I interviewed Longbow Digital Arts’ lead designer Jim McNally four years ago. Last week, I was joking with one of my Toronto based friends that she should storm their office and demand information on why it wasn’t done.
McNally sent me an email this morning to tell me it was done.
I’ve just completed the demo and I am really looking forward to playing more of the game. It has an interesting way of keeping you on task – almost intrusive in its insistence that it can help you finish objectives. The economy still doesn’t make perfect sense to me and the fine art of using my forces in a tactical chess match is still being worked out.
But the strategic map? A thing of beauty. You zoom out and see a parchment map of the Aegean. Zoom in a little closer and you see cities and structures and armies like you would on a board game. Closer still and you see your armies and workers and supply carts. Until I play the full the game and see how everything fits together in real time at a more complex stage of the game, I won’t have any firm statement on it.
Still. An ancients game. You knew I’d plug it.
Bought! I hadn’t even heard of this game, but after playing around with the demo for a little while, it seems to be worth 30$.
Thanks for the tip.
Two minutes with the demo, and I was instantly sold on it. Thanks for shining a light on it Troy.
Hmm, I really wish this was turn based. I agree, the strategic map is awesome, and I like the more historical framework. I may buy it just to support what they’re doing. I just would rather it not be RTS.
You can pause it as much as you want, planning your actions, setting your orders, then unpause and watch it unfold. So not strictly Real Time all the time without options.
Hmmm this cloth map zoom out detail thing seems to be a new trend. Elemental and now this. I wonder if it feels distracting.
Looks cool. Downloading demo now.
World War II: General Commander and the upcoming R.U.S.E use it too. To some extent I suppose you could say Sins of a Solar Empire and Supreme Commander uses it aswell, but with Hegemony I think its the boardgame miniature style that makes it appealing.
My background is in turned based strategy gaming, so when designing Hegemony, I made sure that I could do everything “paused” then just unpause, until the next event auto-paused the game.
The auto-pause thing works pretty well, I think. I’d still like a way to change the speed, though. Managing 3 battles at once can be difficult, even with the ability to pause.
Yeah, I’m enjoying it a lot so far, but it can get hectic. I finally figured out you pretty much have to accept you’re going to be regularly harassed on all your borders, and you have to decide where you just have to endure it and where you might need to move in a larger force and be more aggressive. There’s a lot of difficult decision-making, which is great — pulling that extra army from a defensive position for an attack and praying that no enemies appears in the weakened zone until you can send the army back.
I’m having a little trouble balancing my strategic goals (i.e. expanding in a way that doesn’t leave too many vulnerabilities) with the various objective paths, which occasionally seem to encourage you to overextend yourself. But I do like the objective system overall — it gives a lot of flavor and a sense of urgency.
does anybody know where i could by one at a discount. even if it’s in 2º or 3º hands?
Perfect Game !
I think is the best game i have played the last 2 years…