Writing about worlds of wonder: strategy games, stories, and soundtracks
This week’s piece is the warm, beautiful “A Town with an Ocean View”, from Kiki’s Delivery Service. It is as good as you would expect a Studio Ghibli soundtrack to be.
Below, I’ve linked two different versions:
Enjoy!
I’m further along in Frostpunk 2, the survival city-builder, since I posted my first impressions. The campaign is still compelling: I’ve reached the start of Chapter 3 (from late in Chapter 1 before). I also find it much easier after getting the hang of things — I weathered the latest crisis with full granaries and oil tanks — and I’d like to try a sandbox game afterwards. Returning players wanting to know what’s new might be interested in reviews such as Windows Central’s, Eurogamer’s, and IGN’s.
I’m also reading Christian Cameron’s Chivalry novels (Amazon link here), a historical fiction series about the adventures of a cook’s boy turned glorified bandit turned, eventually, knight and captain in 1300s Europe. Mount & Blade players will feel at home with these books. Certainly, we can relate to the main character scraping together the money to pay his followers & maintain his equipment, then being captured and losing his stuff…
I’m early in Frostpunk 2’s campaign, near the end of Chapter 1. I was a bit leery going in: the series has a forbidding reputation. But the more I play, the more it grows on me:
Moment to moment, Frostpunk 2 is about managing resources:
Free lunches are rare — everything costs upkeep. For example, growing food requires workers, heating, and materials, plus the one-off cost of the prefabs to set up the district. Those workers require housing, which must also be heated. The generator that provides heat runs on coal. The coal miners need food. And so on.
As such, this is a game about scarcity — there is seldom enough for everything at any given time. It is also difficult to achieve equilibrium:
Frostpunk 2’s political system is novel for a city-builder:
Tonally, this reminds me of Alpha Centauri. A message of both games is that humans will always, always have different opinions about how to organise society and respond to environmental challenges, whether on an alien world (Alpha Centauri) or a ruined Earth (Frostpunk).
Playing on the easiest difficulty setting, the game is challenging but manageable.
I beat the tutorial/prologue on my first try and achieved the best ending. Planning ahead helped — it became clear early on that I would need to aggressively expand to grow enough food to meet the scenario objectives.
The main campaign is tougher — I never have enough. At the same time, I’ve also managed to avoid outright crises. I’m undoubtedly making rookie mistakes, so a veteran Frostpunk player might find this easier.
Yes. The game has intrigued me: I want to improve on my mistakes and continue growing my city.
The campaign has just introduced a new level of complexity: setting up a daughter colony to send oil back to the main city. So, let’s see how well I can juggle two different settlements, and what comes next.
This week’s piece is “Ode of the Black River”, the beautiful main menu theme from the “Kingdom End” expansion for X4: Foundations.
Years after I wrote about it, X4 remains a unique, impressive game that continues to receive ongoing support. Part of its appeal is the soundtrack — the ambient music tends to be optimistic, and pieces such as this are a joy to listen to. Enjoy!
My newest discovery on PC is Fantasy General II, a game that released back in 2019 to positive word of mouth. I took advantage of a bundle sale on Fanatical to buy the game and all its DLC for a song. So far, after three battles, I’m impressed! The next battle reportedly represents a difficulty spike, so let’s see how I fare.
I’ve also dusted off Field of Glory II, the turn-based wargame set in the Ancient World, after buying its DLC in the same bundle sale. The DLC expands the game’s time frame to approximately 4,000 years — from 3,000 BC to AD 1040 — and includes a vast range of armies, from Ireland to India. The game and DLC are well worth a look for period fans.
On console, I’m playing the superb Elden Ring and its DLC, “Shadow of the Erdtree”. Reaching the late game has been a long, on-and-off journey over more than 18 months; I thought I was ready to power through to the end, but the DLC has rekindled my appetite, so my journey still has a way to go.
After recently playing a practice game, I have mixed feelings about Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War:
I often see Gladius described as a “4X” game, a label I wouldn’t use. Instead, it feels like a cross between a beer-and-pretzels hex-based wargame and — this will sound slightly contradictory — a turn-based version of an RTS.
