From: desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games
Subject: STAR LEGIONS first looks
Date: 23 Nov 92 16:52:57 GMT
Organization: IDA Center for Communications Research, Princeton

I just picked up STAR LEGIONS so I thought I would post my first
impressions for anyone who is thinking about getting it and doesn't want
to wait for a full review to appear.

GAME PLAY.

The game is 100% real-time.  It is not just continuous movement, like
SIEGE.  You can pause the game to take a break, but you cannot give
orders to your troops or even examine their status while the game is
frozen.  You also cannot change the speed, which is one second of player
time per minute of game time.  On the plus side, the game nearly always
responds smoothly to your commands, unlike SIEGE where you are
frequently waiting for the computer to finish thinking.

The game is 100% mouse driven.  I don't think there are even any
keyboard accelerators.  For example, in order to assault a zone with 9
units of shock troops, you need to click on "9" on a tiny pop-up keypad
on the screen, rather than using the 9 key on your keyboard.

Time management is a very important part of the game.  You have a planet
to conquer in a fixed period of time, and many separate combat zones to
attack.  You need to have units active in multiple zones simultaneously
in order to meet the deadline, so you are constantly jumping around
between them.

The game starts out slowly but by the sixth scenario starts to get very
difficult.  (I don't know how many scenarios there will be but I guess
around 20.  There need to be at least 15 to make it possible to be
promoted to the highest rank.)  You start to be significantly
outnumbered by the defending forces and you have to develop strategies.
A lot of the strategies seem to be of the form, "trick the stupid AI by
putting a few units over here and decoying most of its forces in that
direction," which is explicitly spelled out in the manual.

BUGS.

I have encountered two apparent bugs.  One was minor and one I regard as
very serious.

The minor bug is that once I was scrolling between command panels just
as one of the popup windows was appearing.  Part of the popup window was
drawn, then the screen scrolled, then the rest of the popup appeared.
The result was that everything was frozen while I needed to click on a
button which wasn't actually shown on the screen.  However, by
remembering about where the button was supposed to be, I eventually
found it with the mouse, and the game proceeded smoothly from that
point.

The major bug is in bombarding cities from space.  You have phasers and
torpedoes for attacking cities which are too tough for your troops.
However, these will understandably not fire at cities in which you have
troops engaged.  (The Krellans aren't as ruthless as I thought, I
guess.)  The bug is that when I attacked a city, and subsequently lost
and withdrew all of my forces, the game would say that I had 0 units in
the city, but positive combat strength, and thus I could not bombard it!
This happened repeatedly.  It seemed to me to rule out a very important
strategy, and while I can't say for sure, I thought it made the game
much much harder.

                                        David desJardins