Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Flipside on May 21, 2008, 02:19:15 pm
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This is probably about as far from Unreal Tourney 3 as you can get, but whilst tidying my office, I found this little 9-year old gem.
It's mostly a turn based combat game, but during the other players turn, you can do material management and construction at your base, so you can't just sit around forever during your turn, since the enemy are doing the same thing, so the game-flow works quite well.
If you haven't played Battle Isle before, it's kind of hard to describe, the originals were brilliant turn-based strategies, with loads of weapons, from the missile-buggy, scourge of the early stages, to rail-mounted artillery to the Behemoth super-tank, and a damn smart AI, the one main advantage of turn-based games.
TAW follows most of the original concepts, but is 3D instead of 2D like previous versions. My only concern about it is that, like many games of this type, it seems to have lost a degree of diversity of units by going 3D. Same thing happens with city-builders like Ceaser IV, for example. Though, in all fairness, I'm still pretty early in the campaign, so I may be wrong, I'm just going from the manual that came with the game.
If you're an adrenaline freak, forget it, this game will barely raise your blood pressure apart from when you watch your most skilled units surgically obliterated by the AI, however, if you like a single player game where you really have to think about tactics, ranges, cover and elevation etc, rather than Tank-rush the nearest enemy (this doesn't work, and since resources are very limited, is a waste of tanks).
Oh yes, forgot to mention, I have, at least, found out where Supreme Commander got their waypoint system from, the system used by TAW is almost identical in a lot of ways.
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Ooh. I loved BI 1 and 2 (especially 2, spent over a month beating that and never got bored... easy, it is not), but I never knew about this one. Gonna see if I can get a hold of this somewhere and give it a try :)
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Battle Isle is great - I played it more than 15 years ago on my Amiga 500 ;7
same game, or a mod is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Line:_1914-1918 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Line:_1914-1918)
but i preferred the Battle Isle series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Isle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Isle)
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Heh, glad I'm not the only fan of BI here :D
It's certainly worth a go if you can pick it up cheap. It takes a little bit of getting use to, since you now have a 'Battle Isle' and a 'Base Isle', one provides units, the other blows them up.
What I loved about BI in particular was how much you had to treasure those experienced units later on, you begin to think like a general does, Elite units aren't tougher, but are much better shots, so you still need to protect them, hence the need for 'grunts' to soak up the counter-attacks.
The only other thing that sort of disappointed me is that logistics have been nerfed to a degree, units don't run out of ammo any more, they use a power-grid system, it speeds up the game, but means the old trick of destroying enemy supply trucks to cripple heavy units isn't nearly as effective as it used to be.
Edit: Looking at the Wiki entry on Battle Isle, I wonder what difficulty setting they were playing on, certainly at easy level the enemy just move blindly towards your units, but at the harder levels they set up ambushes, and draw your units into the firing range of heavier weapons etc.
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Yeah, one of the great things about the BI games is they dared to be hard. Forget to resupply your units? Your units run out of ammo or fuel and are useless. Forget to pay attention to the weather reports? That tank offensive you just started is going to get bogged down in mud or snow. Neglect to support your experienced units? The AI will destroy you. And it is quite willing to destroy you right from the first mission, no playing nice or holding back just because you're new.
As for the wiki entry, they must have been playing on a low setting for sure. The AI is genuinely nasty if you let it play to capacity, which is a really nice change from many newer games where the AI tends to cheat to give the illusion of being good.
Oh damn it. Now I have to load up BI2 on dosbox again. See you in a month.
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Shades of Panzer General...
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Same idea in any respects, it's more about tactics than pumping out as many units as possible, buggies are a great example in many ways. They are mounted with missile launchers that can take down a tank in a few rounds, and because they can fire and still have enough action points left to move a fair distance, they are great at a fighting retreat against armoured units many times their size, however, up against simple soldiers with grenades, they are pretty much helpless.