Anyone Else Seen These Before?

[KG_AGCent]

Here's an interesting little tid-bit

http://www.slitherine.com/arcanelegi...anelegions.htm

and

http://www.slitherine.com/commander/commander.htm

Two games I intend to keep and eye on.

[KG_AGCent]

Another interesting title

http://www.west-civ.com/fof_screenshots.php

[KG_AGCent]

Here too

http://yhst-12000246778232.stores.ya...dingreich.html

and

http://forums.navalwarfare.org/showthread.php?t=1342

[KG_SSpoom]

I havent but some of them look like they deserve a closer look

[KG_Jag]

I heard of the Civil War game. But don't know much more about it than that.

Unfortunately the review that I read on Defending the Reich opined that the German side was almost unplayable. I think it was an Armchair General Review. HPS's Vietnam air game (released before Reich and probably using the same engine) was described by at least one reviewer as an interesting instructional piece about the subject, but not much of a game.

[KG_Panzerschreck]

I have heard my Nephews, RPG online hounds, talk a little about Arcane Legions, but in no great detail.

The WWII grand strategy game sounds interesting as does the Civil War game. Although my WWII grand strategy gaming plate shall soon be full with my soon to be arriving copy of Strategic Command 2, Blitzkrieg game.

[KG_Jag]

This is the review that I had read (underlining added); beware of "colorful" language:


"DEFENDING THE REICH is HPS's newest air-strategy wargame, depicting the struggle between the RAF Bomber Command's night assaults on erman
cities, and the German Luftwaffe's night-fighter arm countering them.

First, the nuts & bolts.

The system requirements are bare minimum. Pentium, 128MB RAM, 250MB
disk, blah, blah. Nobody who can read this post should have any trouble
loading and running the game. The game arrives as a CD in a jewel case.
No box. No paper manual. No nothing. The software installs without a
hitch, zip. There appears to be no copy protection or similar hassles,
and (Many thanks for this!! Designers take note!!!) you don't need the
CD in the drive to play. That decision always makes me *very* happy,
since my laptop is my primary wargaming platform these days.

DTR offers (a) single player against the AI, (b) PBEM, and (c) networked
play in real time. The only thing I've tried thus far is single player,
so I can't speak to the mechanics (or the fun) of email or net play.

There are no "scenarios," only the campaign game beginning in August
1943 and ending in May 1944, which you can play either as the RAF or the
Luftwaffe. The strategic (planning) portion of the game operates in
one-week turns, so there's 40-ish turns in all. Contained within each
strategic turn is a sort of mini-tactical-game where the actual RAF raid
appears and the Germans defend against it.

So the sequence of play is:

Planning Phase; move your assets, do R&D, build up squadrons, allocate
stuff, blah, blah. During the Planning Phase the RAF player plots that
turn's raid(s).

Combat Phase; the incoming raid is gamed out.

Recovery Phase; end of turn stuff here.

That's it. Repeat this process 40-odd times and you're done.

NOTE: It needs to be carefully understood that the RAF player gets to
do absolutely nothing during the Combat Phase. His only interaction
with the Combat Phase is to watch as the German player games out his
reaction to the RAF raid(s) created during the Planning Phase.

Game Interface

The interface is sort of a mixed bag. It's nice that it's not YATG (Yet
Another Tiller Game) and the graphics are interesting and pleasing. The
game map is a knockout, a high-res period map that really looks sharp.

The only problem I have with the interface is an old and <sigh> familiar
one; once again a designer thinks he knows better than Microsoft, and
has decided to throw away every convention of Windows in order to roll
his own thingies.

I hate this.

You end up with "windows" which sorta-kinda appear to be windows, but
that you can't do any windowish things with: resizing, relocating,
minimizing ... nope. There are no real *problems* with this, and
everything works OK, but it would just be refreshing to see the
components and widgets of a game work as well and as conventionally as
the pieces of the meanest utility you can freeware from TUCOWS.

Little things can be improved. For instance, some icons are grayed-out
at certain times. That's fine, but even the non-grayed-out icons are
pretty damn gray all the time. This means that it can be difficult to
tell what icon is active when.

Similarly, the map is positively crawling with icons that sometimes
*can* be clicked, and sometimes *cannot*. For example, in the planning
phase, clicking on an airbase does nothing - unless the air units box is
currently open, whereas a click will select the air units at the base.

Likewise, clicking on a target does nothing. Why not click on a target
and have the target-status window open to that target? Why not click on
an airbase and see the airbase and the attendant squadrons?

Stuff like this is mildly annoying, but nothing too terrible.

So. Is it any good?

The meat of the game is encompassed in the gaming out of each successive
raid - the Combat Phase - and this is where the game completely falls
apart and becomes virtually an unplayable clickfest.

The problem is that the *slowest* time compression ratio is *sixty to
one* (60:1). Thaaaats right, kids, every *minute* you spend doing
anything on the tactical map, a whole *hour* passes in the game - and
there's no slowing it down. Oh, and while you can pause the game, you
can't do *anything* while paused. Not even look at stuff.

What this means is that from the moment you press the "End Planning
Phase" button, the entire British raid - from soup to nuts - is going to
play out in about *six minutes*.

From a practical, game-wise perspective, this utterly ruins the
simulation. The night-fighter war was, in reality, a cat & mouse game
where the Germans built up a graduated series of defenses which included
signals intelligence, offshore and naval observers, increasingly strong
systems of radar, and dedicated formations of purpose-built
nightfighters. The Germans got quite good at their defenses, and the
RAF's area bombing campaign was a near thing at times.

