Land Air Sea Warfare - awesome Indie 2D RTS game

[spillblood]

Hi, I discovered a great Indie RTS several months ago called Land Air Sea Warfare by Isotope 244 and bought it last month. It's a simple to control oldschool RTS game with random maps and no campaign, and it has no multiplayer, but the AI is pretty good. It's available for PC, Mac, IPod and IPhone and Windows mobile. Anyway, I enjoy it very much and there's a new version with many improvements available since last week (but only beta so far). It's the right game if you wanna play a quick round of an oldschool-RTS. It's a bit like a 2D version of Supreme Commander and also similar to Total Annihilation, but a bit more simple than both of these games. Games with large maps can last up to 4 or 5 hours. Because I think the game is not well known, I wanna hint to it here in this forum. It can be registered without Online connection (I don't have Internet at home). Just test the demo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y__KCscVp8w
http://www.isotope244.com/land-air-sea-warfare.html

[Mánagarmr]

*mutters and waits for the inevitable Android port*

[eRe4s3r]

Impressions

- When you build something the mouse cursor snaps to the screen center = fail?
- CTRL + 1-10 does not work, instead SHIFT + 1-10 = fail! (Sorry, but this is a gaming convention since 1990 - changing that for NO reason to a button more to the left/top nets 6billion negative impression points.
- There is no way to queue commands (for exploration etc) (no surprise, as Shift is wasted on the group assign key there was no more shift functionality left ;P)
- There is no build radius limitation - at least not enough of it.
- Unit Pathfinding is rudimentary
- Combat is = who builds more, wins more.

So overall, i do not approve. Maybe for smart-phone and the likes its a neat short game, but on PC this is a lot inferior to basically any other rts.

[spillblood]

Yeah, sure, it has some errors, but I think it's a lot of fun anyway.

[Echo35]

*Looks around website.
*Shrugs.
*Pulls out DSi and Advance Wars.

[spillblood]

Have you tested the new beta 2.0 or only the old demo (cause it's a lot better). And the full game is way better than the demo.

[eRe4s3r]

Mhhh, i tested the "Download now for -> Windows" thingy straight on the mainpage of the site you linked

http://www.isotope244.com/files/Land-Air-Sea-Warfare-Windows.exe (careful, direct link)

Is the beta different from that?

If thats so, then i guess my comments relate to the version one gets from said link.

Also - if the main game is better than the demo then the demo sucks. A demo is what makes the first impression - and i can't pay 20$ for this game just to find out whether you are right or not. ;P Demo's first impression is as far as i am willing to give a game the benefit of doubt nowadays. When i played AI War demo, way back in 1.004 i was hooked after the (back then 2hr) tutorial... and a campaign that addicted me after 3 hours.

And i played 2 rounds of LASW. Thats 2 more than i wanted to play after my mouse cursor snapped to the screen center after every building build command which forced me to constantly rearrange the mouse position on my pad. And thats a pretty dang bad first impression - as it annoyed me. And theres not much stuff that *can* annoy me nowadays. And if a demo manages to annoy me rather than hook me, then that lowers my "care-o-meter" from "trying the demo" to "What was the name of the game?" ;P

Also just for the record, this snapping thing, thats the first thing that i noticed, as the first thing you do is build a power generator. Talk about a bad first impression.   I don't even understand what kind of confused line of thinking makes a coder MOVE my mouse pointer to the CENTER of the screen? My mouse pad has a limited movement area, when you move the mouse to the bottom, the mouse is in the bottom area of the mouse pad, if the game moves my mouse cursor to the center, now i got to LIFT UP the mouse, put it somewhere higher or i can not scroll DOWN to place buildings in the lower half of the screen. Just to explain why i regard that as a EPIC fail ;P That is not only epic fail, that is the biggest fail i have ever seen in a PC Game.

And yeah, i am bored so i felt like "being hung up" on that issue now. Maybe the developer reads this and fixes it, in which case... that would be nice.

[spillblood]

Yeah, it is. He changed some stuff in the newer version. You have a fullscreen tactical map now (where you can give commands etc.), many units are rebalanced and the interface is different, with bigger buttons etc.
I think that mouse cursor bouncing thing you mentioned is also removed from the new beta. And there are a few new units. By the way, the demo is pretty limited. The full version is much more fun. I hope the developers add right-click commands in future versions (maybe as an additional option), and Infantry units (this is missing in the present version).
The game could also use building limitations like you mentioned. Another cool feature (don't know if that was in version 1.01): You can practically draw lines of buildings when you keep the left mouse button pressed. Very useful for building up ressource-gathering buildings or defenses (walls).
I'll give the developers some tips for improvement (have already done that before). And, by the way, you're right, AI war has a staggering amount of content even in the demo, and very long games (that's why I haven't played it as much as I'd like to, but I have it registered since version 2.0).
But this random map generation thing in LASW surely increases replayability (but the games are always shorter than in AI War). You see, it's a good game for a quick round of RTS, whereas AI-War is better for longer campaigns. By the way, the 2.0 beta is in the news post under the 1.01 demo-buttons (it says:    
Nov 22nd - v2.0 Beta Released!) I think you can try this as a demo because I had to reenter my registry key for this.

[spillblood]

Ah, version 2.0 is released now, so you should be able to get it by clicking at the normal download buttons.