Review on The Ancient Art of War
by
Edmund Phoon Jian Cheng
Real-time strategy defines the
performance of our actions in the game, ranging from the building of resources or
units to fighting against opponents to claim territories, simultaneously
without the requirement of taking turns. Players deal with these situations as
they occur at the same time and react accordingly to how they can prepare the
resources and strategise during this ‘time limit’.
One of the first and oldest known RTS games to be ever
made is The Ancient Art of War, which is nothing alike those others of
the same genre from the newer generation. Named after “The Art of War” by Sun
Tzu and released in 1984, the game stimulates a battlefield emphasizing on the
basic elements of the type of troops, their formation and their strength. The
goal of the game is to gain victories from a set of battles provided in the list
of campaigns.
Players start in choosing the type of battle (e.g.
skirmishes, capture the flag) and the opponent to face off with. An interesting
feature to this is the use of famous historical acknowledged leaders, including
Sun Tzu himself, known for their battle strategies to give an unique AI personality so
that the gamer doesn’t feel he is playing with a machine and does not feel as
bad if he is beaten by the likes of Sun Tzu or better yet gain a boost in ego
if he defeats Sun Tzu, representing the most experienced and hardest AI
opponent.
The Ancient Art of War is one of the few examples in
RTS that has enabled the balanced system of the classical strengths and weaknesses
of characters to be brought to play. For example, knights were strong against
archers which in turn could overcome barbarians. This round plays out as the
barbarians come up better when faced off with knights. This is reminiscent of
the classical animal chess game to even out the playing field forcing the
strategic application of resources and positions to gain the upper hand over
the opponent.
The player also has the ability to attach or detach
the various compositions of knights, archers and barbarians to create a task
force to the assigned job to engage the enemy task force. This is necessary
since the terrain, such as mountains, forests and water, depending on height,
density and flow of current respectively, also plays a part in how fast or slow
the various characters would move against the enemy outmanoeuvring instead of
direct confrontation.
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdgwPOf2BCA&gl=SG&hl=en-GB
and https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mdgwPOf2BCA/hqdefault.jpg
There is also the option to create your own maps, formations
and battles to take place as customised scenarios in the game, in which it will
broaden our approach in revising our strategy against the opponent team as the
areas change.
When I played The Ancient Art of War several years ago,
I found difficulties during gameplay since the mechanics are quite tedious as
compared to the modern-day video games we see today. The controls are limited
to using the key arrows instead of the mouse of the keyboard to move around or
select a squad. Certain keywords may also move the selected squad to travel or
attack (i.e. the arrow keys), zoom in battles and even surrender (i.e. key
‘S’). In other words, the game has a primitive ‘background’. Around its
release, the 8-bit graphics, controls and even the simple music and ‘one-shot’
sound effects are not well developed at that point of time as the game was
designed in the old computers. As only visual words and graphics are depicted,
there is no required voice audio in the game.
These factors of constraints can be challenging for
amateurs who have not played any games before the 1990s. For anyone who is
looking into real-time strategy games, The Ancient Art of War is a must as it
is a learning experience on how the games of this sub-genre were like back in the
olden times.
