From: "Tirpitz" Subject: AXIS & ALLIES REVIEW Ok, got the game and played through now as german, russian, british and american. Will try the japs tomorow. The game looks good and the map is pretty easy to keep a eye on. One level of zoom betwhen the full map and the play map would have been nice, but i can live without it. Seems like all the rules options are present, and the play is smoth. Install was no problem, and no crashes or funny behavier as of so far. The game playes fast and brings back many memories from the board game. Now for the bad part. 1. The tanks all are the same color. You have to be in the zoom level to see to whoom they belong. Also i think if they took the icons of a famos tank per nation it would have been nicer. The Models(icons) do change once you get tech upgrades to reflect the enhanced units. 2. The computer AI playes very very weak. I have won the game as every nation so far. And i have not played the board game for good 8 years. America keeps buing submarines like crazy. Brittan keeps placing a carrier and a transport into the north sea, which gets detsroyed by the german luftwaffe every time. You would think they would save the money one turn and purchase two or three battleships at once to shoot the planes down. Not once have i seen a computer player invest into technology, even when they got tons of money to spend. I think it will be very interesting to see how it playes in multiplayer. If there is no problems connecting it should be a blast. Fix List - Fix the AI - Make the tank and plane icons look like a common tank from the nation it represents, maybe even let the player choose one of a list. (yea yea...the japs would not have much choices in tank looks....grin) - Fix the AI ok...this was just a quick review. i think the game is worth it, but only because i hope the multi player part will make up for the weak AI. From: kofman@best.com (Ken Kofman) Subject: Axis & Allies: First Review! Hi! It seems that I get to review Axis & Allies first. I choose to employ actual examples of play to illustrate my opionions about this game. What the 'D' in 'D-Day Stands Means For my first game, I decided to give the Allies to the computer, and play Axis. I set all second edition rules, but did not allow Russia to attack first turn, or allow weapons development. The computer played its five star generals, meaning that it played at maximum difficulty. There is nothing so cut and dried as a Russian first turn, when Russia cannot attack. The Russian fleet goes to protect the British fleets, one transport to protect the lone Brit transport, and the sub to join the fleet off UK. Some people prefer to place the entire Russian fleet in one or the other location. Both variants are acceptable, if less optimal. The computer left the fleets where they were. The Russian reinforcements go to bulk up Karelia, so that the Germans do not attack in full force. But these Russians did no such thing. Instead, the forces were split between the Caucasus and Karelia, leaving behind 4 infantry in Russia itself, where they threaten and defend nothing. The Russian Pacific forces tend to pull back, leaving no more than one infantry in the Soviet Far East to get crushed by the inevitable Japanese seaborne invasion. But not these Russians. Only the tank pulled back. The only thing the Russians did right was to buy eight infantry. This disaster of Soviet planning cannot be attributed to a flawed AI, but to game designers who either didn't know the game, or simply didn't give a damn. It's the very first turn of the game; the correct moves could have been predefined. But no. The AI is also rather dumb. After I finished crushing Karelia and the British fleet, in a pretty standard German first turn (9inf, 1arm, attack all Brit fleets, blitz to Egypt) otherwise, the Brits had their chance for revenge, and I had my chance to see how the AI reacted. I need not have bothered. The Brits sent one fighter from the UK to take out my surviving German transport in the Baltic, which I used to transport 2inf from Western Europe to Karelia during the invasion. The other fighter stayed at home, when it could have helped the other fighter. The bomber stratbombed Germany. My fleet of one Battleship and one sub off Gibralter was left unharmed. These were clearly dumb moves. The British should have used its own surviving transport (it shot down my lone fighter with a good roll) off Canada and its air force to finish off my main navy, and let the Russian fleet take care of my Baltic transport, especially since UK decided to build a Carrier on the first turn, another mistake. In Asia, the Indian transport went down to Australia, instead of transporting the two Indian infantry to invade a lightly defended Egypt. Not as bad a mistake as the other, but still bad. The builds were terrible, however, armor and a carrier. Experienced players know that UK should rarely build a carrier on her first turn, but that if she does, it must be accompanied by a transport. The computer player did not know this. I could go on, all the way up to the beginning of my second Japanese turn, but the computer's play does not improve. If anything, it gets worse. Rather than protect the carrier, the computer sends the British Canadian transport and the American East Coast transport to Mexico(!!) It lands the American bomber in Gibralter, unprotected and in range of my entire German air force. 