These layers of defenses all played a role when a raid was suspected.
Signals intelligence tracked the formations of the bomber streams over
England, and tried to triangulate on the routing of the incoming raid
(s). Long-range radars built up a multi-node picture of the approaching
aircraft and the various plots were reported to the central control.
Fighter control sectors built "boxes" along the plotted routes as the
intelligence firmed up, and vectored the fighters to within range of
their airborne radar sets.

DEFENDING THE REICH, on the other hand, is anything but tense a cat & mouse game of building and firming intelligence about an incoming raid.
Nope. DTR is a tedious exercise in shoveling your little map-symbols at
the incoming map-symbols as quickly and as effectively as possible.

*You have only six minutes*!!!!

There's no time to do precisely the things that I suspect draw players
to this title in the first place:

Which incoming symbol is the main raid? Build intelligence? Puzzle it
out? Establish a patrol scheme? That's a fucking laugh. You're better
off picking targets at random, because you've got roughly 90 seconds to
try and pick out the main raid from the decoys - take any longer than
this and you won't be intercepting anyone until after the bombs fall.
What squadrons should I send after which raid? Should I try and go
after some decoy mosquitos with units armed with He-219s? Or will the
Richards work better? Are Me-110s any good at going after the bomber
stream. Nope. Forget it. You don't need to worry about that, either
(unless you're willing to commit all this to memory), because *you have
only six minutes*. Get clicking, pal, and the faster you shovel
airplane-shapes willy-nilly at whatever raid is closest, the better
you'll do.


Sure, defending against a raid is *do-able* (barely), but there's no
semblance that you've taken the roll of a Luftwaffe sector controller
trying to defend against RAF bombers; once the tactical phase starts,
it's purely an exercise in: "Incoming pixels sighted! Enemy roundel inbound! Quick! Click on my green-glowing runes! Stab the 'A' key! Enemy pixel clicked on! Our crosslike-shapies move towards the roundel. Enemy crosslike-shapie sighted! The tiny, grainy combat films are playing - NO TIME TO LOOK AT THEM! Get back to clicking! Characters appear and disappear in the log-window thingie! STOP WATCHING THE LOG-WINDOW THINGIE OR ALL IS LOST! Back to your clicking! <whip-crack-sound> Enemy crosslike-shapies outbound! Some of our runes now glow red! <sob!> Some of our runes still glow green <hahahaha!> End of pixel-chucking-phase
reached!!!!!"

Six minutes. A whole night plays out in *six minutes*.
<sigh>


Not that I'm doing *badly*, mind you. In fact, I've played out a dozen
turns now, and the Campaign Status dialog clearly shows that I'm kicking
the enemy AI pixel mover's ass. I appear to be rather a good rune-
clicker and roundel-destroyer. Indeed, I seem to excel at tending my
little flock of crosslike-shapies.

But if you told me I was defending against Orc incursions with Elven
warriors, all you'd need to do is change a few of the graphics:
"Incoming Balrog sighted! <clickety-clickety> Pauke-pauke! Horrido!
Enemy Balrog fustigated! Elrond returning to base!"

Whenever someone builds a game that incorporates greatly-accelerated
time, I start to think he's hiding something, and it always suggests one
(or both) of these design defects:

(a) The AI is so dumb that if you give a player anything resembling a
realistic amount of time to reflect, react, and consider, the player
will swiftly find the disastrous flaws in the AI programming and just
kick the fuck out of it. And, as previously noted, the British player
has absolutely no interaction with the game during the Combat Phase, so
playing against a human player will not mitigate this problem.

(b) There's something so flamingly unrealistic about how the individual
units interact that this interaction must be buried in a thunderstorm of
crazy-busy clicking.

I have no idea if either of these describes DTR. But the question
remains; why not let a player game out a process which takes six hours
of real time in six *hours* of game time? Why limit him to six minutes?
Why not do what so many game designers have done, and set the slowest
time compression ratio at 1:1, or simply allow orders while paused?
Sure, some players will wish to employ crazy-fast 60:1 time compression
ratios, but I'd wager that just about *every* player will want to run at
much, much more realistic time frames - particularly while learning the
game.

Overall, my recommendation is for players who dislike Click & Twitch
exercises should avoid this game until the designer installs a realistic
time compression scheme (IE, a non-compressed scheme) or implements an orders-while-paused system.

In its current form, it's unplayable *except* as an exercise in click-
twitching pixels at pixels.
--
Giftzwerg"

[KG_Norad]

hmmm I would be dubious. I did not care for Jim Lundfords last game Decisive Action. That game came with 6 scenarios...short ones. With just about all other hps titles you get your money's worth. PzC SB ACW. But the "Simulation Games" from HPS are not so good. At least in my Humble Opinion.

That said the next Panzer Campaign is Minsk 44 I suspect it will be released soon.

[KG_Panzerschreck]

LOL, that review sounds like it was written by me. There is nothing in the world that ticks me off more than plunking down my money and getting a half assed game thats unplayable or so screwed up that it isnt worth playing.

The 2 PC games at the top of my all time hate list in this catagory are -

#1 - G.I. Combat

#2 - Advanced Squad Leader

[KG_Norad]

I will second GI Combat!!!!!!!!!!!