[Nihon Falcom, NEC PC-8801]
– I’d like to make a game about the battle of Midway?
– Midway? That’s old history! No one cares about that, and I doubt one can make a satisfying game on the topic!
– What about the battle of Midway… in SPACE?
While I strive to play all wargames in chronological order, I give myself some latitude on games that are not “core wargames” (typically space games), particularly if they are, say, in Japanese. For this reason, I had skipped Galactic Wars. However, Ahab, the unrelenting DataDrivenGamer, ploughed through the game as part of his coverage of early Nihon Falcom and reported that Galactic Wars was an adaption of Avalon Hill’s Midway Campaign, but turn-based and, of course, in space. This put Galactic Wars back on my radar, and when the Geofront “Fan Localisation” team released an English translation in January 2024, my last misgivings waned away. Ahab had played the original Japanese version in easy difficulty, and I will play the English version in hard difficulty.
The objective of Galactic Wars (also inconsistently called Galactic Wars I in game materials) is to protect planet M23 against an attack by the Third Empire, with the help of two mother starships (“Battle Stars”): the Entreprise and the Hornet – I mean the Falcon and the Unicorn – still on their way towards M23 at the beginning of the battle. Presumably, the space Yorktown could not make it in time.
Where Midway Campaign was all in real-time, Galactic Wars is turn-based, but with limited time to input orders. Happily enough, the Battle Stars, the probes and planet M23 remember the orders they received the previous turn, so you only need to give a specific order once.
Each Battle Star has fighters, attackers and bombers, with the two latter replacing respectively the Pacific War dive bombers (high accuracy, low damage) and torpedo bombers (low accuracy, high damage). In practice, you are going to send all your attackers/bombers every time so the split has no gameplay impact. Just like in Midway Campaign, you can prepare your small starships for attack (put them “on deck”, which I suppose increases the damage received if attacked) and you can assign some of your fighters to a defence mission around your planet or Battle Star – let’s call that a Combat Space Patrol or CSP.
In hard difficulty, the Battle Stars and Planet M23 start depleted, so I allocate all my fighters to CSP. For now, I have no idea where the enemies are, and while I have sent one of my 3 probes to find them, it is more likely that they have the jump on me rather than the opposite.
This turns out to be a wise decision because I am soon attacked by Imperial starships sent from the Alsace. My CSP deal significant damage to the attackers, but the survivors inflict heavy damage to the Falcon.
The Falcon receives 39 damage. Happily enough, Battle Stars are not brittle things like aircraft carriers, and they are only neutralized at 70 damage, and destroyed at 100.
Unfortunately, there will be more attacks, and there is nothing I can do prevent that. At the highest level of difficulty, the Imperial starships far outrange mine, and my Battle Stars don’t go faster either, so all I can do is carry on and hope the Alsace runs out of bombers before the Falcon runs out of HP.
The Alsace does not lose track of the Falcon and attacks it every 2 turns (it needs to prepare its starships every other turn before sending them). I bring it to 3 attacks and 10 bombers, and it brings the Falcon to 69 damage!
That’s when the Unicorn arrives in range of the Alsace and launches a strike , inflicting a meagre 23 damage. Still, that’s enough: the number of surviving starships on the Alsace must have passed below a threshold under which it stops attacking, even though it is still in range and has nothing to do with its attackers and bombers.
The respite does not last. A couple of turns later, the Specter and the Gorgon reveal themselves as they attack respectively the Unicorn and Planet M23 – splitting their efforts and keeping my damage below the neutralisation threshold.
Once again, the enemy Battle Stars are out of range, so there is nothing I can do except keep as many fighters as possible in CSP. Luckily, Planet M23 regularly receives reinforcements and had at that point 20 fighters. It also automatically repairs, so it is hard to destroy. As for the Unicorn, it had 35 fighters in CSP, so the Specter‘s complement receives unsustainable losses every attack.
The following turn, before the Gorgon and the Specter can launch a second wave, the Falcon docks with Planet M23. It can either be repaired or receive reinforcements, and I choose the former.
That’s the high tide for the Empire. Their subsequent waves from the Gorgon and the Specter are smaller and smaller as my fighters shoot their attackers and bombers down – it is clear that their attacks are pointless. Meanwhile, the Falcon spends one more turn docked to Planet M23 to replenish its starships… and it turns out the replenishment is conjured out of thin space and not levied from those Planet M23 starships I can allocate. The replenishment is also massive and the Falcon ends up fielding 60 attackers, 60 bombers and 71 fighters, the latter because the 11 fighters currently flying CSP are not counted when refilling to the maximum.
With such a force and starships coming from Planet M23, I easily destroy the Alsace:
At this point, the Empire has stopped attacking altogether and is retreating toward the bottom of the map. The Specter is intercepted and annihilated by the combined attacks of the Falcon, the Unicorn and M23:
This leaves the Gorgon, but it is out of range and the speed differential between it and my own Battle Star is marginal (speed 45 vs 50). It soon disappears from my view. My attempt to detect it with probes fails, and 10 turns later I am forced to admit the Gorgon has escaped!
I will never find the Gorgon, leaving the game unfinished. The manual states that enemies leaving the map repair and replenish, but the Gorgon never came back. Well, I still chalk this as a victory.
