Without a doubt, Siege should have made more of an impact than it did at the time of its release in what was a relatively sparse RTS market. Developed by the now defunct Mindscape, Siege and its expansion pack, Dogs of War, was unfortunately unable to really make a good showing against other titles; such as the genre defining Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty by Westwood Studios, which also debuted in 1992.
While Dune II would define the format of future titles such as Command and Conquer with the collection of resources to build structures and units, Siege opted for pre-defining your army through its scenario based structure.
While the game claimed that the sides were balanced, it seemed quite easy to outflank the computer as the attacker and gain entrance to the castle piece by piece; it was never all that good at reinforcing its own troops.
The lack of a good AI and a null modem connection for multiplayer that made me take up smoking to pass the time during load times probably killed the longevity of this game. Once you had beaten each of the scenarios once, there was really no randomness to the game or skill that brought you back to the table.
Graphically, I actually quite enjoyed the top down view of the battlefield as it never left you guessing if a unit was partially hidden behind a rampart or other
obstacle. While simple by today’s standard, you could differentiate between terrain and the simply animated units that made up either the “good” or “evil” side of the encounter. Like most of the rest of Siege, the graphics are functional as opposed to phenomonal, and serve the playability factor well enough.
Unfortunately, the user interface left something to be desired. While it had a built in menu system, it felt awkward enough to use that I felt that I had to rely on the keyboard controls which mixed the attack and move commands into the 1-0 number keys. There was nothing like telling your units to retreat when you accidentally give them the “Fire at Will” command. While the commands were likely clustered together to avoid hunting for the right keys, the idea backfired somewhat. Thankfully, as mentioned earlier, the AI in this game rarely ever capitalized on it as ferociously as one of their later titles.
One of the key features of Siege that I found the most attractive was the ability to create your own scenarios; something that was relatively unheard of in the early 90’s outside of hex editing to cheat. While it had a clumsy interface, it was easy enough to place tiles and units if you had the time to spend designing a new map. I doubt many players took advantage of this feature since it seemed that lacking a campaign mode in the game you feel that there was no plot to speak of.
Overall, the top down view, the ability to watch your horde of attackers/defenders attack en masse and the ability to create new scenarios were hampered by a poor user interface and slack AI, but I still have many a fond moment of sending my Zorlims into many a frenzied fight.
