I honestly do think, though, I’m in the minority that liked Star General.
The general games would be a real coup. I wonder if I can find my old Fantasy General hint book.
coughStartopiacough
Excuse me. :)
For all those Fantasy General fans in the thread, I highly recommend “Fantasy Wars” and its sequel “Elven Legacy”. Those games really pay tribute to the “General” series.
They also have a very effective RPG leveling system for the units too. Its an RPG system that introduces new and interesting strategy choices, rather than just being a power fantasy of making your units uber powerful.
I’ve come to like it more than the original “General” games.
Tony
I’ve played it. Pretty good, but no Fantasy General.
What makes you prefer Fantasy General?
Difficulty, individual scenario construction, the light (but still fascinating) strategic layer (which I would like to see expanded in the hypothetical Fantasy General 2 that exists in my head). The unit leveling system in Fantasy War is somewhat interesting, but not an ideal fit in a game like this IMO (or maybe I should say: I’d rather have other Fantasy General mechanics present/possibly expanded on than this). Fantasy General’s advancement system was simpler but still elegant.
The 4 generals added interesting and varied strategic and tactical choices. I don’t recall anything like that in Fantasy Wars, but it has been awhile. Fantasy General had a lot of underrated mechanics that tied into that strategic layer. You couldn’t rush up one or two research trees without suffering but there was still leeway. Newer versions of units were not always a better choice. The system for delivering free stuff to the AI was pretty reasonable (but unfathomable unless you had the hint book or got the information from someone online. That’s not something I care for).
And the hero units had character out the yin yang, not to mention interesting gameplay implications.
If Elven Legacy didn’t reliably CTD on my machine whenever an airship levels up I’d like it more…
I actually own Fantasy Wars and Elven Legacy, but I’ve yet to play them. I really should. Fantasy General though…ah, peacedog hit all the points, but besides that, FG hit a sweet spot that, for me, few games of its type have hit before or since.
There is certainly a factor here that is not quite nostalgia. It was the first war game I got seriously into. When I initially began playing FG, I thought I’d roll over everything with Cavalry (because, you know, Tanks == cool!). Boy did I got rolled. So I read the hintbook (I purchased this as a game/hintbook combo. The hintbook was exceptional, just really amazing) to get a feel for the strategies I needed to be employing (it had several excellent sections detailing general play methods and discussing some of the under-the-hood mechanics). And I fell madly in love with the game. Fantasy Wars has some of those core mechanics at work and that’s great, but it still doesn’t capture the FG feel for me.
And, those additional mechanics are important. Money in FG was to be preciously horded and then carefully spent. The strategic layer was really wonderful, as was the cleverness in each campaign’s design (where you could affect how later battles progressed based on what you did in the short term). I think I secertly didn’t like any RTS post Dune 2 (And I retroactively stopped liking it) until RoN because they tended to have campaign based single player games that ignored the strategic layer.
Ah so that’s where that cover with the green guy which I vaguely remembered was coming from!
Yeah, Fantasy General is one of my favorite games of all time. I replay it every few years or so (I haave it installed right now), and it holds up extraordinarily well. Easily the best of the General series (though I have a soft spot for the original Panzer General, too).
Fantasy Wars did nothing for me. People sometimes talk about how Advance Wars is a lot like the General games, and I just shake my head and sigh. It’s not.
Ugh. Don’t get me wrong, I like Advance Wars. But any relationship to the general games is entirely superficial (they are both TBS).
Well, I never played any of the PG games. Is PG2 worth checking out? I’ll probably buy it no matter what. I wonder if I am being too optimistic that this might be a sign of other General games appearing, FG in particular.
It’s worth checking out, but I liked the first round of General games a lot better. The pseudo-3D look made the map harder to read and the units harder to identify.
Just picked up PG2, was curious if it was possible to play in a window or if it had to be full screen black with a small res in the middle.
[quote=“Demorve,post:2124,topic:45651”]
If I remember right it was one of, if not the first real time game. The other I mentioned was turn based.[/QUOTE]
Bunten’s Modem Wars game for EA did real time prior to his Command HQ game. Modem Wars was also the first game I remember to save replays of games.
I picked up Arx Fatalis a couple of weeks ago when it was on special at GOG but I haven’t been able to get the game to work (I just got around to starting the game up today). The opening video is broken, a jumbled mess, and tends to crash a few seconds into it. If I skip the video, I can make it to the menu and I’ve set up my options to the proper resolution, etc. I took some advice and turned off my AV and combined with the proper settings could make it through the entire video (although it was still a graphical mess of partial images). I noticed some advice to get rid of the video entirely from the game directory so I’ll try that. However, the last time I started the game it BSOD’d Win7 x64 immediately (looks like a video issue, according to the report). Also noted discussions about making sure to set core affinity to a single core, texture fixes to download (got it), and other random troubleshooting tips.
Depending on how much troubleshooting I have to go through, I may just leave it be and move on. It was only about $5, so I don’t feel I lost out on much if so. One of the dangers of buying old games, I guess, is that it’s a gamble to get them to work properly on modern systems sometimes. Just turns out in this case I got the bad roll, but it does tend to make one wary.
Did the issues with GOG’s version of Interstate '76 ever get fixed?
Mostly, I had to use a third party utility to soak up CPU time but it played fine after that. The music was still wonky though, it’s not synchronized to the game at all.
Sorry I have no advice for you regarding getting the game to work, but I did want to chip in that keep giving it some effort. I’m finding that Arx Fatalis is a fantastic game. Easily the best $5 purchase of recent memory for me.