Dreamlords Resurrection: Paradox Interactive’s first FTP online title

Paradox Interactive announces its first Free-to-Play (FtP) title, Dreamlords of Resurrection, a fantasy theme that will, hints the release, include long term strategic planning. (Press release: Paradox Interactive unveils Dreamlords Resurrection – Paradox Interactive.)  This and future FtP titles will be released under the Paradox Connect brand. Dreamlords is an MMORTS game (Massively Multiplayer Online Real-Time Strategy) that has been around for a few years independently.

400-turn Civilization 5 action report

A report of some pre-release play of the new Civilization V. In sum: graphics improved, of course. And a new city growth system exploits the new map hexes nicely, which is good to hear.  Elimination of unit stacks brings the games into the realm of strategic, army-level war games. Long overdue. As the reviewer mentions, encirclement becomes a viable ground strategic goal, instead of the wars of attrition, with single-square stacks of units hammering each other until one or the other is eliminated. Additionally units now have hit points, which will make combat a bit more interesting than the winner-take-all affairs they’ve been up to now. Also discussed are city states, a totally new concept, and a revamped social policy aspect. No mention of the supposed ranged combat feature. Perhaps it was dropped. Archers firing at targets two or three hexes away at this scale would squander all the benefits of what sounds like an improved strategic combat system. Come September! Yes. We have come around.

UPDATE: Article author Stephen Totillo in an e-mail reports that ranged combat is still present, but that it works well. Not a deal breaker. We’ll see.

Strategy Game Review: East India Company, Designer’s Cut

Channeling the great prestidigitator, film director, raconteur, wine pitchman and professional living-legend (now deceased) Orson Welles, InfinityBound will post no strategy game review before its time. So for you late-comers and you long-tail riders, here’s a much-belated look at a pretty good game that meshes a simpler trading type strategy mode a la Patrician II with real-time ship-to-ship Age of Sail tactics, make for a visually engaging and playable hybrid.

East India Company (EIC) is Paradox Interactive’s early-Age of Sail commerce/naval combat simulation that puts you in control of one of the semi-private 17th/18th-century enterprises that established, organized and exploited trade in parts of Africa and Central Asia for their respective crowns and countries.

One of the reasons we were so determined to review it is that it meets the criteria for open-ended strategy game that InfinityBound so favors. We had hoped to review EIC when we first installed it on our own PC last year, since it looked like we met the minimum system requirements. Then we saw how badly the game ran.  Jerky and draggy, it was also non-reactive, requiring you to click on commands two, three times or more. A most unpleasant gaming experience. The NVIDIA GeForce 6150 on the motherboard of my off-the-shelf desktop PC just didn’t make the grade. And it’s an unfortunate indicator of what we can expect from games to come. Graphics RAM is where the rubber meets the road in games these days and the exact requirement of 128 meg, which my machine met, wasn’t enough, even with the preferences dialed down. 

When we got temporary access to son Leo’s graphically blazing home-built HD outfit we immediately installed EIC.  What a difference 500 megabytes of graphics RAM can make. The game ran like a charm, and best of all you only had to click on stuff once.

So since getting the game there have been some add-ons, including: Trafalgar, Pirate Bay and Privateer. The version we ended up reviewing here is the Designer’s Cut, which adds islands to the tactical maps and various other improvements to the visuals and to the multiplayer experience.

In the strategic game you make all major decisions for an East India Company operating out of one of the major European maritime trading powers, starting in the 17th Century. You build ships and add them to fleets of up to five boats each, then send them around the Cape of Africa to India and environs for silk, tea, spices or other goods. Or they can trade closer in for diamonds and ivory, among other things, on the coast of Africa and its offshore islands. You’ll be competing against the  other companies of the sort, those from England, the Netherlands, Spain , Portugal and France. Even the Holy Roman Empire (the loosely organized German states) can engage in trade, even through they weren’t quite a maritime power.

The trading is straightforward on a beautifully rendered strategic map. You’ll know which ports will earn you a  profit for which commodities, unlike many trading games where you have to guess or keep notes. This is only right, since the operatives in such companies made it their business to know where the best trades would likely be. Along the way you’ll have to cope with pirates and other random events, like ports closing suddenly due to disease and/or your ships being quarantined. And goods aren’t limitless, so even though you know you can turn a profit somewhere, you may show up to find they are fresh out of their main trading item.

