From: somebody@somewhere.com Subject: War of the Worlds - Overview & Opinion War of the World (WOW) is a depiction of H.G. Wells' novel, where you get to save good old England from the violent tendencies of little green men in their not-so-little green machines. The game map is of the British Isles and is the only map available. You can either play the humans or the Martians. Other than that, everything else is absolutely the same for every play--the set-up, the resource allocation, the difficulty level. There isn't much in the way of replayability. The game is what I call a split-level game. It has a strategic level which is akin to RISK, where England is divvied up into jigsaw-like regions, and to win, you have to conquer all of the regions (the humans only have to conquer the starting Martian region to win). When you move your units into an enemy region, then you go to the tactical level where you duke it out C&C style. The interface has its ups and downs. On the positive side, there are useful pop-up info boxes (balloon help) when you position the cursor on a viewed object. Very useful in managing the info clutter. On the down side, the idiosyncratic interface structure ignores normal conventions and forces you to learn its particular method. Once you get through the initial annoyance, the interface is efficient enough that it doesn't get into your way. Resources: Each side has three types of resources. The humans have steel, coal, and oil. The Martians have an equivalent set, but with just different labels. Each region has a pre-allocated output amount for each of the 3 resources, and you can increase this output by building factories in the region to "mine" more of the particular resource (the amount of increase is also pre-allocated). I didn't pay attention to which resource is used for what. I just max my mining by building enough factories for each region. Research Trees: Research for both sides is geared toward greater combat capability. The techs for both sides are roughly equivalent in general terms, although specific techs differ. The Martians have big, slow-moving units that have great firepower and armor, while the humans have lots of fast-moving units that rely on numbers rather than on quality. At the start, the humans have level 1 armed trucks (lorries, in British lingo). You can research this to level 2, or you can research a level 1 tank (a track layer). To get to level 2 stuff, you have to research a level 2 factory. There is research to get submarines (submersibles), aircrafts, tunneling tanks, etc. You can also research for vehicle upgrades (armor, firepower, range, etc). Research takes time, and that's the main problem with it, is that everything takes so inordinately long to get done. For example, to get a Mk III tank, you need to research a level 3 factory (150 days). Then you need to build the factory (50 days) while you research the tank (60 days). Then you need to build the tank (30 days). So, even if you research nothing else other than to go from a level 2 to level 3 tank, it'll take you 2/3rd of a year. I stuck with only one line of research (the tank, plus some vehicle upgrades), and I finished the game before I can put out a Mk III tank. Speaking of time, the game has a time slider that lets you adjust the speed of time. It also has a fast-advance-until-a-critical-event button which helps in speeding the game along without making things hectic. You give orders while the game is paused. It's a great scheme that I wish other strategy games would copy. Combat & AI Strategic: The game opens with a Martian "blitz" as they drop down on England in pods. While the pods contain mostly scouts, the humans only have a few level 1 armed trucks, and will quickly lose the northern third of England. (If you play as the Martians, then the humans get many more units and they also start with a level 2 truck). The hardest part of the game as the humans is to counter this blitz and form a coherent front. Unfortunately, the AI is rather timid, and it is a fairly simple matter to do. (Hint: Research the 6-in medium gun ASAP and put the max of 12 guns around each HQ. It will negate most every Martian attack. The 4.6-in gun at start is adequate vs the Martian scouts.) Once you have put up the guns, the Martians will stop attacking for a long while, allowing you time to research tanks and put out a more effective fighting force. You can put a max of 15 units (at 5 vehicles per unit) into a region, so you can field up to 75 units per combat. Even with the initial level 1 truck, this size of a force will win most battles. Once you have a Mk II tank, you are pretty much invincible, and the only constraint is that you have to build up enough factories to maintain an adequate resource level. Tactical: The tactical graphics is very nice. The terrain is 3-D (and I assume that it depicts the actual topography), and the lighting reflects the time-of-day. Vehicles have headlights at night, and the 3D units are equivalent to Total Annihilation's units. I like the tanks, which are modeled to look like the early WW I trench crawlers that have two cannons sticking out each side. The friendly move AI is good. Pathfinding is generally not an issue, since units can go over practically everything (it does get strange to see a WW I vintage tank climbing an almost vertical mountain side). Collision handling is excellent, as I've manuevered big masses of units through bridges with no problem. The enemy AI is bad. Units simply wander around until they spot a target to shoot at. This leads to a fatal problem I've stated before, where if you have a HQ stashed in the corner (as I do, for better protection) and defended by turrets, then the tactical combat can go on forever if the Martians don't wander into your location. This happened twice for me, and each time I had to blow up the HQ and lose the sector to end the combat. The tactical combat is like a very primitive C&C. You can bandbox select, but you can't assign the group to a hotkey. Also, commands are done through a very awkward right-drag hierarchical menu system (with no keyboard shortcuts) that ends up being useless in the thick of combat. Fortunately, the default of selecting a gaggle of units and clicking on the nearest enemy works fine. The 3D terrain has no effect on combat, either for height or for defense. Another major faux pas that everyone has commented upon is the slow load time to go between the strategic and the tactical maps. It's not that it's long (I timed it at about 5-10 seconds on my SCSI setup), but that you have to go back and forth so frequently. The tactical map is not only used for combat, but also when you build any structure in a region (and you will be building many structures). The main thing that turns me off about this game is that there is no strategic consideration to winning. It's just a matter of building up enough mass to overwhelm the enemy. The regions have no positional significance, nor do the unit mix matter. In the tactical combat, because you cannot assign groups to a hotkey, the only viable method is the "glob everything into one big mass and kill things one at a time" strategy. Terrain plays no role in combat. Unlike the C&C games, the concept of combined arms doesn't exist in the game, as there is no rock-paper-scissor relationship among the unit mix. What's the worst about this game is that, unlike other games where there is a variety of map types and situations, there is only one map, one setup, one opponent, and it's all the same for every play. And once you figure out the appropriate research path to follow, then there's nothing left to play for. It's a very shallow game.