COTD What I thought after 5 games

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COTD What I thought after 5 games

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All Forums >> [Current Games From Matrix.] >> [Napoleonics] >> Campaigns on the Danube 1805 - 1809 >> COTD What I thought after 5 games

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COTD What I thought after 5 games - 10/17/2005 5:29:08 AM

lancerunolfsson

Posts: 257
Joined: 2/7/2005
Status: offline

I've been currious about Adanac games for a long time sort of like one of those movies you see at Hollywood video that you can't quite bring yourself to rent because it is obscure. You have seen no trailers, no one is talking about it and the description on the cover makes you think. This could be pretty good and this could be pretty bad. Under such conditions it is a lot easier to spring $4.00 to decide whther to finish watching a movie after 15minutes. Than to spend $ 46.00 to decide whether a game is any good or not. Though when a game pays off it pays of more cost efectively than a video rental;^)

PLAY
Basically this is a really nice command control game. Campaigns on the Danube aproaches the idea of a wargame from an unusual tangent. With full fog of war on not only do you not know where the enemy is and what he is doing but you don't even know where all of your own army is and what it is doing. Simply put the player is in the position of army commander. He issues orders to his units the orders take time to travel to the units. This time is not fixed it depends on distance and can be efected by delays. The orders might not even make it to a unit. Once (and if) a unit recieves the order the player will not see the units postition up dated untill enough time has elapsed for reports to have returned to the players headquarters. I can't say anything about the supply system because after looking at it I decided I was bettwer off just leaving that under computer control. The main lesson is that the ruther somthing is away from HQ the less good information you have about and ability to efectively intervene. Realisic and made to work well in context of a game.

Download and Instalation
The game down loaded in a reasonable amount of time I think just around an hour even on my punky 4x dialup DSL. I should have saved the 17.00 extra bucks physical shipment costs after You tack on shipping. It would be nice if Matrix posted download times at various speed with the games. The fact that they do not makes me feel a little ripped off. Because of course the first thing i did was burn the exe to disk along with the activation number.. Which is what i am going to get for the extra 17 bucks I spent.

Game installed just fine though it is kind of irritating to have to bring the activation code back up to even install the patches. This is just stupid. The fact that the game is installed proves I have the activation code.

Interface
The game really looks GOOD! Though the fact that the unit counters are larger than the hexes can be irritating at times. This sadly though is about the only good thing i have to say about the interface. Realy the rest of the interface and tool buttons are not bad they just are not good. There is the suspicion that a little more effort would have yeilded a little more map on screen.

Stuff the Interface Really, Really, needs
1] A map resolution between the close up view and the small strategic map (wich is always on) the current maps are just barely adequate for play (though they look good). The Austrian units are barely visible on the Strategic map.

2] Though there are a reasonable number find functions on the tool bar. They do not make up for the fact that the game does not hot spot locations of the action when reports pop up. Be sure to have a pencil and spiral note book handy to record information given at the begining of your turn. So you can find the location of the events you can not even move the report pop ups around the screen so that they do not obscure the center of the map. Nor can you scroll the map when a pop up is on.

3] because the game is built around the idea that you issue orders to units and the orders take time (sometimes several turns) to get to the units. There Really really really has to be a way to bring up the orders you have already sent to units that have not arrived yet. I suppose I could write this down but i don't think i should have to!!!!

4] Kind of sovled if 3 above is implemented but it would be nice to have corps you have not sent orders to hilighted some way.

5] It would be nice if the units subordinate to a Corps HQ were hilighted when the corp comander is selected.

6] It would really be nice if Help were available during play and if there was Help at all beyond the 38 page PDF manual.

7] It would be nice if the game played in a window as it does not even always seem to respond to an ALT TAB.

8] It would be nice to be able to start a new game without exiting the program and rebooting it. Though you can load an old game with out having to exit.

9] There are no real good excuses for a turnbased game that does have PBEM capability to not have a Hot Seat mode.