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