Shannon A. (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} shannon_a) wrote,@ 2006-02-01 22:53:00 |
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Antike Mini-Review
Was off to EndGame tonight, and Eric V. was there with Antike. I wasn't super-enthusiastic, but I was willing to give it a second shot. Sad to say, I was not impressed. If I rated this on RPGnet I'd give it a 4/3: above average Style because of the neat pieces and the double-sided board, but the gameplay is strictly average, with any neat elements offset by a poorly developed final product.
The Good:
The roundel is entirely original. It's a circular set of 8 roles (earn 1 of 3 resources; spend 1 of 3 resources; move troops) and the circle enforces which order you can do the roles in, though each turn you get to move clockwise 1-3 spaces (or more if you spend resources to do so). Yeah, it's just a different type of role selection, but the constraints implied by always being on one half of the roundel or the other are neat.
There's a lot of paths to victory, and you can focus on different things.
There's some tension because there's a constant opportunity for other players to mess you up because you can do so little on one turn (just one role).
Turns go very quickly because you can do so little on one turn.
The Bad:
Combat is somewhat broken. It's really hard and costly to attack someone. Basically, there's 1-for-1 troop attrition, with more attrition required to take cities or temples. In addition it's slow (thus also costing turns) because you have to move in, then attack on a later turn.
Now the new Conquest of the Empire did this too, and it felt uncomfortable there too, but after seeing the mechanism a second time I have to classify it as a mistake. There's just too much opportunity to bring in reinforcements, and that really slows down the game.
There is a way to move your troops faster, which lets you move and attack on a single turn, and that's pretty much required if you want to be a combat machine. But it's still difficult and costly, and if you get into a fight with one opponent, the others can feast on your corpse(s) like vultures.
The first game I played there was one battle the whole game. Afterward I thought maybe we'd gotten into some nasty groupthink and so I was very aggressive this time, concentrating my territories on iron (to build troops), then twirling the roundel as fast as I could to alternatively build troops and move them. I got my troops up to max movement too.
It was still very hard to make many gains. (I took two territories.) The better defended temples were just about impossible to take. And I had to leave myself open to other attacks.
After my two games I think combat is just too difficult in Antike for it to be a good empire-building game.
I also don't entirely like the way the Victory Points are laid out. There's stacks of cards for different types of VPs (technologies, sets of 3 temples, 5 cities, or 7 boat-territories, and temple destruction). If you don't move fast enough at the start of the game you can get cut out from some of the VPs, and then when those are gone there's really no way to catch up.
The game can also grind to a halt at the end as the easier VPs go out. It no longer becomes viable to attack other players unless you can destroy temples, and everyone starts fiddling their thumbs. This time around one other player and I started massing huge amounts of resources to do a huge temple build and gain final VPs. My opponent, sitting just to my left managed to spend 30 resources on his turn to build 6 temples and win the game ... the turn before I would have spent 45 resources to build 9 temples and win.
If I had to list an overall problem for Antike I'd suspect it's that there was no blind playtesting. There's some style of play that actually works for this game, and that the designers used, but after two games, one played defensively and one aggresively, I have no idea what it is.
A pity, it has some nice potential (and is OK to play).
Was off to EndGame tonight, and Eric V. was there with Antike. I wasn't super-enthusiastic, but I was willing to give it a second shot. Sad to say, I was not impressed. If I rated this on RPGnet I'd give it a 4/3: above average Style because of the neat pieces and the double-sided board, but the gameplay is strictly average, with any neat elements offset by a poorly developed final product.
The Good:
The roundel is entirely original. It's a circular set of 8 roles (earn 1 of 3 resources; spend 1 of 3 resources; move troops) and the circle enforces which order you can do the roles in, though each turn you get to move clockwise 1-3 spaces (or more if you spend resources to do so). Yeah, it's just a different type of role selection, but the constraints implied by always being on one half of the roundel or the other are neat.
There's a lot of paths to victory, and you can focus on different things.
There's some tension because there's a constant opportunity for other players to mess you up because you can do so little on one turn (just one role).
Turns go very quickly because you can do so little on one turn.
The Bad:
Combat is somewhat broken. It's really hard and costly to attack someone. Basically, there's 1-for-1 troop attrition, with more attrition required to take cities or temples. In addition it's slow (thus also costing turns) because you have to move in, then attack on a later turn.
Now the new Conquest of the Empire did this too, and it felt uncomfortable there too, but after seeing the mechanism a second time I have to classify it as a mistake. There's just too much opportunity to bring in reinforcements, and that really slows down the game.
There is a way to move your troops faster, which lets you move and attack on a single turn, and that's pretty much required if you want to be a combat machine. But it's still difficult and costly, and if you get into a fight with one opponent, the others can feast on your corpse(s) like vultures.
The first game I played there was one battle the whole game. Afterward I thought maybe we'd gotten into some nasty groupthink and so I was very aggressive this time, concentrating my territories on iron (to build troops), then twirling the roundel as fast as I could to alternatively build troops and move them. I got my troops up to max movement too.
It was still very hard to make many gains. (I took two territories.) The better defended temples were just about impossible to take. And I had to leave myself open to other attacks.
After my two games I think combat is just too difficult in Antike for it to be a good empire-building game.
I also don't entirely like the way the Victory Points are laid out. There's stacks of cards for different types of VPs (technologies, sets of 3 temples, 5 cities, or 7 boat-territories, and temple destruction). If you don't move fast enough at the start of the game you can get cut out from some of the VPs, and then when those are gone there's really no way to catch up.
The game can also grind to a halt at the end as the easier VPs go out. It no longer becomes viable to attack other players unless you can destroy temples, and everyone starts fiddling their thumbs. This time around one other player and I started massing huge amounts of resources to do a huge temple build and gain final VPs. My opponent, sitting just to my left managed to spend 30 resources on his turn to build 6 temples and win the game ... the turn before I would have spent 45 resources to build 9 temples and win.
If I had to list an overall problem for Antike I'd suspect it's that there was no blind playtesting. There's some style of play that actually works for this game, and that the designers used, but after two games, one played defensively and one aggresively, I have no idea what it is.
A pity, it has some nice potential (and is OK to play).
