Decline Sid Meier's Ace Patrol (iOS)

[DDZ]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/sid-meiers-ace-patrol-revealed-6407825

World War I-set mobile strategy game for iOS launching May 9 as free download.
The next game from Civilization designer and industry veteran Sid Meier has been revealed. 2K and Firaxis Games today announced Sid Meier's Ace Patrol, a World War I-set air-combat game launching May 9 on iOS as a free download.

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The game was conceived, designed, and programmed by Meier himself. In Ace Patrol, players pilot vintage aircraft and must defend their base camp and allies from invaders.
30 upgradeable historical World War I aircraft and more than 120 missions will be available in Ace Patrol. In addition to a turn-based single-player mode, the game will offer two-player either locally or through asynchronous multiplayer via Game Center.
Ace Patrol joins a growing list of mobile games from Firaxis, followingHaunted Hollow (launching May 2 in the App Store) and XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which will launch this summer on iOS.

 

[DDZ]

I'm really bad at copy pasting on the Codex.

Anyway, I don't have anything that runs apple stuff so I will be missing out, it will probably be shit anyway though.

 

[evdk]

I'm really bad at copy pasting on the Codex.

Anyway, I don't have anything that runs apple stuff so I will be missing out, it will probably be shit anyway though.

30 upgradeable (...) aircraft

Is there even any doubt?

 

[DakaSha]

Civ revolution on ios is even worse, by maginitudes, then its counterparts.

Its going to be shit.

 

[Diablo169]

Sid Meier need to get the fuck away from tablets and back to PC's.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Or he can join other devs that used to make cool games but then became corrupt and retarded and commit mass suicide.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Or he can join other devs that used to make cool games but then became corrupt and retarded and commit mass suicide.

Edgy.

 

[evdk]

Or he can join other devs that used to make cool games but then became corrupt and retarded and commit mass suicide.

Edgy.

Vodka?

 

[MetalCraze]

Or he can join other devs that used to make cool games but then became corrupt and retarded and commit mass suicide.

Dude he is spearheading these devs. He doesn't even design anything anymore (hasn't been for 15 years). Just gets money from dumbed down crap Firaxis poops out every year.

 

[SCO]

Sid Meyer is still alive? I thought they just kept his corpse employed to print his name on covers.

 

[Diablo169]

Sid Meyer is still alive? I thought they just kept his corpse employed to print his name on covers.

 

[MetalCraze]

Wrong.

And everyday they sacrifice thousands of jewgolds to his Marketing Throne to keep the corpse alive.

 

[Diablo169]

Well played.

 

[Galdred]

Actually, the game plays quite well. It gets a bit expensive for its length if you buy the whole content (around 8 euros I think), if the other campaigns are as short as the free one, but the turn based system is quite nice. It plays a bit like XWing : the board game, but in a IGOUGO format instead of WEGO.

 

[Infinitron]

OP, paste as plain text.

 

[Galdred]

oops, forget what I said about the IAP : the extra content is ok, but the pay real money to get your prisoners and wounded back option is not.

 

[Trash]

Sounds like someone finally did a new version of The Ancient Art of War in the Skies. Plus I don't think Sid doing a game like this is him being dead. It's basically him returning to roots by making a smaller strategy game with a smaller budget and a smaller team. Big chance it's going to be decent at least.

Apart from the newfangled money grubbing shit that is. Fuck modern gaming.

 

[Heresiarch]

Yeah, it's ok so far. Nice implementing of air battles. I think true WWI air plane geeks may masturbate over it. The campaign isn't that costly either, $5 for a whole game with everything. The IAP to get the POW or wounded back seems to exist only as a cheat option.

 

[Galdred]

Yeah, it's ok so far. Nice implementing of air battles. I think true WWI air plane geeks may masturbate over it. The campaign isn't that costly either, $5 for a whole game with everything. The IAP to get the POW or wounded back seems to exist only as a cheat option.

