NFOpocalypse

One of my hobbies is collecting old PC games. Over the years, however, I’ve amassed a large number of games that I’ve never gotten around to playing. I would like to play all of these eventually, but I don’t have a lot of time to invest into playing them all to completion. Therefore, I’m going to play them all for an hour or two and discuss my preliminary findings. I’ve chosen to start with strategy and war games.

Home of the Underdogs calls Silicon Knight’s 1993 D&D-licensed title Fantasy Empires as “one of the best fantasy games ever made.” I was not as impressed.

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Okay, let’s put aside the fact that war doesn’t really make much sense in real life. We’re talking about games, here. This is a gaming blog.

I’m not a historian by any means, but I don’t think I need to be one to tell that something’s a bit off when one of the CPU-controlled players, with whom I’ve had very little contact, declares war on me even though I’m not controlling an important resource, blocking some strategic position, or otherwise being much of a threat. Potentially, I could turn this into a long rant on why AI in 4X games can be so lacking, but I don’t think that’s the actual problem, here.

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