Indie Strategy Games - post 'em if you find 'em

[Modron]

Another SGS game came out a few days ago:


Freecol hit 1.0 a few days ago as well so I posted that in the dedicated 4x thread.

 

[Lagi]

Another SGS game came out a few days ago:


Freecol hit 1.0 a few days ago as well so I posted that in the dedicated 4x thread.

woow historical game not about ww2 ? no hexes? area control ? china and no anime girls? spearman and muskets.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Another SGS game came out a few days ago:


Freecol hit 1.0 a few days ago as well so I posted that in the dedicated 4x thread.

woow historical game not about ww2 ? no hexes? area control ? china and no anime girls? spearman and muskets.

Dayum. Taiping rebellion is IMO one of the coolest events that ever happened, so the game is worth looking into just for the setting alone. Not sure about the price tag though...

 

[Victor1234]

I just mean in terms of actively fighting/swinging your sword/dodging/blocking type of stuff, that might only last, in a very localized area, for a few minutes, before the men at that point of the front back away to near the edge of, or just beyond, missile range, to take a breather, drink water, hurl insults and step forward and throw missiles, and after a pause some local junior officer or chieftain leads them forward into another melee attempt. Certainly the whole battle can last many hours or all day. Kind of think about it as analogous to, in a boxing match, the two fighters might spend more time rotating around each other and taking quick feeler jabs than they do fully going at it. See if you can find this somewhere:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/300198

...

...
4. unit behaviors are interesting [intentional?]... i have 2x spearman units, and both block stop 10m from each other in formation, and from front lines few spearmen walk to the center to solo eachother.

thanks for trying it!
...
4) yes they are intentional, but perhaps fit swordsmen better than spearmen, so I may need a different combat coordinator for them. The idea is to be a bit like the description of combat in Phil Sabin's Lost Battles and other essays where men don't constantly fight, as that would be impossible to sustain, but shift back and forth on the battlefield, locally coming into contact in a flurry of melee and then falling back to rest and throw missiles if they have them, but it still needs work.

Just as an FYI on #4, that topic (sustained melee combat) is very controversial even though it's becoming very popular in academic circles nowadays and has been since the early 2000's.

As a summary, certain academics take the view that ancient battles can't have been all day affairs like the ancient historians claim because actively fighting for too long would tire people out ('be impossible'). They use examples from things as diverse as modern reenactment groups, MMA fights and even the WW2 SLA Marshal study (that itself has IMO thoroughly been discredited) that claims the majority of soldiers didn't attack/shoot but only fired in self-defense.

Frankly, I think it's BS. Just because battles took all day long, that doesn't mean everyone was actually fighting all day long. Ancient historians are very clear in describing a host of other activities that technically count as being part of the battle but are not actively fighting. This includes things like a battlefield recon by cavalry while the main army chills in camp, having breakfast, forming up into lines, etc.

Even Total War battles don't last longer than an hour or two of fighting, which is perfectly reasonable to spend in physical exertion IMO, and this idea that just because it's mostly fatasses that are trying to squeeze into lorica segmenta on weekends and they can't waddle around for more than an hour or two at a time, that this was true for all of human history, it turns portrayals of ancient battles into a joke. How silly do we think people were back in the day anyways?

Yes I know, that's what I meant too and why I said it's controversial. You are going with Sabin's interpretation. He is supported by Goldsworthy and Thorne and has been gaining a lot of traction for years because of it (Goldsworthy is...well, gold for some reason despite being a rubbish historian IMO).

On the other hand, you have Anders and Zhmodikov who disagree and argue for a more traditional interpretation. Ironically, Sabin actually based his idea on Zhmodikov's work. Zhmodikov never said that melee fighting only lasted a few minutes though, he said that Roman soldiers spent more time in ranged warfare throwing pila than just the 1 pre-charge volley and that Roman battles took as long as the ancient historians said because they switched between melee and ranged with the flow of the battle, not because they took water breaks or time outs.

To me, the controversy is moot. Sure, it's technically open to multiple interpretations because we have no conclusive witness accounts to say specifically one way or another from this time and they are trying to explain how battles could last all day. Sabin's theory is they had short rounds and took breaks like in boxing or MMA, which is farcical and anachronistic if you think about it even a little. Modern boxing rounds last for 2-3 minutes because they're not the blood sport they were originally, but we have records from the first semi-organized/legal fights and the rounds were over 20 minutes long in the beginning. One of the longest fights we have is from Australia, where 2 dudes bare knuckle boxed for over 6 hours in the 1850's.

