What is The Ancient Art of War?

Generals have tried to achieve victory in battle for thousands of years. The Art of War, a classic work on military strategy, was written in ancient China by the brilliant warrior-scholar Sun Tzu. The Ancient Art of War, a fascinating strategy game from Brøderbund Software, is based on this work. In the game you maneuver your forces across a map while weighing factors such as the condition of your troops, the terrain, and the availability of food. You win by capturing all of the enemy’s Hags, forcing a surrender, or annihilating the opponent’s forces.

Campaign Variations

Art of War offers a variety of play options. You can choose from eleven preset campaigns; some resemble historic battles, while others are imaginary. You can adjust the game’s level of difficulty by modifying factors such as available food supply, reinforcements, and visibility. In addition, a game generator lets you dream up and play campaigns of your own design.

Each campaign has a preselected opponent, but you can modify the selection by choosing any of eight formidable opponents including Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and even Sun Tzu himself. Each opponent has a unique approach to strategy along with characteristic strengths or weaknesses. Geronimo, for example, follows the principles of guerrilla warfare, moving his warriors rapidly through forests and mountains without trying to hold any ground. This variety of foes adds personality to the game.

Mapping a Strategy

The action takes place on a map that scrolls across a varied terrain of flatlands, rivers, hikes, seas, forests, mountains, villages, forts, and bridges. At the game’s strategic level, you maneuver squads of up to 14 soldiers across the map. When the game begins, friendly squads and opposing squads are deployed in different locations on the map. You decide which squads to move and where to move them to most effectively accomplish the campaign s objective. You can choose the formation the squad will assume before it encounters an opposing squad, detach individual soldiers to form a new squad, or join two adjacent squads into one.

Tactical Control

Unique among strategy games. Art of War has a tactical mode that lets you control the.action directly during a battle. Instead of merely weighing such factors as numerical strength and a squad s condition and then “rolling a die” to produce an outcome for each battle, the game warns you when a battle is about to start and lets you zoom in on an animated depiction of the battle to take command of your troops. (If you’re too busy elsewhere to supervise a battle, the program resolves the conflict automatically.)

The tactical terrain reflects the terrain shown at the strategic level of play but shows greater detail. For example, when you zoom in on a battle taking place on a bridge, the two squads face off on an impressively rendered bridge over a river complete with lily pads and overhanging trees.

You have four types of soldiers under your command: archers, barbarians, knights, and spies. Archers fight with bow's and arrows, barbarians with bare hands, and knights with swords and armor. You must consider the different strengths of each type of soldier when you draw up your battle plans: Archers fare best against knights, who provide them with slow-moving targets. Knights fare best against bare-handed barbarians, and barbarians fight most effectively against archers, who are vulnerable at close quarters. During a battle, you can deploy your soldiers only by type, rather than individually.

Unlike the other types of soldiers, spies are complelely defenseless and do not participate in battle. Their only advantage is that they can see twice as far as other soldiers, making them useful for reconnaissance. If a squad with a spy in it loses in battle, the spy is captured.

Battle Formations

Art of War lets you choose among 12 battle formations, such as legion, phalanx, rear, wave, wing, and wedge. The game also includes an option for replacing some of these selections with formations of your own design. Many factors affect your choice of formation, including the type of soldiers in the squad and its current objective.

A single campaign should never take more than a few hours to reach its conclusion, so you don’t need the superhuman level of patience required in most fantasy role-playing games. The game includes a w^ll-designed manual that leads you through your options as a commander. You can play Art of War on a 128K or 512K Macintosh, but the battle scenes are slightly slower on a 128K Mac. You can save games in progress to other disks and save as many campaigns of your own design as disk space permits.

The Ancient Art of War is an engaging game for veteran war-gamers, and its animated battle scenes should amuse players who would not otherwise enjoy strategy games. The game offers so many variations that you can expect it to yield many hours of interest and enjoyment. Long after you have bested Napoleon or Genghis Khan, you can spend hours plotting battle situations of your own or re-creating famous battles with the game generator. I recommend The Ancient Art of War as a challenging and unique addition to the Macintosh entertainment software library.

Lucia, Armando. (August 1986). War Games. Macworld. (pgs. 147-148, 150).

Download The Ancient Art of War for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 1.0 up to Mac OS 5.0

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac