From: "Gary J. Robinson" Subject: [consim-l] Ancient Art of (whatever) computer wargames I never got to play the Air one, I don't think it came out on the Mac, but the other two were great games. To this day I have no interest in playing Age of Nelson wargames because I played so much Ancient Art of War at Sea. The previous summary Leonard gave mentioned a lot of good things, but I don't think he gives these games enough credit. Ancient Art of War had a very important attribute for each unit of troops called "Condition" or something that was a measure of the troops' fatigue, morale etc. Condition made a huge difference in how well troops fought and strategy often revolved around trying to maximize the condition of your troops while minimizing the enemy's, e.g. a unit which fought would have lower condition, so you would want to pull it out of the fighting so it could rest. Moving units lost condition as well. So aggressive maneuver could lead to your "winded" troops running into a fresh enemy unit, and getting slaughtered. Similarly there were a lot of formations, including custom ones you could make, and you could exchange warriors between units, so you would try to make your units have the mix of unit types necessary to take maximum advanatage of your favored formations. You could issue orders as well during battle but they applied to the whole unit so your barbarian escorts might have to stand on the wings and get shot at if you wanted your archers in the center to stand and shoot. Archers could shoot your own troops in the back so it was important to make sure your own troops would not walk in front of them. Scenarios would have troops starting in various states of condition so you might want to throw up some roadblocks to allow the rest of your troops time to rest. Also, castles would produce new soldiers of a random type occasionally so you tried to maintain a secure rear area where you could allocate the soldiers accordingly to make sure your formations had the right mix. Some scenarious could also be won by placing a troop in the right place so you might have inferior forces but if you could engage the enemy in such a way as to allow one unit so slip around the back and "capture the flag" you could still win. Units could detach soldiers to make new units to facilitate this. I found each scenario to require some analysis to figure out what you needed to do to win, and it often involved losing a number of times before you hit on the right strategy. Ancient Art of War At Sea similarly had a choice, when shooting cannons, whether to aim for the enemy sails or hull. A ship which took hull hits lost crew, and was easier to capture, but it was also closer to sinking. Ships which lost sails were slower. So if you wanted to capture an enemy ship (for example of you had a ship of the line) you would probably aim for the hull and try to reduce his sailors before boarding, but carefully - one hit too many (and there were magazine explosions too) and the ship would sink. A frigate would be more likely to aim for the sails to turn the enemy ship into a hulk which could not move, in which case you could rake it at will till it sank or else capture it automatically (if I recall correctly) once it lost all movement capability. Repairs required being in a port and took a long time so capturing ships was very important strategically. Having the advantage of wind was very important tactically. I seem to recall different opponents had different attributes (Pirates would have huge numbers of boarding parties, while Spaniards might have more musketeers and less cutlass guys) which also affected how you tried to handle them. I also seem to recall the range on the enemy guns, and their number, varied on the opponent, so pirates might have more cannons but shorter range. You did not have enough crew to fire both sides of your ship and reloading the cannons took time so you had to issue orders as to whether the crew should rearm the cannons they just fired, or run over to the other side of the ship and man the cannons there, which hopefully were already loaded. In this way you might try to maneuver so as to fire first one side, then the other, then sail off to rearm. Of course this was not always practical with a big slow ship so rearming the same side was a better choice. Overall I played these games to death, they were probably the best computer games of this type I have played to this day and I have very fond memories of them. They might not have been the most realistic games but in terms of gameplay decisions and a combination of strategy and live action (and you had to aim the ship cannons yourself) they were second to none. In a way they were like Defender of the Crown in that they had both strategy and real-time action. I still have my old beige Mac in fact so I can play these games! Gary