We also do have accurate timekeeping and records from early modern period battles that were still melee heavy, that spell out point blank that melee fights went on for hours and nobody collapsed from exhaustion, from a time when clock technology was also pretty advanced. Anyone reading any of the IIRC 4 common soldier/lower officer memoirs from the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631) is immediately struck by how physical the fighting was. In particular, there is a pike battle on the Imperial right flank that goes on for 2 hours and only ends when the commander gets killed and they rout with no breaks in the fighting.

Ultimately it's your game, but know there are multiple interpretations of it in academia.

 

[gabe1010]

I just mean in terms of actively fighting/swinging your sword/dodging/blocking type of stuff, that might only last, in a very localized area, for a few minutes, before the men at that point of the front back away to near the edge of, or just beyond, missile range, to take a breather, drink water, hurl insults and step forward and throw missiles, and after a pause some local junior officer or chieftain leads them forward into another melee attempt. Certainly the whole battle can last many hours or all day. Kind of think about it as analogous to, in a boxing match, the two fighters might spend more time rotating around each other and taking quick feeler jabs than they do fully going at it. See if you can find this somewhere:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/300198

...

...
4. unit behaviors are interesting [intentional?]... i have 2x spearman units, and both block stop 10m from each other in formation, and from front lines few spearmen walk to the center to solo eachother.

thanks for trying it!
...
4) yes they are intentional, but perhaps fit swordsmen better than spearmen, so I may need a different combat coordinator for them. The idea is to be a bit like the description of combat in Phil Sabin's Lost Battles and other essays where men don't constantly fight, as that would be impossible to sustain, but shift back and forth on the battlefield, locally coming into contact in a flurry of melee and then falling back to rest and throw missiles if they have them, but it still needs work.

Just as an FYI on #4, that topic (sustained melee combat) is very controversial even though it's becoming very popular in academic circles nowadays and has been since the early 2000's.

As a summary, certain academics take the view that ancient battles can't have been all day affairs like the ancient historians claim because actively fighting for too long would tire people out ('be impossible'). They use examples from things as diverse as modern reenactment groups, MMA fights and even the WW2 SLA Marshal study (that itself has IMO thoroughly been discredited) that claims the majority of soldiers didn't attack/shoot but only fired in self-defense.

Frankly, I think it's BS. Just because battles took all day long, that doesn't mean everyone was actually fighting all day long. Ancient historians are very clear in describing a host of other activities that technically count as being part of the battle but are not actively fighting. This includes things like a battlefield recon by cavalry while the main army chills in camp, having breakfast, forming up into lines, etc.

Even Total War battles don't last longer than an hour or two of fighting, which is perfectly reasonable to spend in physical exertion IMO, and this idea that just because it's mostly fatasses that are trying to squeeze into lorica segmenta on weekends and they can't waddle around for more than an hour or two at a time, that this was true for all of human history, it turns portrayals of ancient battles into a joke. How silly do we think people were back in the day anyways?

Yes I know, that's what I meant too and why I said it's controversial. You are going with Sabin's interpretation. He is supported by Goldsworthy and Thorne and has been gaining a lot of traction for years because of it (Goldsworthy is...well, gold for some reason despite being a rubbish historian IMO).

On the other hand, you have Anders and Zhmodikov who disagree and argue for a more traditional interpretation. Ironically, Sabin actually based his idea on Zhmodikov's work. Zhmodikov never said that melee fighting only lasted a few minutes though, he said that Roman soldiers spent more time in ranged warfare throwing pila than just the 1 pre-charge volley and that Roman battles took as long as the ancient historians said because they switched between melee and ranged with the flow of the battle, not because they took water breaks or time outs.

To me, the controversy is moot. Sure, it's technically open to multiple interpretations because we have no conclusive witness accounts to say specifically one way or another from this time and they are trying to explain how battles could last all day. Sabin's theory is they had short rounds and took breaks like in boxing or MMA, which is farcical and anachronistic if you think about it even a little. Modern boxing rounds last for 2-3 minutes because they're not the blood sport they were originally, but we have records from the first semi-organized/legal fights and the rounds were over 20 minutes long in the beginning. One of the longest fights we have is from Australia, where 2 dudes bare knuckle boxed for over 6 hours in the 1850's.

We also do have accurate timekeeping and records from early modern period battles that were still melee heavy, that spell out point blank that melee fights went on for hours and nobody collapsed from exhaustion, from a time when clock technology was also pretty advanced. Anyone reading any of the IIRC 4 common soldier/lower officer memoirs from the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631) is immediately struck by how physical the fighting was. In particular, there is a pike battle on the Imperial right flank that goes on for 2 hours and only ends when the commander gets killed and they rout with no breaks in the fighting.

Ultimately it's your game, but know there are multiple interpretations of it in academia.

yes of course battles or individual fights lasted a long time, but even in a 6 hour boxing match or 2 hour pike combat, you can still take a single step back to semi-rest on a minute to minute basis, even if you don't fall all the way back for water etc....Keegan's account of Agincourt for example describes how, without the room to at least back away to manuever a bit and block, if you are thrown on to the enemy by a mob of your own men behind you and don't have the space to temporarily back away, then you get totally slaughtered as you are basically defenseless, too crammed in to move like in a moshpit.

Game-wise, I mean that the total war approach of smashing the two units together and assigning each soldier a combat partner and they each constantly fight until one falls over is insufficiently subtle and detailed in its approach, and doesn't enable things like systematic unit fallbacks that we know were common and would require space. What are your thoughts for example on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRcJi7Mn8t0
..

 

[Victor1234]

I just mean in terms of actively fighting/swinging your sword/dodging/blocking type of stuff, that might only last, in a very localized area, for a few minutes, before the men at that point of the front back away to near the edge of, or just beyond, missile range, to take a breather, drink water, hurl insults and step forward and throw missiles, and after a pause some local junior officer or chieftain leads them forward into another melee attempt. Certainly the whole battle can last many hours or all day. Kind of think about it as analogous to, in a boxing match, the two fighters might spend more time rotating around each other and taking quick feeler jabs than they do fully going at it. See if you can find this somewhere:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/300198

...

...
4. unit behaviors are interesting [intentional?]... i have 2x spearman units, and both block stop 10m from each other in formation, and from front lines few spearmen walk to the center to solo eachother.

thanks for trying it!
...
4) yes they are intentional, but perhaps fit swordsmen better than spearmen, so I may need a different combat coordinator for them. The idea is to be a bit like the description of combat in Phil Sabin's Lost Battles and other essays where men don't constantly fight, as that would be impossible to sustain, but shift back and forth on the battlefield, locally coming into contact in a flurry of melee and then falling back to rest and throw missiles if they have them, but it still needs work.

Just as an FYI on #4, that topic (sustained melee combat) is very controversial even though it's becoming very popular in academic circles nowadays and has been since the early 2000's.

As a summary, certain academics take the view that ancient battles can't have been all day affairs like the ancient historians claim because actively fighting for too long would tire people out ('be impossible'). They use examples from things as diverse as modern reenactment groups, MMA fights and even the WW2 SLA Marshal study (that itself has IMO thoroughly been discredited) that claims the majority of soldiers didn't attack/shoot but only fired in self-defense.

Frankly, I think it's BS. Just because battles took all day long, that doesn't mean everyone was actually fighting all day long. Ancient historians are very clear in describing a host of other activities that technically count as being part of the battle but are not actively fighting. This includes things like a battlefield recon by cavalry while the main army chills in camp, having breakfast, forming up into lines, etc.

Even Total War battles don't last longer than an hour or two of fighting, which is perfectly reasonable to spend in physical exertion IMO, and this idea that just because it's mostly fatasses that are trying to squeeze into lorica segmenta on weekends and they can't waddle around for more than an hour or two at a time, that this was true for all of human history, it turns portrayals of ancient battles into a joke. How silly do we think people were back in the day anyways?

Yes I know, that's what I meant too and why I said it's controversial. You are going with Sabin's interpretation. He is supported by Goldsworthy and Thorne and has been gaining a lot of traction for years because of it (Goldsworthy is...well, gold for some reason despite being a rubbish historian IMO).