The scenario you choose will also pose challenges, divided into primary and secondary goals: import a number of tons of some good, or conquer a city or destroy enemy ships of a certain number by a certain year and you’ll be rewarded by the crown. Missing the mission will end the game, but as long as you meet the goals you’re free to pursue any other strategy. The advantages gained by the goals will accrue to your benefit in any case.

You’ll build ships of the expected types:  various merchantmen and galleons and, of course, the ship that gave the name to a category, the East Indiaman, as well as frigates and ships-of-the-line. They’ll come assigned with a captain, but you can dismiss him and assign another. You’ll have complete control over who commands the fleets and will be able to shuffle ships from fleet to fleet depending on your needs of the moment. Captains and crews gain experience over time and through encounters, and captains can earn special skills.

Ground combat to take cities are abstracted. The software will match your strength against the enemy’s, factored in that number and quality of marines and sailors, strength of fortifications and of ships present. You’ll either take the city of not, and losses will be applied accordingly. It is possible to lose ships in city assaults.

When your units encounter an enemy ship or fleet at sea you’ll be taken to the tactical game. Your fleet and the enemy’s will see each other at the horizon. The encounters can be at any time of day or night and many different sea and atmospheric conditions. Sometimes you’ll wish to avoid contact with a stronger enemy but the speed of the fleet’s slowest ship dictates so there may be times when you cannot. Once on the tactical map, depending on the wind direction, you may be able to flee, or close with the enemy if you feel like you have the advantage. The sky and sea vistas in the tactical game here are another beautifully executed aspect of the game.

The  tactical game has two modes: RTS (Real Time Strategy) and Direct Command. In RTS you control your ships from above — although you can zoom in fairly close – using simple point-and-click, as well as commands for organizing the fleets into groups as per other games of the type. The sail controls, unfortunately, are no more detailed than other games in the genre, with three settings: no sails, combat sail and full sail. One feature the game has that most others do not, though, is crew. The decks of your ships have men scurrying about, a welcome touch.

In Direct Command mode you can get right down on deck with the gun crews (in a frigate or other type with an open gun deck.) The TAB key lets you change your view and the WSAD key combination will steer the ship left-right and change the sails. From here you can give the order to fire the great guns, and from close-in you’ll experience the virtual sound-and-fury and the sometimes startling battle effects. The damage model is particularly excellent, once eliciting an audible gasp from your reviewer when a ball burst through a sail and the sail behaved as you’d imagine a slack sail would, first a sudden radical unslackening then puncturing, leaving a hole.

Left-click the slide show for full-screen mode.

We have minor quibbles with some interface awkwardness in the homeport screen and we came across a consistently reproducable crash in the  loot screen (after a victory, when trying to add a surrendered ship to a full fleet) but other than that the design is solid. 

Many decisions similar to establishing and maintaining the real far-flung trade seem to be reproduced (tip: try to make Cape Town yours) and so the game succeeds as a strategic simulation.  You can set your trade routes and let the traders go about their business, while monitoring your progress toward achieving the goals of the current mission, while also perhaps simultaneously taking command of a combat fleet to cruise around the map keeping the trade routes safe, looking for likely enemy targets or pirate fleets. It’ll be your own choice to emphasize the strategic or tactical game, where EIC is at least equal to any of the pure sailing titles out there and better than some.

And yes, it is moddable.

Summary: East India Company is a beautiful and playable strategic/tactrical hybrid, but make sure you have plenty of graphics RAM.

Retro Review: Carriers at War

Carriers at War: Map Screen

And here’s the Task Group management screen.

Carriers at War: Task Group screen

The Matrix verison has an updated interface that fans of the old game will appreciate – for instance, use a mouse wheel to control the game clock. Mouse wheels didn’t exist in 1991. The graphics are updated as well as are the animated overhead battle scenes. It’s not 3D polygonic but it’s a colorful way of communicating your hits. 

The game is stable under Vista except for one recurring spot. Be sure to save your game before adding US torpedo bombers to a coordinated strike. We had it crash there multiple times.

