{"id":1081,"date":"2008-10-17T15:50:20","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T19:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/10\/17\/ironclads-american-civil-war-demo-comments\/"},"modified":"2008-10-17T15:50:20","modified_gmt":"2008-10-17T19:50:20","slug":"ironclads-american-civil-war-demo-comments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/10\/17\/ironclads-american-civil-war-demo-comments\/","title":{"rendered":"Ironclads: American Civil War Demo Comments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A demo is now available for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.totemgames.ru\/main_en.html\">Totem Games&#8217; 19th century naval wargame<\/a>. You can play either side of the war in a multiple ship battle.<\/p>\n<p>My early impressions are not good, mostly because it doesn&#8217;t feel like naval combat. It&#8217;s turn based, which is fine, but you only face enemy fire on the enemy&#8217;s turn, which is not. When you move your ship into a position to fire, you can unleash hell and then run for the hills and get no counter battery in your direction. Fire your broadsides and run like hell; there&#8217;s only a small chance that you&#8217;ll be chased.<\/p>\n<p>The result is that there isn&#8217;t a lot of risk\/reward calculation in choosing your angle of approach, only in your direction of escape. If I can get close enough, I can fire my fore, aft and starboard guns and, if my ship is fleet enough, turn and get a couple of port shots off. Meanwhile, the enemy captain has to wait his turn.<\/p>\n<p>This sort of design isn&#8217;t unique to <em>Ironclads<\/em>; I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ve run across it in other wargames. But even older land wargames like <em>Age of Rifles<\/em> had opportunity fire that you had to be aware off. Yes, much of the time you could approach and fire without a shot against you. But part of the game&#8217;s design was to save some of those action points for firing at whatever came in range. This was why defensive positions were so tough to crack.<\/p>\n<p>The game looks OK and has a very intuitive interface. It&#8217;s probably one of the most user friendly naval games to come along in a while. I&#8217;m still not sure whether I&#8217;ll pull the trigger on a purchase though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A demo is now available for Totem Games&#8217; 19th century naval wargame. You can play either side of the war in a multiple ship battle. My early impressions are not good, mostly because it doesn&#8217;t feel like naval combat. It&#8217;s turn based, which is fine, but you only face enemy fire on the enemy&#8217;s turn, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[62,99],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-hr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}