Hacker Chronicles 2/HACKER2.BIN/1560.CASTLE.REV

Text File | 1991-09-07 | 17KB | 262 lines

 CASTLES

 "Is there anyone who isn't fascinated by castles?" reads the copy on
the back of the manual for Interplay's new game, CASTLES. Indeed the
massive fortresses of the Middle Ages, with their associations to legend
and history, do seem like an irresistible subject for a game. Interplay's
CASTLES aims to integrate features of war games, role-playing games, and
simulations such as RAILROAD TYCOON into one package. Unfortunately,
CASTLES falls far short of what it should have been. Instead of being as
addictive as SIM CITY, CASTLES quickly becomes tedious. Real life castles
are fascinating, but Interplay's CASTLES isn't. (This review is based
on the MS-DOS version.)

 The goal in CASTLES is to design and build a castle while defending it
from enemy attacks. The player designs a castle by selecting a piece and
then laying it on the overhead design map. There are two basic castle
pieces: walls and towers. Walls can be one of three different heights and
three different widths, and may have arrow slits or cauldrons of boiling oil
built into them. These extras are costly, as the taller and thicker a
wall is the longer it takes to build. Towers may be either round or square,
and can be one of three different heights. Round towers provide better
protection, but take longer to build. There is a third castle piece, the
gate, which is required to complete your castle. Gates can be opened and
shut, which is sometimes useful for releasing infantry during a battle.

 After laying out the castle, the player must assign workers to build
it. You can hire many different sorts of specialized workers, such as
diggers, quarrymen, and carters. You can also change the wages you pay them
(of course, if you don't pay them much, you may find no one is willing to
work for you). Construction is illustrated on the screen by small animated
figures bustling back and forth digging, sawing, and working on scaffolds.
They even wave to you when they finish a wall segment. The castles are
nicely rendered in perspective, and can be viewed from two angles.

 Workers have to be paid, of course, and to pay them you have to collect taxes.
The player gets a certain amount of tax revenues each year, the amount
of which increases with the number of castle pieces he has. The player
can also collect monthly levies, although this method of finance tends
to upset the peasants. The player has to be sure to keep enough money
on hand to pay both his workers and his military -- if the player runs out of
money his employees abandon him.

 Construction is interrupted by two kinds of events: messengers and battles.
Messengers arrive every game month and present the player with political
and military problems. The player must then choose among three possible
solutions. For example, the messenger may say that an outlaw has been
captured and give the player the options of imprisoning him, beheading him,
or setting him free. These incidents are strung together to
form miniature stories, so that the outlaw you fail to behead today may
return to bedevil you tomorrow. The messenger events vary randomly from
game to game, giving the game replay value.

 Battles can occur both randomly and after you make major decisions. In battle
mode you place your archers and infantry on the map (not necessarily within
the castle itself) and then watch the battle take place. Each infantry unit
can in principle be controlled by clicking on the unit and then clicking on
its destination. Archers cannot move during a battle, though you can control
which target they fire at. Battles end when you wipe out the opposing sides
forces or when they tear down most of your castle, whichever comes first.
Losing a single battle also means losing the game, so players are advised to
save often.

 Players can choose single castle, three castle, or eight castle campaigns
set in either a realistic or a fantasy setting. The campaign is complete
when the player has completed the required number of castles in succession.
There are eight areas total that must be pacified, ranging from grassland to
swamp. Landscape terrain varies from area to area, but not from game to game.
There are three different difficulty levels plus a practice mode.
Increasing the difficulty level reduces tax revenue and increases the
probability and severity of enemy attacks. The difference between the
fantasy and realistic modes is small, affecting mainly the messenger
vignettes.

 If all the features described above had been properly implemented, CASTLES
would be a very good game. As it is, the best that can be said about CASTLES
is that it is mildly entertaining for a few hours. Seeing your
castle design constructed before your eyes gives the player the same
simple satisfaction that playing with blocks does, and watching the animated
workmen and soldiers wander around is fun, too. But once the initial
thrill is gone, CASTLES fundamental flaws emerge: a poorly written
manual, lack of depth and variety, and historical inaccuracy.

