Legions has all the earmarks of a truly great game. It's good-looking, involved, has a great interface, runs under Windows, has numerous play variations, supports multiplayer games, and is even fun, once you get the hang of it. If this sounds like praise, don't be fooled. Legions ISN'T a great game û but it SHOULD be. With a few tweaks, I even feel it CAN be. In the interest of prompting the designers to make such tweaks, here's a list of exactly what I think Legions needs to become a classic:
1) TUTORIAL AND BETTER HELP FILE: This is the biggie. It doesn't matter how much fun a game is, if it takes more time to learn than you're willing to invest before returning it to the store in disgust, you aren't going to play it. The manual, while better than average, is still not good enough for a game with a learning curve this steep. The help file could have compensated for this. Instead, it's just pitiful. It could have contained a wealth of useful information available at the touch of a button. But no, I had to learn many things about the game through laborious dissection, time which a few words in the manual or help file would have saved me.
2) HOW MANY SUPPLIES DOES MY ARMY CONSUME?: Really, this is basic stuff, folks. Strategy Game Design 101 û when maintaining a military unit (or anything else, for that matter) costs something I'm producing, tell me what it is and how much, so I can plan. The percentage of tax income method has lovely verisimilitude, but A) Makes no sense to me whatever, and B) Happens AFTER the fact, so by the time I know what's going on, there's nothing I can do about it. And what's with that "recommended level" of supplies and food? Why is it recommended? And what happens if I don't have that many? Hunh? HUNH?
3) STATS FOR UNITS ON THE MILITARY TRAINING DIALOG: It was a nuisance having to refer to the manual for the units' combat values, how many resources of various types it cost to build them, etc. This is made especially tedious since the units in the manual have been cleverly put into some completely random order. Incidentally, the help file doesn't have unit stats in it, either. I would have liked this dialog better if it had a pull-down list of all the units my empire knew how to build, and greyed out the "begin training" button if I didn't have enough resources.
4) COMBAT ALGORHYTHMS REVEALED: I know what movement of 3 means, but what about Combat and Defense? Is 3 a good value? What are the advantages of defending in a forest or a town, if any? Are stacked units proportionately more effective than unstacked units? How much so? I mean, come on! What are these things, a trade secret? Tell us how to win a battle, for crying out loud!
5) SHOULD I BACK NAFTA?: I'd sure like to know what sort of trading is going on with other empires. A simple report showing how many units of resources were passed back and forth, and at what price, would be great. How else are you supposed to judge whether to enter into an economic alliance? Astrology? Obviously, if you're trading at a deficit, you need to be more aggressive about managing market prices, or not trade with those people. But you have no way to tell, because the game DOESN'T TELL YOU!
So you're reading this and thinking, "God, he HATES this game!" Nothing could be further than the truth. If I didn't think this game was worthwhile, I wouldn't have taken the time to point out the places where it could be better û I would have just slammed it and gone on to the next title in the queue. I cracked the shrinkwrap hoping to love Legions, learned to despise it when I couldn't find straight answers to my simplest questions, then came around to liking it very much once I had spent about twelve hours of pure hell deciphering it. It's a good game, but the designers needed to give players more information about how to play and what's going on in the game. If they are kind enough to do so û like I already said û Legions could be GREAT.
