Perimeter

[Ish]

Picked this up today. Its, errrr, different!

I've played through the first 5 machines so far and its definetly a new twist on PC style RTS. You don't actually command individual soldiers. Instead you control the composition of upto 5 squads and command them at squad level.

Aaarrgh. Just seen the time. Football beckons. I'll post more later...

[superkully]

Was very tempted to pick this up today. Got the demo on PC Zone instead, will give it a blast later...

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I don't like it seems flakey.

[Ish]

Hee. Back to where I left off

Ok. So you have 5 squads. Each of those squads is made up of a number of 'base units'. You can change each of those squads at will (but for a cost) to be a given unit type (nanotechnology background is the idea) if you have sufficient base units for that type in the squad.

You have a single resource: energy. You don't mine for it - you just build generators. Energy is used to build things and, more importantly!, to power a defensive shield that you use to keep enemies out (with only 5 squads you end up relying heavily on this at times). The shield draws a lot of energy so you have to be selective about when you use it.

Terrain is very important. Not in a "I must have the highest ground" sense. But in a "I must have flat ground" sense. You can only build on terrain that is perfectly flat. Flattening terrain costs. Therefore if you can keep your enemies terrain disrupted (there are many many ways to do this!) you can, hopefully, gain an advantage. Oh and the terrain is fully deformable.

Neil - I've not found it flaky at all. But what I have found it at times is confusing and hard to understand for the first 4 hours and at first I thought it was (ahem) bug riddled because it didn't behave how I expected. Basically because my first instincts have been to follow the by now well trodden PC RTS path of mine resources, build mix of units, dispatch towards base. And this simply doesn't play like that. I must have spent an hour swearing and cursing about why I couldn't build an anti-grav unit to load my troops onto when in fact what I should have done is convert my squad to a lifter move them over there, and convert to rocket launcher troops.

To quote a good friend of mine "You must unlearn what you have learned"

At first I was utterly befuddled by it all but as the day went by and I started to realise how it worked I'm starting to really enjoy it. Hopefully this will continue as I've not had a really good PC strategy fix since Medieval: Total War.

[Rushy]

Got my copy today, will hopefully have chance to check it out over the weekend. I'm not a big RTS fan, and have little experience of them so I shouldn't have to 'unlearn' anything.

[superkully]

Was playing the demo last night. Woo, its confusing, I havn't played an RTS since Age of Empires so jumping straight in with no instruction book was well confusing.

One thing I will say is that it chugs like a bastard at 1024x768 with the details even remotely turned up on my XP3200+ & 9200/128MB setup.

It's OK, and the terraforming is pretty, but the RTS genre on the PC makes me ill just from the thought now-a-days, the PC bods need to invent something new.