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Armored Brigade, the real-time tactical sandbox which covers a vast swath of Cold War gone hot possibilities, has received its first add on...

Armored Brigade - Italy-Yugoslavia Pack + Campaign Generator Armored Brigade - Italy-Yugoslavia Pack + Campaign Generator

For your Wargamer, Toy soldier collector, MiniFig collector, military history nut. Reviews, interviews, Model Making, AARs and books!

RTS


Armored Brigade, the real-time tactical sandbox which covers a vast swath of Cold War gone hot possibilities, has received its first add on content. It's called Nation Pack: Italy-Yugoslavia, and as the name suggests, it adds two unique new nations to the game. I won't go too far into describing the base game, since Robert did a good job of that here. Suffice to say, this a 2D RTS that will feel familiar to anyone who has played Close Combat or Combat Mission. 



What really sets the game apart is its vast scope. The game covers theoretical war in Europe between the years of 1965 and 1991. Accurate army rosters are available for 7 different nations in the base game, with this add-on increasing the count to 9. The other significant feature of the game is how it generates battlefields. Rather than having hand crafted maps or randomly generated ones, the game ships with several gigantic, accurate maps of various interesting locales in Europe. Individual maps are then generated from this by simply drawing a box of your desired size on that big map, and there you go, a new place to fight over. Combat can scale from company sized skirmishes to brigade sized brawls. This is the beauty of the game, it can be stretched and squeezed to give you exactly the sort of battle you want. 


Infantry squad knocks out a T-55 after losing their ride into town.
This new nation pack extends that sandbox even further by giving you two new nations to play with and a new map that covers 61 square kilometers of the Italian-Yugoslavian border. The two nations combined add over 250 new units to the game. That's a lot of new toys to play with! Now, I'm no aficionado of the Italian and Yugoslavian military makeup in this era (or any, really), so I'll link to the official description here which has a nice summary of the strategic thinking in those nations during the Cold War. The short version is, these nations were not the titans of the world, fielding first rate tanks and elite infantry. These are the oddballs, nations that had no desire to fight WW3 to begin with, nor did they have the resources to match the big boys if they wanted to. I've loved playing these sorts of secondary powers in every wargame since I got Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin as a kid. It's always fascinating to dig around in the OOB and see what kinds of units are available, and then figuring out how to fight a battle with what you've got. Here I was especially interested in some of the earliest formations, which include plenty of WW2 leftovers. I know lots of people are clamoring for the game to be expanded into a full on WW2 game, but here you can at least get a taste. 



Now, let's look at the new map a bit, as it offers a great variety of terrain to fight over. There are constricting mountain valleys, wide open plains, urban zones, coastal areas, and lots of rivers to cross. I have not fully explored the map yet, of course, but every battle so far has been on a tactically interesting battlefield. Where the map really shines is when you combine it with the new campaign generator.

The one great shortcoming of Armored Brigade (besides the lack of multiplayer) is that the game does not come with any campaigns and only a handful of scenarios. Those scenarios are mostly tutorials, and after playing around with them you are left with only one-off battles that you generate. While the battles you can generate are excellent, and created exactly the way you want, they are still just one off battles with no narrative or larger stakes to consider. That has all be changed with the free update launching alongside this nation pack, which adds a dynamic campaign generator to Armored Brigade, even if you don't have the DLC. 


Each green box represents a potential battlefield for the campaign. It can be much shorter, of course, or feature much larger battlefields.
This campaign generator is analogous to the single battle generator in that it is very flexible and easy to use. You just click on the map to indicate the general track you want the campaign to take, tweak the settings and scope as you please, and away you go. Each campaign starts off with a meeting engagement, and then the winner will advance and the loser retreat. As the battle moves towards one end of the campaign track or the other, the defender will be able to get more supply points and be able to build fixed defenses like pillboxes and such. If the momentum of the battle shifts and the fighting passes back over old ground, the destruction of the previous fights will be evident. This can change the landscape of a battlefield that is fought over several times, creating an immersive narrative for the player. Losses also carry over from one battle to the next. The player will receive a certain amount of supply points after each battle, and these can be used to repair and refit units lost in the fighting. 



