interesting, though)
By lucian on September 28, 2005
Star Control 3 (DOS)
A good game of diplomacy
The Good
I've played SC2 several times and still needed 3 attempts to finish this one. Each race has its own agenda, power, behaviour and motives, which do not relate to one another (for instance, the Doogs have the best ships in the game, but are quite and passive), alliances are made and lost unexpectedly and distributive thinking is required, as well as paper use, because the hint system is bad.
There are many traps in the endless dialogues and one mistake can end the game.The key is to adapt your behaviour for each race and not make moral judgements.
The colonization process is tedious, but rewarding for your space travel. Also, you have to remove precious crew from your ships in order to colonize (30-50 people is decent for any new colony, having 10000+ resources) but the population in your old worlds will increase very slowly, which makes ship building a fast way to get people, even if you'll never use them in combat.
Fancy ship designs are not the best, but each one is unique and probably useful to destroy another. So far I'm using just Utwig, Doog, Ur-Quan,Chmmr(less) and Claircontlar ships in encounters.
The story manages to get real and keep your attention for hours (even if it's scripted). The times waiting for event X to happen can be used in exploration and colonisation.
The Bad
The search system is simply terrible. Each time you need to get to star X you have to carefully look for it in the unexplored and explored ones, because only the colonisation sites appear as valid targets for search. And if you cannot find it, let a second to rotate the galaxy and search again manually. That's simply painful.
The dialogues are very, very, very long and repeated each time you encounter the same race, even if the events who triggered it are long gone. That is making this game an interesting training option for these diplomatic talks :) For instance, each time you encounter Daktaklakpak and not want to kill them (so that you appear as good in the eyes of the League) you have to pass through 12-13 dialogues and have to remember the correct answer each time. But after a while you'll be responding instantly, without bothering about what the other said.
The combat is annoying, boring and very long, interrupted just by an occasional crash into that little tiny planet, then you're trying to get away from the grav pull and find yourself crashing again into that unrealistic space anomaly.
The Bottom Line
If you're deeply involved in politics, your girlfriend left you, or you're trying to convince yourself to give life another chance, this game is a must, but try to win it without watching the walkthrough. Carefully write on a sheet of paper every aspect worth mentioning, because it requires more time and attention than the previous version, which I loved.
By lucian on September 25, 2005
Sid Meier's Civilization (DOS)
The first game where AI had a meaning
The Good
Civilization was the first strategy game I ever played on a PC,and the third true game ,after Prehistorik and Chessmaster
Since I was creamed at chess due to the recursive backtracking procedure that computer used to prove it's faster than a human mind,I expected the same in this square-by-square game,but...there were to many for backtracking
So the rat-mind computer employed massive cheating:population boost,building things out of thin air,map knowledge,etc,instead of: "Gee,what happens if I send my lonely knight into thy army?"
But that added to the challenge (since I barely noticed that until my first spaceship got launched) which was based ,mainly ,on discovery of technologies,meeting leaders who had a different look each time they changed their government, advisers and senate who influenced your decisions and even blocked your desire for expansion in democracy and ancient republic
(So you could not bomb and invade everyone in a democracy:)
Unfortunately the later sequels of this great game (who also employs a good manual,at least from historic point of view) have lost many of its advantages:
The democratic rulers became mere communists and the democracy itself became just a prosperous dictatorship ,with less wars.The other leaders faces were hidden and only the diplomatic sense remained out of the personal feeling that I loved so much.Also ,when you are talking to a republic,no longer the minister of foreign affairs appear ,with he's glasses jumping at each one of your offensive proposals,no longer you talk to many in a democracy,but just with the old Stalin:(
The advances are realistically related and the pace of discovery increases,instead of decreasing ,as with all sequels
The Bad
The graphics are simply bad,even for that time,the pieces are just..that,2-D chess-like.
The settlers unit is working to hard to build roads ,essential to your commerce,and everything else that matters and unit maintenance is too high
The piece by piece movement is boring and time consuming,there are no armies
Also,it's to often when you''l find your Apache being shot down by a mounted Afghani with a Stinger missile-launcher in his hands or your Leopard tank being ravaged by slingers
There's too much cheating by the computer
The Bottom Line
That's the game I searched for 10 years ,I wanted to have it for it's the single most-important road-opener to global strategy gender
Now I'm playing it with the same sense of humor,not with the same passion and it's faults appear more disturbing to me
But,as the intelligence quantity is a constant and the size and time constraints of all strategy games are increasing,it's one of the very few smart games still available .In a very short time,you can learn a lot about balance ,focus and planning-ahead.
So go get it!
By lucian on April 8, 2005
Hammer of the Gods (DOS)
An old,intelligent game,unlike today's
The Good
Hammer of the gods has kept me for at least one week non-stop,day and night,in front of my new-486 in the old days of smart games,that's it in 1995
The goal of your strategy should not be to develop large and uncontrollable space empires,nor expand your land and conquer your neighbors.Rather,you have to fulfill (and chose wisely between) 28 quests given by realistic gods(although not the historic ones) from the Viking mythology
These quests will often trick you and make you not so stubborn about a specific city or site that you should raid,therefore increasing your impatience and game realism
In the end,even if you do not dare to look at Odin,the god of Victory and wonder:"how should i get all these 75% of magic,population,territory,gold?" you feel the accomplishment of your mission
The Bad
The last Odin's quest turns the smart player,focused-objective into a conqueror and the game becomes boring
The names of the gods are repeating ,but less often than their designations,often inside the same race:"Magni" and "Tyr" are both Gods of Strength
The challenge is a bit to easy as you climb up the difficulty levels,i only play on impossible,best AI and always win
There are to many raiding,plundering,razing quests,as opposing to exploration ones.I never had to explore more than 25% of the map,which is quite interesting,even Dacia is there ,I think
The short version of the game lets you complete 20 quests only and it;s pointless
The Bottom Line
As a must-have game
There are many places on the net in which you can find great games of the past,which are much more less-boring ,intelligent and workable than the 3-d recreations of today
For instance,Civilization 1 had the senate in democracy and republic,and the diplomacy screen was greatly influenced by their social system,and in the sequels all these democratic enhancements were removed!and the player became the communist with a human face
Same thing with this great game,today adventures focus on war and violence,mainly,not on "do your job and let others live in peace"
Alongside Civilization 1,Master of Orion 1,UFO 1,Hammer of the gods is a game which will remain in history of strategy games and it was this game who inspired me in my life afterwards.
By lucian on April 8, 2005