If you are curious, this is how the game looks like when all three imperial Battle Stars are defeated:
Ratings & Review
Galactic Wars by Yoshio Kiya, published by Nihon Falcom, Japan
First release: June 1982 or December 1982 for Casio FP-1100
Genre: Space Tactics
Average duration of a battle : 20 minutes (easy) to 1 hour (hard)
Total time played: 2 hours
Complexity: Low (1/5)
Rating: Totally obsolete
Ranking at the time of review: 144/152
Context – In the late 1970s, Masayuki Katō, a system engineer from Hino Motors, born in 1946, was tasked with creating a new branch for his company in Bangkok, Thailand. During a convention, he was shown an Apple II – a moment he would later describe as a “culture shock” to him. It was a far cry from the massive and unwieldy computers he worked with, and he immediately bought one to test its potential. Finally able to have a machine of his own, he learned to code games by compulsively typing code listed in magazines, a learning accelerated, Katō recalls, by a feedback loop with his 5-years son: “He would keep saying to me ‘Dad, can you have it so I have more bullets?’ or ‘Can you make that bad guy stop showing up?’, and in the midst of modifying programs, I learned how to make my own games.”
Returning to Japan in 1980 or 1981, Katō left his job to found Nihon Falcom in March 1981; the name came from Star Wars’s Falcon Millenium, to which he appended Nihon (a synonym for Japan). With all the experience acquired creating a branch from scratch in Thailand, he somehow managed to negotiate distribution rights with Apple, and in July 1981 opened a shop in Tokyo: Computer Land Tachikawa. The “shop”, initially staffed only by Katō and his wife, was cosy, with sofas, warm beverages and public computers. It soon became a gathering point for early gamers.
Yoshio Kiya was one of those early gamers. A car repairman by trade, he had bought a NEC PC-6001 in 1981 and learned to code on it. Skilled, but cash-strapped, he hung around Computer Land Tachikawa and occasionally bartered his software for pieces of hardware. Kiya kept dropping hints that he wished he could work for the shop, and after enough nagging Katō relented and lent him a Casio FP-1100 to prove what he could do. I assume that Kiya had played Midway Campaign on one of the Computer Land’s Apple IIs, and being himself a fan of Star Trek he merged both universes into Galactic Wars, which he showed Katō. Impressed, Katō traded the game for a printer, took an unrelated drawing made by his brother as a cover and sold the game as a full-fledged product. This was depending on the sources either in June 1982 or December 1982, with a port on PC-8801 and PC-9801 early 1983.
Traits – As I said, Galactic Wars is Midway Campaign in space. The key difference between the two games is not the scouting probes (they’re hard to control, and finding the enemy usually does not change the tactical situation), nor the turn-based nature of the game. No, the gameplay-altering change is the difference in lethality. In Midway Campaign, it was critical to have the first shot, because carriers could be destroyed or at least neutralized in one attack. In Galactic Wars, however, Battle Stars are sturdy and will always survive the first waves thrown at them. On the other hand, fighters are very good at shooting down hostiles, so the best strategy in easy and medium difficulty is always to wait for the enemy to attack with all the fighters flying defence, shoot down all the attackers and only then attack the depleted Imperial Battle Stars. In hard difficulty, this strategy relies on luck (the Falcon was almost neutralized), but given the enemy outranges you it is not like there is any other strategy available.
Other issues end up making Galactic Wars a worse version of Midway Campaign: the game is purportedly about defending planet M23, but you can’t help it: it will be attacked before you reach it, and you can’t transfer fighters to planet M23 either. If you are unlucky with Planet M23’s defence, it is game over, whereas the Japanese in Midway Campaign cannot blow up the island so the battle continues even if they neutralize the airfield. On the other hand, if planet M23 survives the initial attack and your Battle Stars reach it, it is game over in your favour as nothing can resist 60 fighters, 60 attackers and 60 bombers.
Did I make interesting decisions? None. Once you’ve understood you just need to put all your fighters in CSP, the game could just as well be automated.
Final rating: Totally obsolete. Ahab found Galactic Wars marginally better than Midway Campaign, on my side I find it significantly worse: it’s more or less the same game, but when I could finish Midway Campaign in 5 minutes with minimum input, it takes close to one hour to finish a battle of Galactic Wars, a significant chunk of it spent either watching the long attack animations or putting my starships on deck, which I must do every attack.
Aftermath
Galactic Wars may not have been a huge success, but the development cost from the point of view of Katō was one printer. Given that the game was only ever sold at Computer Land Tachikawa or through mail-order, and only ever assembled (the tape duplicated, the instructions xeroxed, …) on demand, it must have been profitable for Nihon Falcom, though not enough to warrant a Galactic Wars II. However, the game triggered a game-making enthusiasm among the Computer Land hobbyists, and in 1983 Nihon Falcom added around 10 of their games to its catalogue, going from the erotic Joshi Daisei Private to the (lost) submarine simulator SSGN Covert Cruise Special Attack Strategy. As for Yoshia Kiya, he contributed with an interesting proto-RPG called Panorama Toh. Over time, those games would add a significant revenue stream to Nihon Falcom. In 1984, Katō therefore decided to internalize those efforts and recruited the best of the designers, including Kiya. Kiya would design the very successful Dragon Slayer / Xanadu series (1984-1987) but, alas, most of Nihon Falcon’s post-1984 catalogue consists of RPGs, so I may never return to discussing the company on this blog.
Source:
- I rarely recommend YouTube videos, but I will make an exception for Bowl-of-Lentils’ deeply researched “The Early History of Falcom” and his associated picture collection from which all photos in this article are sourced.
- Preserving Galactic Wars, Game Preservation Society, without which none of us could have played Galactic Wars in the first place
- Interview of Masayuki Kato (in Japanese)
- Interview of Masayuki Kato and Toshihiro Kondo (in Japanese)
- The Prehistory of Nihon Falcom [Internet Archives]
- Official Timeline of Falcom (in Japanese) for the date of opening of Computer Land.
- Giantbomb has great articles on Nihon Falcom, Galactic Wars, Masayuki Katō and Yoshio Kiya
One Comment
I liked the pretty pictures, but they must become boring very quickly. Lovely review of a game with deep flaws… but a lovely look at the history behind it too!