Reply To: First Impressions

[Martli]

#8345

Agree with your summary, Wesbat. Cool game, but it just takes forever! I love a good 4X game though, so this just hits all my dopamine centres and I definitely got that familiar feeling of obsession that I get from these types of games.

I had a quick go at ‘war-game of the century’ to get a feel for it, and have played through a couple of games on the ‘deluxe’ edition.

My first impression was “wow, you mean I don’t have to worry about economy OR keeping my population happy, and I can focus ONLY on military production and strategy?!”. I thought this would make the game quite simple, but as the game progresses you end out having quite a lot to think about. I found I would easily lose track of units stationed inside my cities, and it was quite time intensive to take stock of them all without a summary window like in other 4X games.

The long build times in particular require a fair bit of future planning. Control of the seas really counts here and ships take AGES to build, so you need to make sure you don’t neglect that otherwise you’ll just not be able to progress in the end game.

Likewise, what appear to be basic manoeuvres/invasions can take a long time to execute, as you have to navigate production, transportation/concetration, and sometimes even your own traffic jams!

I did not find the UI very intuitive to start with, particularly in WGOTC. I just wanted to click on everything I wanted to deal with then and there rather than work through the order of moves determined by the game. This resulted in a few bungled moves (thinking I was in survey screen). I definitely recommend skimming over the manual to understand the different screens and keyboard commands etc. Once you get the hang of that, then the rest of it is pretty self explanatory. The ‘W’ key (for wait) is very important so you can sequence your units moves right. Took me a while to figure that out…

One frustration was also the combat variables/odds. I couldn’t tell if there was an obvious way to know if I’d win a conflict or not? I’d be keen to know if there is, other than a unit’s relative hit points etc. To me this just seemed a bit random and I wanted something that would indicate whether a battle is worth picking or not. More often than not though, I just threw caution to the wind (maybe that’s what they want you to do?).

In deluxe I played a few ‘basic’ games. In these games planes aren’t available and you can see all the enemy’s moves and production. This is probably too basic, but a useful introduction. On my second game I was able to quite quickly isolate my enemy’s city and destroy their transports while I built up a big enough invasion force to take them out, so yeah, definitely too basic. I will have a crack at a ‘standard’ game soon which I imagine is similar to the standard WGOTC game.

The music is… annoying… but helpful so I know what type of unit I’m moving I guess. But hey we’re not in it for the music right? This is all about guns and conquest.

Overall, love it, just wish it didn’t take so long.