Chariots of War

Choose your campaign.

Chariots of War is a turn based strategy game from Slitherine and Paradox Entertainment that gives you the chance to rule the Middle East at the dawn of civilization some 4000 years ago. This is a follow up to the successful game Legion and gives you a similarly high level of control. Resource management is key to this game with a limited number of units being able to participate in any given battle.

The game plays out as a single-player only game featuring a few possible campaigns. The campaigns are vast in scope and are configurable in terms of the nation you play as, who the other nations are and the difficulty level providing plenty of game combinations.

Researching the technology tree

Inspecting a settlement and choosing what to build.

Chariots of War gives you a fine level of control over your burgeoning empire with control over nine resources from food to horses. You also control the production of army units starting with a peasant army and progressing in skills with your research on the technology tree as your settlement becomes a village and then a town and so on. You govern the growth of your settlement, too, and you must choose which buildings to build in each turn including everything from farms to the Tower of Babel.

Each building has different resource requirements such as a small amount of food to build a farm or food, building materials and gems for fortifications. These resources are also required to recruit troops and so you must balance your need for buildings to generate the resources against your need to generate an army.

Fighting Talk

The troops prepare for battle

Your army consists of up to eight squads of any combinations of units. When you come up against an opposing army you have to set your squads into formation and issue attack orders for each squad. These include envelope, seek target and outflank. You don’t know the extent of the enemy or their formation beforehand and so setting a battle strategy involves some educated guesses and attempting to use the skills of each unit. You might send the horse drawn units in up the middle while your foot troops go around the outside and your archers hang back; or you might hold your horse drawn troops back so that all your troops meet the enemy at the same time. The possibilities are quite wide ranging.

The computer AI in battle can be very tricky although a lot of the time it comes down to who has the most troops at the start of the battle. One flaw I did find with the computer’s strategy was that they would send out pitifully small squads to try and capture one of my settlements. This is especially silly if you’ve just captured one of the computer’s bases with a squad of 10 units and they send out a squad with 2 units of peasants. Why would the computer think they’d be capable of defeating the large army I had there just a few turns ago?

Campaigning

Move your armies around the map using this view of the world.

Chariots of war has only a few different campaigns set at different points in history but these are very wide in scope and almost infinitely configurable. There are 58 nations in the game in all and two of the campaigns pit you against all of them. These two campaigns are the same except that one starts later in history and so places you further along the technology tree. The other campaigns are smaller in scope giving you fewer nations to compete against. The default campaigns can be configured so you can determine which nation you play as and which nations you have to compete with. You can’t configure starting resources or your starting position on the technology tree, though.

The AI plays out events for all of the other nations in a realistic fashion so other nations get vanquished and bases change hands as you would expect. The AI extends to generating random events such as the level of your harvest, earthquakes, plagues and even civil unrest.

The presentation lets it down

Trading is accomplished with this rather dry screen

The presentation of this game is rather basic in terms of both graphics and sound. Both of these are what might be expected fro ma game in this genre although there should be no reason why they can’t be improved upon. The static screens that show whilst you are making your choices are dull although, admittedly there is little that could be done with these. However, troops move around the map by sliding along a path rather than being animated.

The battles that take place in real-time do involve a decent amount of animation and detail but are still a rather dull affair, and the sound is drab during the static screens and not much better during the battles. A few war cries and a poor music track are all that are on offer. It is to the developer’s credit that the game is still enjoyable and playable despite the poor presentation.

Not so clever now

Position the troops and give them orders that they will follow in battle.

The AI is the main part of a game such as this. You are essentially telling the AI system what you want your people to do and it’s trying to simulate what happens with those inputs, which takes a level of control away from you. Unlike a real-time strategy game where you take direct control of your units and are therefore responsible for the outcome of battles, here you are in more of a mayoral position. You can take no direct control of events as everything plays out turn based except the battles.

In the battles you set out your strategy and then the units run around the screen in real-time before you. You have no more control over the units once you press GO. This would be fine if the AI was a bit more refined but the outcome is too heavily weighted towards the side that has the most troops. Some bias is given to the skill of the units in each troop but the terrain and numbers play a too heavy part. The involvement of the terrain isn’t necessarily a bad thing but its implementation is flawed because troops can become stuck.

The battle is won but the war goes on

Bodies litter the battlefield

The battle is won when all of the troops on the opposing side have been routed. A squad is routed when it’s moral drops, which seems to be affected by troop deaths against kills inflicted. This causes a problem when a squad gets trapped in some trees. Only the troops at the front actually take part in the battle and once a few of them have been killed the rest of the squad is also routed. Rather than to move around the terrain the troops just stand there not fighting and then run away. That said, the battles can be quite tense and exciting when equally sized squads face off and both sides are down to their last unit battling it out.

Chariots of War is an immensely deep game and is extremely playable and addictive. Once you load it up you’ll wonder where the last three hours went when you next look at the clock. The slow paced turn-based style really makes you want to complete just one more turn before you switch it off and this will keep you playing for hours.