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kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
I got ICBM and Ultimate General Civil War.
ICBM is souped up DEFCON, a game I could appreciate conceptually but not get into. I wasn't one of those weepy faggots that would piss myself because the scary War Games computer graphics make it feel like horror, but I already miss them. This one is basically DEFCON with economy; if there's a way to boom I haven't found it yet, but you have a GDP (and the game does not have to be symmetrical) that goes towards your construction queues and research trees, so you basically go from late WW2 where the height of technology is conventional carrier warfare and dropping nuclear bombs from planes to Star Wars. It's the same gameplay concepts, just more of everything.
The game only has two real scenarios besides generic continental unions fighting, a Cold War one that's a little half-baked and a bizarre French-Spanish imperial war that's honestly genius: two metropoles that border each other, then a continent each that's dominated by one empire (Spain in Latin America, France in Africa) with small outposts of the other. They didn't seem to think to include Vietnam and the Philippines. You can actually edit scenarios, but I don't think there's a way to edit cities, so you have to live with whatever balancing it has, and modern day borders. Still, the first thing I did was rush out and create a WW1 great powers scenario: United States (no Hawaii, unfortunately, but Philippines, Liberia and its banana republic occupation states), the British, French and Russian Empires, Italy + the Balkans Allies, Ottomans + Bulgaria, Germany + Austria-Hungary and Japan. It's such an awkward game to get used to, because while it does helpfully auto-pause whenever something happens and has time scaling, you basically have - like in real life - massive periods of nothing followed by extremely fast, devastating exchanges. My Great War was over fast. The map is an absolute clusterfuck, of course, with colonial empires, because there could be attacks from absolutely any direction. I played most of my infrastructure into the Philippines, immediately was on a war footing with Japan (there's no, sadly, DEFCON countdown or Doomsday Clock: the only thing preventing a nukefest is not having nukes at the start, and everybody is on a hostile footing by default), allied them of desperation when everyone else turned me down, and basically got stuck in an anti-colonial losers club with them and the Ottomans while the two big colonial empires (France and Britain allied). So I'm doing a decent job of staying out of combat in the Atlantic, where I have an absolutely shit situation vis a vis Britain, while clearing the Gulf of Tonkin, and I make the mistake of launching a nuke on vulnerable Indochina. Well, the AI must be programmed to have a sense of retribution, because the moment I did that all help broke loose, nuclear missiles came flying in from every direction, and against an alliance of maybe three times my GDP, I just got pummeled into the dust. I hadn't made a single nuclear missile yet.
So I like this. There are so many interesting scenarios you can make even with being stuck to cobbling together factions from modern national borders. Game doesn't come with it, but you could do colonial empires of the Enlightenment, WW2, Napoleon, deathmatches like Indo-Pakistani, Israeli-Iranian or South Africa vs the collective Black world, etc. scenarios. It's a lot to take in, though; nuclear/aerial strategic warfare is something very alien to me.
Ultimate General, on the other hand, is very meh. I heard it had a stellar reputation. The game is definitely of a certain generation; janky, poor presentation. No battle music. No narration or anything. Really cheap game. You're basically buying a campaign pack (but it is a long and detailed campaign). At first glance it looks content-less, but the truth is that units aren't differentiated by gamey identities like in Total War but by the firearm they're equipped with, the commander in charge, etc. There's no need to have Repeater Infantry vs Rifle Infantry vs Smoothbore Infantry in your UI if you can simply have Infantry WITH a repeater, rifle, smoothbore. Except that (and it may be realistic - may - but it's not so fun) you then don't know what you're fighting with and usually have a ton of units to juggle. Have not been able to notice if friendly fire hardly matters. In Empire it's a big deal; it's a big deal that you can bring fire to bear from multiple angles or hold a hill to allow stacking several units shooting at the same target from the same direction at once. Here it feels like a clusterfuck. Frankly, just doesn't feel good at all, but it can run on a shitbox and is more casual.
I played Bull Run (CSA), Shiloh (CSA, draw) and Shiloh (USA) so far. I actually know little about the military history side of the War between the States; that never interested me so much as the grand story of it. Shiloh is a shitshow. Trying to march through endless forest filled with a regiment every other step - defense in depth - is Hell on Earth. The game does capture something Total War never did. You're always fighting for a specific operational purpose, not just to destroy an army, and every battle consists of barely scraping by while both sides feel like they're losing until a trickle of reinforcements come in that's just barely enough. I never really had a sense for how much that mattered in Napoleonic warfare, that the armies were so dispersed that you really did have tons of separate battles going on and getting drug into each other gradually over a day or two.
Edit: FML I forgot ICBM already HAD a sequel.
