This ST-urday sees another instance of a game somehow breaking free of its Atari ST/Amiga roots to find moderate acclaim on other systems. It's not hard to manage when you're Sensible Software: the first company we've properly revisited for this feature (Gremlin's second appearance in that Demo Derby doesn't count) and one of the better known UK developers internationally. As I discussed with last week's Gobliins 2, it's practically inescapable to talk about tentpole (in my view, at least) games without occasionally bumping into cases where those same games saw various international and/or console releases due to their popularity. And, like last week, I determined that it's probably not a terrible idea to occasionally cover games people have actually heard about. When dropping all these blogs in the games' respective forums here on Giant Bomb it sometimes feels as if I'm interring Tutankhamun's body into his lavish and carefully constructed pyramid tomb and leaving it for future historians to discover in a couple of millennia.
Sorry about that. When it comes to Ancient Egyptian coffins I tend to snark off I guess. Plus, there's going to be enough ancient history to appreciate with today's entry already.
Mega Lo Mania (Tyrants: Fight Through Time)
Sensible Software are best known for Sensible "Sensi" Soccer and Cannon Fodder, but Mega Lo Mania proved that their expertise with games that have the player ordering around tiny little sprite people didn't begin and end with the UK-friendly genres of footy and military shooters. It has all the elements you'd expect of a turn-based computer strategy game from the 90s: the player can expand their territory, research new technology to give them a military edge over their opponents, create and equip whole armies of soldiers, or attempt a fragile diplomatic route. However, it does all this in such a truncated and transparent way that it feels more like a fast-paced RTS game. The game to be widely regarded as the first modern RTS game, Herzog Zwei, pre-dates this game by only two years. It wouldn't be until 1992's Dune II that a game would properly codify the trappings of the genre, leaving Mega Lo Mania as a sort of prototype evolutionary dead-end. Fitting, given its subject matter of human progress through history.
I've often lauded FTL's Dungeon Master for two reasons specifically: the first is in how it paradigm-shifted the measured, thoughtful cadence of prior first-person dungeon-crawler RPGs like the genre-establishing Wizardry to something a lot more tense and immediate and action-oriented. The second is the way it managed to streamline a lot of its genre features for the sake of enhanced accessibility; even if it's not the best pure CRPG it was an effective gateway for a younger audience, including the tiny baby 1987 version of myself, to be introduced to games from that genre.
Strategy simulation games, similar to CRPGs, needed something less dry and impenetrable to the young and the clueless and got it in Bullfrog's 1989 game Populous: a game I'd written off for this feature simply because it was far too ubiquitous. It'd be difficult to find a new angle on Peter Molyneux's Ur-God Sim, so instead I've opted for the slightly more divisive divinity-sim duplicate Mega Lo Mania. Mega Lo Mania is definitely a strategy game I've come to admire more for its design priorities and sense of pragmatism for this reason.
Disclaimer: "Tyrants: Fight Through Time" is what the game was renamed for its US releases. The Atari ST, despite being a computer created in the US, didn't see a whole lot of traction in its home nation. As a result there is no US Atari ST release and, thus, no Atari ST game called "Tyrants: Fight Through Time". I've added it to this ST-urday's title for the sake of clarity regardless. Maybe you played the DOS or Mega Drive versions, which did indeed see US releases (though, oddly enough, the SNES version did not).
Welcome to Mega Lo Mania! Yes, the game does space its title out that way.You'll notice that their personalities are all essentially synonyms of each other. They're all entirely untrustworthy and as likely to march into your territory uninvited. I'm going with the Italian (Green) to honor Vinny's recent involvement in the duplicitous strategy chicanery of Crusader Kings II.The game presents each of its "epochs" - discrete eras that continue to increase in complexity, size and potential technological peak as the game continues - with three islands that the player must conquer with a total pool of a hundred men. The first strategic decision, then, is to decide how many men you actually need to win each island. Any units left over get carried over to the next epoch, making it slightly easier.Oberon's already draped the proverbial towel over the region to the south, giving us few options. Fortunately, the first epoch is simply an exercise in blunt force. I won't need to worry about optimal starting positions just yet, but each area of each map contains a different assortment of minerals we can forage, mine or distill. It'll be important later on.You'll notice how barebones the interface is: this is by design. Sensible didn't get to where they were in the 90s by being too complex for their own good. The lightbulb takes you to your research center, the shield allows you to build defenses and the sword allows you to equip and deploy soldiers.Research is the most important element for right now. We start with 25 people: when unassigned, they'll sit around foraging for basic items and breeding. (The manual says there's a whole bunch of women in each tower that isn't accounted for in the population total. I guess that was easier than making every other sprite female.) The more you assign to a task, like trying to figure out how throwing rocks at people works (hey, it's the Stone Age era, sorta), the quicker it gets done. That clock, by the way, is ticking down in real-time: it takes exactly one minute for a full rotation, and the number underneath says how many minutes total you'll need to wait. (There is a way to speed the game up, though that also speeds up the opponents too.)Now that I've figured out how rocks work, I immediately turn every able-bodied man (though someone has to stay behind to guard the fort) into a rock-slinger and deploy them.Most epochs won't be quite as straightforward as this. It only works here because we don't start with any technology - offensive or defensive - and we can catch our opponent sleeping if we're fast enough.Unable