This is a feature that the game desperately needed, and I'm happy to see it added as a free update. Really the only thing that I didn't like about the base game was that the battles never felt like they carried much weight, since they were just randomly generated one-off affairs. Now you can have a narrative arc, with real consequences for your losses and poor (or brilliant) decisions in battle. I haven't had enough time with the game to play out any epic campaigns just yet, but I imagine many players will be firing up a titanic US vs USSR campaign that spans the length of the Germany map. The especially cool thing is that everyone's campaign will be unique!

So, if you have been enjoying Armored Brigade so far, this is an easy recommendation. The two new nations add some extra variety to what is available in the base game, and the new map is excellent. If you were on the fence about Armored Brigade, the free update including the campaign generator has given it a lot more value, and I suggest that you take another look. I imagine we will be seeing several nation packs similar to this one over the next couple of years, and I look forward to trying them out. In a sandbox of a game like this, you can never have too many toys or too much sand.

Armored Brigade and the Italy-Yugoslavia Nation Pack are available directly from Matrix/Slitherine.

- Joe Beard






I will start this review by telling you the hard truth : Battlefleet Gothic : Armada (BG:A) is a game that makes me feel ambivalent. N...

BATTLEFLEET GOTHIC: ARMADA BATTLEFLEET GOTHIC: ARMADA

For your Wargamer, Toy soldier collector, MiniFig collector, military history nut. Reviews, interviews, Model Making, AARs and books!

RTS


I will start this review by telling you the hard truth : Battlefleet Gothic : Armada (BG:A) is a game that makes me feel ambivalent.

Now you may ask yourself, or for that matter, me, why I am sitting here with my mixed feelings. So let me start at the beginning.

The first time I saw the announcement about BG:A, I was ecstatic. My mind started to go crazy, dreaming of the release day when I would be able to command my fleet of Imperium Cruisers and cleanse the universe from the filthy Chaos !
And, as soon as I could, I pre-ordered the game to get into the Beta and start enjoying this game.

My initial feelings when I first delved into the game was of shear excitement. I can still remember how great it felt when I got a look at my first fleet, to play through the small campaign introduction and to play my first skirmish game against the AI.

And, with some reserve, I am still enjoying BG:A. So, what happened down the road...
Why can't I make my recommendation for this game to all players out there?
I will try to answer by the end of this review.
First, let me introduce you to the game as it is and what you will get when you purchase it.

What do you get?
Battlefleet gothic is a Real Time Strategy game (RTS) set in the Warhammer 40K universe. The game offers you many game modes that make it really attractive:
- A campaign
- 4 different races: Imperium; Chaos; Ork; Eldar
- Fleet management
- A multiplayer mode with a cooperative option and with a persistent fleet.
- A skirmish mode without a persistent fleet.


  • The Campaign

I won't go into any great detail about the campaign. Why? Well, because I do believe this game was essentially developed to be a multiplayer game. The campaign is there, it is enjoyable, it really is. It has a great story IMHO and you can feel the love the devs have for the W40K universe. But, it in my opinion it's not the core of  game, though I'd loved to be able to play it in a co op mode however that's not possible. The campaign wasn't the part of the game where I spent most of my time. It was useful in that the first few campaign missions are actually the games tutorial. So I suggest you do play the campaign or if your like me and really want the multiplayer play part of the campaign as this is where you'll start to get to grips with the fundamentals of Gothics gameplay. Playing at least the start of the campign is obviously  a big help  for those who want to delve into the mulitplayer, the mode I was really interested in.

  • The Races

The game has four races: Imperium; Chaos; Ork; and the Eldars. Each of those races have their own design and lore. Of course, the capacities and competence of your captain and crew will be different from one race to the other.
This is one of the positive elements of the game. You can play any of the factions and each one will require a different approach in terms of tactics etc, which means you'll have to re-evaluate how you approach the game if you want any success with the particular faction. This also then helps the games replayability. From the huge Ork cruiser that will try to ram any ships in sight to the Imperium and their boarding tactics. The truth is that the game races offer enough difference of gameplay for you to find yours of choice.