On the other hand, you have Anders and Zhmodikov who disagree and argue for a more traditional interpretation. Ironically, Sabin actually based his idea on Zhmodikov's work. Zhmodikov never said that melee fighting only lasted a few minutes though, he said that Roman soldiers spent more time in ranged warfare throwing pila than just the 1 pre-charge volley and that Roman battles took as long as the ancient historians said because they switched between melee and ranged with the flow of the battle, not because they took water breaks or time outs.

To me, the controversy is moot. Sure, it's technically open to multiple interpretations because we have no conclusive witness accounts to say specifically one way or another from this time and they are trying to explain how battles could last all day. Sabin's theory is they had short rounds and took breaks like in boxing or MMA, which is farcical and anachronistic if you think about it even a little. Modern boxing rounds last for 2-3 minutes because they're not the blood sport they were originally, but we have records from the first semi-organized/legal fights and the rounds were over 20 minutes long in the beginning. One of the longest fights we have is from Australia, where 2 dudes bare knuckle boxed for over 6 hours in the 1850's.

We also do have accurate timekeeping and records from early modern period battles that were still melee heavy, that spell out point blank that melee fights went on for hours and nobody collapsed from exhaustion, from a time when clock technology was also pretty advanced. Anyone reading any of the IIRC 4 common soldier/lower officer memoirs from the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631) is immediately struck by how physical the fighting was. In particular, there is a pike battle on the Imperial right flank that goes on for 2 hours and only ends when the commander gets killed and they rout with no breaks in the fighting.

Ultimately it's your game, but know there are multiple interpretations of it in academia.

yes of course battles or individual fights lasted a long time, but even in a 6 hour boxing match or 2 hour pike combat, you can still take a single step back to semi-rest on a minute to minute basis, even if you don't fall all the way back for water etc....Keegan's account of Agincourt for example describes how, without the room to at least back away to manuever a bit and block, if you are thrown on to the enemy by a mob of your own men behind you and don't have the space to temporarily back away, then you get totally slaughtered as you are basically defenseless, too crammed in to move like in a moshpit.

Game-wise, I mean that the total war approach of smashing the two units together and assigning each soldier a combat partner and they each constantly fight until one falls over is insufficiently subtle and detailed in its approach, and doesn't enable things like systematic unit fallbacks that we know were common and would require space. What are your thoughts for example on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRcJi7Mn8t0
..

Ah but that's a different question, of spacing not melee intensity/timing. I'm not very familiar with medieval historiography but as far as I know what you wrote is the consensus about the Battle of Agincourt, but is unique to that battle and the French specifically, with the English having no spacing problems. The English archer's staves and muddy field ruined the French knight's momentum in the charge, they got stuck and unhorsed and the follow on French infantry crushed them between themselves, the English and their own dead horses/comrades in a moshpit like you said. This sort of effect did happen in other battles too obviously, but only when things went wrong like at Agincourt.

In the classics there is a general spacing debate though, about the Greek hoplite phalanx. One side says that the phalanx fought mainly with doru spears with enough internal spacing in the formation for it (and that's another never ending debate, whether they used overhand or underhand thrusts...) the other side says it was more of a shoving match to knock the enemy dudes down and kill them after, focused on shields and the rankers behind each front man pushing to generate force against the other side doing the same. My opinion is the shoving match would get pretty chaotic and easily lead to a mosh pit effect like you said, but I can see both sides have their points (like with the overhand vs underhand thing), so it's not as clear cut to me as the intensity debate.

As far as the game goes, I checked out your video. I can see what you're trying to do and how Total War looks in comparison, but honestly I think you'd be better off improving the battle AI logic (and making it moddable) than focusing on this specific issue. Your average player isn't going to appreciate it and it'll just look weird/stupid to them and possibly turn them off from the game.

For this specific clip, I think the behavior is mostly believable. We know multiple cavalry charges were a thing. The only things that bugged me personally were how the cavalry threw missiles immediately before impact instead of while charging (didn't seem like they'd have time to switch to anything a second before impact) and the infantry behavior in the early part. It's immersion breaking to see individual infantrymen leave the safety of their formation in that clip to do 1 on 1 duels with the horsemen, putting themselves at a disadvantage for no reason.

