The reviews for Knights of Honor are pretty lukewarm, and let's be frank: no Paradox game is actually done on release. I'll wait a couple of months for the patches to get settled in.

Supreme Ruler 2010, on the other hand, looks pretty damn neat to me. I know that every game in this genre up until this point has been a total dog (Third World War being the only exception), but they all get me hot and bothered anyway. It's taking some SERIOUS self-discipline to not buy it off of Chips and Bits right now. But I'm resolved to wait for some feedback before I get it.

What GWJ grognard wants to take it for the team and get SR2010 for me?

Put up an AAR if you have time Rob. I realize that we might as well be talking to ourselves, here, but I'd still appreciate it

EDIT: Dang, looks like we got ourselves a demo for SR2010. I didn't know this was coming.
http://www.bgforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=3834

Whoa, that 2010 demo is not half complicated, is it?

I've played some more on easy level with KoH. It's holding up. It differs from MTW and EU2 in that there are locations within the provinces, villages to plunder and protect for example. So moving armies around is a decent sub-game. Fog of war is enforced outside your lands.

I like the way you have a lot of choices for cities, but only 12 building slots. The same principle holds with your 9 leader slots. Your mix of leaders will reflect how you like to play, definitely. And there are around 20 different combat skills that leaders can get, but they can only have 6 of them.

At easy level, provinces seem to change hand on a fairly regular basis.

Well, you can plunder villages to get money and degrade your enemy's lands. Rebels will do that before attempting to take the main city. I had one guy invade Kent; I beat him, but he fled from the first battle. So I tracked him as he headed for my docks, to commandeer some ships and go back to Brittany. When I engaged him again, I auto-resolved and captured him. Then I had the option to trade him back for 5600 gold! That's a truckload. Unfortunately, I left him alone for a while and he died in my dungeon. Wanker.

I managed to land in an ally's province in Europe, and marched down to attack Brittany. He sent his forces to attack an ally of mine and I went straight to his city and assaulted it. Lost half my guys but his town guards gave in. Then I faced quite a long period of pacification. So I offered an alliance to one of my allies; he took it and I asked for Cornwall. He said "Only if you give me Anjou!". And that got me out. But the former leader of Cornwall took up as a rebel, and I had to find a port and sail home to defeat him. I used my small defensive force and my third marshall and raised two smaller armies while the rebels looted Cornwall. Then I got my main force into the castle city, and used the other two to reinforce the built-in defenders in a village; they routed the rebels and both of those commanders gained a skill each.

Now I've got London building a moat and I'm going to rebuild Cornwall. I'm wondering if I can get some seige equipment (and a leader who can use it) and take out York. I'm number 21; he's number 6. But I have hopes!

I just think it's got enough of a different feel to be fun. It's not MTW, it's not EU2, it's not Civ, it's not Seven Kingdoms...But it's *like* all of them in some ways.

I will get Supreme Ruler, though. Just to be fair.

I'm diving into the SR2010 tutorials again. If I don't post again in two hours, it's because my brain asploded. Call paramedics.

Is BF2 out?

The Supreme Ruler demo is huge and complicated, but it does not feel as hollow as that other game that tanked a few months back. I'm still leery and I want to see whether it holds up. But the problem that the other game had was that you had goals like "Turkey must be admitted to the EU within ten years". Well, you just make one or two changes to their economy, set it rolling and then later click on the treaty, and you are accepted.

SR2010 is much more like Civ, in that you define success. Each country or region is stand-alone, and it's neighbors may attack it or help it, and can be swayed by economics, diplomacy, resources, etc. So it seems like it is more of a general-purpose empire-building game. It has this big complicated engine for...well, for everything...but it also seems like there's a coherent whole that each part fits into.

I still don't have the big picture on it yet, but I started a scenario with Portugal, Paris, Southern France and several Spanish territories, and it made sense. I sort of understand what was going on, I set some policies, my advisers started managing things according to their own ideology, and soon I was churning out defensive units and training them. I watched one unit of APC's (with infantry, I think) roll out of the factory, drive to my research facility and entrench. Then others went to military bases, a river crossing, factories....It made sense, and all I'd done was to say "Emphasize training" and "Bolster Defenses" or the like.

Very interesting so far, and extremely daunting in scale. Reminds me of learning Victoria.