I'm not too sure about it : it looks like the game is built around farming IAP from players :
Once you have one guy captured for instance, you cannot replace him at all, and are stuck with a depleted squad for up to 2 campaigns. The only way to get the guy back before the next prisonner exchange (that is, on average 6 missions later) would be to pay.
I am not sure the game was balanced as is, and IAP are a cheat code. It might very well be that the game was balanced for someone purchasing one IAP (to decrease recovery time by 1 mission permanently), or even 2.
After playing a little bit more, the IAP are not that hard to ignore if you consider that you really are not supposed to let your pilots get shot down, and that 3 pilots out is more or less game over (without that, the game would be too short/ too easy).

 

[Heresiarch]

Apparently Pocket Tactics like it, giving it a 4 out of 5: http://pockettactics.com/2013/05/13/review-ace-patrol/

I've unlocked the British campaign and it's hard in the second round of the campaign. It may have something to do with I playing at Hard, but I have no clue what the difficulties do either.

The game really forces you to plan out your pilots skills. Pilots with advanced maneuver skills can really dominate the battlefield, and those without can barely damage those with.

Getting your pilots wounded/POWed really hurts without using the IAP.

 

[oscar]

Android please.

 

[Trash]

Glad Sid still got the touch. Sad he apparantly can only apply it to mobile gaming.

 

[LESS T_T]

Sid Meier: We must not forget the value of the core gamer

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...e-must-not-forget-the-value-of-the-core-gamer

For Meier, one of the elements that's going to ultimately make a game more fun is to polish its design. And with the way the console industry has evolved, Meier now believes it's easier and more effective to get more design done on a mobile title.

"It's just a fact of life that in AAA in order to compete you've got to have awesome graphics and full multiplayer network support and a seamless interface and awesome orchestrals and sounds; that's really what it takes to compete in that marketplace," he said. "There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just that the proportion of design time versus the time to create all those other pieces [is much smaller], whereas in iOS there are lots of cool graphics and sounds but it doesn't have the same time investment to do all that, so you get to spend more time doing design; it's just a different paradigm."

"We can make games more quickly in the mobile space but there's still almost the same amount of design that can be done... A lot of what we're doing is designing and iterating games, the core stuff of making games and less of the other parts of it. Being able to get a game done in under a year and do a lot of the game design and programming and AI myself is part of the appeal to me. I can just do more games in the space than I can in another space."

Meier was quick to point out, however, that just because he's excited by the mobile market now doesn't mean he's abandoning the PC gaming marketplace. The traditional, grand scale game hasn't lost its allure just yet.

"It really depends on the idea that I'm excited about and where I can bring it to life most effectively. I could see myself doing a PC game next or a mobile game or console game; it's really not platform driven. It's more idea driven and where that's going to work best. As a company, Firaxis is committed to PC - that's been our bread-and-butter and where a lot of our audience is - but we're interested in console and we're interested in iOS. As our players evolve and move and embrace new technologies, we're going to meet them there. So to me, it's not platform driven, but it's about how a game comes to life most effectively," he explained.

I just hope.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Hope, just like sanity, is for the weak.

 

[Galdred]

Apparently Pocket Tactics like it, giving it a 4 out of 5: http://pockettactics.com/2013/05/13/review-ace-patrol/

I've unlocked the British campaign and it's hard in the second round of the campaign. It may have something to do with I playing at Hard, but I have no clue what the difficulties do either.

The game really forces you to plan out your pilots skills. Pilots with advanced maneuver skills can really dominate the battlefield, and those without can barely damage those with.

Getting your pilots wounded/POWed really hurts without using the IAP.

The difficulty makes enemy pilots more skilled (ie have better maneuvers) : the higher the difficulty setting, the more advanced maneuvers the opponent pilots get, so it changes a lot, and forces you to spread your kills at higher difficulty (or not ever get one of your top pilots out of action). The missions are not consistent in difficulty either :
the ones where you need to stop 2 bombers at once are the hardest IMO, it forces you to hurry, and the opponents gets a lot of firepower to down your planes.
Protecting or attacking resupplying tanks is much easier. The best to skill up your rookies are the balloon hunting missions.
Escorting bombers is easier than escorting recon planes, because you don't need to make them come back alive to get a win.