The Ancient Art of War Review

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.