Who Likes Old School Wargames?

[skeezix]

Theres a number of projects floating around in my head, that've been lodged there for years. I won't tell you, since I'll get to them all someday But the one that has been coming to the fore more often than the others of late, is a good old fashioned wargame, styled after the old ST and Amiga days (though I'd do it with more modern artwork of course.)

ie: I'm not talking a 'Tactics' game per se .. those are descended from the older wargames for sure, and have some great features; but one of the aspects of those is smaller numebrs of units so they can focus more on tactics, and less on strategy (the larger scale.) No, I'm talking about mapsof a few hundred by a few hundred squares, with cities randomly strewn about, and where each city can be made to produce a unit at varying production -- you know tanks, fighter craft, aircraft carrier, submarines, and a few other units. Click-and-drag to make an elastic band selection of units, send them off in some direction to explore the map, crsh neutral or enemy cities.

That sort of thing

Some of you may remember Empire (or Empire Deluxe); this is a random screenie I found, of the Mac edition:
http://www.cartania.com/alexander/images/empiremap.gif

Naturally I have a pile of ideas and things for such a game and I'm not revealing it here; I just want to gauge interest.

Tactics games are obviously very popular, so I'm sure theres some interest to their older brothers; but this is necessarily a simpler less defined game I'm planning, since I have limited resources of course.

(Yes, for Pandora, but I'd likely backport it to other platforms as well.. I pretty much cannot make something that isn't cross platform; its not in my nature.)

Interested?

jeff

 

[danielliu88888]

i love these types of games. i made a board game like this when i was in middle school, it was fun. the screenshot does seem to capture essence of it.

 

[God Ginrai]

I can't really imagine what you mean. :\ But if you think it's fun, then go ahead and code it. I'll be sure to try it.

-God Ginrai

 

[slaanesh]

You've described one of my all time favorite games: Civilization (the original).

Big Map, production, military units (and others if you want to play 'nice'), turn based exploring, crush the civilizations!

I really wish there was an open source version of the original Civ. Not to improve the graphics, I loved them the way they were.
Just to speed some things up and perhaps make the user interface more suitable to handhelds (or touchscreens), etc.

DosBox handles it okay, but suffers from slowness and UI issues.

 

[trooper]

You've described one of my all time favorite games: Civilization (the original).

Big Map, production, military units (and others if you want to play 'nice'), turn based exploring, crush the civilizations!

I really wish there was an open source version of the original Civ. Not to improve the graphics, I loved them the way they were.
Just to speed some things up and perhaps make the user interface more suitable to handhelds (or touchscreens), etc.

DosBox handles it okay, but suffers from slowness and UI issues.

FreeCiv ?.

Trooper

 

[skeezix]

I'm a big Civ fan, but in a way I find Civ 1 one of the greats. (Try FreeCiv for an open source re-implementation of it, btw.) I love each of them (including Civ IV, Alpha Centauri and other variations), but Civ 1 captures a certain something (and because we're all retro nerds, we love our old crap.) Civ 1 was simple (and the AI dumb), but very entertaining; Civ 2 (Testof Time) was great, but added some complexity; Civ 3, and now Civ 4 ... these days I can't afford to blow 15 hours on a game, and the complexity is enormous. Thats great, we love games that just get deeper and deeper the more you look..

.. but sometimes you want to just go beat the living snot out of the enemies and take over the world.

So I'm not envisioning a tech tree. More like the old Empire game, or even faster version of your Panzer General and so forth.

The Tactics games are 'move, and action' type games, with very limited number of units and points of interest on a map -- its designed to put you into an interesting position with a smart AI; here I'm talking about a large world, you're all on the same tech level, and you rove out and destroy/capture.

(Though I have a lot of ideas to make it more interesting; one coudl easily add a 'run option' that makes it so your production timers are faster/slower as your percentage ownership of cities changes; thus as you win, you start to really win, and as you lose.. you better recover, or get steamrolled. That woudl be an option for a match .. if you want a fast game, that'd do it.. tension claw and tooth in the middle until the balance tips, then slaughte;r or play a normal paced game, where tanks cost 2 turns to make, planes 5, and ships 10, say, and go explore and conquer.

I envision keeping the rules simple to start with, a minimal UI, and so on .. and then grow it later.

Just might be too old school.. not sure if anyone wants a bsic wargame anymore, or if they want Tactics (very specialized and stylized) or Complex (like Civ, Glactic Civilization, etc.)

jeff

BTW, in addition to freeciv, you can of course run Civ 1 in ST emulators, SNES emulators and Amiga emulators .. Civ 1 got ported to everything

 

[Vorporeal]

What you're suggesting sounds somewhat like Advance Wars.

 

[God Ginrai]

You've described one of my all time favorite games: Civilization (the original).

Big Map, production, military units (and others if you want to play 'nice'), turn based exploring, crush the civilizations!

I really wish there was an open source version of the original Civ. Not to improve the graphics, I loved them the way they were.
Just to speed some things up and perhaps make the user interface more suitable to handhelds (or touchscreens), etc.

DosBox handles it okay, but suffers from slowness and UI issues.

FreeCiv ?.

