It’s more than that. FW’s unit upgrade system looks neat on paper. But it really isn’t suited to that sort of game. Is this skirmisher the one I upraded to make it good at X? Nope, it’s the one I upgraded to make it good at Y. I guess the one for X is over there. . . nope, that’s the third skirmisher where I went wtih Z. It’s a system like that probably works well with a game like Fire Emblem, where each unit is a little distinct thanks to the story/background/etc. The system felt out of place in Fantasy Wars. I missed FG’s hidden but fascinating research/upgrade system.
I found performance meh. I found the AI lacking. I found the missions gamey/puzzley but missing a certain something that FG had (note, FG is my only real Generals experience. But I will be getting Panzer Corps, you better believe it). FW never felt like a wargame to me; it felt more like a FE-like game that had some slightly wargamey mechanics. FG was a war game through and through. It defied my first 10 serious attempts to play it (I had no wargame experience at the time). I finally seriously read some of the early chapters in the Strategy Guide which talked about how to play a war game (and some implications of the usual mechanics in FG). Talk about a revelation. It completely changed what was a frustrating experience to an amazing one.
Yeah, I get the same feeling. I also seem to take significantly less damage attacking dug-in units than I’d expect though. It makes me wonder if the combat rules/damage was tweaked for the tutorial.
Also, while they can move and attack, they can only move one hex. Any farther than that and you have to truck them, which negates the ability to attack that turn.
Yeah, but that 1 tile can be huuuge. It’s pretty much like every artillery unit has 1 extra range. All that time you wasted packing, moving and unpacking artillery in PG was a huge drawback. And yet, artillery was still really powerful.
Also, the ability to shoot and then move in a truck makes them a lot more mobile than they were in PG, unless I’m remembering PG wrong. I thought that in PG, once you fire, the artillery can’t move. Having them able to fire, wait for the ground units to clear out the area in front of them, and then put them on a truck and zoom them up to the next objective once the way is cleared, is huge.
They definitely do very little damage so far, but IIRC the early arty in PG did almost no damage either. It wasn’t until you got a few upgrades and some stars that artillery started doing big damage to enemy units. I haven’t played enough PC to know whether its arty is a death-dealer or a pure suppression/support unit.
I think Alan might have been thinking of Fantasy General, which did not allow elite replacements (although units could have part of their strength “wounded,” which came back with full XP when you rested. But “deaths” could only be replaced with green replacements).
Since I’ve been playing the previous remakey version of this, I happen to know the artillery rules off the top of my head:
You can fire once a turn.
You can’t fire mounted.
You can’t fire after moving.
Unless mounted on halftracks you can’t move into swamp, or just about anywhere but clear when it’s muddy.
Unexperienced even really strong artillery (the 19 soft target one you get a couple scenarios in around Norway) does very little kills unless the enemy is unentrenched infantry or on a river. It’s chiefly for reducing entrenchment in cities.
Those changes to artillery do sound ludicrously overpowered. Was airpower reduced in strength to compensate or something? Or maybe the better AI makes it necessary.
Don’t think anyone above answered this. The only place I saw this documented was in one of the pop-ups in the tutorial campaign. The pop-up said engineer units(not sure if there are any but the bridging ones) are immune to rugged defense.
Which is less useful than you’d think, by the way - you won’t ever get the random rugged defense modifier, but enemy entrenchment still affects initiative and combat modifiers. They’re also so expensive I level them up as regular infantry before switching types; otherwise they’re incredibly cost-ineffective for taking out defensive guns or 8-entrenched infantry.
In the original PG, there was really almost no reason to use any infantry other than bridge engineers (and occasionally paratroopers). I know they “fixed” this in PG2, separating out bridge engineers from pionieres. That is, PG2 bridge engineers still ignored enemy entrenchment, but their combat strength was much lower. Pionieres had better combat strength but didn’t provide bridging.
Based on the two battles of the campaign I’ve fought, plus the tutorial, yeah, I’d say so. The bonuses for cities and entrenchments and the penalties for armor assaulting them seem to work out so that infantry does a better job, and tanks alone at least in the early war years don’t cut it.
I didn’t think tanks were very good for assaulting cities in the early war years in the original PG. At least in the fan remake, the AI will spam tank destroyers around their cities if you build too many tanks and you won’t be able to make a dent in them.
I haven’t picked up Panzer Corps yet, but I certainly plan to.
Just wanted to kick in an alternate opinion on Fantasy Wars to counter the naysayers. I loved Fantasy Wars and Elven Legacy. I suspect I will enjoy Panzer Corps too, but I liked the way Fantasy Wars added a 3d graphic engine. Plus in contrast to peacedog, I liked the FW upgrade system. I do agree that FW was quite puzzle-y. But I would definitely give it a strong recommendation to anyone that likes Panzer General type turn-based strategy and likes Fantasy.
I was referring to the PGForever previous fan remake, which had a “fairly brutal” AI setting. I think this one is by the same guy, I’m downloading now.
Honestly, that’s one of the things I hated about Fantasy Wars. I thought it looked aggressively ugly, and the garish art combined with the 3D engine made the map much harder to read at a glance, for no good reason. In practical terms, 3D adds nothing to the experience. The General games work perfectly well as 2D games. So it also taps into my general dislike of the tendency of game developers to make their games 3D just for the sake of making them 3D, even if the game in question is worse off for it (HoMM V was also guilty of this).
Panzer Corps’ 2D art looks way, way nicer than anything in Fantasy Wars, and is also more functional.
