Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!pacbell.com!tandem!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games Subject: FAUG demo of Powermonger by E.A. -- long review Summary: Looks really good! Keywords: simply incredible Message-ID: <1990Dec5.110344.6364@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 5 Dec 90 11:03:44 GMT References: <1950@unlisys.in-berlin.de> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 181 At the First Amiga Users' Group meeting last night, a representative from Electronic Arts demonstrated Powermonger for the club Tuesday night. First the bad news: the game is not hard drive installable, and won't multitask. Paraphrasing: They do these user surveys, you know? And the answer they get back from all these guys in Europe is "I'm going to add memory to my A500 and bring it up to an awesome one meg Real Soon Now." And that's 5/6ths of the game market, A500's with 512K of memory. To put a game like this in that box, you haven't got any choice; you have to nuke the operating system and take over the machine. Make it HD installable or multitasking, and it won't run in 512K, and you just threw away 5/6ths of the Amiga market. It was the great sales response in Europe that made it possible to bring Populous out in the states, and the same holds true for Powermonger. Sigh. You can't argue very hard with that logic. They have to pay the bills. Next the quasi-good news: you can back up the disks, though you have to use a commercial disk copier: without the OS, they chose a disk format of their own, and Workbench's DiskCopy chokes and dies on it. Anyway, besides my having to buy pirating software to back up my disk legitimately, at least they've had the sense to go to manual-oriented copy protection schemes. OK, maybe some _real_ good news. ;-) The game looks great! It starts out with an introduction sequence of maybe half a dozen, animated, full screen pictures with castles, armies, couriers, a mean looking warlord, great music, some text to tell you what's going on, etc. Then you drop into a completely Amiga style game, with mouse, menus, vaguely the same screen layout as Populous, only prettier: a local map on a work surface, with control gadgets built into the surface, an overview map up in one corner, various other stuff. The work surface is a "table", and behind it stand your warlords, planning their strategy and controlling their armies. To start playing, you pull up this _huge_, scrolling, multiscreen map of the world. The worlds of Populace have become territories in one world for Powermonger. To win the game, you have, not to conquer the whole world, but to island hop from upper left to lower right along any orthogonal stepping path you choose. (Doesn't say you _can't_ arrange your path to nail every single territory, just that you don't have to.) You can save games, it looked like maybe nine possible save files from the back of the room, so you probably need a blank floppy. You get no choice in where you start, but you have the choice to redraw it with a random territory button if you don't like what you see. As you conquer territories, they are marked with a dagger driven through them; neat bloodthirsty touch! Your game motivating scenario is that you and your small battle force have been driven out of your homeland and put ashore on this small island to conquer or perish. Like Populous, the game has people off in various parts of the current territory "doing their own thing". These people have an incredibly rich level of detail. Each person has a trade, a name, an alliegance, possibly a carried weapon, a current health, and at least half a dozen other stats I didn't pick up from the back of the room. In addition, the game is _rife_ with livestock, bleating, baaing, mooing, crowing, whatever, and you can click on even the livestock and get some stats. The land is covered with villages, and if it is a farming village, then it is surrounded by fields, and the farmers are in constant circulation between the fields and houses. Villages have "manufacturies", too, and if you conquer a village, you can conscript some and put others to work "inventing" things, and keep others at work in the fields. Did I mention that your army needs food? If it is a fishing village, (near the water of course), then the fisherfolk come out of their houses, walk down to the water, enter their coracles, and go out to catch fish. If it is a mining village, then folks are working on a mine, and, since the map is a 3D cross-section of the world, like Populous, if you move to the right spot you can watch the mine's progress underground. If there are some woodcutters, then they go to the nearest forest and cut trees, and we watched them flush a flock of birds up out of the woods. The game has equal opportunity killing and dying; characters of all types may be male or female in stats and names; I wasn't close