Trooper

I was thinking the same thing when I was reading his post.

I'm a big Civ fan, but in a way I find Civ 1 one of the greats. (Try FreeCiv for an open source re-implementation of it, btw.) I love each of them (including Civ IV, Alpha Centauri and other variations), but Civ 1 captures a certain something (and because we're all retro nerds, we love our old crap.) Civ 1 was simple (and the AI dumb), but very entertaining; Civ 2 (Testof Time) was great, but added some complexity; Civ 3, and now Civ 4 ... these days I can't afford to blow 15 hours on a game, and the complexity is enormous. Thats great, we love games that just get deeper and deeper the more you look..

.. but sometimes you want to just go beat the living snot out of the enemies and take over the world.

So I'm not envisioning a tech tree. More like the old Empire game, or even faster version of your Panzer General and so forth.

The Tactics games are 'move, and action' type games, with very limited number of units and points of interest on a map -- its designed to put you into an interesting position with a smart AI; here I'm talking about a large world, you're all on the same tech level, and you rove out and destroy/capture.

(Though I have a lot of ideas to make it more interesting; one coudl easily add a 'run option' that makes it so your production timers are faster/slower as your percentage ownership of cities changes; thus as you win, you start to really win, and as you lose.. you better recover, or get steamrolled. That woudl be an option for a match .. if you want a fast game, that'd do it.. tension claw and tooth in the middle until the balance tips, then slaughte;r or play a normal paced game, where tanks cost 2 turns to make, planes 5, and ships 10, say, and go explore and conquer.

I envision keeping the rules simple to start with, a minimal UI, and so on .. and then grow it later.

Just might be too old school.. not sure if anyone wants a bsic wargame anymore, or if they want Tactics (very specialized and stylized) or Complex (like Civ, Glactic Civilization, etc.)

jeff

BTW, in addition to freeciv, you can of course run Civ 1 in ST emulators, SNES emulators and Amiga emulators .. Civ 1 got ported to everything

Just to clarify: By Tactics, do you mean games like RTSes? (C&C, Stronghold, etc.)

Also, your game sounds interesting. I've never played that type of game before, so I can't tell you if I will actually enjoy it or not, but I can say that it has sparked my interest and that I would give it a shot if you made it.

-God Ginrai

 

[bnolsen]

I'd like to see something like steel panthers on pandora. That would be an excellent port.
I would think that lgeneral would be easy to port.

 

[Esn]

I can't really imagine what you mean... I haven't played any of the games mentioned (other than Advance Wars, which was fantastic). I'll be willing to try it out on the Pandora, though.

 

[bzar]

What you're suggesting sounds somewhat like Advance Wars.

Advance Wars is an example of the "Tactics" type game he's talking about. I really love those games .

 

[RajTakhar]

Shit Yeah - we're interested

Just love old school tactical sims circa Dune II (Command and Conquer type) as well as the more tactical type ones

Quite a few should be freeware by now

Would be willing to help in whichever way possible

Cool!

 

[mosschops]

i'd enjoy a game like that but for me it would need a dreaded "Unique Selling point" like offline multiplayer, a Risk type borders scenario, dare i say multi playtform interoperability? to seperate it from the advance wars and freecivs etc.

 

[bzar]

i'd enjoy a game like that but for me it would need a dreaded "Unique Selling point" like offline multiplayer, a Risk type borders scenario, dare i say multi playtform interoperability? to seperate it from the advance wars and freecivs etc.

I actually have an eternity project (it progresses VERY slowly ) like that. It's kind of a cross-breed between advance wars and weewars (which is a web-based tactics game). My game's going to be web based as well (because that way it works on any platform and is easily accessible). I have a simple game mechanics python prototype already working (actually it also works on s60-pygame if you set the files up right, which is nice ), but the web implementation will be much better structured and generally of better quality, so it takes time. Also for the next X months I'll have near-zero time for my own projects. But it's coming "when it's ready" and the interface will be pandora-friendly.

 

[elwing]

I loved "Civilization: Call to Power" even if that wasn't a real civ

 

[peelie]

Robocalypse - great game with great +humour+ in it, something like this for pandora would be great; been playing the ipod touch version.

cheers

 

[scottm]

Hi Skeezix,

I'd love an old style Strategy / wargame for the Pandora - of course it would have to be tbs ;-) to make it old skool ;-) A game based with a fantasy theme would be my choice - like Fantasy General by SSI.

I've remade a few tbs Strategy / war games myself - I was hoping to port them to Pandora - but as 2 are in Blitzmax and 1 is in vb.net this doesn't look likely ;-). The TBS I remade are SorcererLord, Lords of Conquest and Kaiser. You can see the screenshots and download them here http://www.kaiserpc.co.uk

 

[hitbyambulance]

actually knowing what you're talking about* - yeah, something Avalon Hill-ish would be cool to see.

* not just because i'm old, ha ha

 

[gruso]

I'd hit it!

 

[MaxNormal]

The Warlords series of games on PC is very much like you describe, but in a fantasy setting. I used to play it for hours and hours with friends to battle take over the world. The original and possibly Warlords II should be fine in dosbox on pandora.