It never ceases to amaze me how a few tweaks in the basic C&C engine can create genuine variation in play experience between different games, presenting new strategic challenges and modeling different tactical imperatives across widely divergent historical periods and genres.
Some of these differences are minor and modular, such as national unit characteristics in Napoleonics or elephant units in Ancients, but each game has one or two major elements that define the game and are the fundamental features that differentiate it from its C&C cousins. For base game Napoleonics reduction in firepower with block loss, for Samurai Battles the Honour and Fortune economy and the Dragon deck, for Medieval the Inspired Action tokens, and so on.
I enjoy many of the C&C games but Ancients is still my favorite. In part this is my personal historical interest, part is what I perceive to be the lean, clean interplay between units and the perfectly balanced deck, giving me a feeling of battlefield control that I never quite get with the other C&C games. Most important, though, is what I consider to be Ancients’ two defining features, the critical importance of leader positioning, and evasion. The latter will be one of the subjects of this article.
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