One flaw in the original that was not updated is the inexplicable lack of randomized start, especially with the Midway scenario. There are however, 38 different mystery variants of the Coral Sea situation. Run through them in order then start again. By the time you get around to the first one you’ll probably forget. That may be random enough.

There’s also multiplayer, which I’m pretty sure was not in the original game.

And  there is no campaign game. You can’t fight the whole war. There was only one carrier game that had that, Carrier Strike, and it didn’t do it too well. But at least it tried. That game had other problems.

But the day of the pure carrier game may be over. Maybe we can get ahold of one of those recent Pacific strategy games. We’ll see.

Europa Universalis: Rome add-on: Vae Victus

Vae Victus (”woe to the conquered”) is the Paradox Interactive add-on to the Rome-era application of its landmark Europa Universalis strategy engine. Here’s a link to the summary of the enhancements in the upgrade. 

Wouldn’t you know it that the day we’re sure to get this post up Paradox releases the first patch for Vae Victus. It’ll have to wait. We won’t have a chance to play it just yet. But from the readme it appears that the patch will merely refine and enhance the refinements and enhancements outlined below.

First off, as with all the EU  titles, help comes in the form of the highly interactive roll-over information there is no in-game help or online manual. Hover over just about anything in the game interface and it will explain itself. The one drawback to reliance on this with an add-on is that any set of new features can get lost unless you know were to look for them. So read the readme and start with a run through the highly detailed tutorials, which are are more of a familiarization tool than a simulation of play.

There is an obviously smoother, less wildly combative but nonetheless deadly AI. You may find after a long successful inland campaign that a very powerful Carthage awaits you if you don’t knock them out early. It’s hard to ignore tha barbarians, the colonization opportunities and the easy tribal country pickings to the north, but you may want to force yourself.

New to the game is an extensive and engaging Senate system. You’ll spend the first few hundred years as a republic, where the Senate can be more a hindrance than a help, unless handled just right. There are factions to deal with and many of the random events effect their strength, gaining or losing seats depending on your decisions. If your Consul (a single one, not historically accurate but cleaner) is of a particular faction then some abilities will gain modifiers. The two most powerful factions at start are the Military and the Populist. But if you work on it you can arrange for the occasional Mercantile Consul or a Religious one, enhancing diplomatic and omen powers respectively.

Vae Victus: Roman Senate

Personalities, feuds and family are a bit more prominent, and you’ll want to pay a little more attention to this aspect of the game. There’s enough here that you could immerse yourself in it.

A welcome refinement is the addition of Regions. Your micro-management will be reduced, since you now have only to name and track the dux of several regions rather than a governor of each of dozens of individual provinces. Management is streamlined yes, but civil wars can be more dangerous as whole regions may now leave the fold and take the local legions with them.

Bottom line: As much of an improvement as you can expect. It’s been patched. We’ll start a new game as soon as we can.

Link to first post in multi-post Europa Universalis: Rome review.

Europa Universalis: Rome – 5. Action Report

Click here to read Part 1 of this review
Click here to read Part 2 of this review
Click here to read Part 3 of this review
Click here to read Part 4 of this review

Review of Vae Victus add-on

It’s 534 AVC and our first swipe at the earliest scenario playing as Rome has come to an end. We’ve resigned it and have started again, to try it from another angle. The long and the short of it is the game, Europa Universalis: Rome, like Chef Paul Prudhomme says of good Cajun food, makes you want to keep eating. 

For the first game we chose the earliest scenario, as is our habit, and chose to play the Big Dog of the time period, Rome, as many would. Your challenges are myriad. In the Pyrrhic War scenario, as Rome, you start at war withe Epirus and Magna Graecia, one-province and a two-province countries, respectively. You also have Carthage acting up out in the Mediterranean, Macedonia in the wings causing trouble, barbarians everywhere, and your own provinces ready to rebel at the slightest opportunity.

The  major mistake we made here was trying to hold the overseas province of Epirus at all costs. This cost turned out to be allowing the barbarians to hit us from the north, to decivilize one of our recently acquired provinces, thereby reducing our chance of colonizing other adjacent unattached provinces. This reflects our play-style tendency/fault of not giving up hard-earned conquered territory. This amounts to classic short-term gain that proves unprofitable in the long run. Next time we’ll go about it differently.

