I bought the game before the week-end, and sure enough spent a fair bit of time on it, so I'm willing to share my first impressions if they are of any interest here. Just to put things in context, I've been an (occasional) table top player since 20 years [although I'm maybe more a rule collector than a player, for want of time and space], and I have a keen interest in the period [although I claim no expertise on P&S warfare, I'm more focussed towards diplomacy and political history].
Overall, the game is pleasant, intuitive -- and difficult. These @#$?! Swiss pike blocks... Still could not find the way to beat them... This is a nice touch, though.
Graphics: At first glance the game is very nice, very pleasing. The main title image is superb. The in-game graphics are nice, very peaceful and rustic battlefield, troops that have the right scale and feeling : at last, a game where a tercio looks like a tercio ! The overall feeling is that of a tabletop game, which may or may not be something you like.
After the initial "wow" moment, though, one becomes more critical. The units are effectively square blocks painted over. Upon close up, the bunch of pikes protruding above units look like exactly what they are -- vertical stripes painted over a cube. The units are a bit too static (I'd love so see pikes jittering, horses getting a bit disordered with some stargglers and some faster, etc.), their status does not change their appearance (disorded units could be less well aligned for instance, and there is no reason routed pikemen would still hold their pikes still and paralel). Melées are a bit boring, all you get is a red arrow but the troops do not get any closer or entangled. The small medaillon showing the troops are nice, but a bit small, especially in the force selection screen we could have something better. We could also do with some animations, a charge that looks like a charge for instance...
Still, the overall effect is pleasing, and very efficient.
Ease of play etc.: mostly, easy, nice and intuitive. A handful of minor things:
- A "undo" button would be nice to have. Not to undo a charge that went wrong of course, but sometimes you inadvertenly right/left click instead of, for instance, hovering over another unit and I'd appreciate being able to cancel such bona fide mistakes [typically a move that did not entail any consequences such as shooting or combat could be cancelled without opening any possible cheating, I think].
- As I pointed in another thread, the impossibility to reassign keyboard keys is a royal nuisance. I'm on a French keyboard and trying to scroll with zqsd (yes, this is what wasd looks like to me) is incredibly annoying. By the same token I could never delete units form the editor, presumably because "del" is called something else on my keyboard.
- I'm playing on a laptop, that gets at home hooked on a dock with a larger screen. I started on the big screen; next time I started the game I was on the laptop screen, and the game was expecting to have a 1920*1280 screen, that was not here (my laptop being 1380*something). It never started, and worse, my screen flickered uncontrolably until I ctrl-alt-del'd the whole system. Annoying, the workaround is to delete OPTIONS.TXT, thus forcing the game to detect the screen it is on.
None of these are major, though.
Rules etc. : There are several threads in the forum arguing about specific rule points. Based on my expectations for what a period battle should look like, I'd say I can understand them: the game makes some fairly strong design assumptions, and is in a sense "one man's view of P&S battles". Now this is not necessarily wrong, but this makes for a game with strong opinions
- The lack of command&control. Battle accounts for the period are full of wings being routed before the rest of the army even saw battle, commanders rallying their troops with inspiring speeches, leaders leading a decisive charge or whole wings standing still waiting for their commander to give orders. I'm missing that -- not that it would massively change the way the game would play, but it would add some nice period flavour to have on the table Gonzalo de Cordoba, Pappenheim or Bayard. Some command rules would also force the player to keep its wing in some sort of line of battle (although the limited movement ability of foot does achive that at the moment).
- The very strict rules of engagement. The image in this review at rock paper shotgun (the forum won't let me insert an url, but it's image pikeshot05.png in the review dated 2014-10-24
) highlights nicely the issue. Here it makes no sense to have the left hand pike unable to do something about the battle going on next to them. The troop type differentiation is perhaps a tad bit too strong here, and instead of having a strict "heavy foot cannot charge horse, period" rule, we could have alternative options such as "unless it is already engaged in combat", or "unless the foot passes a cohesion test", or "unless it is commanded"... Likewise in the same situation, if the left-hand unit was skirmishers (muskeeters), it's hard to justify that they are not allowed to shoot. Again, a small amendments to the rule that "you can not shoot at an enemy in mêlée", perhaps in the form of "unless you are shooting from another side of the unit" (through its side if it is in frontal combat, for instance), may be worth considering.- The rout/pursuit rules. They certainly do give a strong flavour to the game, capture some of the features of the period and in the end are what makes the system interesting. Yet here again I feel they are somewhat extremist. I was really surprised at first when I saw my heay foot, barely able to move at 2 squares per round, running away like rabbits at 4-5 squares. I was even more surprised to see the opposing Swiss pikes running after them at the same pace -- now I can understand that the reason heavy foot is so slow is because it is hard to maintain order, but the difference seems a bit extreme to me here. Likewise I'm not sure a Reg Pk(S) unit would drop everyting and run after the loosing unit (especially if it is some skirmishers), when there are more dangerous units nearby: this is a justifiable behaviour for Irr Kn(), but does not sound right for trained, disciplined heavy foot. Essentially it makes all fights resemble cavalry engagments... Perhaps here several options could be considered, such as try a morale test before pursuing (and keep line if passed, pursuit otherwise), do not pursue unless all the opposing wing (as opposed to single unit, see my point on command) is routed, etc.
Essentially the three things together give a very strong DBx flavour to the system (surprise, surprise...), with its assets but also its limitations.
Now I understand this is the author's choice and understanding of the period, and I respect that. However, it seems to me that in a game so open to modding, there would be a very easy (hrem) solution: have most of these behaviours controlled by variables read through config files. For instance the pursuit distance (and there must be somewhere a variable giving this value for each troop type, right ?) could be exposed to the user (in a text file, perhaps ?). The rules of engagment could also be in the same file. For instance we could have
rules.cfg:
<unit_type="heavy foot"><pursuit_move=4><cannot_charge="cav"><cannot_charge="skirmishers"> etc.
Like that, modders unhappy with the current distances could edit and modify the rules.cfg to their heart's content and everybody would be happy...
Anyway -- my overall impression is very positive, and I'm dying to return to the game !
JF
