1st impressions
Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 6:18 pm
Glad to be a tester! I downloaded winzip and had no problems with the game download. I have a 2003 Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with 512 ram. Game speed has been great and I haven’t experienced any slow down in performance of other tasks.
My only previous Panzer General experience has been on an original playstation 1 and a bit of play with PG forever. I was very excited to get the download. The first five min. was great, although with my inexperience it took a while to figure out how to use the mouse to move units. The graphics are far and away much better than anything I’ve played with before. I wasn’t sure about the animations at first, but they quickly grew on me; I think they’re just about right.
I should say that I also downloaded this on my laptop and found it difficult to maneuver the map with the touch pad and couldn’t figure out how to enlarge the map. It is much easier with the mouse, so much so that I probably wouldn’t enjoy playing it on the laptop. However I did like the mouse interface after I figured it out.
Overall I was very impressed. I have so far played the first 3 tutorials and looked at several of the scenarios. Things I don’t like – On the UI you can’t tell unit stats. I have a VGA and toggling the stats bar cuts off part of the screen. I could get used to it, but it would be nice if at least part of the stats were visible. Particularly attack/def. values and if a unit is mechanized or not. I do like that the units will dismount at the beginning of a new turn, but I don’t know if that is new to this game.
I wish the zoom was a little more comprehensive than just near and far. I think it might be cool if there was some way to visually see what particular unit is mounted with out having to mouse over to it. I mean, it’s not too much to just point the mouse at it but I’m always forgetting exactly which unit I parked where etc.
I did have one issue with the 3rd campaign. I got to turn 14 and it quit on me and went back to the main screen. I went to auto save, and it did it again. I assume this is built in for the testing version?
I will continue to test. I want to finish all the tutorials and then I will try some scenarios and campaigns. I will also look at playing online and modding.
My only previous Panzer General experience has been on an original playstation 1 and a bit of play with PG forever. I was very excited to get the download. The first five min. was great, although with my inexperience it took a while to figure out how to use the mouse to move units. The graphics are far and away much better than anything I’ve played with before. I wasn’t sure about the animations at first, but they quickly grew on me; I think they’re just about right.
I should say that I also downloaded this on my laptop and found it difficult to maneuver the map with the touch pad and couldn’t figure out how to enlarge the map. It is much easier with the mouse, so much so that I probably wouldn’t enjoy playing it on the laptop. However I did like the mouse interface after I figured it out.
Overall I was very impressed. I have so far played the first 3 tutorials and looked at several of the scenarios. Things I don’t like – On the UI you can’t tell unit stats. I have a VGA and toggling the stats bar cuts off part of the screen. I could get used to it, but it would be nice if at least part of the stats were visible. Particularly attack/def. values and if a unit is mechanized or not. I do like that the units will dismount at the beginning of a new turn, but I don’t know if that is new to this game.
I wish the zoom was a little more comprehensive than just near and far. I think it might be cool if there was some way to visually see what particular unit is mounted with out having to mouse over to it. I mean, it’s not too much to just point the mouse at it but I’m always forgetting exactly which unit I parked where etc.
I did have one issue with the 3rd campaign. I got to turn 14 and it quit on me and went back to the main screen. I went to auto save, and it did it again. I assume this is built in for the testing version?
I will continue to test. I want to finish all the tutorials and then I will try some scenarios and campaigns. I will also look at playing online and modding.