Thanks for popping in to say hi, Chris; that's very cool of you. You guys made an outstanding decision when you released a demo on day one.

I did the whole run of tutorials today, and after I dove into the game again I did feel like I had a better grasp of what was going on. I will check out that PDF you mentioned, for sure.

My thoughts so far:

The game is ambitious as hell, more so than SuperPower 2 in almost every way. The economics model feels and acts just like my cursory understanding of macroeconomics expects it to. The controls are very straightforward and you get used to them quickly. The interface also presents a TON of information in way that doesn't devolve into menu soup. From time to time there are moments where I catch myself thinking, "Why can't I get to information x through menu y", but that will come out with the wash in a patch or with more familiarization.

The ability to explicitly dictate what your AI ministers can and cannot do for you is well-implemented and definitely graduates the learning curve. I have to spend more time with that feature to really get a handle on how effective the dynamic of minister skill levels and agenda recommendations plays out.

I can't complain about the scope, it's just what a game of this genre should be. I haven't gotten into a scrap with any of my neighbors yet, so I can't speak to the military operations side, but the R&D and unit/industrial/infrastructure production is pretty cool (I can draw my own highways! w00t!).

My big bitch so far: I wish my ministers would talk to me more. If my approval rating is slipping (which it always seems to be thus far ), I wish my interior minister would pop up and say, "Sir, cutting the pension fund was a stupid idea," or "How about shutting down facility x, because it really isn't making any money." In my scenario, I got so focused on balancing the budget that I let my other domestic issues get out of hand. It would be nice to have a minister pop up with some suggestions.

This game is like one of those albums that you listen to once or twice and you're sure that you like it, you're just not sure if you love it, and only 10 more spins can tell you if it's gonna grow on you. I'll drop some more science once I've spent a few more hours with it.

Sanjuro,

Where did you find the option to build highways?

Happy to be able to help

Sanjuro

Glad you’re finding the interface to be intuitive, after all, we did redesign it 3 times.

As for the minister talking to you more, when nothing is “lockedâ€?, they have very little to say since you’re letting them do everything. There are about 300 e-mails in the game already but we are still working to expand this more in the future.

Robear

We certainly are proud of the way the ministers handle the departments, we really feel it makes a complex strategy game accessible to the masses.

Concerning the military units, the decision was made to have as much real world equipment as possible. I never realized what an undertaking that would prove to be when we started. Everyone has their own designs! Certain units are good at certain things so it is helpful to learn them (at this point I know most of them, but the research for the equipment was on of my duties) but it is not a requirement.

First, in the Defense department, units section, autobuild options, you can tell you minister roughly what you want by adjusting the sliders for offense vs. defense and quality vs. quantity. If you do decide to learn the units, most list of units offer the four key stats when you select a unit. Clicking on one of the associated images sorts the list by that value. If you select a tank in a base and click on it’s “hard attackâ€? image, the list will be sorted with the highest hard attack unit at the top.

There is no “random location� option for starting a campaign, but in multiplayer once a map is picked, regions can be assigned randomly.

It should be in stores today or tomorrow on the East Coast, based on calls to EB and GS.

Yeah, poppin; you MUST get the demo first. This is not a game for everyone. This is not even a game for every grognard. That being said, give the demo time to warm up to you and vice-versa. It's pretty intimidating at first. The Paris Attack PDF in the demo's root directory (as pointed out yesterday by Chris) is a good read, but do the tutorials first so you have a better idea of what the guide is talking about.

My problem with games like Supreme Rule 2010 is not spending the time; I'm willing to do that if the game is good. I hate spending the time only to find out the AI is terrible, the UI is terrible, etc. It's a sunk cost issue; it would be nice to know if the game was decent before you blow 10 hours trying to figure it out.

Unfortunately not with the AI. The only way to know if the AI can stand up is to put a fair bit of time getting most of the way into the game. For example, if the mid-game/end-game AI sucks, you maybe be 15 hours in before you realize it, and the suckitude then makes you feel as if you wasted all of your time.

Yes, I realize I'm being a bit whiny here. I have the demo now.

Stop it people. No more games...no more games...wimper....

Thanks to the dev for stopping by and chatting us up. That does help move units even if people keep saying....no more games....