Ashes of Empire (1992)

Name:Ashes of Empire
Number:238
Year:1992
Publisher:GameTek
Developer:Midnight
Genre:FPS/Strategy
Difficulty:5/5
Time:8 hours 50 minutes
Won:No (104W/76L)

Ashes of Empire presents a more complex version of what Midwinter 2 was trying to do, gain control of a territory before an opposing force decides to attack you. In contrast to the slightly goofier post-apocalyptic setting of Midwinter, this time it's in a vast country called the Confederation of Syndicalist Republics, which is somewhere between the Soviet Union, in size and having a massive nuclear arsenal, and the Yugoslavia in having 5 distinct ethnicities that all hate each others guts and would like to see those guts spilled on the streets. (Well, that's what the CSR has, anyway)

I note that I'm reconstructing the information about the game as best I can from what resources I have. See, this game has a truly massive amount of background materials. It's a bit difficult to find the manual, but even so, this manual is incomplete, it doesn't have anything from chapters 4-7, which are possibly not essentially to winning the game, but do provide important background information. Knowing the Midwinter 2, "Regional Profiles" sounds absolutely vital to actually winning the game. And the rest of it sounds like useful background information. I do understand why nobody bothered to upload what is 100+ pages of something that's of little interest to even most DOS gamers, even if it hurts. On the plus side, there is a VHS tape that a few people were kind enough to upload to the internet.

It's not difficult to see why. What the manual has paints it as more valuable than the game itself in terms of actually playing it. I'll explain some of it later, but even in this cut down form it contains vital information for success. The player is the commander of the United Community (Obvious take off the UN) forces. What these are is vague, but you're leading a force to bring peace and harmony to the CSR by pacifying each sub-Republic. This is accomplished by performing four tasks. Building, Demolition, Pacification and Ethnic Harmony. As the UN's major failures in Yugoslavia were yet to happen, I believe this was not intended to be satirical, but rather completely serious.

Selecting where you start off.

Getting away from the Yugoslavia comparisons, we ARE talking about a power which has nukes, and has elements in what remains of the government who aren't afraid to use them. Time is a factor in the game, you need to go through things as quickly as you can. There are hard limits and soft limits. The game has a time limit of 150 days, owing to how the state of nuclear alert goes up every 50 days. You're likely to get less than that, since that's the high limit. Soft limits are things like time in a province or republic, dictated by how many "morale" buildings you get under your control or by capturing provinces.

Further soft limits include the people in power deciding to nuke the region you're in or partisans deciding to set fire to forests. You get fire-fighting teams for the latter, but there's nothing you can do about the nukes. From what I understand, having never had either happen, they destroy resources you get for freeing a province rather than killing you.

So...it's almost a famine?

Despite being a game with goofy gameplay, I don't believe I've ever played a game that's captured quite a feeling of despair in warfare before. You're not fighting against some evil empire, you're just fighting against desperate people doing desperate things. Yes, the top brass are willing to nuke themselves, but the country is literally collapsing around them. We're not dealing with people who are all there.

Civilian cars, because even in fictional communist republics, some people are more equal than others.

To win the game, one needs to get all the Republics pacified, which requires pacifying two provinces and the capital province, or a considerable number of other provinces. I never got far enough to deal with a capital province, so maybe it's considerably more difficult. The specifics of each pacification programme in each province is different, the buildings you need to build/capture, the buildings you destroy, the enemies you need to eliminate and the votes you get all depend on various factors.

Negotiating, and being told when some local Professionals will return.

The way you accomplish this doesn't change much though. You start off in a plane, flying from village to village, negotiating with the owners of various buildings. You're not getting buildings for the sake of getting buildings, because resources play a role in the game. You get a number of trade goods, combat items and then campaign goodies. You can trade these to get the buildings, along with other goods. You can also negotiate for the building, trying one of eight persuasion options in order to get it to change hands. This instead costs time. What can you afford to lose more of? Or you could just know that buildings of a certain type in a certain area all work via the same persuasion method.

The heads rotate around on the neck, because that isn't off-putting at all.

