Apocalypse (1983): Terrible UI and stale gameplay packaged in one successful game!
Well, I at least can pinpoint the exact moment in time that put me unrecoverably behind - building a nuke in the South America, that got promptly exploded by the Mayans with their own nuke, which wiped out 1/3 of my revenue, 70 or so points in armies and nukes, and allowed them to capture about 15 tiles or so. That was because of misunderstanding what the game instructions are saying, and I can't fully take the blame, because they are somewhere between misleading and unclear on this particular point (although I could have tested it before).
Haiti fighting in the early game did not help either me or Mayans at all, though.
Building nuke when you're behind is counterproductive.
Building nukes when you're ahead is also counter-productive.
Yeah, I have to agree with both of you here. 😀 There doesn't seem to be a good reason to build those - either they are short-range and easily captured, while hard to use, or they are long-range and so expensive they don't really make sense. For a while I though they are good option to break through city defenses, but as it turns out, there's a better option of not being so damn unlucky with the rolls. I was usually taking at least 1-1 losses on the offensive even in the open terrain, and as it turns out, that's far from forgone conclusion in the system.
I feel the game could have been so much better with 2 changes:
- Max speed of units either 3 on land and 5 on sea (including armies). It would have made the naval aspect of the game so much more important
- Units can only be built in cities; alternatively, units built outside cities cost twice as much.
- Having done that, I would probably have increased the price of nukes to 16 by level, but that's just an extra.
While this might make the game a little bit less hectic, it would also make it so, so, so much longer (especially on low-water maps). This is already a painfully slow game, although it probably would be much faster in actual hot-seat arrangement, and making every strategic movement take 2-3 turns instead of one (deploy far from frontlines, march to them with half speed) would kill any momentum it might have.
I've spend more time than I probably should've over the last few things trying to compile a short list of changes to improve the Apocalypse, but I came to a conclusion that it's simply impossible. As Dayyalu put it - "I can see Apocalypse being a fun game. Also an entire different game by different developers."
You have already covered most of the points I was also going to mention. I think the rules would force every play session to follow the same pattern, first a race to occupy all the free tiles and after that exchanging tiles in a back-and-forth fighting. Even though our start wasn't optimal (like those early turns wasted by battles in Haiti and Texas), at some point we converged to normality.
I had the fun moment of the game when I was able to capture South America by nuclear chain reaction. Although have to acknowlege that it did help that KarbonKitty was mishandling his nukes at this point.
I think the reason we didn't end up on stalemate is because Dayyalu stopped playing rationally. Especially that move when he made an all-out attack to capture my nuke which was aimed against Genar and not the nuke Scribe was aiming against him. That prevented me to finish the Southern war against Genar and thus prevented me to prepare for Scribe's Northern attack. Then it was sealed by KarbonKitty when he decided to help Scribe instead of stopping him.
Then the systems.
If I understood correctly, the board game only has the land war, and Red Shift added the naval warfare to this adaptation. I can imagine that they might have had an idea of making the game deeper, but just copying the land battle rules and keeping them otherwise separate was a complete failure. The problem is that this game is about controlling land tiles and there's no need to occupy sea tiles. It's quite stupid design that warships have double the cost but not that much use compared to armies (other than that extra defensive layer in ports).
Maybe on the European map, with more land and thus more resources, it would be possible to build those longer-range nukes. In our game it was really difficult to find opportunities to use nukes cost-effectively, long-range nukes feeling too expensive and short-range nukes quite useless.
I agree that this is a very slow and tedious game to play, and the board game UI would have really benefited from streamlining for the computer. Bluffing in the guess battles might be fun for a moment, but when you are having so many battles in a row, the interest just vanishes quickly. With these rules there's no need for tactics, and like Scribe said, battles just reduce to boring number games.
Even the changes proposed by Scribe most likely wouldn't have been enough to salvage this game, and like Dayyalu put it, it would have needed a complete overhaul. In the column, which Scribe linked in the email, there was mentioned that Red Shift was planning an updated version. I wonder if they would have addressed any of the design flaws of the game. But I guess playing this helped me to understand why the board game never saw a second release.
@operative-lynx : You knew about the boardgame beforehand? I did not know about it before reading about Red Shift.
About nukes: Indeed, as fun as they are, chain reactions are unlikely to happen in a real situation with experienced players, because you won't build a nuke if it can be nuked itself. The only 3 cases I can see are:
- Betrayal ^^
- You build a nuke somewhere to force your opponent to nuke your nuke instead of something else. Of course, in real life, since you spent your turn building a nuke and not men, your opponent will just capture your nuke with infantry and use his own nuke for whatever he planned too,
- You build a nuke somewhere dangerously close to the front, and another nuke to blow it up should it be captured. If you are wealthy enough to do this, you've probably already won the game,
Of course, sometimes features can have a huge gameplay impact just by virtue of existing in the rulebook, even if they are never called. Except in this case, it makes nukes even less useful in a game whose title should make it about nukes. Sad.
I had heard about the board game, so I was aware of its existence. But hadn't much more knowlege than that and I have never played it myself.
For documenting reasons it might have been a good thing that we were learning the rules on the go, because our mistakes produced some out-of-normal situations like that chain reaction. If we would have had a good grasp of the rules from the start, this most likely would have been an even more boring match than it now was.
I was actually considering the third option from that list as possible approach to move along Central America and Mexico if I had won the war against Genar in the South. But, yes, the better you are understand the rules, the less useful the nukes become. It's really difficult to build a strong enough protective layer for your nukes unless you are so wealthy that you wouldn't even need a nuke.
During the end game I was able to do that only once for that nuke in Caracas, and that was because I just happened to have enough idle ships for creating that naval blockade. I estimated that it would consume enough of your resources to break through that so you wouldn't have enough left for naval assault against Caracas. There I was able to use that nuke just like I planned to use it.
Since the combat is so dependent on RNG, after a couple of unlucky rolls in a row, it becomes quite tempting to start using nukes because they give at least some sense of having control of the result. Which is quite ironic, since it doesn't have a much of difference in the end, as we saw in our game.
I agree, a game called Apocalypse should have usable long-range nukes!