🚀 go-pugleaf

Spalls Hurgenson  <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I didn't really enjoy Fantasy General, but I remember being surprised
>at how much I liked the Panzer General. Wargames usually were - and
>still are, to a large part - the dominion of the hardcore grognards to
>whom terms like defilade and enfilade have meaning. Panzer General's
>greatest achievement was that it made this mirish genre accessible to
>more casual players. This was helped greatly by the simple replacement
>of the usual military symbology - an arcane collection of small boxes
>with various crosses and dots representing different types of units -
>with graphical representations of said units (e.g., a tank squadron
>got a bitmap of a tank.  All of  a sudden the average joe could look
>at a battle map and understand what and where his army was, and what
>forces were arrayed against him. It is surprising at how revolutionary
>an idea that was in 1996.

The idea of using an icon of the unit that looked a tank or soemthing more
representive than the NATO symbols wasn't revolutionary, as it had been
done before in war games.  It was the execution of the idea that was
revolutionary.  The icons were drawn big enough, and at a high enough
resolution, to make it easy enough to understand.  In V for Victory for
example unit graphics were the default, you had to turn on NATO symbols
if you wanted them, but you were still using the small sized unit "chits"
that worked well the symbols but were too small to render the graphical
representations of the units effectively.  Here's a C64 game from 1994
that can also switch between icons and symbols:

	http://www.myabandonware.com/game/road-to-moscow-52z

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
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