Medieval Mobile Boring?

For game that does so much well at the tactical level, Medieval Total War on mobile phones is very disappointing as a strategic game. Clearly, the team who ported the PC game to the J2ME platform have a very good hexmap based, IGUO engine for fighting pre-modern battles, but the strategy and diplomacy end is no more than a device for stringing the individual battles together. At that level, it compares very poorly with Civ3, which I have had on my cellphone for over a year now. I will still be using it in my class on the Infantry Revolution next year though.

At the strategic level, you play one of 6 powers and try to conquer all of Europe in the 13th Century. The diplomatic options do not appear to make much difference to the campaign – I’ve demanded tribute from other powers to fund my wars, and they just keep handing over the florins. I’ve pushed trust ratings down into single figures, and yet no other power has declared war on me. In fact, after my Holy Roman Empire had conquered the Ottomans, France and half of England, the Spanish actually offered to send troops to help me at the very time when the AI should have been building an alliance against me. I think a major limitation here is that the game only allows you to be at war with one other power at a time, and once you have conquered a power, its 6 provinces fit happily into your empire, its people get gradually happier and it never revolts even if you need to pillage it for cash. It is very tame compared to the Hobbesian chaos of Civ3.

At the tactical level, the game is much better. The PC versions of the Total War series have awesome graphics, and you are clearly not going to get anything like that on a cellphone. The PC version had a combat model that was mostly great but had some serious flaws in terms of historical accuracy which could easily have been fixed; and you won’t get that level of detail here either. What you do get is a range of units – swordsmen, pikemen, archers and quite a few distinct national units like Ottoman Horse Archers or Highland Clansmen for the English as well as early cannon in the form of mortars. Pikemen will make holes in knights, which is about right, and swordsmen will go through a pike block in double quick time, which is what you would expect from properly trained sword-and-buckler units. Knights will roll over most foot troops once they have been weakened by archers.

Proper combined arms tactics work well in the game – since foot units have 2 movement points and missile units have a thee hex range, you can always win by building a good line and wearing down the enemy with firepower as they move up. Knights on the flanks (6 Movement!) can dart in and pick off weakened foot units. Once you get the hang of the game, any remotely competent wargamer should win every battle. Indeed, by the time I got to York (even though the provinces aren’t named, it was that area) I was able to knock off 6 English units before I took any damage.

Part of this was down to my pair of mortars, and part due to the shortcomings of the AI. I always thought there was too much field artillery in the Total War Series, and this carries over to the mobile version. If you only have a dozen units, it seems excessive that the mix includes up to 2 catapults, trebuchets or mortars and you can buy more. Setting up a nice ‘kill zone’ is easy, and the AI will simply feed units at you. Since most battlefields are only about 20 or 30 hexes across, you can expect the knights to turn up in a turn or two to be cut down, and have plenty of time to reset your line for the infantry. It is a hard game to lose, and it would be better if the AI was less focussed on attacking you units and your HQ, and more geared towards defending its own and keeping units together. However, in fairness knights rushing off to get wiped out has fair historical basis.

Given what I said about map size and unit numbers, some people will draw comparisons with the De Bellis Antiquitatis family of miniatures rules. Obviously, the rules are completely different, but Medieval Mobile certainly has the right “look and feel”. If it was possible to rip the graphics out of MTW and bolt on a DBA-based backend,you’d have a nice system as well.

All in all, the folks at Impressionware have done a decent job of fitting a good wargame with nice graphics into the J2ME platform. It is a pity the strategic level is so weak and the tactical AI is limited. I’m sure that if one could lay hands on the code, it would be possible to improve those elements without adding too many lines to the .jar file. It is unfortunate that the market for serious wargames is limited, since it means that a better game will probably have to wait for an open source developer. Since MTW Mobile is small, quick and handy, and it does show some interesting elements of warfare in the era of William Wallace and the rise of the Swiss pikemen, and the early gunpowder era, I’ll probably add it to my collection of teaching wargames


Posted

in

by

Comments

3 responses to “Medieval Mobile Boring?”

  1. […] ported the PC game to the J2ME platform have a very good hexmap based, IGUO engine for fighting prhttp://www.mikecosgrave.com/blog2006/?p=121Read “RE: Lucky 13th – Page 48 – SpaceBattles.com” at Creative Writing Forum TRO: THiE As battle […]

  2. […] ported the PC game to the J2ME platform have a very good hexmap based, IGUO engine for fighting prhttp://www.mikecosgrave.com/blog2006/?p=121Art Review Life in Iran, Etched With Suspicion and Humor – New York TimesWith rich allusions to […]

  3. Irmgard Bolig Avatar

    Can you believe it? I read it twice. While I am not as accomplished on this issue, I agree with your determinations because they create sense. Thanks and goodluck to you.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

css.php