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Assault On Democracy Review (GamersGlobal.de 8/10)


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Many thanks to xwormwood for his English translation of the AoD review :)

Assault on Democracy: The Essentials

The main novelty of Assault on Democracy is the huge world map in the central scenario "1939". It now has 484x200 fields, which is five times as much as in the main program. Overall the proportions are much better now, but of course you still can't really speak of a true to scale implementation of the earth. While the the greater detail level is already noticeable in Europe, the differences are much more pronounced in Asia: China, the Philippines and many other regions are displayed much larger and more accurate., many islands have entered the map for the first time, or in a much better detailed appearance. In sum you receive more tactical options, and you get more combat units (even though there is still no stacking). When you play the Americans or Japanese you will notice the new light carriers. Even though these CVLs might look feeble, they have at least one big advantage: they can replace their planes much cheaper than the main carriers. The struggle for China is now more exciting than before and no longer a simple battle of attrition. Even better: you will have to move your infantry skillfully if you want to have success with the conquest of Southeast Asia.

Speaking of skillful: let us take a look on the AIs ability to handle the new large world map. Like we already mentioned above we can confirm that the AI will now try to kill your units much more efficient than before. But on the other hand the AI tends to play fast and loose with its fleets. While the Royal Navy should have had no problems at all to handle the German (North Sea, Atlantic) and Italian (Med Sea) navies, the AI tends to waste it instead. In our game we could bomb not only one but two British Carriers to the ground of the English Channel, and when we started our Operation Sea Lion (Invasion of England) the AI had obviously nothing left to oppose our invasion fleet. Even Japan faced less American resistance than it has been the case in history (except from some rather annoying sub attacks). We reviewed the beta version of the game, so we're not sure if these weaknesses will be in the official release version of the game, or not. We imagine that the (heavily scripted) AI should be able to do better than this, at least with the some help from income and experience bonuses. So if you want to make the most of your Strategic Command game, you should play against an equally strong human opponent, with no bonuses for either side, and this like always via Internet or by e-mail. There is even a new option to pause the replay of your opponents turn!

Assault on Democracy: The Scenarios

Apart from the actual world war on the entire giant map AoD contains seven smaller scenarios with their own maps. We really liked the scenario "1945 invasion of America," which provides a detailed view of the United States and Mexico. Japan and Germany attack by land and sea from the west, south and south-east and have to conquer several target cities. This scenario offers fun on either side (attacking and defending), even if the AI ?handles the defense (obviously without any help of scripts) better than the attacks. The Axis powers debark in several places on the map and have to fight their way through Mexico, toward the USA, while the U.S. player must consider where and how strongly he wants to put up a defense line, when and where to retreat to, where to build up the next defence line (preferably behind a river or in mountain tiles). Diplomacy naturally plays no role, however, the research is worthwhile in the long run.

Also fictitious, but smaller are the scenarios "1941 Hercules" (invasion of Malta in 12 rounds), "Hermes 1941" (Rommel's reach out for Iraq), "1941 Wake Island" (can the U.S. win this time?), "1943 Brilliance " (Allies conquer Gibraltar back) and" 1943 Flatiron " (Reconquer and free the UK). The only historical scenario (next to the main 1939 campaign) is "1942 Solomons", which recreates the Battle of the Solomon Islands, north of Australia, between Japan and the United States.

Jörg Langer

I advise every Strategic Command Fan to buy this add-on, mainly because to the "1939 World at War" campaign. The much larger and more detailed map (supported by many smaller improvements and some more unit types ) evaluates the entire and well-known gameplay even more. The combination of long-term planning (research, recruitment and diplomacy) on the one hand and the strategic to operational warfare on the other works in AoD better than ever before in the SC series. And the new supply rules add so well into the game. Despite all the changes since the original release of 2010, this Global Strategy game still remains 1st in terms of "handle-ability" (individual units instead of columns of figures à la Hearts of Iron) and its controllability. Nevertheless you should still take into account that it will take twelve hours or more if you play the main campaign.

The scenario of "Invasion of America" offers another weekend of good fun, no matter which side you play. What can i say about the remaining scenarios: well, i took a short look into them, but I never really played them. And that won't change (with the possible exception of "Solomons") in the future: the smaller the scale of a scenarios, the less well will the combat system (which had been designed for the large-scale battles) adapt. In short, the $25 are very well laid out for fans of the series! Those of you who never played the game before I would like to say that I myself would be very surprised if there wouldn't be a some kind of 50 $ bundle (consisting of AoD and the main program) following pretty soon.

* * *

The original review can be found here:

http://www.gamersglobal.de/news/70891/gg-kurztest-strategic-command-assault-on-democracy

Hubert

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Dear readers, please excuse my crappy english.

I should have done (at the very least) a thorough check to remove mistakes like "no/now" or accidently mistakes like doubled words ("to to" ) etc.

Sorry for that.

:)

Hubert, please feel free to remove the most blatant spelling mistakes, it hurts so much to read them.

:eek::D

PS:

it wasn't my intention to write an "official" translation, but i had no problems at all to say yes when Hubert asked me if he could use it for the forum.

:)

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Thanks xwormwood and I believe I've fixed the outstanding errors and spelling mistakes :)

I can also confirm that this "preview" was based on an earlier Beta of AoD and two of the notable issues have since been corrected for the official release.

We had a bug introduced during development due to some changes to the naval combat that was over exposing Carriers and this led to them being easily destroyed as they were sailing on their own. This is now of course corrected and further refinements have improved the US naval Pacific Fleet actions so expect the full scale challenge with the official and non Beta release :)

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  • 1 month later...

Very good review for new SC players, indeed! Solid game and very fun, again!!

Their remarks for the fleet losses are kinda odd, I didn't see that at all. I tried 4 games now to do a Sealion and it never even REMOTELY works. Ofcourse, this is on the highest difficulty settings, maybe they didn't set it that high.

Also, I do find it kinda odd that they pay so much attention to the different other scenarios, I always thought that everyone only played the long one, but apparently not!

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