From: "Mircea Pauca" Subject: COMP: Nostalgic review: Lords of Midnight (ZX Spectrum) Greetings from Romania ! I just found on the good old ZX Spectrum (8-bit '1982 computer) the game 'Lords on Midnight'. Warning: the review may be a little biased, for this was the game that started me into gaming - like Panzerblitz for you, old grognards. It's a very curious design, unusual these times despite much better technology: it's a turn-based wargame with fog-of-war and command limits, disguised as a 3D, 1st person roleplaying game (!) At start you have 4 characters and no army, at a tower amid a forest, including the charismatic overlord Luxor the Moonprince and the young Morkin. The story begins with the huge armies of the evil Doomdark (around 140.000) who invades your fertile lands. You, the player, can switch between your 'active' characters which can look in any of 8 directions: you see a nice 3D rendering of the terrain around you; a screen draws in about 1/2 sec. As they march day-long around the countryside, they meet local lords and can 'recruit' them to the defense of Good; if not, they defend only their own fiefs. Any lord can lead up to 1275 riders and 1275 foot warriors (see ? 1275 = 255 * 5-man 'steps') Forces can be transferred between leaders only at keeps and citadels, via their garrisons. Cities also reduce your fatigue, but in a nice realistic touch, they can be plundered only once ! Your army finally gets to some 30 leaders with 30.000 troops. The whole atmosphere is poetic without being too much 'out of this world': majestic mountain chains [hinder marches], forests [good for your 'Fey' footmen], keeps and citadels [defense bonus and supply sources], and the occasional friendly dragon [used like a scout and attack helicopter]. Vast plains let you see enemy and friendly forces in the distance [you don't know which if you don't keep a roster], otherwise each leader can see only one square ahead. All descriptions are only with words, only troop numbers are spelled: "You have one thousand two hundred riders, which are utterly invigorated. The Ice Fear [morale] is quite mild." Fantasy is sparse and marginal: bad dragons, wolves and swords to slay them with; magical lakes give you strength [supply dumps]; and finally the mystical quest, which is somewhat of a game spoiler. The map is 64x64 squares of about 5km each, as an army could force-march 8 squares, or 40 km per day. But make foot soldiers force-march for 4 days without rest , and they'll get "utterly tired and unable to continue". Diagonal moves use x1.5 more time, which leads to less error overall than hexes (!) The combat model has two alternating rounds of linear probabilistic attacks (good-bad-good-bad) with 20-40% chance of enemy loss for each own strength point, all strongly influenced by fatigue and morale [Ice Fear - influenced by distance to own leaders, and no. of forts taken by the bad guys ]. The whole resembles strongly The Operational Art of War, with its 'readiness' and 'proficiency' ratings. Several years of intermittent play throughout my adolescence revealed various facets of this wonderful game: 1) Just wandering and wondering around the 3D countryside, then I drawed the map while reading reported 'rumors' of isolated keeps falling to unknown enemies (usually defeat in 30-40 days) 2) Following a rough march-and-recruit plan with pins sticked in the above map, I gathered much of Good forces at Citadel of Xajorkith, the final enemy objective, defeating waves upon waves of enemies scattered by the long marches across our country. This could be risky if several weak forces fatigued our defense, then one concentrated group overwhelmed us. 3) gathering blocking forces at key citadels, and catching enemies unsupplied between the blocking force and supply bases; after a lot of enemies defeated, invade enemy base citadel. - victory in about 24 days. 4) like above, but block enemy and invade their base in parallel, knowing and avoiding their standard march routes [spied from shameless reverse engineering] - victory in 18 days. 5) while doing like above, young Morkin with a small guard performs the magical quest of bringing the Ice Crown to melt it at the Tower of Doom. - victory in 9 days. Discovered by chance, while reverse engineering was far from complete. This left a feeling of "That's all folks !" Enemies are controlled only a "programmed opponent" (no hot-seat) with forces split into 4 mission groups: 1) Guard their bases and access routes. 2) Randomly patrol around their bases, attack threats 3) [The main force] invades your country, via standard march routes with intermediary objectives at your forts; then leave small garrison and continue to one of 2 forts, next in order. 4) Follow and engage your lords, but especially Luxor. They know to avoid combat if inferior and engage if superior, and have an 'error' rule which tends to scatter them around. One drawback of the game war there was just one scenario world, and one has to reload the whole program to restart. The programming part is in itself a masterpiece: all this is 40K long !! of which 11K of machine code, extremely tightly written, some 20 K of fixed data and the rest current variables. Of course, all data is packed at bit level and text is compressed on 4/8 bits. They would't program now this game in 1.1MB of code :-( Reverse-engineering this game taught me a lot about good game and software design and hacking too. Overall, a very interesting approach for a medieval-like wargame, with the involving feel of 'being there'. Mircea Pauca (mpauca@fx.ro), Bucharest, Romania