Re: Hegemony: Phillip Of Macedon
I bought it on an impulse (not the platform lol) yesterday after completing the demo. I encourage you to try the demo, but some of my off-the-cuff observations are...
The good:
You can pause the game whenever you like, and issue orders while paused. This can be really important when you've gotten the "enemy sighted" alert but you're not sure where. Just pause the game and hit "v" to scroll through sighted enemies.
The sense of scope with the zooming feature is really cool. The demo according to the devs is only 1% of the map, and it certainly feels that way. It's also cool to discover more parts of the map and go "oh hey I've hit a new neighbor on this border."
I like that every unit is named after whatever town it was recruited at. So you have your "1st Aegae Phalagite Brigade" (or whatever) or your "2nd Pella Company of Peltasts".
The game has a (very critical) logistics thing. Your cities need food to defend themselves, and your units need food or their morale drops and they'll run in a fight. This makes the (gently paced) seasons very important; good luck getting a ton of food from your enemy's farm in the dead of winter! On the plus side, stumble upon a roving flock of sheep and you'll eat for a long time.
Even though the game only lets you play as Macedon, there is a ton of stuff for you to do. There are core objectives that you need to accomplish to win the campaign, but there are also "side missions" with multiple submissions. The rewards are usually cool, too, like giving you some of Alexander's historical companions so you can make them into powerful unit commanders. One side mission got me an Illyrian city that I had captured and made it a Macedonian city so that it stopped being angry about being occupied and it also contributes to the manpower pool for Macedonian instead of barbarian troops.
What I don't like:
Whack a mole. Your surrounding enemies will routinely send units to harass you. This is annoying because there isn't any AI for your units. So your units will sit there getting arrow'd if you don't tell them to attack or run away. And if you don't stop the raiders, they'll burn or capture your farms. Very frustrating, and the only solution seems to be capture the city their raiding from. But then they'll raid from another city next to the one you capped. The Athenians (from where I am now) are the dumbest; they stage regular naval invasions from the next city over. They always land in the same place, so I put one of my phalanxes on the beach every time I see them coming. They always die in droves (think Omaha Beach but spears instead of machine guns) but they keep coming back. And I have to move my phalanx from the beach back to a city for food then back to the beach every time they drive by again.
The scroll and zoom and camera are weird. It's not quite choppy, but it moves strangely and sort of laggy. There's also a bit of a pause when issuing orders to units, especially attack orders. I usually issue attack orders from pause where I can correct screw ups easily.
Part of the game involves "connecting" cities and towns and farms and forts via road. Doing so generates more money and connecting farms to cities means the all-important food gets stockpiled safely in a city. It's simple, just select one and right click where you want to connect it. However, there are non-obvious rules about what you can connect what to. So some cities just can't connect to each other, and there's no explanation given other than there aren't open "nodes" - even when neither city seems to have too many things connected to it. I just don't get it.
I don't know if the game is worth $30. I'm hoping Longbow Games releases some patches, because the potential is definitely there. Play the demo - you'll either see through the flaws or you won't.
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