Like an RTS or a 4X game, players in Gladius build cities and collect resources. But a resource called “loyalty” constrains building and expansion to an extent that felt punitive: the optimal number of cities is quite small, probably only three. Instead, the focus is squarely on recruiting an army and fighting neutrals and other players.
This is where the “hex-based wargame” part comes in. Units have multiple traits: figures per unit, armour, hit points, different weapons each with their own damage and armour penetration, switchable ammunition types, abilities such as overwatch fire, and more. Playing as the Imperial Guard felt thematic:
The base game includes four factions: the Imperial Guard, Space Marines, Necrons, and Orks. Other factions, and more units, are available via DLC1.
Putting these pieces together, my Gladius game resembled the progression of an RTS match: build up, fight off attacks, build an overwhelming force, and win the game.
I enjoyed this, but I’m not sure I’d play again. Next to comparable genres:
Does Gladius suffer from a contradiction in its design, or am I simply not its target audience?
If you’d like to see for yourself, the base game periodically goes for free (this is how I received it), or on sale for less than A$5. At the right price, this is still probably worth a look.
This week’s piece is “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”, which plays as the Rohirrim charge in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It’s great:
Below, I’ve linked it on Youtube and on Spotify. To find it if you are searching by album, you need to look for the “Complete Recordings” for ROTK. Enjoy!
Unless something extraordinary comes out in the next few months, I already know what my Game of the Year for 2024 will be: Eugen Systems’ WARNO.
WARNO is a real-time tactics game, set in an alternate 1989 where the Cold War escalated into World War 3. Building on Eugen’s earlier Wargame and Steel Division series (for which long-time readers will know my love), it offers:
The result is a game that’s deep, rich in content, and tremendously replayable.
WARNO’s battles and the supporting army customisation system are the culmination of lessons learned from Wargame and Steel Division. They offer a rich experience that reward combined arms, create fluid, back-and-forth battles, and encourage replayability.
In battle, the goal is to seize and control objectives, each worth a certain number of points over time1. Achieving this requires coordinating tanks, infantry, scouts, artillery, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, ground-based air defences, supply units, and more. Over the course of a match, reversals are common and early leads can slip away, as players call in reinforcements, strengthen their defences, and identify and breach enemy weak points.
Playing well requires both attention to detail and an ability to keep an eye on the bigger picture. For example:
It helps that WARNO has quality of life features such as a line of sight/unit range checker, eliminating “can I hit that target from here?” guesswork.
How does a WARNO battle play out in practice? Imagine the following example:
The disclaimer I should add is that I seldom play single-player skirmish games — instead, I normally play multiplayer. By now, I can reliably trounce the AI on “Hard”, the highest difficulty setting on which it doesn’t get a resource bonus. It does particularly badly at attacking urban areas, with a tendency to blunder tanks into ambushes.
In general, I think the AI is the main limiting factor for WARNO — discussed further in the campaign section, below. The good news is that the developers read and respond to AI feedback, so over time this may improve.
Multiplayer is effectively several different games in one, depending on how many players are in a match: 1 v 1 matches play very differently from my mainstay, 10 v 10.
1 v 1 games are about pure skill. Everything I said about tactics above applies; and victory & defeat are up to me. Don’t ask what my win/loss record is…
At the opposite extreme, 10 v 10 games offer spectacle — and plenty of chaos:
Interacting with skirmish mode is the army customisation system. Between battles, players build their deck — the available forces — from one of the available divisions, each of which has its own strengths, weaknesses, and play style. Different division types from the same country can play very differently to each other. For example:
This contributes to both faction diversity and replayability, as there is a lot of scope to try different divisions and tactics. The same map can play very differently depending on the chosen division.
Besides the regular skirmish battles described above, WARNO includes eight “operations”. These are scripted single-player battles with set maps and unit rosters, comparable to the historical battles in Total War games. They’re not my favourite mode:
However, I enjoy their chrome (voice acting, introductory briefings, and events), and a certain operation has possibly the best twist I can remember in an RTS mission. I’ll leave you to discover which one…
WARNO offers five “Army General” campaigns (one introductory and four main ones), of which I have beaten the first three. The campaigns offer an engaging strategic layer and can generate memorable tactical battles, although eventually I turned to auto-resolve.
