Strategy & Tactics: Dark Ages

After several hours, I still have no idea how this game is meant to be played.

At first glace "Strategy & Tactics: Dark Ages" (from here called STDA, yeah it sounds like a disease) looks like everything a hardcore strategy gamer would want. Collectible leaders ranging from Common to Legendary, lots of varied units, a wide game-play board with lots of areas to conquer, even a level up system. Pretty neat for it’s economic price. Sadly when you jump in STDA you soon realize that the complex strategy look is just that, a look and the game is simple, shallow, and dare I say it… ‘casual’. It feels like STDA was suppose to be a much grander and complex product than we got with weird cues that feel like they had wanted to do more but for whatever reason they couldn’t. The one move per turn rule is very painful and makes the game dreadfully slow. Naturally your first instinct is to try to speed up movement so you focus on capturing roads, thinking (Like every other game) roads will reduce movement costs. They don’t. In fact… roads don’t do anything outside of give some minor boosts to certain unit performances. In fact… most terrain does nothing except give these small boosts. Movement costs is equal value on everything regardless of what it is so there’s really no point to terrain. What about those unit boosts I was talking about? Small and almost completely useless. The boosts are barely noticeable and will never be useful in large scale. You’re never going to win a fight because of terrain. You might lose less health value per unit, but not enough that you’ll ever feel like it matters. Even on defense the main AI opponents, not the random spawns like bandits, are actually smart enough to not attack you unless it has a chance of winning. This usually means a larger and stronger army and while in an even match a terrain bonus might give you a small edge the fact that you will mainly just be outnumbered means it won’t matter. Tactics is also painfully absent. Like terrain there are a few abilities or formations that can give your army some small boosts. Again, in many cases this doesn’t matter because your biggest advantage is just being bigger than your enemy. The Dev teams apparently knows this which is why your biggest challenge when starting any scenario is a giant AI deathstack which outnumbers anything you can field early on. You circumvent this by just throwing trash and mercenaries at it until the numbers dwindle. Again, what leads me to believe this was the way the game was meant to be played is the fact that AI armies don’t reinforce. Sometimes they’ll hire a replacement unit, but I’ve never seen them reinforce or heal injured units even when they’re smack dab in the middle of a town they own and you know they have the money because reinforcing injured units is really cheap. So simplified movement and lack of actual strategy and tactics? Could still be fun, right? Sure, but it’s also unstable. Almost five years after release and bugs are still be reported and fixed. Dev team is fixing stuff so that’s neat. The game is supported, but I still crashed about three times in the past 7 or 10 hours I’ve been playing. Sad thing is, the crashes feel really random and are hard to reproduce not to mention even know what causes it. There this weird thing that if you recruit units and then go to transfer those units to the city garrison the game crashes, no error report. This is random though and sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t. Game also has this weird bug that if you alt-tab out to like answer a DM or maybe take a breather the game will randomly think you’ve changed resolution and close out. Again, this is random as sometimes you can alt-tab out no problem and other times the game just… is stupid. Overall, move along. There’s nothing to see here that is worth your time.

Oyun İsminden Belli

o jogo é legal mas não inova em nada pois lembra muito heroes of might and magic