 Gameplay in CASTLES covers a wide variety of subjects, ranging from
proper castle construction to managing revenues to military strategy.
One might expect a nice fat manual bursting with information, just like
the SIM CITY and RAILROAD TYCOON manuals. Unfortunately the CASTLES
manual is thin and sloppy. Often vital information is missing, such as the
definition of resource points, an explanation of when moats may or may
not be dug, and the requirements for a completed castle. The section of
the manual devoted to a tutorial is presented as a hard-to-read,
tongue-in-cheek dialogue between a knight and his squire that jumbles
together important information, bad jokes, and faux-medieval dialect.
Space that could have been used to explain the game is instead given over
to a list of "Five Good Reasons Not To Be a Peasant in the Middle Ages"
and a lengthy, irrelevant, and not very accurate account of the deeds of
the early Plantagenet kings. Basic information on castle design is
scattered throughout several sections, or not given at all.

 The poor manual compounds another problem of the game, namely its monotony.
After building your first castle, you have seen just about all the game
has to offer. Essentially all you do is lay out your castle, assign your
workers, and deal with the infrequent messengers and battles. This leaves
long, long stretches where there is nothing to do but watch your workers
work. One can tinker with the taxes or the food supply (used in sieges),
but this is seldom necessary. You can adjust the number of workers on
each segment of the castle, but this is easily and quickly done. One can
try to improve the composition of your workforce, but the game gives you
little feedback on how to do this. All one is told is if one's overall
workforce efficiency is "Poor," "Satisfactory," "Good," etc. These
generalities are of little help in determining whether you should hire
more carpenters or increase the pay of your masons, and the manual isn't
much help either. You can try and improve your efficiency rating by trial
and error, but it's far less aggravating to just stick with the
"Satisfactory" default settings.

 What CASTLES lacks are the graphs, charts, and reports that are found in
such abundance in SIM CITY and RAILROAD TYCOON. All CASTLES provides in
this area are the most basic statistics about the number of employees, their
wages, and overall income and expenses. It would be wonderful to see graphs
showing the efficiency of masons over time, say, or the growth of revenues,
or the size of the food supply. Then the player would be able to spend
the dead time between messengers and battles consulting the reports and
fine tuning his allocation of resources. Most of the player's time in
RAILROAD TYCOON and SIM CITY is spent in just such fine-tuning, and it's
what makes those games so addictive.

 Although the messengers and battles are entertaining compared to the
construction phase, these segments also have their drawbacks. While some
messenger vignettes are entertaining (such as the story of the outlaw
mentioned above), others are dull or pointless. Often picking the right
solution is just a matter of reading the manual. When the manual states
that the Duke of Norshire is incompetent and cowardly, or that the Abbess
of St. Martha's is crazy, it's pretty obvious how these people should be
treated. In a way, the messenger segments add to the monotony since only
one messenger arrives a month: no more, no less. If you send an army off
to battle in a faraway land in April, you can be sure it will be May before
you learn the result; if you exile your brother-in-law in October, you can
be sure you won't hear about the political fallout till November.

 Battle quickly becomes dull as well. The computer's artificial intelligence
routines are poor. Enemy forces appear on the map, walk straight towards
the castle, and attack your troops and castle walls. The computer enemy
does not exploit weaknesses in your castle design, and tends to attack from
the same direction. Thus if the enemy usually attacks from the east, you can
dedicate your time to building up the east wall and neglect the others.
The enemy will walk right into the trap instead of attempting to circle
around to attack from another direction. Terrain seems to make little
difference in battle -- armies walk at the same speed over water as they do
over grass. This means there is little point in positioning your castle
to take advantage of the terrain. Although you are supposed to be able to
click on infantry units to give them orders, in my experience the clicks
seldom "take" and your infantry simply walks in a straight line towards the
enemy. Alas, this means they often get stranded behind wall segments where
they are of no use to anyone. (This problem may simply be a quirk with my
system, but as I use a Microsoft mouse on an IBM system, I doubt it.) Battles
are therefore a routine matter of putting your troops in place and watching
the two computer-controlled armies slug it out.

 The monotony of the game might be excusable if it was an accurate simulation
of medieval castle building. Yet the castles in CASTLES bear only the
slightest resemblance to their historical counterparts. For example: All
walls in CASTLES are stone. Stone walls are expensive, and can only be
built slowly. In CASTLES this means there are often large gaps in the castle
walls because the player can't afford to build the entire wall at once.
In history the real castle builders avoided such problems by doing the
obvious thing -- they used wood when they could not afford stone. Wood walls
were cheap and quickly built. Many medieval castles had stone keeps and wood
surrounding walls, with the wood walls being gradually replaced with stone
ones when the owner's pocketbook allowed. In fact, many early castles were
made entirely of wood and bore a greater resemblance to the palisaded forts
of the Wild West than the massive stone structures of the later Middle Ages.
CASTLES forces the player to do something a medieval strategist would
consider suicidal, namely leave large gaps in the defense, simply because
it requires the player to use stone walls.

