Simulation RPGs, aka Tactical RPGs, aka Strategy RPGs, are games that take the character progression mechanics of an RPG and apply them to combat occurring on a map of some sort. Broadly speaking. Look, you probably know what these are. Shining Force, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Wachenröder. That kind of stuff. The ones that are about strategy are often incorrectly referred to as TRPGs and the ones about tactics are often incorrectly called SRPGs.
I’ve been playing Warsong, the US localisation of the Mega Drive version of the first Langrisser game. It’s pretty good! It’s quite a complicated game, and fairly different from a lot of other SRPGs that I’ve played, particularly in the size of the forces you control.
The plot is that there’s this sword, Warsong, which has great power and has been kept locked away by a royal family so it doesn’t endanger the world. You play the son of the king, and at the start of the game your castle is being invaded and the king orders you to flee. In the levels so far I’ve fled to a neighbouring kingdom, fought off a bandit raid, returned to my home kingdom and retaken the castle (magic sword is gone, though), and I’m just starting to invade enemy territory. I’m slightly less than halfway through the game.
The mechanics of battles are in some ways fairly standard. It happens on a square grid and you move your units around to attack others. There’s no facing, but terrain types can make a big difference, as can a weapon triangle (archers beat horsemen who beat footsoldiers who beat archers). The big difference from other games like this is that besides your main characters (“commanders”) you can hire subordinates. These are of various types and come in groups of ten. They’re weaker than the commanders but get a stat boost by being close to them. All experience earned by the subordinates goes to the commander, and any subordinates remaining at the end of a stage are gone for the next one, so hiring too many is a waste. Enemy forces have the same system. The result of this is that a battle might feature a couple hundred people on each side, though since the subordinates are in groups there might be like fifty to a hundred discrete units on the map at the start. That’s still a lot for this sort of game, I think.
The number of units on field can get unwieldy, so you have the option of letting the AI control the subordinates. This isn’t a bad thing when you’re just on your way across the map, but it’s generally better to control them directly if the enemy is nearby, because the AI is as dumb as a bag of hammers. Many a time I’ve neglected to tell one of these guys what to do because they’re already where I want them (and I’ve forgotten that I haven’t turned off their AI), and then they’ll go and move themselves away. They’ll happily abandon high ground and attack enemies that are stronger than them from a weak position. On a few occasions I’ve seen a whole series of subordinates attack an enemy commander and each get completely wiped out in turn without doing any damage. Aside from losing a bunch of units, this can lead to enemies gaining levels. Even worse than your subordinates going rogue is when you have an allied commander to worry about, which can force you to overextend yourself to save them from themselves (this keeps things interesting, though). The bad ally AI is somewhat made up for by the equally bad enemy AI. In the last stage I finished, I parked an aquatic unit just off the coast and wiped out about ten enemy units who just waded out into the waves and attacked him one after another despite the terrain boost he got from the water and the penalty they got from the same.
The actual attacks are depicted in a side view, with your little party running up to the enemy party and some of one or both sides getting killed. The terrain they’re on will be shown, and ranged attackers will get to land hits before melee units reach them. A unit with 10 HP has ten guys in it, one with 4HP has four, and so on, so lost HP translates to lost attacking power. I’m not actually sure if initiating an attack gives any advantage over the enemy starting it, other than getting to choose the ground. Battles involving commanders are slightly different, in that a commander’s unit is just the one character. Their attack tends to land first and to smash the enemy. This is in contrast to the real world, where commanders are also more likely to survive a battle than their subordinates but achieve that by being well away from danger rather than having any special prowess.
If a commander is killed (and this game has permadeath, so you don’t want your commanders getting killed), all their subordinates flee or something. They’re out of the fight, anyway. In theory this (along with any kind of ethical understanding) would make killing the enemy commanders rather than their underlings a top priority, but of course taking that route would deny you the XP to be gained by killing the enemy to a man. You also get no benefit from keeping your own guys alive, so it often makes sense to use them as human shields for the commanders or even to send them out to finish off an enemy unit knowing they’ll be killed for sure during the enemy turn. I find this despicable, but I keep doing it.
Scenario design has been pretty good. Most fights have more complicated objectives than just beating all of the enemies. Sometimes you have to reach somewhere on the map, sometimes you have to protect NPCs, sometimes you just have to survive a certain number of turns, in one stage you have to catch up to and defeat a fleeing enemy (again, not sure of the morals of this one). It keeps things interesting. Otherwise I think I’d mostly just be holing up in the mountains (30% defence boost) and letting the enemy come to me.
I thought before I started that a console game of this type and age (30 years) would be too simple, or too complicated, or too impossible, or too obtuse, but it’s actually falling right down the middle of all of those, at least for me. It’s complicated and I don’t fully grasp the mechanics (is it RNG that makes what look like two equivalent encounters have such different results sometimes, or are there factors I’m missing?), but it’s very playable and fairly forgiving - aside from four regular save slots, you can save in a single slot at any point during battle. I tend to forget about that too often to really abuse it, but given a single stage can take over an hour and a bad choice can lose you a unit permanently it’s nice to have.
