juliet7bravo
Posts: 894
Joined: 5/30/2001 Status: offline
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I like the game alot, and am playing the **** out of it. BUT...there's some problems. I definitely won't be playing this game 15 years from now like PacWar. It's sort of unfair to judge UV by PacWar, but PacWar IS the standard. Mainly, you're at the strategic level, but your minions are idiots, and you get left with all tedious management chores. (1) You can't let your commanders off the leash, or they do stupid stuff like driving their carriers up to Rabual on a reaction move. Ergo...reaction moves as useless, and you HAVE to play TF commander, only without any real ability to do so built into the game design. Leaves you basically a crippled and innocent bystander watching a train wreck in progress. Being able to give your TF commanders some operational level guidance and parameters would be nice...then if you want the guy to show some initiative, you put an aggressive TF commander in change. (2) Game balance. Lots of things still need to be tweaked in the game. Not a bitch or a complaint, just a statement. PacWar is 15 years old and we're still tweaking it. (3) The micromanagment aspect, especially supply. The interface is clunky for one thing. Another is the computer supply routines are really kludgy...you end up doing it yourself as you can't afford too many mistakes with the limited resources you have. It's really frustrating when your troop convoys split without loading all the troops, and loaded supplies instead. Irritating as hell to have to make 2-3 trips to pick up that HQ unit you need desperately to get your fighter CAP up and running. An option to load 50% supply, 50% fuel would be nice. Managing fuel is even tougher than managing supply since you have to make separate convoys to do so unless you have spare AO's/TK's around...more tedious beancounting. One hundred screens, steps, and button clicks to go through to get anything done, and you're still left with "this isn't what I want to do". It'd be nice to be able to give the AI orders "reinforce Lunga", and have it start gathering resources and moving supplies and troops with whatever it's got to work with...then be able to jump in and micromanage if you feel the need. Not sure if that's the answer, but something isn't "there". Like someone else pointed out, something got lost in the translation. (4) The "it's too late for UV, but we'll consider it for WiTP" syndrome. Okay, why do I want to even get attached to this game? The point seems to be crystal clear that this game is a training run and test bed for Matrix. The glaring stuff will get fixed I'm sure, but after that it's going to be forgotten. What we got was "half a game", and we basically are paying to be beta testers for WiTP. WiTP is at least a year away, and the appeal for UV ain't gonna stretch that far. The half we got is pretty cool...but it's still just half a game. How great the half we got is, just highlites the half we didn't get. (5) It's supposed to be a strategic level game...but other than making the strategic decision "I'm gonna take out Lunga first, then island hop to Rabaul", the rest is all beancounting as you have no real operational control. You can't define objectives to subordinate HQ's and let them handle anything. You can't tell your carriers to "proceed to point X at flank speed" or to launch strikes against specific targets...it's really frustrating to have 6 carriers "barge busting" with a damaged carrier TF in range and running away. You can't issue orders to subordinates; you have to literally feed, cloth, and move each individual unit, monitor their health, hope they have good attitudes, personally hold each unit commanders hand, and then when it's time for combat you push them off the cliff and hope they learn how to fly before hitting bottom. (6) The AI is...odd. About the most agression I've seen is the bombardment runs on Gilli Gilli...which came to a fast halt with some well placed mines. Units committed piecemeal. The first full scenario 17 I played, I didn't see a IJN carrier at all. Finally loaded up as the IJN player, and there was 1 CV, 1 CVL in Truk, the rest were in Japan.
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