to withstand my immediate assault, Oberon's forces perish. They learned a harsh lesson this day: Aloha means hello, but... it can also mean goodbye.So let's make this a little more sporting. Cilla, the hardest of the three initial islands, gives us two opponents to tackle.Actually, nah, let's just squish Yellow in another one-sided fight on Bazooka, the third island. You'll see that I created some defensive technology this time: defensive units are placed on the battlements wherever there are gaps to hold them. The player's main base, or "castle", has four such slots for defenders.The more technology the player researches, the faster better technologies will be developed. My people are still in the primitive bronze age era, as evinced by the loincloth T-posing icon that represents my populace and the mud thatched cottage that is my HQ. That means if I want to research Roman-era Pikemen, it's going to take far longer than is feasible. By moving to a new location and building a second base, we have a different assortment of items to forage from the surrounding environment.Instead of producing pikes, the bones we collect are instead put towards catapults. Unfortunately, they're the Dennis the Menace kind rather than the siege weapon kind, but it's a better ranged option than throwing pebbles at people.With three pieces of technology researched, we've edged ahead to the Bronze Age (approx. 3000BCE). New technologies will come faster and we've got a whole new facelift for our people and buildings. Also new? That giant hole in the ground. Don't worry, it's not the Shai-Hulud or anything quite so devastating, just that we're now able to mine additional resources. By digging up new materials we can increase the number of things we can research (provided they're the right materials) and be even more imposing.I haven't described the mini-map in the detail but you might've seen in earlier screenshots for this island that the yellows didn't have a castle, just a single dot on the map that represents an army. Their army, in this case, was just three unarmed villagers roaming around. Figured it was the best way to show off this game's technological progress mechanic without worrying about an imminent attack from a CPU I've ignored...Anyway, I've decided to skip ahead a few epochs. The game starts slow by necessity, but it doesn't get interesting until a few epochs in. The 7th Epoch is close enough to the end that we can see all the late-game tech.The 7th Epoch starts us at 1914CE, the advent of WW1, which is why all the humans look like big-scarfed Drew Scanlon Flight Club pilots. The first thing to do is to build a mining facility, a laboratory and a factory. All three are instrumental for building modern tech: the mine collects the resources we need to build the tech, the lab allows us to research the tech and the factory allows us to actually manufacture it. Not quite as easy as finding a rock and sticking it in a soldier's hand.Rather than minerals and ores, we're extracting the elements themselves. In true goofy UK developer fashion, Sensible gets a little unsensible here with elements like "alien", "moron" and "maarmite" (fortunately, none of the latter is here).We picked the best island to start on, naturally, so we've already advanced to 1945CE. However, our tech is even more advanced thanks to the Alien element we're digging up, so now we're researching the best technology in the game: Strategic Defense Initiative Lasers. This is the Star Wars shit Reagan was trying to build in the 80s.Did you spot the crater on the mini-map? That's a nuke. There's not a whole lot you can do if a nuke flies your way, but the SDI Laser can reliably shoot them down in mid-air by sacrificing itself. With a few of these babies on our buildings, we won't have to worry about becoming an irradiated pit.We also built some UFOs because it seemed like the thing to do. We're currently hovering over an enemy base dropping energy diamonds on it as the bazookamen on the battlements try in vain to shoot them down. I only have five UFOs deployed, but then that's all I really need.After removing the Green's "Nuclear Deterrent" defense - which isn't so much a defensive measure than another nuke that immediately launches in retaliation for some mutually assured destruction - I send a Fatman over to see them off. Suffice it to say, nobody survived. Ain't war grand?
I think that paints a comprehensive tableau of the sorts of antics you can get up to in Mega Lo Mania. Strategies mutate as you move from island to island and epoch to epoch, and unless you monitor your opponents constantly it's hard to judge how well they're doing comparative to your own efforts. By focusing on research and development you usually have a pretty good chance of overpowering your opponent with superior tech superior tech early on, but that strategy doesn't work quite so well when better defensive tech becomes available from the offset in the later epochs. When the ICBMs eventually start showing up, they will change everything about how you need to plan your next move. That's nukes for ya.
Though the mechanics rarely change, give or take a few additional buildings you may have to construct, the strategies constantly do and this is a key part of Mega Lo Mania's appeal and is in a microcosm the guiding philosophy behind its game design: simplify, but don't soften. While everything is explained with mouse-over hints the game never holds your hand, even through those early epochs with fewer features to worry about: the blitzkrieg strategy I demonstrated had to be discovered first, and the game makes no firm declarations as to which stratagem is the preferred one on any given map. Even if you crash and burn, each map only takes about ten to thirty minutes to complete depending on how often you hit the fast-forward button to get some technology invented faster, so it's no matter to jump right back in with a better plan in mind or a new starting location to try for a better spread of resources.
It's a rudimentary game in many ways, but back then there were precious few gateways to the dense numbers-and-spreadsheets world of computer strategy simulation games and wargaming. It rewards careful planning but also decisiveness and the player's reflexes in much the same way that Command & Conquer, StarCraft and, eventually, MOBAs like DOTA 2 and League of Legends would eventually do. And, hey, if you ever wanted to see a caveman take on a biplane in real-time, maybe check this game out.