 Another example: In CASTLES, sieges are very simple. At the start of a
battle the enemy decides whether to lay siege to your castle. If they do,
your food supply begins to drop. When it hits zero, your troops begin to
die at a very rapid rate. Eventually the enemy stops the siege (though
why they do so is unclear, since they are quickly killing off your armies
by starvation) and a regular battle begins.

 This has little to do with real medieval sieges. A medieval siege was
always a two-sided affair. Those within the castle had limited food
supplies, but usually so did the besieging army. The defenders had to
rely on their stores, but the attackers had to rely what they could
plunder from the nearby area. The attackers also had to worry about being
cut off from their supply lines by the defender's allies; about maintaining
discipline during a lengthy siege; about the disease that always struck
army camps; about the onset of winter and the end of the campaigning
season. The game was seeing which side would give in first. Yet in CASTLES
the enemy's food supplies are never depleted; the enemy's troops suffer
no attrition due to disease or desertion; the enemy is never forced
to withdraw because of winter or the approach of the defender's allies.
The siege in CASTLES is simply a way of whittling away your forces to
give the computer opponent an edge.

 These objections might be dismissed as historical nitpicking. Just
because CASTLES doesn't depict history perfectly doesn't necessarily
mean it's a bad game. After all, RAILROAD TYCOON took some major liberties
with its historical subject matter and yet RAILROAD TYCOON is a classic game.
But CASTLES fundamentally misrepresents what castles were and how they worked.
Instead of being the sophisticated and efficient tools for holding a
territory that they were in history, CASTLES portrays castles as fragile
and ineffective.

 This is due to a major flaw in the combat system. In reality breaching a
castle wall was a long, difficult business involving tunneling under a wall
and undermining it. In CASTLES, enemy infantry simply walk up to a wall
and push it over with a minimum of effort. The cauldrons of boiling oil
in a wall can kill an attacker, but for some reason each wall is only
allowed one dose of oil per battle. Archers are of little use. They do very
little damage to begin with, and since they not allowed to shoot at tight
angles they are ineffective when the enemy gets too close. This means
once a enemy unit reaches a wall it is very difficult to stop him from
pushing it over.

 The key to victory is therefore killing off the enemy before he reaches the
walls, and since archers are so ineffective the only way to do that is
to place your infantry _outside_ the castle. That way they can intercept
the enemy before he gets too close. Of course, the infantry takes terrible
casualties with this strategy. The infantry labor pool is apparently
refilled each game year, however, so this is no great loss. Simply hire a
new crop of cannon fodder (sword fodder?) next year. But this is
the exact opposite of the way real castles worked. Real castles existed
so that the castle walls would absorb the attacks meant for people. In
CASTLES, where completing the castle is the sole route to victory, the smart
thing to do is to let people absorb the attacks meant for the valuable
castle walls. Real castles existed to protect important assets -- people
and their property. In CASTLES the castle walls are an end in themselves.

 Paradoxically, this means that there is no reason to build a castle in
CASTLES. The following strategy works better than building one central
structure: Place the keep and the gate (both of which are required for a
completed castle) in the middle of the map. Then instead of building
walls around the keep, build a large network of free standing towers.
When the enemy attacks, it will march single mindedly towards the
central keep. It will ignore most of the towers alone unless they are
directly in its path. By placing your archers in the correct towers
you can create a long corridor of crossfire for the enemy to walk
through en route to the keep. If you plan it carefully the enemy will
never get within bowshot of the central keep and damage to the "castle"
-- the network of towers -- will be minimal.

 On the plus side, CASTLES has nice VGA graphics and a smooth, mouse-driven
interface. It is relatively bug-free (but don't save games during
battles). The game engine is easy to use and a good starting point for a
castle simulator; one hopes that Interplay will someday roll up its sleeves,
do some comprehensive rethinking of the project, and produce a CASTLES II
that accurately reflects its namesake.

 CASTLES supports CGA, Tandy, EGA, MCGA, and VGA graphics, and comes on
four 5.25" and two 3.5" diskettes (boxed together). The game requires
540K to run in VGA mode; 555K to run in VGA mode with music. A color monitor
is required. The game's only copy protection is a simple manual lookup
during the installation routine. It supports all the major sound boards
(though as with all strategy games you will probably quickly turn off the
music). A 10 MHz or better machine is recommended (on my 12 MHz machine, only
the fastest speed was tolerable).