The whole point of a formation and casualties during routing is that single soldiers are much easier to cut down than when they're in formation, even though some cultures practiced champion combat, which is basically what this is showing until nearer the end. Even the late Eastern Romans/Byzantines did during the Muslim invasions at the tail end of antiquity (I don't know enough specifics to know if for example the Japanese samurai would've found 1 on 1 horseback vs foot to be fair though).

Conversely, the cavalry doing 1 on 1 duels with the infantry like that with so much space for the infantry to gather around looks off. Again, it's not my area, but I do know that in the late medieval period, militias in modern Belgium/Netherlands found ways to beat the French mounted knights by adopting tactics that saw them swarming in groups of 3 against 1 knight, with specific roles for each infantryman (1 would try to kill the horse, 2nd would try to knock the knight off, the 3rd would be ready to kill him once on the ground, etc). It seems the infantry are being very polite to queue 1 at a time to take the horsemen on, but looks much better when they all charge nearer the end.

I think you should also make a new topic for your game in the Codex workshop part of the forum since that might get more eyes/visibility on it than here.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

This is a game I always wanted to see and never thought I'd ever see it.
All the battletech DOS games combined into a sandbox. This is the coolest god damn thing ever.

 

[gabe1010]

I just mean in terms of actively fighting/swinging your sword/dodging/blocking type of stuff, that might only last, in a very localized area, for a few minutes, before the men at that point of the front back away to near the edge of, or just beyond, missile range, to take a breather, drink water, hurl insults and step forward and throw missiles, and after a pause some local junior officer or chieftain leads them forward into another melee attempt. Certainly the whole battle can last many hours or all day. Kind of think about it as analogous to, in a boxing match, the two fighters might spend more time rotating around each other and taking quick feeler jabs than they do fully going at it. See if you can find this somewhere:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/300198

...

...
4. unit behaviors are interesting [intentional?]... i have 2x spearman units, and both block stop 10m from each other in formation, and from front lines few spearmen walk to the center to solo eachother.

thanks for trying it!
...
4) yes they are intentional, but perhaps fit swordsmen better than spearmen, so I may need a different combat coordinator for them. The idea is to be a bit like the description of combat in Phil Sabin's Lost Battles and other essays where men don't constantly fight, as that would be impossible to sustain, but shift back and forth on the battlefield, locally coming into contact in a flurry of melee and then falling back to rest and throw missiles if they have them, but it still needs work.

Just as an FYI on #4, that topic (sustained melee combat) is very controversial even though it's becoming very popular in academic circles nowadays and has been since the early 2000's.

As a summary, certain academics take the view that ancient battles can't have been all day affairs like the ancient historians claim because actively fighting for too long would tire people out ('be impossible'). They use examples from things as diverse as modern reenactment groups, MMA fights and even the WW2 SLA Marshal study (that itself has IMO thoroughly been discredited) that claims the majority of soldiers didn't attack/shoot but only fired in self-defense.

Frankly, I think it's BS. Just because battles took all day long, that doesn't mean everyone was actually fighting all day long. Ancient historians are very clear in describing a host of other activities that technically count as being part of the battle but are not actively fighting. This includes things like a battlefield recon by cavalry while the main army chills in camp, having breakfast, forming up into lines, etc.

Even Total War battles don't last longer than an hour or two of fighting, which is perfectly reasonable to spend in physical exertion IMO, and this idea that just because it's mostly fatasses that are trying to squeeze into lorica segmenta on weekends and they can't waddle around for more than an hour or two at a time, that this was true for all of human history, it turns portrayals of ancient battles into a joke. How silly do we think people were back in the day anyways?

Yes I know, that's what I meant too and why I said it's controversial. You are going with Sabin's interpretation. He is supported by Goldsworthy and Thorne and has been gaining a lot of traction for years because of it (Goldsworthy is...well, gold for some reason despite being a rubbish historian IMO).

On the other hand, you have Anders and Zhmodikov who disagree and argue for a more traditional interpretation. Ironically, Sabin actually based his idea on Zhmodikov's work. Zhmodikov never said that melee fighting only lasted a few minutes though, he said that Roman soldiers spent more time in ranged warfare throwing pila than just the 1 pre-charge volley and that Roman battles took as long as the ancient historians said because they switched between melee and ranged with the flow of the battle, not because they took water breaks or time outs.

