I have had WW1 Gold for a while because it seemed to be the best game on the subject matter. While I wanted to try HPS SIMS France 1914 I felt that it was a Panzer Campaigns game just with more restrictive movement rules and new unit pics and didn't think I could get into it. If anyone has played France 1914 and thinks it is the best out there let me know. God knows another 40 bucks to them won't kill me since they already own my first born.
Way back in the day I beta tested Guns of August and have that on my hard drive as well. For some reason that game always seemed flat to me I do not know why. Also I wanted some sort of global conflict simulator. WW1 Gold seemed to be the natural choice but the amount of bugs and that crazy orientation of the map that the original version of the game shipped with turned me off. Once Gold version was released and the map was turned to go east to west instead of north to south that alleviated a lot of issues for me right off the start.
So now I sit and try to learn this game, with its terrible in game tutorial and grammatical errors, and still find it very frustrating to play. The interface in a wargame has to be slick, and this one has serious issues with clicking, picking up and moving units. What is the best way to get around this? The bars under a soldier icon in a area are not cutting it for me. I drag and drop, and half the time it wont pick a unit up or it just de selects the area or doesn't register that I grabbed a unit. How do others move stacks or stacks within an area effectively?
In the screenshot below, why is the REPORTS window so small (bottom of the screen)? Is that a chat window thing? Do I have to enlarge that somehow? Is it a graphical glitch?
I will keep trying using web references and mods to make the game work to my liking but I am thinking that with the other titles on my hard drive struggling this much to just move around and get working in a game is more than I can tolerate. In most wargames you have about 30 minutes to grab me. I can usually tell if something is just not working right and I refuse to wrestle with interfaces and bugs. I want to like WW1 gold so I will keep diving in but man that click and drag interface is absolutely terrible.
Some resources I am consulting:
The HOW IT WORKS thread on the AGEOD forums: http://www.ageod-forum.com/showthread.php?t=11524
A new sound mod which can be found here. The combat sounds of "Charge" and "Retreat" that ship with the game are laughable and should be an embarrassment for any company that wants money for a wargaming title.
I am also using a mod to brighten up the map. Why it is so dark I have no idea. When you go to drag and drop a unit the silhouette is sometimes drowned out by how dark the area is. Here is where I got the mod: http://www.ageod-forum.com/showthread.php?t=18612
Last but not least the Syt learns to play WW1 AAR on the AGEOD forums. If you go through this you will learn the game. One page at a time. Also see the Schlieffen Plan AAR in that same forum. All of those are located here: http://www.ageod-forum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=238
So here we go. I will struggle with this game for a couple more days since I am getting my fill of HPS games thanks to a playtest and Squad Battles and all that fun stuff. Sometimes I need a change and usually it makes me very thankful for the easy interface in the HPS games or in titles like War in the East. If anyone else has played WW1 Gold and has some tips leave them in the comments section please. By the way I got the game super cheap on Gamers Gate. Matrix Games wants more money for it so avoid that for now.
We must be on some parallel timeline at the moment, because it was only a day or two ago, I bagged this title, and more or less attempted to take it all in with Syt's Learning to play AAR from AGEOD's site.
ReplyDeleteI bought my copy from Matrix, because they were offering a 25% discount if you had a serial number from the originally released game. I'd bought it from retail what seems like an eternity ago, and had shelved it after the bugs made it unplayable. So with the discount it came it at around £2 for the Gold edition!
I have one or two AGEOD titles, and its with American Civil War (ACW) I've had the most success - but I'm still not entirely familiar with the mechanics. After a session with Guns of August - which has piqued my interest in World War I again (simple to play WEGO game, which was easily grasped by following an AAR/Tutorial from the Matrix forums), I wanted to go deep into the AGEOD title.
I too struggled with the interface still, and was a little overpowered by the combat resolution - although it seems to follow a much more boardgamey protocol than the previous AGEOD titles. With the ability to slot reserves and add troops into waves of attack, rather than the more simplistic all vs all numerical resolution of the likes of ACW.
Since Squad Battles: Modern War dropped into my lap, I've put this on hold, till I watch some WWI documentaries and get the patience to tackle the UI again.
Yup. The First World War on PBS got me looking. I think though I should have gotten Decisive Campaigns: The Blitzkrieg from Warsaw to Paris instead
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