Ultimate General: Gettysburg Beta Gameplay

Interessante e recente video di gameplay con Ultimate General: Gettysburg

Ultimate General Gettysburg Promo

Ne avevo parlato qualche tempo fa come il lavoro autonomo di Darth il famoso modder dei Total Wars.

Adesso è su Steam Greenlight (segnalato su Realtime Strategy):

Il nuovo lavoro di DarthMod - Ultimate General

Giusto l'anno scorso Darthmod, il famoso modder dei TW da diversi anni, aveva dato l'addio per sempre ad ogni futuro mod sulla serie, dopo la polemica con la CA, sia per la chiusura progressiva e controllata al modding della serie, sia per non essere stato nemmeno invitato alla session dei modders organizzata dalla CA.

Ebbene, non solo Darthmod, alias di Nick Thomadis, ha confermato che non ci sarà nessuno Darthmod per Rome 2 ma sta lavorando con un piccolo studio di appassionati ad un gioco nuovo (in realtà lo studio sta lavorando su due giochi), che riflette le loro idee e si propone come la versione intellingente dei TW.

http://www.ultimategeneral.com/

(link al secondo gioco: http://www.navalaction.com/ )

Ultimate General: Gettysburg deve essere il primo titolo di una serie ad ambientazione storica; the feature principali del gioco saranno:

Take Command - Fight the Battle of Gettysburg as a Union or Confederate general and attempt to rewrite history through a chain of historical and “what if” battle scenarios.

Dynamic Progress - Your performance in battles affects future missions. Losing too many soldiers in your first encounter will drastically change the last days of your battle.

Easy controls - Deep tactical gameplay driven by simple controls. Give orders to hundreds of troops organised in brigades of infantry, cavalry and artillery.

Thinking Soldiers - Units can retaliate and defend themselves without player input and excessive micromanagement, giving you the freedom to focus on other more important strategic matters.

Realistic Morale - One of the most complex morale systems ever created makes your tactical decisions crucial on the battlefield – demoralised troops become irresponsive, devastating volleys cause havoc in your lines, flank attacks can rout your strongest units.

Terrain Advantage - High ground provides increased weapon ranges, accuracy and morale bonuses. He, who takes the hills, wins the battle.

Challenge - AI does not need traditional game cheats or hidden tricks to face off against humans. Innovative Ultimate General AI comes with different characters such as "Careless", "Indecisive", “Defensive”, “Cautious”, “Cunning”, “Aggressive” or “Dynamic”.

Sul blog trovate linkato un forum dove potete interfacciarvi con Darth e gli altri.

Queste le parole di Darth:

There were things that I could not deliver to players as a modder (Read about my mods). That is why I decided to develop my own strategy game and in this blog post I will write about its main aspects. Working with a group of very talented programmers I am now able to build the strategy game I always dreamed of that will satisfy the following four main principles:


Battle Realism: Rock/Papers/Scissors-style simplistic gameplay is in my opinion an obsolete way to provide battle balance and does not resemble reality. Would Alexander the Great win his battles if these examples always happened: cavalry beats archers, spearmen beats cavalry, infantry beats spearmen (the usual simple approach of an RTS game)? In our game soldiers will react using realistic physics and many important tactical aspects so that the player will feel that he commands real troops and not lifeless robots. Our current graphics technology may prohibit us from creating the perfect looking game, but from the start we will offer common sense to strategy. Factors like Morale, Fatigue, Flanking, High Ground are essential to strategic thought and must be simulated as accurately as possible.


Deep gameplay with less complexity: Striving too much for realism can make a game too complex, boring, difficult to handle and eventually a failure. On the other hand over simplicity and arcade gameplay is something I have never preferred as a gamer and I am certain many others feel the same, considering the success of smaller Indy games that outsell games with much bigger budgets. So in a few words I will try to make Ultimate General: Gettysburg as easy to handle as possible without many confusing buttons. You should not require a tutorial or a big manual to play the game but you will be able to understand progressively how the "inside" complex mechanics work. For example: terrain importance increasing unit's effectiveness or brigade's exhaustion making them rout more easily even when facing a smaller force.


Good AI: A strategy that is easy to beat offers only few gameplay hours and can be really frustrating, if AI is a complete fool. Now, I have the chance to design an AI that can make a proper firing line, that can flank, that can understand where and when to attack… in real time. That may sound trivial, but I think you will agree that very few games can offer these features in a whole working set. Most RTS games make the AI tough by providing better fighting statistics per higher difficulty rate or hide its incompetence by speeding up everything so the player cannot catch up with all simultaneous actions. This is a cheap cheat! My goal is to make the AI effective and able to win you without these tricks. And from first looks it seems we have succeeded in that (we will be able to show it to you in the near future).


Connection with players: It will be a game where strategy fans can participate very actively in its creation. As you did for DarthMod, providing valuable feedback, and requesting features, you can do it now again; using our forums where we will have active discussions with players, gather ideas and organize frequent gameplay tests. For me a game must have a strong “pre-connection” with all of its potential players during production, so that it gets as many features they want as possible.

Naval action sarà l'equivalente di Ultimate General ma sul mare