We made short work of Epirus, across the Mare Hadriaticum on the Greek mainland, and of two other remaining fragments of Greek former glory, Ager Bruttius and Tarentum, in the toe and heel of the boot, respectively. Then we sat back and  thought to bide our time and let the two provinces north of Bononia be drawn in as colonies. To do this your adjoining provinces must have 10 points in population and at least a 50 percent civilization rating. Just as we were about to score on this count the Macedonians begin to assassinate my aristocrats. This should have been taken for a sure sign of an attack, but we hoped for the best. And we were disappointed. Still, if we didn’t feel like we had to defend a cross channel province, and build the strong navy because it it we might have gotten away with it. As it was, the need to strip Bononia of strong defenders allowed the barbarians to trash it, and our allies in Massillia began to colonize in the north. A peace with the Macedonians didn’t last, and soon we were at war with them, other Greek leagues  and with Rhodes and Crete. And our manpower was completely drained. Time to resign.

A tip: pay attention to the supply limits. Having a big legion in a province that drains it ten percent a month will also plunder your manpower. And lengthy wars with lots of attrition will do the same. If you look up and suddenly see your manpower numbers almost to zero, these factors would be the reason. Hover over your Manpower number and you’ll see your replacement and usage rates. If the latter is bigger than the former, you’re in for steady manpower drain.

A positive: even in full screen (non-windowed) mode, the game ALT-TABs pretty quickly, so during those slow times, if you have the message settings set just the way you like them, you can flip over to do other more useful tasks, like write blog posts, and then check in to the game to see if there are any developments.

A word on the art: We had mentioned that the in-game graphics were strictly serviceable, and this is true, but the art in the loading screens and the opening start-up menu are quite good. it’s a shame that’s the only time you see them and a little more variety would have been nice.

Multiplayer was not tested, a visit to the Paradox-provided MetaServer saw no traffic in the visits we made, but that’s sure to pick up. The manual is a bit short on information about getting onto the server. What you need to do is log on as a member of the Paradox Plaza Forums web site. Then look for the “My Games/Registrations” link at the upper left. Click there and you’ll see where to input the registration code from the game package. That code is in an obscure spot, on the card that advertises the strategy guide book for the game. So be sure not to throw that away as packaging spam.

This will be the last formal post of this review series, but we’ll post more as the play continues, and, of course, when we achieve some milestone of success. But for now I would think that fans of the Rome genre in strictly strategy game mode would consider this getting a copy.

It is an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master in the Paradox Interactive style. it’s not action-packed so first-person shooter or even RTS fans may not go for it, but it’s full of historical nuance and though none of us were ever a Roman Consul or Emperor, you sense that some faint echo of the same decision-making may be getting as simulated as it will ever get. Who shall I appoint? Who are my friends? Where do I march my legions? Or after a defeat, like Augustus after Teutoborg….

“Give me back my legions!”

Europa Universalis: Rome – 4. Diving in

Click here to read Part 1 of this review
Click here to read Part 2 of this review
Click here to read Part 3 of this review

*** 

It would be impossible to review this game without touching on the ultimate Rome game, Rome: Total War. You will not avoid noticing some similarities in approach to the strategic game. Europa Universalis: Rome completely foregoes a tactical map. Your armies are pitted against the enemy and you have no control over their disposition or movement on the battlefield once they get there. All you get are the results. If it’s a tactical ancients game you’re looking for then Rome: Total War is still your best bet.  

The most striking similarity between the two will be the 3D game map, and in Europa you have nearly 100 percent zoom and full 360 degree turning abilities. Use the CTRL key to achieve this, then let it go and the map will stay in the viewpoint you set. And if you’re expecting state-of-the-art, realistic graphics you’ll have to look elsewhere. The art here is strictly serviceable, although clear and colorful. With these games the play is the thing, and the accuracy of the research. It may not be so difficult to find symbols of the Carthaginians for use in your game, but we wouldn’t know where to even begin to look for data on the Phangorians or some of the other more obscure ancient cultures that are present.

As for game play, this title strikes a middle complexity, somewhere well below the denseness of Victoria and above the relatively simple-minded Crown  of the North. Tooltips abound. Just about everything you hover your mouse pointer over will give you detailed information about the object under it. Hesitate and most often you’ll get even more details.

