Archinerd
Posts: 23
Joined: 9/16/2005 From: Chicago Status: offline
|
Hi. I bought this game on June 16th. I have no experience with either of the earlier H&M games. I've only had a chance to play 1 scenario so far, and it was designed in order to learn the game and only 4 turns. The game seems pretty easy to learn. I've played a handful of turn based pc games in the past, but I'm by no means a grognard. After a quick read through the manual to get the general idea, I decided to dive in and give a scenario a shot. I'm sure I missed some things, but I was able to quickly figure out how to bombard the enemy, advance the infantry and eventually managed to mount a successful assault on the enemy's position. The finer points of the command/activation mechanics still escape me, and I'm not really sure what some of the actions do exactly (Cold Steel for instance) but I plan to re-read those portions of the manual carefully. The graphics are nothing special by todays standards, but are functional. I don't particularly like the cartoon unit portraits though... and sometimes it was hard for me to tell which way my infantry were facing. I don't know how good the AI is yet, the scenario I was playing had me playing both sides... I'm assuming it was designed that way, but maybe I accidentally set up a hot seat game. The interface is a little clunky I think, I had several mis clicks that sent Friedrich marching off halfway across the battlefield and I had some difficulty keeping my infantry units in the battle line facing the right direction. There were two things that seemed unrealistic to me, the first is the speed at which units moved, and the second was the number of men in each unit. The speed seemed unrealistic because my commanders were able to gallop halfway across the map in one turn, and my infantry seemed to be able to move very fast despite being deployed in line formation. In regards to the number of men in each unit, I was dissappointed to see that the units were all exactly the same number of men and all were operating at full strength... this seemed overly simplified to me and I would like to see some variation in units and some realism in regards to attrition vs. on paper strength. Both of these are determined by the scenario though, so maybe this is a problem only with the scenario I played. This game has flaws without a doubt, and despite the recent graphic update it still isn't pretty, but it seems like a very good game and I look forward to trying some of the other scenarios. The Activation mechanic is very good and seems to be a simple but elegant solution for modeling the difficulty of commanding troops. Thanks for the hard work on this game, I look forward to see where you take this system next.
|