Then there are Professionals, individuals which travel across the map and offer various things in exchange for more. Sometimes it's just more simple goods, other times it's something like various teams, which function as people goods, get enough Professionals on your side and you can make new ones. For the most part, Professionals don't offer anything you can't get elsewhere, they just make it considerably easier. That said, they also offer votes, which you cannot get in any other method. There's seemingly more available votes than Professionals than you need, but I didn't get very far by necessity.

A map which has been filled out with a lot of towns, but not much in the ways of enemies.

Most of the gameplay for me consisted of traveling between villages, capturing Radar Stations, which allow you to see more of the map, capturing vital buildings, and capturing the building pairs which allow you infinite vital resources within a certain region. Ammo, fuel and food are the primary ones, which are incredibly useful to have. There are buildings which allow you unlimited vehicles of certain types, as well. Then recording the locations of various Professionals, and possibly giving them the goods they ask for if it's a good deal.

Engaging in a little air-to-air combat.

You'll note that most of this does not describe shooting things. For the most part, you can just fly past enemies. Combat is odd. There are two weapons, missiles and bullets, most vehicles have them. (There's also a stun weapon for when you're on foot, but I was never in that situation) I feel like by the end of the game, I didn't have any issue whatsoever with the mouse aiming, even if at the start I had to turn my mouse sensitivity down. Because enemies can be removed by Professionals, you only want to do this when necessary.

About to shoot at a tank in a fighter, something which just won't work in this game.

But what you can shoot and be shot at is decided with a somewhat complex system. Everyone is in a vehicle, except possibly you, and that vehicle can attack certain other types of vehicles, and a few are the only ones which can take out buildings. So if you're flying a fighter, you can only shoot other aircraft, and can only be hit by enemies which shoot at aircraft. In practice, because flying is faster than driving, and there's always a building which offers unlimited aircraft, it's picking out one kind of plane for that moment.

Driving in a tank. Note the HUD, which is nearly flawless outside of the compass being apart from the radar.

It's fine, nothing fancy, no flight sim developers are soiling themselves in terror. Guns are actually easier to aim than missiles, because they are given quite a generous hitbox. I'm talking as long as you hit the tile something is in, you've killed them. Missiles have this problem where the enemies shoot missiles at you and both explode. You can avoid this if you're really high above them, but this can be impractical. Side note, bombers shoot bullets, presumably this was to make things easier on the development side.

If you get shot down, you either use up medical treatments you've traded for or get to wait longer. Because everything is a question of time, not health. You get another vehicle by pressing a button and selecting a new vehicle. It costs you resources, fuel, the vehicle in question and an airlift, so not getting shot down is good. If you run out of ammo, you get more by pressing a button to restock your ammo, which costs you fuel, ammo and an airlift. If you're out of fuel or airlifts, good luck.

And that is the entire game, repeated probably 30 times. The idea is very clever, but at the same time, Singleton has this design philosophy which makes these things feel like an insurmountable problem that can't be managed without knowing everything ahead of time. If you don't know how to do everything perfectly, then you won't have much chance at winning at all. Which means that through every province you go through, you've have to do it at least twice. Once to figure out where most of the important stuff is, again in order to handle it quickly. You don't quite have to plan out your route that much, but there's just no playing around.

There's basically no reason not to want this particular deal.

Which is not helped by the game setting itself up so that any actual fighting seems like it's counterproductive to your objective. Yes, you are supposed to take out enemy troops, but there are professionals which allow you to turn a lot of them to your side. That combined with the whole peace vibe the game is going for, makes the act of fighting itself feel wrong. In odd irony, this is the most a game has ever actually done to make the war is hell theme work as opposed to window dressing or something hamfisted. Fighting is always possible, but these are not bad people, and just as easily they could be fighting alongside you. They're not even fighting against you for any reason other than survival.