The campaign strategic layer is a simple turn-based wargame in its own right, representing individual units down to the battalion level. Units can attack enemies next to their zone of control; nearby units (and support units such as artillery and aircraft) can join in. The player can fight the resulting battle on the tactical map, or auto-resolve. Battles progressively wear down units through fatigue and casualties; fatigue can be recovered, but men and equipment cannot.
For players familiar with the dynamic campaigns in Wargame: AirLand Battle and Wargame: Red Dragon, the WARNO campaigns will feel like moving from the 2D to the 3D Total War games: the map and the front lines are much more detailed than the large, aggregated provinces in the old games.
Even by itself, the strategic level of the campaign offers an interesting challenge — I confirmed this by playing the “Airborne Assault” campaign using mostly auto-resolve. There is an art to:
Armoured battalions were my workhorses. I liked to use helicopter squadrons to hunt down the most threatening Soviet units, typically the ones with the newest tanks. Meanwhile, I learned to keep infantry battalions in urban tiles so they’d have favourable terrain on the tactical map.
Aiding this, WARNO’s strategic AI is surprisingly good:
Its main weakness is that when I attack on my turn, the AI seems too prone to hanging the target unit out to dry instead of sending in reinforcements.
Playing out battles on the tactical map gave me some memorable moments:
Along the way, I also played out many, many bread-and-butter tank battles:
They were often challenging and exciting, especially when I was outmatched (such as in the opening battles of the “Fulda Gap” campaign — more below) or had to think outside the box. Over the length of several campaigns, they eventually became repetitive, which was what prompted me to auto-resolve most of “Airborne Assault”.
The campaigns’ biggest limitation is the tactical AI, which opens nearly every battle by charging a massed tank column down the highway. Their sheer mass can be dangerous, especially if I’ve spread out too thinly in my opening deployment. But this also presents several problems:
The introductory campaign, “Bruderkrieg”, and the first main campaign, “Fulda Gap”, both begin with the opening shots of the war, as East German and Soviet forces surge across the border. The US 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment must survive the onslaught and stage a fighting retreat until West German and US reinforcements arrive to hold the line. The opening battles are epic, in the sense of “the defence of a narrow place against the odds”; the outnumbered but heavily armed 11th ACR can maul its pursuers. Once reinforcements arrive, the focus shifts to holding — and recapturing — the objectives. “Bruderkrieg” covers a smaller section of this battle, while “Fulda Gap” covers a wider area.
“Airborne Assault” is also set during the outbreak of war, further to the north. After Soviet and East German commandos seize an airport behind the lines, the West German army must quickly take back the airport before Soviet reinforcements fly in, then shift its attention to the oncoming Soviet tank columns. The West Germans in this campaign have older equipment than those in “Fulda Gap” and rely more on lightly armed infantry and home guard units, offset by generous German, US, British, and Belgian air support.
I have yet to play the last two campaigns, “The Left Hook” and “Highway 66”. Both take place several days into the war: both sides begin depleted after the initial Soviet offensives, while NATO is preparing to counterattack once reinforcements arrive: Belgians5 and British in “The Left Hook”, and the US 1st Armoured Division in “Highway 66”.
Following the recent release of a new patch, it’s a good time to start on “The Left Hook”. After that, we’ll see how much appetite I still have — “Highway 66” is a monster of a campaign, the only one marked as “very long”.
WARNO has several DLC available as of September 2024, plus a roadmap that runs out to 2025:
As an Early Access customer and owner of the Gold Edition, I have all the currently released DLCs. I like them and would recommend them to any fans — the trade-off between cool, unique toys and often serious limitations makes the DLC divisions fun and interesting to play. At the same time, none are essential.
WARNO is a worthy heir to some of my favourite games of the last decade. It is not perfect, notably in its tactical AI. All the same, it has entertained me for over 130 hours, across both single-player and multiplayer modes, and through individual battles and campaigns, since I started playing late in its Early Access period. If you are interested in its genre (real-time tactics) and its period, I cannot recommend it highly enough.