'D' stands for Dumb. Most bad players play better than this program. But the computer has one advantage going for it. The Enigma Machine At the beginning of my second Japanese turn, I surveyed the map before placing units, and discovered that my Japanese battleship had disappeared, somewhere off the coast of Hawaii. At first I figured that I had missed an Allied attack, but no; the American fighters were back in the box, after being sunk with the British carrier on my second German turn, and the Pacific fleet did not move from San Francisco, neither to flee to the Atlantic theatre or to attack my Hawaian fleet. So I decided to take advantage of the 'time machine' feature, to discover what happened to my battleship. To my dismay, it disappeared during the second German turn. This is clearly a bug. Or an enigma. You choose. But if the computer removes enough opposing forces, it has a chance. Maybe. The Look and the Feel When Hasbro looks for programmers for their products, it is clear that they want only the best - if their idea of 'best' is completely different from my own, or if their idea of 'best' means 'using the very latest in pre-Windows95 game programming techniques.' We Don't Do Windows Axis and Allies does not run in a window under W95. When I used Alt-Tab to switch tasks, my desktop was garbled. I had to quit the game, though I was about to anyway. There are no scroll bars. The user interface is clunky. For example, one cannot undo a single move; to do so, one must go to the 'time machine' and redo the entire phase. The music is terrible. You'd think that with an entire CD to fill, and with so much WWII-era music available, that this game could have had excellent music. But if you thought that, you'd be thinking, a habit that is clearly alien to the designers and implementors of this program. This game is best played with the music off, and after enough vodka to float the Bismarck. But I'm Only Using It for Multiplay I have not yet tried playing this game with other humans. But I fear that units will vanish, and that other bugs will surface. Conclusion This game ranks as an example of how not to program. Still, I expect that Hasbro Interactive will sell quite a few copies. I only wish I could return mine. I only wish that enough gamers would tell them that they refuse to buy A&A, despite being a great fan of the game, because the production values are absolutely atrocious in all matters that count, except for the introduction when the program is first launched, if that counts for you. Alas, this will not happen, because most of us who have not been converted to 'realtime strategy' games are desperate, and will accept whatever swill we are given. Which this game most certainly is. And if the game doesn't sell, then Hasbro and others will no doubt decide that designing intelligent games costs a lot more than designing glitzy games that rely on a very fast processor. Nutshell: This game is an insult to your intelligence. Anyway, KenK From: David Wessman Subject: Comp: Hasbro's Axis & Allies If you're a fan of this game, you've probably already rushed out and bought it. Then, if you were lucky, you immediately returned it for a refund. That's what I and some of my colleagues have done. Why? This sends a message even marketing and management can understand. People really want the product, but it is unacceptable as delivered. From what I hear at the retail level, they're running a 33% return rate on this one. The "most popular wargame of all time" clearly has the potential to be a huge hit, but Hasbro Interactive screwed up big time. Either their management has absolutely no respect for their QA department, or the QA department is completely incompetent. In either case, it's clear they have nothing but contempt for the fans of the boardgame. The game is seriously flawed. Everyone expects AI to be poor, but this is ridiculous! I played the game as the Japanese with computer players all set to their highest skill level. I have never witnessed such bone-headed moves in my life. I won an Axis economic victory in 5 turns primarily by taking the western U.S. in such a way that no human player would have allowed. While playing this and another game as all five sides, I witnessed numerous bugs and rules violations. With their acquisition of Microprose and Avalon Hill, this bodes poorly for their future offerings to strategy gamers. David Wessman