Hi guys.
If you like AIWar, you might like this game: Men of War.
http://www.menofwargame.com/ Mow is a RTT game: Real Time Tactics. Focus is on tactical warfare in WWII, but there are (and will be) expansions dealing with the CCCP in Afghanistan and the US in Vietnam, so it is a quite versatile game engine, capable of dealing with more than just one era. It looks and feels a bit like Company of Heroes, with the major exception that CoH is childs play compared to MoW.
Let me state right here at the beginning, that if you do not think loosing is fun, this game is not for you. In most scenarios, what you get is all you get, and if you loose one of your men, he is gone for good. (In coop MP you can revive your soldiers a few times, but in SP the game is quite unforgiving, if you are dead, you are dead, period). Some scenarios are mega monsters, where you are supposed to control 30+ units individually, but the core scenarios (imo) are the small commando actions, where you typically control four to six individual soldiers and/or a few vehicles.
The name of this game is situational awareness, if you forget to reconnoitre you die horribly. So you sneak around every new map in a state of constant fear, and very often you only learn by dying. After playing the same scenario twenty times you eventually learn where all the guard posts are, but don't be too sure, a lot of guards are on patrol, so even if your scout has been looking at an empty field for five minutes, you'll have to be prepared for the occasional patrol suddenly showing up.
The ai is not very clever (I have yet to meet a clever ai), but the devs have made up for this with some heavy scripting. Somehow they have managed to make your enemy quite unpredictable. Of course, a lot of enemies just stand on the same spot every time and wait to be assassinated from behind, but you are never totally sure that you know where all the mobile patrols are, or if you have overlooked one or two. Some patrols seem to leave the board but then they come back somewhere else, in their own time. Another example: I was overrun on my right flank, so I quit and restarted, making sure that I had guns and stuff on my right wing. Then he overran my left flank.
The interface is awkward and unintuitive. All newbies, prepare to die a lot because of fumbling with the controls. But it seems there is no way getting around this awkwardness, even if most controls are customizable, as you can do so very many different things with and to your soldiers, that I personally have only been able to figure out a very limited amount of changes to make the interface more streamlined, without loosing control. This is another way of saying that the game is extremely micro-intensive, so if you principally hate micro, this game is not for you. But when you eventually have learned all the commands by heart, you will be rewarded with what approaches to total control of your soldiers.
There are two game "modes". You can select your units the ordinary way and give them orders by pointing and clicking, but if you so wish you can switch mode and take total control of one unit at a time, in the so-called DC (Direct Control) mode: You hold down the Ctrl-key, and then move your presently selected soldier/tank around the map with your cursor keys (arrows) while aiming and shooting with your mouse. Just like in an FPS with a 3rd person viewpoint. Meanwhile, the rest of your units can be set to (1) stay where they are or (2) move freely, while they (a) hold fire, (b) return fire, or (c) fire at will. In certain situations the game can feel a bit like Whack the Mole, with you being the mole, and here it is very, very convenient to be able to take personal control of your precious last surviving tank and retreat it in an orderly fashion, before it gets whacked.
I have so much good to say about this game, that I don't know what to say next. So I guess I'll better stop. One thing I must mention, though: All enemy weapons, that are not destroyed beyond a certain point, can be repaired and used by you. I had this game, which I played over and over, because I wanted to try out a King Tiger. In the end I managed to sneak around it and throw a Molotov cocktail in the engine department, forcing the crew to bail out and get shot, and then the fire luckily died out, just before the tank would have exploded. I repaired the tank, crewed it and had a good time for a couple of minutes, until I went round the next corner and got whacked by an 88mm flak gun. Lesson learned: Always keep a scout or an officer with binoculars close by.
If you don't believe me, there is a fully functional demo featuring the first scenario (of 24) in the game:
http://www.1cfiles.com/menofwar/menofwar_demo_setup.exeI recommend buying the game at Gamersgate, because there you get a copy without malicious DRM-drivers. Men of War (MoW) is made by some Russians/Ukrainians/Czechs, I am not quite sure which, several studios are involved - anyway, it is made in the former East Block and published by the Czech-based publisher 1C Company
http://www.1cpublishing.eu/.
1C Company may be some big and ugly corporation, I don't know and I don't think so, but anyway, this game has all the good things I normally associate with good indie games - original and extremely challenging gameplay first of all - combined with 3D graphics that are on a par with the stuff the Total War guys are putting out.
MoW is no competition to AIWar, as there is no strategic level. AIWar is my number one strategy game, like Dwarf Fortress is my favourite sim game. MoW has its own niche, excelling in tactics only. It is a game for the select few, as one reviewer put it: The best game that noone will ever buy. Well, now I bought it.
