Since I’ve bought the Medieval 2 Gold Edition which includes the Kingdoms expansion, I thought it’d be a waste if I didn’t play any of it at all. The expansion consists of four additional campaigns, each of which is actually a separate installation and executable. The campaigns are the Americas, covering the arrival of the Europeans at the Americas in the 16th century; the Britannia campaign, set in the 13th century during which various factions fought for control of the British Isles; the Crusades campaign covering the Third Crusade in the 12th century and the Teutonic campaign covering the struggle between Christian and pagan forces for control of what is now Germany.
I chose to play the Americas campaign first because it’s easily the one that’s most different from regular Medieval 2. Basically you can choose to either play as New Spain, representing the newly arrived Spanish forces, or one of the established nations in the Americas, mostly meaning Mayans or the Aztecs in the south or the Appacheans in the north. It’s pretty obvious that playing as New Spain is where most of the fun lies, what with the special mechanics and scripted events in place for that faction, so that’s what I chose.
I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with Creative Assembly’s Total War series. On the love side of the equation, the basic formula of a turn-based strategic game coupled with real-time combat, unchanged since Shogun: Total War was released in 2000, is supremely satisfying. The combination of deep decision-making played out on the grand stage of history with a graphically rich and detailed tactical combat phase just scratches all the right strategy itches. At this point, I’d play total war anything. Robotech: Total War? Warhammer Fantasy: Total War? Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Total War? If they’ll make it I’ll buy it.
On the other hand, CA’s failure to update the interface for the strategic portion of the game is an endless source of frustration. It is wholly unacceptable that the Total War games still don’t have the basic tools to streamline gameplay, such as the ability to quickly check which units still have unused movement points, that the Civilization series has had since its inception. This means that actually playing through an epic campaign is unnecessarily daunting and time consuming. Medieval 2 continues this trend and actually adds to it by making the strategic portion more complex compared to previous games. This means that the latest game in the series is epic, beautiful and grand, but, boy, but does it take a long time to actually get through a campaign.
Yep, it’s yet another CCG for the PSP while I’m still waiting for a new gaming rig. This one is based on the War Cry card game by Sabertooth Games that was in turn based on Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy miniatures game. The license means that existing fans of the table-top wargame will find the factions, characters and units in this direct port of the CCG instantly recognizable. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough to save it from ultimately being a very mediocre video game.
The CCG mechanics are robust and appropriately enough, borrow significant elements from wargaming. Each player builds two decks. The Army deck holds only characters, troops and weapons while the Action deck holds special strategies and tactics to be played to change the outcome of battles. Each match actually consists of three battles and each battle begins with a muster phase. During this phase every player is assigned a set number of points with which to alternately play cards from his or her Army deck onto the table, drawing a new Army card after each one played until both players have spent all of their resource points.
Getting to the top of the bestselling PC games list and beating out heavy hitters like Call of Duty 4 and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, even for a few short weeks, is a remarkable achievement for a niche title by an independent publisher without the benefit of a familiar brand name or a worldwide marketing campaign. Yet this was what Sins of a Solar Empire managed to do, and its success, which came as to surprise even to its publisher Stardock and its developer Ironclad, is proof that innovative games with relatively small budgets can still stand out even in a gaming market that is saturated by sequels of familiar franchises.
Unlike most of Stardock’s previous games and in spite of marketing blurbs calling Sins of a Solar Empire a 4X game, this is ultimately still a real-time strategy game, albeit a very slow one with many elements reminiscent of turn-based strategy games. Combined with a nifty interface and a design that emphasizes strategic level decision-making rather than the micromanagement of many other RTS games, it’s a pretty unique beast in the gaming market and deserves every bit of the success it has won.
So, I’ve been messing around with Dwarf Fortress for a while now. Its full name is actually Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter 2: Dwarf Fortress but I figure the game, with the kind of graphics it has, or lack thereof, doesn’t need any more strikes against it. The game has been available as an alpha-state, free download since August last year, but the ASCII graphics intimidated me too much to try it. However, I’ve been hearing plenty of good things about it, and since Bay 12 Games recently added a Z-level to it and other players have made it easier on the eyes with modded tilesets, I finally plucked up my courage to give it a whirl.
I’ve been playing around with Armageddon Empires that I briefly talked about last week. Despite the presence of a fully-fledged deck editor and its collectible card game mechanics, it seems pretty clear that AE is much closer to being an old-school wargame / turn-based strategy game than a CCG. That’s not a bad thing of course, and playing AE brought back fond memories of games like Fantasy General. Like FG, AE plays out on a hex map, though the map is randomly generated in AE’s case. Unlike FG and similar wargames however, AE plays more like a 4X game in a post-apocalyptic setting. Each players starts out with a single base and limited resources and must send units out to control the map to gain additional resources and to scout for the locations of the enemies.
