Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator!

The Game Room
1

I don’t want this to come off like an ad, but it’s probably going to. Sorry. Anyways…

This discussion has occurred dozens of times here, and thousands of times on the rest of the interwebs: “What if a company of WW2-era US soldiers got put on a battlefield against 25,000 medieval footsoldiers?” Or substitute any other 2 units.

Well, now you can find out! Well, you can find out what this computer game thinks would happen, at least.

It’s still in Early Access but what’s there works. It’s 10% off at the moment, regular price $15.99. Minimum system requirements are pretty light, but I’d imagine if you want a really lot of people on screen at once, like hundreds of thousands, which the game will do, you’ll probably need some higher end gear.

I just downloaded it an hour ago and I’m having a ton of fun fooling around with it. You can speed up time up to 2x, which is good since battles can take a while. And you’re not just relegated to spectating, you can possess anyone on the battlefield and fight it out yourself. It’s very, very basic right now, but still fun. Real-time tactics are non-existent at the moment but have been promised in the future, along with more units, more maps, more everything.

Current available units are:

WW2 US soldiers
Medieval heavy knights
Medieval cavalry
Medieval footmen
Medieval archers
Medieval spearmen
Medieval catapult
Golden Knights
Chunk Norris (?!) - I’ve not explored this yet, don’t know what it is.
Romans
Spartans
Persians
Wild Men
Orcs
Giant Ogres
Zombies
Chickens
Penguins
Tortoises

There are only three maps at the moment: a little town in a rock area, a narrow, snowy mountain pass (with giant boulder falls), and a castle keep surrounded by grassy hills and forest.

Anyone else heard of this or picked this up? Have a scenario you want me to run?
BTW, the above scenario, pitting 250 WW2 soldiers against 25,000 medieval footmen, in my scenario they’re in a narrow canyon, and it was an absolute slaughter. The WW2 soldiers apparently have unlimited ammo and never have to reload, and the medieval footmen dutifully marched forward into a wall of bullets to their deaths. End result: complete bloodbath. Casualties: 25,000 to 0. Which was not totally unexpected given the scenario, but damn! Not a single footman got through. Probably could have done some serious damage had one gotten through the bullets.

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That doesn’t sound like a very faithful simulation, then, to me. It seems to me that out of 25,000 men, at least one would be smart enough to think to climb to the top of the canyon and drop rocks on the unstoppable supersoldiers. And did WWII infantry really carry enough ammo to make a hundred kills each?

3

I think that was just the result of the scenario I created. It was wildly unfair in favor of the WW2 soldiers, even being ridiculously outnumbered as they were, because they were at the mouth of a very narrow canyon between two mountains. There really wasn’t any room to climb. The footmen hoard was hopelessly bottlenecked into a front just 15-20 across. Easy pickings for a whole company 50 yards back just opening fire. Many footmen got surprisingly close, but never quite close enough to damage anyone.

As for typical WW2 loadouts, my first Google hit says 10 x 8 round clips + a bandolier with 6 x 8 round clips, which by my math is 128 rounds. Obviously they would have to be extremely organized and exceptionally disciplined to coordinate the shooting to have enough ammo for at least 1 bullet a footman. Probably not very realistic. But wickedly entertaining nonetheless!

So after fooling around with it for a while, clearly, removing firearms from the equation vastly evens things up. It’s a full sandbox game; you do whatever you want. You can create armies from any combination of units, you can adjust the attributes and parameters of each unit, set the geometry of each unit’s formation, place them anywhere on the map, you’re in complete control.

Oh, and “Chunk Norris” is maybe a typo, or maybe a legal thing, or maybe just for shits and giggles, but it’s totally Chuck Norris, and by that I mean Chuck. Norris., and he’s essentially invincible. There’s a video on the Steam page of a single Chuck Norris mowing through 4000 Romans.

4

It looks like it would be fun to mess around with for a few hours but for it to have lasting appeal I’d want some kind of campaign of challenges to win in unusual situations when the odds are against you.

The crowd rendering seems pretty impressive for something written in unity. I’m curious to see how he’s going to add tactics to something like this. Can you even organise your forces into different brigades, squads etc?

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128 rounds isn’t nearly enough for 100 kills. Even with modern weapons, the vast majority of rounds fired miss (many aren’t even intended to hit in the first place, just to encourage the enemy to keep their heads down), and of those that hit, some enemy soldiers will soak up more than one bullet. And I still feel like limited ammo is the sort of thing that the game really ought to account for.

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When you create a unit you set their type, edit their attributes, set the quantity, set their team, edit their formation (which is a very rudimentary digital system where incremental decimal changes starting from “1” adjusts the depth and length of their grouping, e.g. “1” creates a tight rectangle, “1.5” is an elongated rectangle, “0.5” is a long shallow line, etc.), then you place them on the map.

Again, it’s early access, and released just 3 days ago at that. They’ll definitely be getting a lot of feedback from me. It’s not a great program at the moment, to be frank, but it has a lot of potential, and that’s why I was excited about it. Whether it ever gets there, time will tell. I saw in when I first started up Steam last night and I was feeling saucy; it was worth $14 and change to me to find out. If this is interesting to people I can keep up with updates as the game develops.

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I guess what it is, is a battle sim for people who think the Total War games have too much story.

8

Actually, this is not a fair comparison. The only thing this game and the Total War series have in common is large numbers of individual combatants on screen.

This game owes a lot more to Gratuitous Space Battles than anything else. Just like that game, you set up the scenario, and the rest is pure spectating. Well, not exactly, you can jump in and play as anyone on the battlefield, but there are very limited things you can actually do, at least at the moment.

9

Along with morale.