Anthropoid
Posts: 3107
Joined: 2/22/2005 From: Secret Underground Lair Status: offline
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quote:
1) Why did you buy Crown of Glory:Emperor's Edition? 2) What aspect about Crown of Glory is the "best" to you? 3) What aspect about Crown of Glory needs the most work in your opinion? 4) What are your thoughts on the tactical battles? 5) Would you have purchased the game if it wouldn't have had tactical battles in it? 6) How important is the PBEM game, and would you be interested in a 12 player variant, allowing for players to be added for any additional four nations of your choice? 7) Is the treaty system clear to you? 8) What would you think about a six week or two month turn? 1. Why FoF is one of the best games I've ever played at every level: user interface,vision, design, balance, mechanics, detail, historicity, replayability, innovation, everything. Loved the strategic and tactical engines combined. I believe this is wave of the future for wargames. COGEE is in some ways even better, though I would like to see them try to combine the greatest strengths of FoF and COGEE in their next game. I feel like some of the greatest strenghts in FoF were left out of COGEE and vice versa. WCS are not just smart, gifted, "non-sell-out" game designers, their gamers, and their good guys. I know they want to do the right thing for the gamer community, and in particular the Grog community, which I think they want to grow by designing games that both Grogs and Grogs in development can love. Companies like this need our devotion so that our hobby develops in the right directions. I will definitely buy ANYTHING WCS makes; even if the next two they put out are only mediocre at best (which I canot imagein happening in a million years), FoF and COG are such good games, they've built up a sufficient loyalty from me that I'd endure even that many. 2. What best? Strategy AND tactics. Historical constraings AND alternate history opportunities. Details. The non-linearity, "unpredictability" (i.e., not all provinces are alike and not all developments have equivalent effects) of the Econ engine are brilliant. Treaty system is brilliant. Graphics are brilliant. Interface is brilliant. Overall design and look and feel, brilliant. The basic naval engine brilliant. The basic detailed battle engine brilliant. The overall replayability and victory structure, and user-adjustable settings for difficulty etc. brilliant. 3. What needs work? Well, this applies to virtually ALL games, but the AI leaves something to be desired. Once you figure him out, you can take him to the cleaners, but again, without a Cray super computer or Skynet running the show, what do we expect? I dislike the randomly generated detailed battle maps; actual hexified maps for actualy battlefields, and surrounding area, and other strategic areas would be much better. This would be a huge project though I recognize. Maybe someday. The old Civil War Generals II game had better tactical maps, which were replicas of actual battlefields. It would be neat if all of Europe (or at least all of it that was within 7 miles of a road or town in Napoleonic Era) could be digitized into a connected hex map database WITH topography! You guys need to check out Civil War Generals II maps! The Close Combat maps are also more along the lines of what I'm thinking of here. It would be a huge project though . . . More operational options linking strategic and detailed maps, e.g., I should be able to build defenses in prep for detailed battles. Naval maps are too small, and naval AI is completely inadequate. Need formations and tactical doctrine in naval battles. Bring back the FoF approach generals, weapons, more attributes, etc., better "random" generals functions as I've outlined elsewhere (Wishlist etc.). 4. Tactical Had I never experienced the FoF tactical I'd say sure. But now that I HAVE experienced an engine that seamlessly integrates a strategic and tactical interface, I have come to expect it from any game. For example, Commander Europe at War would be a so much better game if it was basically a combination of CEAW and Close Combat!! ALL IN ONE!! The only problem with making awesome games is that it ups our expectations one more notch! 5. Buy w/o Tac? I doubt it now. 6. PBEM Engine works pretty well, but bascially a lot of the detail decisions, tactical decisions and stuff are completely absent from the PBEM, so PBEM is really just the strategic game. Not sure how it could be workable any other way, but that is a slight deficiency. IMO, getting even 8 guys into a good cohesive PBEM crew is an amazing feat, but that is based more on the Civ gamer crowd. Maybe with the community who play games like WCS makes, a crew of 12 would be more tenable, but I tend to think that that is just way too unmaneable. I think it works fine iwth 8 guys and AI controlling the rest, esp considering how much of each humans actions are actually run by the auto AI script during the movement phase. I think 12 would be over-ambitious, and even if it worked, I don't think it would necessarily add anything to the game for a human to get to play an extreme underdog nation. 7. Treaty clear? Yeah, seems perfectly clear to me. 8. Turns If anything I'd go the other direction 2 week turns. 6 weeks would be too fast. I'd prefer more detail to less.
< Message edited by Anthropoid -- 6/17/2009 3:25:58 PM >
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