Whimsical ACW card-based steampunk tactical OMGBBQ: Ironclad Tactics

[JasonPratt]

This game apparently exists.

It unlocks on Steam in about two weeks. I am very seriously thinking of buying it, even pre-ordering.

HOW IS SOMETHING THIS AWESOME REAL!?!

[LongBlade]

Hmmm.

Hmm

hmm

hmm.

[bayonetbrant]

looks very cool

[W8taminute]

It is a great time to be a gamer indeed.  Definitely keeping my eyes open for this one.

[Nefaro]

I expect a full report after you've played it, JP.  :)

[Gusington]

Oh dear.

[TheCommandTent]

I expect a full report after you've played it, JP.  :)

+1

[JasonPratt]

The game unlocked today -- runs somewhere around 350 Megs, so not very large. It's... um... quirky. (You might as well turn off the music because while it isn't horrible or bad in any way, neither is it even slightly synched with what's going on at any time. It just runs in the background.)

Okay... wow... where to start describing it. Steam-driven robots in the American Civil War, but if you've read down the thread you know that already...

You will ABSOLUTELY NEED THE TUTORIAL because I don't know if there are any instructions, and this game plays absolutely differently from any other game I've ever played in 30+ years of playing computer games (or the console equivalents thereof). As it happens, the tutorial is integrated into the campaign. But the first mission is, I kid you not, simply putting your first robot on the battlefield. Which isn't hard, but neither is the game remotely intuitive at first.

(Production values are polished fine, btw.)

The basic concept is that you have a field of four rows (maybe five, I don't have it open at the moment) running left to right. You feed troops into those rows and they march across the field left to right automatically, unless you manually tell them to pause by clicking on them. If they go off the screen to the right, you'll earn victory points equal to the value of the troop. Your opponent is trying to do the same thing to you, along the same rows, except in the other direction.

If you're thinking that this sounds like NO CIVIL WAR TACTICS YOU HAVE EVER HEARD OF, and this bothers you, you should stop now and move along. The ACW is purely flavor setting for the missions: this could have been dragons on the moon, or fast-running zombies charging at each other at midnight in a Wal-Mart.

So, where are the "tactics" of which the game speaks?

Oh the game is surprisingly deep once it gets going, so long as you firmly refuse to try to think not only like ACW warfare but unlike any kind of reasonable warfare that humans and robots and cats might get into. (...um, yes, cats. Cats are unarmed and can run across the field to score points, I think. Unless they get squished by enemy robots. Or shot.)

See, there's this timer, which gives you about two seconds to assign actions (which cost points, which you accrue every round to spend on actions), then cycles through another two seconds working through phases of action resolution (like maneuvering or healing), shooting, and then movement. This clock runs RELENTLESSLY. So once you drop a troop into a row, that troop is going to march forward across the screen unless you click on it to pause it, or play a card on it to change its row.

You'll build a deck of 20 cards from your stock (max four cards of a type per deck), which dictates the probability of what kind of card will be generated every round. So long as a card isn't played it cycles to the right each round and eventually runs off the right side of your hand, but you won't run out of cards -- new ones always cycle in.

If you've built up enough action points (and the cheapest troops only cost one, so you can play them any time), you can click on a troop card and then choose a row to deploy the troop on. Then the troop will appear as the "action" phase resolves, and will move with the final phase, "movement". Different troops move at different rates; scout troops move faster than usual but are typically unarmed.

Robots (automatons) come into play unarmed (so far as I've played, that may change with more expensive types later), and the earliest model cannot ever be armed (so far as I've gotten into the game) but it can still squish organic troops (like humans and cats. I think cats. Maybe cats can be caught by humans or shot by anyone but can scamper under the treads of the robots. Haven't tried yet.)

You arm a robot by clicking a weapon card (if you have enough AP) and then clicking a robot, literally adding an arm to it with a gun. (This also adds a range ahead of the robot.) Humans come into play armed, if they have guns at all, I think. (Human scouts don't, like the earliest robots. And cats.) When a troop has a gun, it shoots (no ammo penalties) once a round at the proper phase, automatically hitting anything in range ahead in its row. Each troop type has a certain number of hit points (or whatever they're called), and each weapon does a certain amount of damage, but you can heal damage in the field (at least on robots) by using the appropriate card.

Maneuver cards allow you to shift a troop into the nearest row to its left or right (up or down on the screen if you're running left to right). This gets unarmed robots out of the way of armed ones, and into the way of human scout troops or whatever.

You don't win by causing damage, but the amount of damage caused to the enemy, or other mission objectives, will award extra cards for your set to make decks from. As far as I can tell, winning is purely a question of getting the goal-number of troops off the map on the enemy's side before vice versa.

It occurs to me that this may be the most schizophrenic description of a game I've ever written.

If there's a demo, I strongly recommend playing that before buying. THIS GAME IS AN ACQUIRED TASTE BE WARNED!! But it has a frantic sort of insane charm.

Would I have spent money on it knowing how it played? No. But that doesn't mean I think the game is inherently bad, the gameplay is unique and does systematically work, and it has its own internal coherent logic. It's just so different that I'm not sure what kind of setting would have worked for it. Definitely not the ACW. (Rival zombie hordes in Wal-Mart aisles, maybe...)

If you want to play something super-different, and the above description intrigues you, go for it.

[JasonPratt]

If you are thinking to yourself, "Didn't the video show the gameplay? Didn't Jason link to the video in the op?!"

Yes, and yes. The video only shows snippets of gameplay, though, a few seconds at a time, and the game clock is moving much MUCH slower even in those few seconds of gameplay shots. When the game video says this is A FAST PACED GAME, and you watch the video gameplay, trust me it's much faster in the real game.

Having played the game, I can see and understand what's "really" happening in the quick gameshots shown in the video. But the reality was very different than my expectations nevertheless. Read my description, watch the video again, pay careful attention to what is going on in the gameplay snippets, and speed up those snippets so that a whole round passes in about three seconds. i.e. about the same amount of time each gameplay snippet flashes up.

(Possibly the gameclock can be slowed down, but I don't know how yet. I suspect that would affect the pressure-based design of the game: the challenge is to think fast in choosing between limited and changing resources, and applying them to the appropriate place for the best results.)

[tgb]

There have been several videos posted since release yesterday, that give a good sense of how it plays.  I've seen it compared to Plants vs. Zombies, and that's pretty accurate.  It is unique, but uniqueness goes a long way in the age of sequels, imo.

I also like that there are no microtransactions (developers say all cards are unlockable in the cmapaign), and that it was designed with single-player in mind, rare for a CCG.

Steam is offering  a two-pack for $22.50, and I would go in with someone else if they are interested.

[JasonPratt]

This review gives a good idea of the game (and is pretty charitable toward it).

Watching it, I suspect the game moves faster during the earlier missions because there are fewer things on the board to take up time resolving the action, kill and move phases. When I'm just watching like this, I can see that the placement phase takes about 4 seconds and the other phases take varying amounts of time depending on what needs to be resolved.

[tgb]

I'm enjoying this, despite the feeling that it's really a puzzle game at heart.  The developer obviously wants you to figure out and create the optimum deck for each level.