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Margaret Chan

Fantasy General, a new war/strategy game by Mindscape, gives you command of an army and total control of the destiny of your own kingdom.

However, the downside is that no one can help you if you make major mistakes and jeopardise your country.

Fortunately, minor mistakes can be rectified quite easily.

 From the game, you can play five ready-made campaigns, or enter the Arena and create any kind of battle imaginable.

  You are also able to engage a friend via the Play-By-Mail (PBM) feature which can be used in the Arena or one of the other pre-generated scenarios.

When playing against someone else or the computer, you can choose to have your units hidden from your opponent's view.

During combat, there are three distinct ranges at which attacks occur. They are Missile range (long), Skirmish range (short), and Melee range (close).

Kills (which can only be recovered during a battle by using the Recruit button while adjacent to a friendly town, castle or tower hex), and wounds (which can be recovered at any time by left-clicking on the Rest button) on living units and damage to Mech units, are results of combat.

 Winning or losing a battle just depends on victory hexes, units destroyed, and the turn limit. As a player, you should know that campaign game victory conditions are pre-determined.

 For Arena games, victory conditions are set when the game is started, and normally there are benefits to end a battle as soon as possible.

   If you have played Panzer General in the past, you would notice that Fantasy General uses the same basic mechanics and has a similar sort of feel. On the other hand, a lot of things are different.

 The game comes with much more involved strategies which give it a lot more replay value.

Fantasy General, moreover, has a terrific combined arms interaction amongst the unit types. Nevertheless, the tactical interactions in this game are rather subtle.

 Regarding the drawbacks of the game, players may find that if they play Arena and have the computer autobuild their troop, they cannot buy additional troops during the game even though they have gold.

 The probable reason for this is that the computer buys the maximum number of units that it can, so its focus is on quantity rather than quality. Until you lose a unit or disband one, you will not be able to buy another as you are already at the maximum number of troops on the map.

 The game can run in Windows 95 DOS session, but it will be slow and seems to hang occasionally. Since it doesn't need much memory in the first 640K, you can run it in a single DOS session with the compression drivers loaded.

 To run the game, your IBM compatible should be installed with a 386/40 co-processor. (A 486/50 PC or higher is strongly advised). Besides, your PC should have 8 MB of RAM, 1MB SVGA card with VESA 1.2 complaint, and MS-DOS 5.0 or above.

 You also have to have a CD-ROM with a minimum data transfer rate of 150 KB and 350 ms access time. Also, the game requires a CD driver MSCDEX.EXE version 2.2, a mouse, and an uncompressed hard drive. For sound output, you are advised to use Sound Blaster and 100 per cent compatibles to connect to your existing computer system.

 MEGAHINT: The general strategy during the campaign based on Archmage Krell is to build an army around Heavy Infantry and Sky Hunters. About half of the Heavy Infantry are closed formation mortals used for forced march blitzing through rear areas, while the other half are open formation magicals, used for slogging through difficult terrain.

 MEGAHINT: Also for the Archmage Krell campaign, the Sky Hunters should first be used on a search and destroy mission, then used to ride roughshod over the rear areas, along with the Bombardiers.

Fantasy General For IBM/IBM compatible CD-ROMs 



Burden of sole control