History Line 1914-1918
I first played this as a result of it coming in a multipack of games with my first ever pc. It didn’t look much and frankly I was more interested in playing Gunship. How wrong I was....
Everyone I’ve ever played this game with thought it was outstanding. Not just from the fact that you get a feel for the vehicles and types of available units during World War I, how many people know what a Sopwith Camel is... but it just is a great strategy game.
It should also be noted that it is remarkably similar to the DS series of games Advance Wars, again everyone I know that played that thought it was great.
History line however is a different kettle of
fish. The game arenas are considerably bigger in size and the units on each side are the same strength (no boss swaying of unit power or unbalancing super powers). You start off with equal numbers of units but progress to levels where you are massively disadvantaged by unit numbers in massive boards. It isn’t impossible however it does reward planning and strategic management of forces by using an experience system for units, such that getting your injured units back to the depot to repair is as essential as killing enemy units to be successful.
It’s also one of the few games I can think of that allow the use of sappers to entrench infantry units and provide the added bonus of impeding tank rushes across open country side, which frankly makes for a much better experience on the bigger boards, as opposed stockpiling tanks and rushing out (see C&C RA2 Prism tanks amongst others). Leading to more balanced unit production and usage.
Resource management is present in so much as factories and depots (along with the base) provide a certain amount of points per turn, spending these on repairs or new units can be a tricky problem but shouldn’t be underestimated, repairing veteran units is often a better way to go than building new slightly better versions.
There is a split screen two player version, that is also fun (split 50/50 over similar maps in general, but with some attacking/defending maps too) but being over 10 years old the lack of dual screens hurts in the turn based environment. Not much sneaking around of you can see all the moves your opponent is making on the next screen, perhaps best to play on a laptop and pass it over each time, or send someone out of the room, although they'd have to be trustworthy...
All in all if you want a good turn based game that requires forethought and planning, you can’t go far wrong with this, it’s good fun and will keep you thinking. Just one thing, attacking in WW1 was pretty hard and defending was pretty easy, you might want to bear that in mind....
