Any opinions good, bad or indifferent regarding Great Battles Medieval and/or Ageod's Great Invasions? Both are on sale this week for $9.99 digital download or $19.99 boxed.
You can probably find Great Invasions for $1.99 somewhere. It was one of those titles that you used to see in bargain bins at Gamestop.
I was just thinking about porting my copy of GI to my Giant Win8 Machine (aka THE PRESENCE) and starting a new campaign!
I own both titles, and have played them long enough to get an idea about them, and I'd say they're definitely worth buying on sale if you're willing to accept what the games aren't and put up with their eccentricities.
GBM is a further development of the real-time battle system dating back to the original Legion and Chariots of War. (Through Spartan/Gates of Troy, then Legion: Arena and its fantasy expansion, which dumped the strategy map management for pure army management; which was then remade pretty much directly with better graphics as Great Battles: Rome.)
The player starts with a handful of medieval troop companies working through the invasion of France (or perhaps also its defense, I forget which) during the 100 Years War, buying improvements and new companies and blinging up those new companies. There is virtually no strategic map management, just a more-or-less linear series of battles, which can be replayed indefinitely to bling up your troops with xp and gear until they succeed at beating a map thus unlocking the next one. The game on the battle maps reminds me a lot of the old Warhammer title Shadow of the Horned Rat (and its undead sequel the name of which I forget), which is a comparison I give as a compliment. The maps are (normally invisible) square grids, and you'll give your companies orders to move from square to square in various formations in pausable real-time (with diagonal moves taking proportionately longer). The game could stand some more polish, but it's quite serviceable for what it is. What it is not, is Medieval Total War (not even MTW1), or even the older Slitherine games from which it has descended; but then again its real-time tactical battle engine is much better than in those old games.
So basically it's non-fantasy Warhammer in pausable real-time with a fairly linear campaign which doesn't punish the player for losing (but naturally wins are more rewarded). There are good reasons why Matrixlither are promoting its port to tablet/pad gaming.
Great Invasions is an adaptation of the designer's monster board game to an early imitation of Paradox' Clausewitz engine. The user interface is clumsy at best, and frankly the whole thing deserves to be remade; but it does deserve to be remade, because it extensively covers a place (the usual WW1/WW2/ medieval European/NearEast/NorthAfrica map) in a time period neglected by practically every other game I know about: the Dark Ages from around mid 350 (with recently Christian Rome splitting into two halves again thanks to a usurper in the West, thus late classical antiquity) until the Middle Ages / medieval period around 1100 with the invasion of Britain by the Normans (starting the first major historical campaign between two Christian nations).
The main stumbling block to playing the game, aside from the headache-inducing UI, is that the game forces players to adhere to the board-game rules for setting up a feasible chance at a long-term game: there are always four or five players (I forget exactly), even if only one is human (the others being AI), and each player starts with a package of nations. The available packages differ between starting dates of course, and there are a bunch of other nations which may or may not rise far enough to be considered feasibly playable at which time the players bid on them. (Among other things this means, since human multiplayer would be even more nightmarishly unwieldy than a typical game of EU4 or CK2, or even the equivalents available at the time this thing was designed, the computer plays the remaining "players" AND ALSO the neutral factions and countries.) A player's nations aren't necessarily allied to one another, however, and yet the player has resources which you can use on any nation you control.
The reason the designer went this route, is because unless you're a huge well-settled nation to start with (i.e. the Persians or East Rome), it's super-difficult to survive until the end of the game, and often a large swatch of time may pass without a nation being quite able to do anything yet. Which simulates the difficulty of nations and cultures during this period, but naturally leads to player annoyance in proportion.
The game thus has a lot of tough barriers for a player to chew through. Fortunately, the game is somewhat moddable, as most of the relevant data is simply held in text files; so it's entirely possible to set up a mod where, for example, I'm playing East Rome, its minor Christian satellites nearby, the Irish and the Franks (with them having been converted a bit early although their kings are still pagan), but it isn't so easy to figure out everything that needs to be changed (which is how I ended up with the Irish and Frankish kings still being pagan! But as it happens that wasn't unusual in those days, for a king to decide to sponsor Christianity among his people, even working to get his main generals and advisers converted, and yet remain pagan himself for various reasons.)
When-if-ever I port it over to my Win8 machine, I'll probably simplify my life a bit and just stick with East Rome and its Christian client nations (even though that will still require me to re-fiddle the text files). But there are lots of choices over several different subperiods in the game. The last surges of the Persian Empire; the rise of Islam and Muslim nations; the rise of feudal European nations all over the remains of the Western Roman Empire; the first developments of the Russian people via Viking influx -- it's all hugely squee-worthy for any grog interested in the post-Imperial military history of the Cradle and Mother of Wars (Mediterranean and European cultures).
Just be aware that it isn't AT ALL an easy game to play, even by the standards of the real Clauz-engine games of the time (much moreso today). Oh, and it's still a bit buggy, though again that's because the game itself tends to stumble over the UI and the gonzo game design. ;)
No other game on the market (so far as I know) covers what it does as far as it does as thoroughly as it does, however, so at the moment it's THE ONLY choice to thoroughly play the period (aside from some partial MTW scenarios, or the Rome 1 Gold expansion which barely gets out of Imperial times, or maybe some CK scenarios which go back a couple of centuries earlier than the usual start date.)
Thanks JP, that's quite an extensive and helpful review of both games. I like honest reviews like yours because they can help us decide against a game as well as to choose to buy one. Neither game appeals to me so you saved me $10.00 I can spend elsewhere!
Welcome. :)
For whatever it's worth, I seem to recall the designer of GI being the same guy who converted his monstrous boardgame of WW1 to AGEOD's World War One (eventually WW1Gold). They don't play anything alike, but have some similar issues of super-ambitious game designs being ported with not great functional success to quasi-versions of popular gaming engines -- and yet for what they are still being the best, in some ways, currently available.