Alerts, the History log and Pop-ups are vital to tracking events in a far-flung empire. The Alerts will appear in the top middle of the screen to remind the player of the most important chores needing attention to optimize your empire, such as province governorships without an appointee and trade routes unfilled.

Other game news appears as messages and can either show in the History log that constantly scrolls at the bottom middle of the screen, as a Pop-up window or dialog or as a Pop-up that pauses the game. You have complete control over this for the many different types of messages. Tip: Check the Message Setting list in the Main menu and make sure that all types of messages are set to appear in the History Log. Then keep a close eye on the log and when a message comes up that you think deserves a Pop-up, right-click and set it.

Characters are deceptively important, their traits and rivalries can have a critical effect on many game developments and on research in particular. Research is a direct function of your population levels but it can be maximized (or stunted) depending on who you’ve appointed as magistrates in the various research categories. When you click to appoint a character, whether as a magistrate, governor of a province or to a generalship of a legion, you’ll see the list of available unassigned characters. but clicking one actually executes the appointment. Because of this you can’t really see the into the next scteen which details their fired, family and rivals at that spot. There is a way to see the entire roster of characters, in the Ledger’s Country Overview.  You’ll have to check the details a character there ahead of the time you make an appointment, if the facts on the second screen are important to the decision, which they can be.

Characters also have a profound and flavorful effect on your control over the military units that fight your wars and put down the inevitable rebellions, barbarian eruptions and civil wars. A legion or a fleet can become so loyal to a character leading it that, though the unit may obey movement commands, you cannot split it or replace its leader. And be careful not to reassign the character who’s the object  of such unit loyalty, or you will not be able to assign anyone else to lead the unit either, leaving it at a disadvantage. Disbanding the unit will also be a costly affair. You may, however attempt to assassinate the character, with all the penalties that may entail, successful or not.

A little bugginess was detected in the family tree.  A daughter was announced born to a our consul but looking at his family tree immediately all it showed was 16-year-old son. And a random event once showed that another consul’s child was a little bossy on the playground. Checking the family tree we saw that the consul still had no children.

All in all though, the game play at first swipe has the potential for an addictiveness, and we’re still drawn to it. 

Click here to read Part 5 of this review

Europa Universalis: Rome – 3. On the March

Click here to read Part 1 of this review
Click here to read Part 2 of this review

***

Getting started with the game, as a single player for now, takes you to the main start-up screen. (Veteran Paradox Interactive players bear with us. Much of this will be familiar from other titles. And that’s the last time we’ll say that in this series so have patience, you veteran Europas.)  

Here, instead of the usual choice of scenarios, you’ll see a series of Bookmark buttons aligned vertically on the left. These represent significant milestones (a Roman invention, btw) in the Roman historical timeline. For even though you can play any of the highlighted available countries, the theme of the game is Rome, so for that reason this Bookmark metaphor fits nicely.

Below that on the left is a Calendar widget, you can choose any date between the earliest and latest that are covered by the game. The earliest date has been pegged as signifying the real ascendancy of Rome as a regional Mediterranean power, the era of the wars with a fading Greece. The entire span goes from, earliest to latest, 278 BC to 25 BC. In the game, though, these and all other dates are represented by the Latin equivalents, 474 AUC to 727 AUC. These years are marked from the mythical founding of Rome as known to the Romans of the time. AUC stands for Ab Urbe Condita.

The earliest start time/bookmark, is the above-mentioned Pyrrhic War (474 AUC), in which the remnants of ancient Greece under the leadership of Pyrrhus, managed a series of costly victories over Rome which sealed its doom – and giving us the term Pyrrhic victory. (”Another such victory over Rome and we are undone.” - Pyrrhus.)

Other Bookmarks include: The First Punic War (490 AUC); The Second Punic War (536 AUC); The Syrian War (562 AUC); Mare Nostrum (604); Gaius Marius ( 647); Caesar’s Gallic Wars (696 AUC); Alea lacta est (705 AUC) and First Emperor (723 AUC).

