It’s supposed to be the first real time strategy game ever made, although that’s contestable. There are some other games that claim the title. Whatever the first one was however, this one was the first GOOD one. The game play is very simple. It has 3 types of combat units: knights, barbarians and archers. Spies too, but they have no effect in battle. Knights easily beat barbarians, but are beaten by archers. Archers in turn are very easily beaten by Barbarians. You can play against a number of artificial intelligence opponents, such as Napoleon for examples.
The artificial intelligence isn’t that great to be honest, but pretty good for the period (1984 was along time ago after all).
You command squads, each of which can consist of 14 units (any units you want to put in a squad). You have to choose carefully because the type of units you select for the squad will affect your strategy and tactics. There are a number of different scenarios you can play. For example capture the flag. The battle gameplay is a little bit obsolete (1984 again!). Whenever two units meet on the field, the whole thing sort of zooms in, and you can resolve that part of the battle before continuing.
The game is very easy to understand and play. Quite fun, trying to come up
with strategies to beat the San Tzu level of artificial intelligence (which is the hardest level available). Very appropriate since he is supposed to be the military genius that wrote the historical Art of War. Unfortunately the game shares little with the book, particularly regarding the use of spies of which San Tzu wrote a whole chapter in his book. I would have thought that the game would have used more spies and option for their involvement in combat since the guy was clearly obsessed with their use in combat.
Then again, perhaps that would just spoil the game play. The game isn’t as simple as it may appear though. Things like exhaustion play an effect: you may have a tough choice to make regarding how fast you want to move your troops to combat. Maybe you should wait and risk arriving too late to seize a position or relieve your forces, or you can hurry and risk getting them there too exhausted to fight. Morale and hunger are also things that play an effect in the game. This makes the game a bit more complicated than it seems.