To me, the controversy is moot. Sure, it's technically open to multiple interpretations because we have no conclusive witness accounts to say specifically one way or another from this time and they are trying to explain how battles could last all day. Sabin's theory is they had short rounds and took breaks like in boxing or MMA, which is farcical and anachronistic if you think about it even a little. Modern boxing rounds last for 2-3 minutes because they're not the blood sport they were originally, but we have records from the first semi-organized/legal fights and the rounds were over 20 minutes long in the beginning. One of the longest fights we have is from Australia, where 2 dudes bare knuckle boxed for over 6 hours in the 1850's.

We also do have accurate timekeeping and records from early modern period battles that were still melee heavy, that spell out point blank that melee fights went on for hours and nobody collapsed from exhaustion, from a time when clock technology was also pretty advanced. Anyone reading any of the IIRC 4 common soldier/lower officer memoirs from the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631) is immediately struck by how physical the fighting was. In particular, there is a pike battle on the Imperial right flank that goes on for 2 hours and only ends when the commander gets killed and they rout with no breaks in the fighting.

Ultimately it's your game, but know there are multiple interpretations of it in academia.

yes of course battles or individual fights lasted a long time, but even in a 6 hour boxing match or 2 hour pike combat, you can still take a single step back to semi-rest on a minute to minute basis, even if you don't fall all the way back for water etc....Keegan's account of Agincourt for example describes how, without the room to at least back away to manuever a bit and block, if you are thrown on to the enemy by a mob of your own men behind you and don't have the space to temporarily back away, then you get totally slaughtered as you are basically defenseless, too crammed in to move like in a moshpit.

Game-wise, I mean that the total war approach of smashing the two units together and assigning each soldier a combat partner and they each constantly fight until one falls over is insufficiently subtle and detailed in its approach, and doesn't enable things like systematic unit fallbacks that we know were common and would require space. What are your thoughts for example on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRcJi7Mn8t0
..

Ah but that's a different question, of spacing not melee intensity/timing. I'm not very familiar with medieval historiography but as far as I know what you wrote is the consensus about the Battle of Agincourt, but is unique to that battle and the French specifically, with the English having no spacing problems. The English archer's staves and muddy field ruined the French knight's momentum in the charge, they got stuck and unhorsed and the follow on French infantry crushed them between themselves, the English and their own dead horses/comrades in a moshpit like you said. This sort of effect did happen in other battles too obviously, but only when things went wrong like at Agincourt.

In the classics there is a general spacing debate though, about the Greek hoplite phalanx. One side says that the phalanx fought mainly with doru spears with enough internal spacing in the formation for it (and that's another never ending debate, whether they used overhand or underhand thrusts...) the other side says it was more of a shoving match to knock the enemy dudes down and kill them after, focused on shields and the rankers behind each front man pushing to generate force against the other side doing the same. My opinion is the shoving match would get pretty chaotic and easily lead to a mosh pit effect like you said, but I can see both sides have their points (like with the overhand vs underhand thing), so it's not as clear cut to me as the intensity debate.

As far as the game goes, I checked out your video. I can see what you're trying to do and how Total War looks in comparison, but honestly I think you'd be better off improving the battle AI logic (and making it moddable) than focusing on this specific issue. Your average player isn't going to appreciate it and it'll just look weird/stupid to them and possibly turn them off from the game.

For this specific clip, I think the behavior is mostly believable. We know multiple cavalry charges were a thing. The only things that bugged me personally were how the cavalry threw missiles immediately before impact instead of while charging (didn't seem like they'd have time to switch to anything a second before impact) and the infantry behavior in the early part. It's immersion breaking to see individual infantrymen leave the safety of their formation in that clip to do 1 on 1 duels with the horsemen, putting themselves at a disadvantage for no reason.

The whole point of a formation and casualties during routing is that single soldiers are much easier to cut down than when they're in formation, even though some cultures practiced champion combat, which is basically what this is showing until nearer the end. Even the late Eastern Romans/Byzantines did during the Muslim invasions at the tail end of antiquity (I don't know enough specifics to know if for example the Japanese samurai would've found 1 on 1 horseback vs foot to be fair though).

