Series : Nectaris Developer : Hudson Soft Genres : Turn-based strategy Wargame Features : Password Save Graphics : Hex Grid Themes : Military Metagame Class : FCU Audio : Adaptive music Other Tags : Greatest Covers Dad Game Achievements : retroachievements.org
not completed.
Image source: mobygames.com
Facts
I learned from Ra226's nice Let's Play videos that you can bait the AI into attack less critical units to protect more important units, for instance, they might attack a Hawkeye anti-air tank if it's in front of other units, even though the enemy has no air units left, making it unusable.
A collection of tips:
- Bait: You can bait the enemy to attack non-essential units in order to protect essential units. In fact, the enemy might focus on the weakest unit, such as infantry.
- Terrain: Carefully place your units in terrain with high defense.
- Pick your spot: If it's beneficial, let the enemy come to you. You don't have to attack.
- Support and Surround: For the purpose of ZOC blocking, Support, and Surround, any friendly unit affects any enemy unit and vice versa, regardless of whether they can attack each other, and whether they are air and ground units, respectively. You can ZOC block a tank with a plane, Surround a plane with infantry, etc.The campaign has 16 stages.
Analysis
I've been thinking about how games with hexagonal grids and tile-based backgrounds work together. Home computer strategy games has had hex grids since 1979, but it's more rare in console games. Rendering a hexagonal grid on framebuffer-based hardware isn't very complicated, but doing it using tiles is less trivial. I noticed that certain strategy games of the 8-bit and 16-bit generation such as 'Nobunagas Ambition' (1986) which was ported to everything had hex grids on home computers but rectangular tiles on consoles where every other horizontal tile is offset half a tile. This implies the same neighbor relationship as with a hex grid, but is much simpler to implement on tile-based hardware. This game and Master of Monsters are early examples of nice looking hex grids on a console that only has tile-based backgrounds and no framebuffer.
I investigated the VRAM tile data in Mednafen, and it seems like the maps are not made using hardware tiles, but rather, the whole screen is directly represented in VRAM, emulating a frame buffer. When the hexagonal tiles are drawn as an overlay, they are drawn to the VRAM tile data. Implementing a frame buffer for a strategy game where the background is rarely updated makes sense.
When the grid lines are being drawn, it happens over several frames, and you can see individual lines being drawn.
