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Monday, February 3, 2020

Anacreon 2.1

My latest video game time sink is Anancreon 2.1.

A friend of mine gave me Anacreon: Reconstruction 2041 for DOS back in the day. I played it for endless hours. I can see this happening here.



The DOS version is still available, but I went with the newer version. I loved the DOS version but I don't want to deal with the annoyance of setting up DOSBox for it. Or, especially, dealing with turn time limits.

The manual is entirely online. I'm digging around to see if I can find stats for the various ships, too. It's tough gauging a fight between 2,000 fighters, 750 hunter-killers, 1000 jumpships, and 20 penetrators vs. 1500 fighters, 500 jumpships, 200 penetrators, and 50 starships without any stats. I know which ships move how, and which are better than the next, but it gets a bit tiresome to think you'd better outnumber the enemy in everything to know you're likely to win. The manual only has some very basic descriptions.

Still it's a fun game . . . and the save-on-exit system means it's by default in hardcore mode. Give it a try and make sure you've got some spare time to spend on it.

2 comments:

  1. I also played the heck out of this in the early 90's, but when I found the 2.1 version a few years back I played about 3 games and was done. It's still interesting, and if they threw a better interface over it and upgraded the AI I might try again, but as it is paled fast.

    Nice to finally be able to get more than 99,999 of something though.

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    Replies
    1. It would play better against another person, for sure. AI still isn't that impressive when it comes to strategy games IMO.

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