I’ve been playing Warsong, the US localisation of the Mega Drive version of the first Langrisser game. It’s pretty good! It’s quite a complicated game, and fairly different from a lot of other SRPGs that I’ve played, particularly in the size of the forces you control.
The plot is that there’s this sword, Warsong, which has great power and has been kept locked away by a royal family so it doesn’t endanger the world. You play the son of the king, and at the start of the game your castle is being invaded and the king orders you to flee. In the levels so far I’ve fled to a neighbouring kingdom, fought off a bandit raid, returned to my home kingdom and retaken the castle (magic sword is gone, though), and I’m just starting to invade enemy territory. I’m slightly less than halfway through the game.
The mechanics of battles are in some ways fairly standard. It happens on a square grid and you move your units around to attack others. There’s no facing, but terrain types can make a big difference, as can a weapon triangle (archers beat horsemen who beat footsoldiers who beat archers). The big difference from other games like this is that besides your main characters (“commanders”) you can hire subordinates. These are of various types and come in groups of ten. They’re weaker than the commanders but get a stat boost by being close to them. All experience earned by the subordinates goes to the commander, and any subordinates remaining at the end of a stage are gone for the next one, so hiring too many is a waste. Enemy forces have the same system. The result of this is that a battle might feature a couple hundred people on each side, though since the subordinates are in groups there might be like fifty to a hundred discrete units on the map at the start. That’s still a lot for this sort of game, I think.
The number of units on field can get unwieldy, so you have the option of letting the AI control the subordinates. This isn’t a bad thing when you’re just on your way across the map, but it’s generally better to control them directly if the enemy is nearby, because the AI is as dumb as a bag of hammers. Many a time I’ve neglected to tell one of these guys what to do because they’re already where I want them (and I’ve forgotten that I haven’t turned off their AI), and then they’ll go and move themselves away. They’ll happily abandon high ground and attack enemies that are stronger than them from a weak position. On a few occasions I’ve seen a whole series of subordinates attack an enemy commander and each get completely wiped out in turn without doing any damage. Aside from losing a bunch of units, this can lead to enemies gaining levels. Even worse than your subordinates going rogue is when you have an allied commander to worry about, which can force you to overextend yourself to save them from themselves (this keeps things interesting, though). The bad ally AI is somewhat made up for by the equally bad enemy AI. In the last stage I finished, I parked an aquatic unit just off the coast and wiped out about ten enemy units who just waded out into the waves and attacked him one after another despite the terrain boost he got from the water and the penalty they got from the same.
The actual attacks are depicted in a side view, with your little party running up to the enemy party and some of one or both sides getting killed. The terrain they’re on will be shown, and ranged attackers will get to land hits before melee units reach them. A unit with 10 HP has ten guys in it, one with 4HP has four, and so on, so lost HP translates to lost attacking power. I’m not actually sure if initiating an attack gives any advantage over the enemy starting it, other than getting to choose the ground. Battles involving commanders are slightly different, in that a commander’s unit is just the one character. Their attack tends to land first and to smash the enemy. This is in contrast to the real world, where commanders are also more likely to survive a battle than their subordinates but achieve that by being well away from danger rather than having any special prowess.
If a commander is killed (and this game has permadeath, so you don’t want your commanders getting killed), all their subordinates flee or something. They’re out of the fight, anyway. In theory this (along with any kind of ethical understanding) would make killing the enemy commanders rather than their underlings a top priority, but of course taking that route would deny you the XP to be gained by killing the enemy to a man. You also get no benefit from keeping your own guys alive, so it often makes sense to use them as human shields for the commanders or even to send them out to finish off an enemy unit knowing they’ll be killed for sure during the enemy turn. I find this despicable, but I keep doing it.
Scenario design has been pretty good. Most fights have more complicated objectives than just beating all of the enemies. Sometimes you have to reach somewhere on the map, sometimes you have to protect NPCs, sometimes you just have to survive a certain number of turns, in one stage you have to catch up to and defeat a fleeing enemy (again, not sure of the morals of this one). It keeps things interesting. Otherwise I think I’d mostly just be holing up in the mountains (30% defence boost) and letting the enemy come to me.
I thought before I started that a console game of this type and age (30 years) would be too simple, or too complicated, or too impossible, or too obtuse, but it’s actually falling right down the middle of all of those, at least for me. It’s complicated and I don’t fully grasp the mechanics (is it RNG that makes what look like two equivalent encounters have such different results sometimes, or are there factors I’m missing?), but it’s very playable and fairly forgiving - aside from four regular save slots, you can save in a single slot at any point during battle. I tend to forget about that too often to really abuse it, but given a single stage can take over an hour and a bad choice can lose you a unit permanently it’s nice to have.