ICBM is souped up DEFCON, a game I could appreciate conceptually but not get into. I wasn't one of those weepy faggots that would piss myself because the scary War Games computer graphics make it feel like horror, but I already miss them. This one is basically DEFCON with economy; if there's a way to boom I haven't found it yet, but you have a GDP (and the game does not have to be symmetrical) that goes towards your construction queues and research trees, so you basically go from late WW2 where the height of technology is conventional carrier warfare and dropping nuclear bombs from planes to Star Wars. It's the same gameplay concepts, just more of everything.
The game only has two real scenarios besides generic continental unions fighting, a Cold War one that's a little half-baked and a bizarre French-Spanish imperial war that's honestly genius: two metropoles that border each other, then a continent each that's dominated by one empire (Spain in Latin America, France in Africa) with small outposts of the other. They didn't seem to think to include Vietnam and the Philippines. You can actually edit scenarios, but I don't think there's a way to edit cities, so you have to live with whatever balancing it has, and modern day borders. Still, the first thing I did was rush out and create a WW1 great powers scenario: United States (no Hawaii, unfortunately, but Philippines, Liberia and its banana republic occupation states), the British, French and Russian Empires, Italy + the Balkans Allies, Ottomans + Bulgaria, Germany + Austria-Hungary and Japan. It's such an awkward game to get used to, because while it does helpfully auto-pause whenever something happens and has time scaling, you basically have - like in real life - massive periods of nothing followed by extremely fast, devastating exchanges. My Great War was over fast. The map is an absolute clusterfuck, of course, with colonial empires, because there could be attacks from absolutely any direction. I played most of my infrastructure into the Philippines, immediately was on a war footing with Japan (there's no, sadly, DEFCON countdown or Doomsday Clock: the only thing preventing a nukefest is not having nukes at the start, and everybody is on a hostile footing by default), allied them of desperation when everyone else turned me down, and basically got stuck in an anti-colonial losers club with them and the Ottomans while the two big colonial empires (France and Britain allied). So I'm doing a decent job of staying out of combat in the Atlantic, where I have an absolutely shit situation vis a vis Britain, while clearing the Gulf of Tonkin, and I make the mistake of launching a nuke on vulnerable Indochina. Well, the AI must be programmed to have a sense of retribution, because the moment I did that all help broke loose, nuclear missiles came flying in from every direction, and against an alliance of maybe three times my GDP, I just got pummeled into the dust. I hadn't made a single nuclear missile yet.
So I like this. There are so many interesting scenarios you can make even with being stuck to cobbling together factions from modern national borders. Game doesn't come with it, but you could do colonial empires of the Enlightenment, WW2, Napoleon, deathmatches like Indo-Pakistani, Israeli-Iranian or South Africa vs the collective Black world, etc. scenarios. It's a lot to take in, though; nuclear/aerial strategic warfare is something very alien to me.
Ultimate General, on the other hand, is very meh. I heard it had a stellar reputation. The game is definitely of a certain generation; janky, poor presentation. No battle music. No narration or anything. Really cheap game. You're basically buying a campaign pack (but it is a long and detailed campaign). At first glance it looks content-less, but the truth is that units aren't differentiated by gamey identities like in Total War but by the firearm they're equipped with, the commander in charge, etc. There's no need to have Repeater Infantry vs Rifle Infantry vs Smoothbore Infantry in your UI if you can simply have Infantry WITH a repeater, rifle, smoothbore. Except that (and it may be realistic - may - but it's not so fun) you then don't know what you're fighting with and usually have a ton of units to juggle. Have not been able to notice if friendly fire hardly matters. In Empire it's a big deal; it's a big deal that you can bring fire to bear from multiple angles or hold a hill to allow stacking several units shooting at the same target from the same direction at once. Here it feels like a clusterfuck. Frankly, just doesn't feel good at all, but it can run on a shitbox and is more casual.
I played Bull Run (CSA), Shiloh (CSA, draw) and Shiloh (USA) so far. I actually know little about the military history side of the War between the States; that never interested me so much as the grand story of it. Shiloh is a shitshow. Trying to march through endless forest filled with a regiment every other step - defense in depth - is Hell on Earth. The game does capture something Total War never did. You're always fighting for a specific operational purpose, not just to destroy an army, and every battle consists of barely scraping by while both sides feel like they're losing until a trickle of reinforcements come in that's just barely enough. I never really had a sense for how much that mattered in Napoleonic warfare, that the armies were so dispersed that you really did have tons of separate battles going on and getting drug into each other gradually over a day or two.
Edit: FML I forgot ICBM already HAD a sequel.
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