Conversely, the cavalry doing 1 on 1 duels with the infantry like that with so much space for the infantry to gather around looks off. Again, it's not my area, but I do know that in the late medieval period, militias in modern Belgium/Netherlands found ways to beat the French mounted knights by adopting tactics that saw them swarming in groups of 3 against 1 knight, with specific roles for each infantryman (1 would try to kill the horse, 2nd would try to knock the knight off, the 3rd would be ready to kill him once on the ground, etc). It seems the infantry are being very polite to queue 1 at a time to take the horsemen on, but looks much better when they all charge nearer the end.

I think you should also make a new topic for your game in the Codex workshop part of the forum since that might get more eyes/visibility on it than here.

i think it's hard to tell, because it's zoomed out and the models don't swap weapons yet, but in that intermediate section the infantry are running out slightly to throw missiles and then fall back, as are the cavalry, they are only meleeing then the cavalry as a group move in for melee or vice versa, so they aren't leaving formation for duels, but they do go to far out. I'll post in the codex

 

[thesecret1]

This left early access:

Tried it shortly before it left EA. The story is alright, the overall strategy is good (the various crises need some maneuvering around), BUT the AI cheats like a motherfucker. It gets free resource bonanza meaning that while for you, losing an army is a massive setback that takes quite a while to recover from, the AI can just pull the EXACT SAME stack as before outta its ass in like 3 or 4 turns. Dev said he'd make the cheating amount dependent on the number of planets left rather than a flat bonus before the game leaves EA, at least, but still. Aside from the obvious bullshit, it creates the biggest weakness of the game, which is repetition. The tactical battles take a long while to resolve, and when you're stuck fighting three each turn (where you are often fighting the exact same army composition that you've defeated twice in the last ten turns), it seriously saps your will to play due to the sheer tedium of it.

 

[Modron]

So this thing hit early access, I should have given the demo a more of shot but it kind of threw you in the deep end of way too many systems and I had other stuff to play.


Someone find out if it's good.

 

[janior]

more like total garbage

 

[Modron]

The latest strategic minds game got a standalone 3 mission demo:

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Next game from developer of Vietnam '65.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Holy shit, so this mad lad is still active. I thought he went out of biz after that 1600s ship game he made flopped. This will be a D1Y, making a game where you can play for the South Africa vs kangz is a ballsy move indeed (some faggots tried to get his Afghanistan´11 off Steam coz its raycis back in the day) and it deserves support. Plus it is most likely going to be gud.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I thought he went out of biz after that 1600s ship game he made flopped.

He made a game about exploration af Antarctica after that one.

 

[thesecret1]

This will be a D1Y, making a game where you can play for the South Africa vs kangz is a ballsy move indeed (some faggots tried to get his Afghanistan´11 off Steam coz its raycis back in the day)

Yeah, making you play as the US army was a real ballsy move, the politically correct option would be to have you play as the Taliban

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Modron]

This indie 4X came out, has a demo:

 

[Lagi]

This indie 4X came out, has a demo:

very nice game, much board game feeling (i love board games because they are excellenty design to not waste my time).
nice readable graphic, clear game rules, no narratives (except questes, not sure if its not part of demo, to teach you the game).
The theme is not adding much to the gameplay, except tugginh the floating islands to your capital. Could be as well game setup on the sea.

i think i will buy it.

z

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Steel Breeze Empire

Turn-based grand strategy map (like Medieval 1: Total War)
Real-time with pause battles (like Centurion: Defender of Rome)
Land battles, sea battles, sieges.
You can choose random units.
It is my game.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

gameplay:

 

[Parsimonious cook]

This looks p. interesting tbh fam and it goes on my wishlist. However it should be noted that there is some drama related to these devs - they made basicaly the same game set in the Afghanistan war called War Room.



I wanted to try it out a few times, but was always turned away by the terrible reviews. There are lots of people complaining about the devs abandoning the game without it being finished and such. People even started drama over this in the White Sands Steam forum and the devs responded there, claiming that "a separate team" is going to finish War Room soon(tm). You can apparently get a free test key for White Sands if you buy War Room and PM the devs on Steam or e-mail them...

 

[Modron]

This hit early access today, has a demo, and is priced to move.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

gameplay:

 

[Catacombs]

Need the avatars set ASAP