  • The Fleet management

Every time you play a game, you will earn some experience that you will be able to use to buy more ships in your fleet, plus you will be able to upgrade your ship systems, weapons, perks, and crew. There is a little bit of disappointment here. Some of the competence you can add to your ships are really nice and necessary, such as sending bombs away or improving your armor or gunpoint cannons.
But I felt like it was pretty hard to understand how some of the crew perks really work.


  • The multiplayer

As I said before, this game was clearly designed to make multiplayer the core of the game. Unfortunately, the game is still suffering from some early matchmaking issues. And, it is not very rare you will end up fighting against an Admiral with a full fleet of ships under his command, while you will only be spawning with one or two of your ships, since they are under repair at the dock after a previous defeat.
The multiplayer lobby should be better at calculating the 'real' number of allocated points to spend for deploying both sides. At least it should do it based on the ship's availability of the weakest.
One of the things though I would love to see in this game, and that is missing at the moment, is a Coop Vs AI with persistent fleet management.
While multiplayer will appeal to a lot of players, the truth is that a lot of people also enjoy Campaign mode in Coop, and there is a demand already for a skirmish mode in a coop mode.

You are the Admiral, so...
So how is the gameplay you ask? Well, here is the thing about my ambivalence.

At first, the game starts easily enough. A couple of ships, max three, and a few competencies for the ships. Not much to do. You setup the max/min range of your engagement, and then you go on with the mission.
The combats are incredibly beautiful. The ship models are just perfectly rendered and the effects and sounds are just immersive.


On paper, the game is an RTS, so you will select your ship, their destination, and then the crew will try to follow the rule of engagement you have predefined (distance, what cannon to use, the port side or starboard, ships, and systems to target in priority, etc.).

What is very important to remember, though, is that when you play, right-clicking your target to attack is pretty useless. As I said previously, you'll set the rules of engagement, click on a sector where you ship will travel and then you will have to trust them to act. The fact that you can select an enemy ship and define it as a priority target, together with subsystems such as the drives, armor, bridge, weapons etc, makes you learn very quickly to trust your Captains and their decisions in combat.
Of course, while your ships have been sent to an area, you can always change those orders.

I do believe the intent of the developer was to make the player really feel like a fleet Admiral.
And that is what may be a little bit misunderstood for RTS veterans or people expecting combat gameplay such as in a game like "Nexus:The Jupiter incident" or "Homeworld".





... act like one!
Your role will be to activate competencies/skill for the ships to attack, send boarding parties, buff your ships or counter the enemy. And, of course, to set the course, as previously said, and to withdraw from the battle if necessary.
The captains and their crew will do the rest.  They will keep firing at the closest enemy ship or upon the ships you have selected as a priority target.
This is a very nice setup IMHO. It reminds me of this Sci-fi book I read not so long ago, Ark Royal from Christopher Nuttall.  The Admiral, still sits in the CIC, but he will not take over the captain role. He will decide on the global tactics, but ultimately the crew and the ship is the captain's responsibility.
Battlefleet Gothic really does a good job of detaching you from the feeling that you are a Captain. You are the admiral, and for this very specific reason, you should be the one in control of the global decisions, not the close decisions.



Don't let this become a click-fest! Use your spacebar!
Because it is an RTS, and the way you play BG:A is not common to another RTS, the moment the fleets engage can just be overwhelming. There will suddenly be a lot to click and to remember during the course of the combat.
When you have up to 6 or 7 ships to manage and that many number of skills per ship, you will understand how confusing and stressful the situation can become.

Remembering in time what cooldown you had been triggering earlier and keeping an eye on each ship status and competence bar can become horrendous...
That is why the game has a great feature implemented: the time compression.

Press the spacebar on your keyboard and the game will suddenly compress time and everything will slow down and allow you to review the situation and to send new orders to your ships' captains.
Sometimes  I have played an entire scenario just in that mode.