enough to judge appearances. Unlike Populous, your goal is not to terraform the land but to conquer its towns and villages. You get not one computer opponent, but up to three, or you can modem out to a friend (2400 baud is plenty fast) and the two of you compete against each other and compete with zero to two computer opponents' armies. The difference is striking; you work from camps or settlements, and when you decide to attack a village, your army pours out of its base, and marches to the target settlement. Your troops carry close in weapons like swords and pikes, or at-a-distance weapons like bows, and your hand weapon troops close the enemy, while the remote weapon troops stand back and pick them off from afar. Did I mention you march slower if it's raining or snowing? One of the controls you have is for the aggression level; you can set it to "win, but don't hurt anybody" for those easy first conquests; I guess you can set it to "take no prisoners" further on in the game. If you lunch one of the autochthons, or more likely vice versa, up floats a little ghost, and if you select it before it gets away, you'll learn that so and so "died for the glory of Xland". It's no wonder you march slower in rain or snow; the designers believe in whole gales and blizzards; it can get hard to find your armies. If you conquer a town with a warlord of its own, there is a chance you can win his loyalty. With two warlords watching over the playing table, you can split your army, and send commands by carrier pigeon from one to the other. Of course, if the starving hostiles shoot your pigeon down and eat it, the message doesn't get delivered, and your subordinate carries on under the old orders. This can probably get very inconvenient. I think I heard that you can have up to half a dozen warlords at once. You start with a few weapons, but you have to put conquered towns to work making more. Don't put everyone in the factory, though, or the crops will fail and they and you will starve. Same problem if you conscript too many people; things stop working with no workers. If you're having trouble following the action because the terraine blocks your view, don't despair; the local map pans and zooms and rotates in real time. We zoomed in on an idle army, and they were encamped in a circle around a commander who was sitting by a crackling fire. Did I mention your warlord grunts "yes" when you give him an order? Did I mention the clash of battle, the screams of the dying, the whistle of the wind as winter approaches? This game is a rich visual, audible, and tactical experience. Minus the few problems noted at the top, and granting that I left out 90% of the stuff I saw, this game is a winner that got a great round of applause after the presentation, and a few cheers during, especially when the presenter casually zoomed and rotated the map in one smooth motion to follow an army around a mountain. I have no idea at all how they got this all in one little box. It was demoed on an A1000, and the presenter said it runs on an A500, an A2000, an A2500, a 68030 accelerator board system, and an A3000, and "probably an A5000 when they make one of those". The good points far outweigh the bad points. We only watched a couple of territories get conquered, but the human interface, even with the same set of gadgets, seems much smoother than for Populous; it doesn't look so easy for the computer to overwhelm you by attacking everywhere at once. Of course, no game should be too easy, and we were conquering kindergarden-land! ;-) Additionally, there is a hook in the game, supported by a gadget in a requestor, to incorporate a data disk, although none is available now, so probably there will be a "Promised Lands" extension for this game, too. Even this many words just can't convey the overwhelming amount of detail and programming skill shown in this game. It is due out in the states in a week, apparently is already available in Europe. If your letter to St. Nick isn't in the mail yet, this is a likely entry. I waaaant one! ;-) This review ought to sell a few thousand; think they'd think to send me a free copy? Ha! Oh, yeah, I got to stand up for a few minutes and describe the c.s.a reorganization to a room half of whom had never heard of USENet, and were bored out of their minds between the few laughs I managed to acquire. They raffled off a donated copy of Amigavision, and two games (Bandit Kings of Ancient China and Ghengis Kahn, from Koei) demoed by another presenter, sold FAUG disks, another person demoed Perfect Sound (good enough that I bought one at the meeting, 25% off list). For SF-Bay area locals, checking out FAUG might be a really good idea; dues $35 per year, and the action packed meeting was in a Hyatt conference room! /// It's Amiga /// for me: why Kent, the man from xanth. \\\/// settle for \XX/ anything less? -- Convener, ongoing comp.sys.amiga grand reorganization.