Pick a Bookmark or select any date in the Calendar, then click on any of the colored-in countries in the main window and the right side of the screen will show details of the chosen country’s leader, the leader’s rating in three areas, the type of government, the main diplomatic situation for that country (enemies and allies) and the difficulty rating of playing that country in that specific situation. If you’ve clicked a Bookmark you’ll get a paragraph describing the historic background of the scenario. Changing the date on the calendar makes that text disappear. But if you don’t wander too far in time the situation will be roughly the same. This feature alone shows the incredible amount of research that goes into the making of this and other games in the series.

Click the PLAY button and your legions are on the march.

Click here to read Part 4 of this review
Click here to read Part 5 of this review

Europa Universalis: Rome – 2. Tutorials and Manual

Click here to read Part 1 of this review

The in-game teaching tool is not interactive and not really a tutorial. You don’t actually click through the instruction along with the games. It’s a series of fairly static screens (you’ll see some animation in the background) with messages that point to and highlight the controls under discussion. They’re called “tutorials,” apparently, because that’s the custom in computer games. It’s better than calling them “static instructional screens.” 

Unfortunately there is no way to back up in the tutorials. If you click OK too quickly, or inadvertently, you’ll have to play the whole file over from the beginning. And similarly there is no way to end the chapter early. None of the game interface controls work and the OK button only takes you forward. So once you’re in one you must go on unless you want to end task. So in a way it works out well that the need to play and replay them is nearly nil. None of them are long, fortunately, and you can probably zip through the entire set in 30 minutes or less. 

On the plus side, the game’s background music accompanies the tutorials. As usual the developers have come up with a pleasing variety of era-evoking, ancient-sounding music. And it plays in random order too, an improvement over some earlier titles.  

The hard-copy manual is quite informative, touching on many subjects the tutorials do not and in much more detail on the ones that they do. It is profusely illustrated with sharp and clear monochrome screenshots. A thorough reading of the manual would be well worth the time spent.

Click here to read Part 3 of this review
Click here to read Part 4 of this review
Click here to read Part 5 of this review

Europa Universalis: Rome – 1. Out of the Box

 It has arrived, our copy this highly anticipated game. Over the next week or more we’ll share our experiences with it in our trademark multi-post fashion. As the main review fades posting may trail off  but if the game is worth playing then from time to time you may see more posts on into the infinite future. It all depends on the greatness of the game.

The Box
It’s a handsome package; tight, simple side-open outer box, with a 97-page full color manual on slick paper, and a high quality plastic disk folio. The cover is a striking illustration of Augustus Caesar, judging from images of his busts out there on the Web. A map of the game provinces is included, which is a nice-to-have but not destined to be an indispensable tool during actual game play. In this case it’s the thought that counts (and it makes for a nice background for do-it-yourself product photos.) Overall the game is well worth having on your shelf. And in our view if you’re going to pay $50 for a game you deserve more than a PDF on the disk. Paradox has always been good for this, but it looks like they’ve taken the next step graphically.

The  Patch
Starting the game brings up a screen connecting directly to news from Paradox interactive, the game developer, and version 1.1 update is available now. First things first then. Patch it up. Be sure to Download rather than Runand don’t forget to close the game launcher before running the download exe file.

Getting Started
One down note: We were interested in the “windowed mode” mentioned in the manual but could not get it to work. The “windowed=no” line in the settings.txt file was not present, and adding “windowed=yes” didn’t help. We also tried removing the “fullscreen=yes” setting altogether but to no avail. It always plays in full screen mode. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for a solution in the Paradox Roman forum and elsewhere and relay our findings. We like to have multiple windows open and though it is still possible to ALT-TAB away from and back to the game, it’s a bit slow, and we were hoping for somewhat more agile switching.

Otherwise the game holds all the promise of its predecessors. Like most in the Europa series, you can play as any of the available countries that start your chosen scenario, or, of course, take charge of Rome itself. The game is named after that empire because, according to the manual’s introduction, the earliest start date coincides with the 3rd century BC ascendancy of Rome over Greece as the Mediterranean superpower.

We’re looking forward to digging into this title, as the Europa series has always delivered on its promise of informative game play. As we’ve stated in a review long ago of the very first release, the games are like interactive scholarly documents, impeccably researched, with involving simulation of the economic and military decision-making.

***

Click here to read Part 2 of this review
Click here to read Part 3 of this review
Click here to read Part 4 of this review
Click here to read Part 5 of this review