The problem is no amount of clever ideas can make a game that just doesn't feel fun to play work. Yes, it feels counterproductive to shoot enemies, but it also just isn't that fun flying around in a small area slowly whittling down a group of 14 enemies, who spawn 1 at a time, among many other groups of enemies, none of which you can fight at the same time, in a wide open area which looks like nothing much at all. It succeeds at being anti-war by making fighting feel like a complete waste of time. This isn't to insult real world peace efforts, but it's just too much like the real thing to be fun at all.

There are probably hundreds of these across the country, and you might just have to enter every one.

And it also doesn't help that the game doesn't really feel like either genre it is, just a weird trading sim. Yes, it's a FPS. They might be vehicles but the difference feels like a moot point. Yes, it's a strategy game, but it doesn't feel like I'm really thinking long term that much outside of time. It plays like a really messed up game of Elite where the most valuable resource you have is time.

The game is also very slow. If you don't know what a particular building is, you have to climb down in your plane. Actually VTOL, because there are small mercies. Check your GUI to see if it's the one you want, exit with a button press, enter the building with another. Wait for the building to load, because every transition, be it a building or a menu, takes a few seconds, do what you need to do. Switch to the village, go through the rest, exit, return to the plane, then fly back up. Yes, the exiting of the plane is necessary, because if you don't, it disappears and that's a vital resource.

Then of course, to get to the next village, you open up the map, go in the general direction, and just stare at the screen, which has a short viewing distance, occasionally returning to your map to check you're headed in the right direction, or opening the expanded radar screen to see if the village you're looking for is within range. Assuming it's in the current cell, because if it isn't, it'll suddenly load in when you change cells.

Between these factors and the general seriousness of the game's subject matter, I keep wondering. Is this game intended to be fun or a learning experience?  The former shows up in a considerable amount of the game's gaminess. There are underwater cities in places with lakes, which took me out of the game for a moment. In the latter, well, while yes, this is a terrible situation, it is not down to one man to literally fix a country himself. No one does anything without your okay. This was fine in games like Lords of Midnight and Midwinter when you were an abstract entity controling various characters. In a game where nobody seems to do anything that isn't at the behest of a man going around bombing every building and killing every enemy himself, during a situation where delay means certain death, it's weird. Then again, we are talking about a game where you can bomb a bombproof factory.

Weapons:
Gun or missile. There's some strategy to them, and they actually felt kind of satisfying once I got used to them. 2/10

Enemies:
The vehicle system aside, enemy AI is very questionable, almost never providing a real threat, just the odd bit of good luck. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
You can actually order in friendly troops, and they'll take out enemies at a 1-to-1 ratio, but it's incredibly wasteful. 1/10

Levels:
Behold, endless tiles and endless villages full of endless people. 1/10

Player Agency:
It takes a lot of time to figure out the various keys you need to enter buildings and check your objectives, and even when you do each transition is slow, but it's very functional. 6/10

Interactivity:
You can destroy buildings, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. 1/10

Atmosphere:
I have never played a game that managed to so successfully impart the awfulness of war and famine. Alas, this is not conductive to it being fun. 5/10

Graphics:
The 3D is kind of hard to distinguish. The 2D is...fine. I don't object to it, but it does remain that it's not very interesting. 2/10

Story:
The game hammers home as much as possible the whole fall of an empire aspect as much as possible, but you're focused completely on the big picture rather than details, so there's not much of an actual story. 2/10

Sound/Music:
I don't know how much music there is, but it's incredibly repetitive for a game that's going to last hundreds of hours. The sound effects are nice, but it doesn't matter when you want to turn your speakers off just to get away from that constant pounding. 1/10

That's 22.

As a game, I can't recommend it. As an experience, it's certainly given me something to think about. I'm not really sure what Singleton was going for here, but I must admit, that could be said of Midwinter 2 as well. Was this fun with added realism? Or something intended as serious look at the collapse of a Soviet Union-like state? Complicating matters more is I can easily see this as a Midwinter 3 - How the Bombs Fell. Those underwater cities are more Midwinter than reality, after all.

Next time, a bit of an off-topic track in Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, which will hopefully provide a bit of contrast to a game which dances around the edge of ethnic genocide and nuclear war.