🚀 go-pugleaf

On 6/17/2017 4:35 AM, Omega wrote:
 > On the homepage near the top: https://www.gog.com/
 > Game details: https://www.gog.com/game/fantasy_general
 >

Fantasy turn based strategy game.  I played this back when it was out. 
I'm not usually that much into strategy, but this was good.

- Justisaur

On Sun, 18 Jun 2017 10:26:42 -0700, Justisaur <just...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On 6/17/2017 4:35 AM, Omega wrote:
> > On the homepage near the top: https://www.gog.com/
> > Game details: https://www.gog.com/game/fantasy_general
> >
>
>Fantasy turn based strategy game.  I played this back when it was out. 
>I'm not usually that much into strategy, but this was good.

It's closer to a "war-game" which, admittedly, is part of the strategy
genre. Still, when people say "strategy" I tend to think more about 4X
games where you have control over economic, political and cultural
aspects of your faction in addition to the military (the Civilization
games being the poster child, but games like Serf City also count).
Fantasy General - and its sister games, Panzer General, Allied General
and Star General (WW2, Cold War, Space War) were war-games where your
influence was only over your side's military units.

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.

Fantasy General took the same engine and tried to replicate Panzer
General's magic except with a fantastical twist. But the game's WW2
origins betrayed this effort; the tactics and methodology that were
designed around mechanized and combined warfare of World War 2 fit
poorly with the strategies of knights and dragons. It was also harder
to understand your army's make-up with a single-glance. In Panzer
General, you could scan the map and easily recognize the tanks and
infantry, and conclude whether one side or another had an advantage;
not so in Fantasy General. The orc footsoldiers looked too similar to
the knights, and does a wyvern have a tactical advantage over a flying
serpent? Who knows (Star General had similar problems). 

Still, while the later games weren't quite as successful as the first
I do have a soft spot in my heart for all the games because they were
a very good attempt at making the genre more accessible without
dumbing it down to real-time strategy levels. The games were the last
big hurrah for venerable SSI as well (they made a few more notable
games after, but Panzer General was the last really big one), and it's
a great last note to go out on.



 

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

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