Surprise! Permanent Price Reductions at Matrix

[spelk]

Its all good news, won't affect the die-hards who were willing to stump up the asking price for thie niche genre, but hell its good news to hear they're making steps towards bringing the admission ticket price down for others who might want to come in and sample the delights of wargaming.

With the likes of Tomislav's Unity of Command and Wastelands Interactive hitting Steam (even if it is Greenlight at the moment), in fact isn't Slitherine dabbling in Greenlight, its all good news for us. And hopefully for the interested maybes out there, that might come and join us here and swell our ranks a bit more.

Anything that opens the hobby up is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

[SgtRock]

Some of those games are how old, 8-10 years?  Who do they think they are still charging full price, John Tiller! :o

[Sparhawk]

I buy very few games at full price now days (I bought X-Rebirth but let's not go there). I've no problem waiting a year trying to get through my "not played" list until a game comes on sale, digital downloading has enabled this. I bought all my Distant World titles during the Christmas sale, even then not discounted as much as I would buy other games, but when a game is good you don't pay as much attention to the price. Oh, I've never had such an intense gaming rush as breaking out of the Korsun Pocket. Took me a solid week of 8 hour days. Intense.

[-budd-]

Got most of those on that list that i want already, might entice others to jump on something they have wanted to try. The only i might get in the future is one of the tin soldier games.

[Rayfer]

Got most of those on that list that i want already, might entice others to jump on something they have wanted to try. The only i might get in the future is one of the tin soldier games.

Interesting....I was just looking over the list and was thinking the same thing; I might want to try one of the tin soldier games too.  Something different than I usually play and a time period I know very little about. Might prompt me to read something and learn!

[Zonso]

There are some very good games on that list for the wargamer - SSG's offerings, Hannibal and the Tin Soldiers series to name a few. The caveat being there is virtually no support, or community, for most of these older titles and if it doesn't work on your machine then good luck. The last time I tried, I could get neither Tin Soldiers or Napoleon in Italy to work on my Win7 machine.

Re this is a good thing - I take the opposite view. Likely I will be proven wrong, but since the Slitherine takeover I half expect an implosion. The wargaming market is not like the rest imo. I don't think you can continually fuel revenue with more and more offerings, or in this case 'sales' to generate positive cash flow on the monthly bottom line, without fragmenting and alienating a large portion of the intended market in the long term. Just looking at the community on the Matrix forums sees a virtual wasteland in the 'current' games section with a few gems among the more numerous duds. Just one man's opinion.

[Anguille]

I can really recommend the Tin Soldiers....great games. I like both but the best one (better engine and graphics) is Julius Caesar. Didn't have problems to run them on Windows 7. Napoleon in Italy is a different matter...it runs but requires special installation (don't remember out of my head).

Cheers

[Sir Slash]

And they've just posted a demo for Germany At War- 1941. Never seen a demo of any of their games before.

[BanzaiCat]

And they've just posted a demo for Germany At War- 1941. Never seen a demo of any of their games before.

I'm downloading it now. Hope to have time to check it out before this afternoon.

[Sir Slash]

Let us know what you think Banzai. Is it more than a Panzer General clone? Not that that's a bad thing.

[BanzaiCat]

Let us know what you think Banzai. Is it more than a Panzer General clone? Not that that's a bad thing.

I just gave it a whirl. It looked like there was a couple of scenarios and one full campaign, plus a tutorial, from the main menu. I tried the tutorial.

It's pretty much a Panzer General clone, but with a few cool bits added on. Your units gain experience, for one, and you can add specialty battalions to them to make them stronger, like a Supply Battalion to give the unit more ammo and fuel, an 'extra' Battalion to get +1 Strength to the unit, and an Anti-tank Battalion to get +3 versus enemy armor. Among other battalion types; I think there were six or so total you could choose from.

The tutorial was pretty simple. You can stack air units over land units but it wasn't immediately clear exactly how to select one or the other; when I clicked on a hex with both, it would select the ground unit. There's got to be a way to select the aircraft, I just didn't have time to hunt and peck.

The English left a LOT to be desired. I caught several little turd gems in there, including my favorite, "eleminate." Plus the grammar was pretty bad; it worked in general but it was obvious it was written by someone who doesn't have English as a first language, and it's obvious Matrix is not using quality writers/editors to look over this stuff before releasing it.

The game's 'housekeeping' screens are pure Matrix - wasting a lot of real estate and not really intuitive. The tutorial didn't cover too much how to go through the interface. It's no doubt in the manual somewhere; I read through the manual and it looks relatively well done. I find it funny that they still use the 2.3.2.4 numbering format that I started with their manuals, not to mention the inclusion of historical information. :) More power to them, I think it works for incredibly anal minds. Widows and orphans abound, though. The manual also describes branching paths that your campaigns can take; it's unlike PG in that regard, where you only play along a certain path and must win to continue. Although I seem to recall a PG that had "extra" levels based on how brilliantly you won a scenario. The branches in the manual aren't explained and therefore don't make a lot of sense, but that should become clear as you play.

I don't like that the manual is relatively well-written from a structural standpoint, but the game itself has English that is crap. That's something that irks me to no end with games, especially Matrix games from Eastern European devs. I understand their first language isn't English, but for God's sake, get a proofer that has some kind of grip on the language, man, and fix that shit in-game.

The tutorial only gave me basics of moving units and then gave me five turns to destroy three Soviet infantry units, which was hardly a challenge; although I did it in four turns.

Once I finished the tutorial, I was told to return to the main menu to try a scenario or campaign, and when I clicked the button, the game froze and never recovered. Had to Alt+Tab my way out of it and bring up Task Manager to see indeed, it was not responding and had to be manually shut down. Not impressed by that at all.

This is all based on one playthrough, though. I'm going to try it again later tonight when I have more time and see if indeed there is a full campaign with this game's demo - I will be impressed if there is.

Overall, I'm not all that impressed with it, but am piqued enough to want to try it one more time, just to be sure my experience wasn't normal.

[ComradeP]

It's a good game for what it wants to be, I liked both Germany at War and Barbarossa (the prequel of sorts). The English can indeed be comical at times, although it's generally better in the campaigns as far as I know as we gave plenty of feedback on it when beta-testing.

[Al]

Let us know what you think Banzai. Is it more than a Panzer General clone? Not that that's a bad thing.

I bought this not long after it came out.  I've messed around with it a bit.  It's easy to enough to play but I'd like to see more content.  Maybe the latest patch has that but with work and school it will be a while before I can look at it again.

B_C has written a more extensive review than I possibly could - although I'm not as bothered by the language issue as he is and I've never had the game crash.  As always, however, YMMV.

If you're looking for an easy game to play and one that does seem to get pretty good developer support I'd say it's worth $20.

Unrelated - does anyone have Commander: Napoleon at War?  That's the only one I'm interested in.

[BanzaiCat]

I played it a little more, trying the campaign, although I'm not quite sure the full campaign is in the demo version. That wouldn't make sense. Anyway, I didn't finish the first mission, just played through a few turns, and it ran no problem; no locking up.

I admit I let the language issue bother me a lot, but I'm a grammarian and take umbrage to certain usage fails. What gets me is nobody seemed to proof the in-game text. I'd done that plenty of times for other games (other developers, not Matrix or their partners), so I know it's a process. I just think it's sloppy to overlook that aspect of it.

[airboy]

The games in this list I have played are:
Carriers at War
Advanced Tactics Gold
Operational Art of War 3
Steel Panthers

All are excellent game.  Advanced Tactics Gold is my favorite 4x WW2 level technology game.  Very flexible and lots of fun.