"Did I do that!? How did I win/lose?"
That is the main thing you will ask yourself while playing this game.
Somehow, you really never know for sure if any of your action have been influencing the course of the battle.
You can see there is a lot of things happening, but at the end of the battle, your look at the victory/defeat screen and the feeling is mitigated.
The game makes you click skills, send torpedo, remove rogue captain from command, buff your ships, send them there and here...
But when the battle ends, you will ask yourself if you did play well or what you could have done better.
You will wonder if the extra armor on your ship did the difference for your survival. Or was it the boarding party you send out ...
It is difficult to know if any of your actions were decisive.


The game is not really good at explaining your doings and what is the best tactic for you to win.
Even the ship customization can be pretty difficult to grasp. All along I am really wondering if crew competencies are really useful. For sure adding ship system is a must... but I couldn't grasp the utility of the crew experience...




My verdict 
Battlefleet Gothic : Armada   is a good game, well made, and extremely polished.
I do like it...
But I must warn you:  the game is tough .
The learning curve can really be steep for newcomers.
As I said earlier it is not for everyone but it will please the 40k license fans, the people who like multiplayer competitive PvP, fast RTS, and who are ready to accept inevitable defeat.

The game will not explain all your gameplay options at first. You will have to learn and to be defeated in several ways before you understand all the feature the game offers you.

Recommendation for the other players who like to think about their action and take time building up their tactics, I will advise to look at the WEGO game Star Hammer The Vanguard Prophecy, another space fleet combat game.



Developer: Tindalos Interactive
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Platform: Microsoft Windows
Official Game website: http://www.battlefleetgothic-armada.com/
Available on: STEAM 

Graviteam Tactics:Muis front   after a few hours play, here are my first impressions.  The con first The new UI....

Graviteam Tactics:Muis front : A must buy for any tactical wargaming fan Graviteam Tactics:Muis front :  A must buy for any tactical wargaming fan

For your Wargamer, Toy soldier collector, MiniFig collector, military history nut. Reviews, interviews, Model Making, AARs and books!

RTS



Graviteam Tactics:Muis front  after a few hours play, here are my first impressions. 

The con first
  • The new UI. In my opinion considering, they have had so many compliants\gripes about the previous UI's etc I just can't understand how they could have made it even worse. I never really had an issue with the previous games. However now I do. The new Box method for me doesn't work at all. I just can't understand why they went this way. Surely they should have had some ideas and tested them with gamers to see what worked. The actual tactical UI part isn't too bad, though again apart from losing those blue boxes has become more confusing \complex. The force management and statistics screens are a total fail. I'm hoping they either redo them or, at least, go back to the previous UI as an option. Saying all this it hasn't broken the game.
  • Anti-Aliasing isn't the greatest. Though not bad enough to spoil the fun



Now the Pro

  • WOW! Once the battle starts it's breathtakingly awesome and exciting. My only complaint with this aspect is we don't have a rewind button as I miss so much awesome action. Honestly, this part of the game washes away the issues with the UI. The UI here is playable.
  •  A great battle editor which gives you an endless amount of battles to create so lots of replayability here.
  •  Even has a feature where you ask to be surprised and it creates a battle which you know nothing about and have to get on with it. Love that.
  • Campaigns look good. Though you do get thrown into the deep end here.
  • Has the historical accuracy and realism you come to expect from Graviteam.

Finally, everyone including veterans must go to Quick Battles and go through the training scenarios and training vids. helped me a fair bit.

Overall it's a must buy for any tactical wargaming fan. I'm sure people know by now I hate real time games..except this one and Command Ops as they are managable and not click fests. It's a crying shame they made the UI even more confusing..obviously they have an issue deisgning this aspect. However once the battles start it's all worth it.


UPDATE:

After a couple of days, I got used to the new force management aspect and with hindsight actually prefer it and it does make things easier. I now can see why other wargamers found the new UI better than the old one. I think as I never had a problem with the old UI learning a new one felt unnecessary.
One issue at the moment is it's having trouble with User made missions and pathfinding, which really needs fixing ASAP as it's making these missions unplayable

So taking into account this update Graviteam Tactics Muis front is an even better tactical wargame propositions and must own


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