Carthage (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
84⚔️ Carthage!!! - was released by Psygnosis in time for Christmas 1990. It has glorious and often grand driving sections, and is also a strategy game. You wont find many people reviewing this game, so I'd say its high time for a strategy guide. Lets dive in and check it out.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 21 July 2019
Narrated: 22 July 2019
Edited: 22nd July - 6 Aug 2019
Ahhhhh :) I'm sitting here (24th Aug) on the last hot weekend of the year, looking back at the hot sunny shores of the Mediterranean. Picture the scene. The long pleasant avenues of rolling trees. The air sweet with juniper and olive trees. A breeze freshens your senses as a current of salty sea air softly gushes and billows around you, as you ride along in your chariot; as free as the wind and the rain, and the ancient earth itself. Over the rolling hills and beyond the rows of olive groves you notice an unusual sail on the horizon. You stop and gather yourself, for the sight is immense. A 40,000 strong legion of Roman hobnail boots is heard marching on the decks of the ships, as through to warn all those nearby of their single-minded objective. To capture and enslave YOU, and all of your people. They will sack the land, and then capture Carthage; burning and levelling your beloved city to the ground.
Returning to Carthage, the city is in panic. You grab a handful of coins, and rush off to each town in the Romans' way - buying up all the combat units you can afford, and send them off in the direction of the enemy! Can Carthage survive?
I'd only had a quick glance at this game having downloaded the WHD version, in 2016. I found the map element very unwieldy, and considering the game instantly too deep for me, I quit. Recently I had the idea to cover a few Roman games, and this seemed the obvious choice after Hannibal. The continuation of that theme ended up being the Roman Holiday series, and this also inspired the presentations about the Punic wars, which set the stage for the games.
The manual is on Lemon, but after all the deep-sounding nature of the game, there is only two parts to it - the riding and the battles. I enjoy the riding and it felt good to gently roll around the meadows and take in the view. The driving feels smooth and the tracks get tricky in the mountain areas, but is easy for newbies. But the collision detection with the logs is rather merciless, and I found it best to stop or go very wide. Which brings me to the battles.
I deliberately chose to not carry much money at the start of this recording, so as not to have the recording sessions go on for weeks like Hannibal. But this was a mistake, because I couldnt show the main core of the game, which is buying armies and building up the catapults and elephants before the Romans sack those cities and leave them dead. At first I didnt know how the battle system worked, but I read the manual which explains a lot, and soon I was able to drag units around and stack them up quite quickly. With all the fuss about the map, really there is only two or three views you need - the X1 view to see the whole map, the X4 view to move around, and x16/32 to plan the battles. But I can imagine it gets nightmarish if you have two battles going on at the same time. Some editing to cover some boring parts, and a bit of added dialogue to fix the ending. At one point I was looking to add Cricket chirping sounds in the background, but I couldnt find a sound I liked.
Danscore:
This is definitely one of those strategy games which needs a bit of getting used to. But the whole game feels disjointed when you have to manually dispatch the single(!) rider each time, and you can only command 5 armies at once. With no automatic moving or firing in the game, you cant just march a legion to meet the enemy, you have to sort out each formation each time. So you are always wondering what else is happening on the map while you are bogged down in war. If there was an option to automatically drive, or fight with 'use previous formation' options, there would be a chance to concentrate on overseeing the whole map like Dune 2, and command the war. Using one guy to control 5 armies against the Romans is unwieldy, and over optimistic, and spoils what could have been a Psygnosis classic. Take a look at any recent ancient strategy mobile game, and you'll notice how the map zooms, and the dragging around of units is very similar, so this isnt miles away from Rise of Kingdoms. The driving sections cut away from the action. If this had been a drag and drop RTS it would get an 8 - but as a mix of two genres and with a fiddly and slow map redraw system, things slow down to a 6.5. Not too bad considering it could have been far worse, and I actually have a soft spot for this title, mostly for the driving artwork, ironically enough.
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