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I found Saratoga a couple days ago and just finished my first playthrough as the Rebels. I have not played through as the Crown forces yet.
My initial impressions are very positive. So far I have found all the missions to be well-balanced. I enjoyed that smaller maps with fewer units (and units of 100 soldiers) were mixed in with the larger maps. I also appreciated that none of the missions were longer than 16 turns.
The new menus and mechanics are working well overall, including Leadership Points. I like the distinction between a unit that needs to be Steadied and a unit that needs to be Rallied. Having the Recovery function be separate from both of those is also an interesting twist which worked well in my first play-through. The two separate > buttons – one to hold the unit until the next turn, the other to cycle through the available units – are both tremendously useful and a big plus.
The only thing I didn't like as much were that the last two missions (Freeman's Farm and Bemis Heights) shared the same map. I don't know if this has any historical basis, but to me it interrupted the continuity of the storyline. “I just had a decisive victory here! Why am I back trying to conquer the farm I just defended?”
A couple requests:
1) The Lead function is cool and provides some good strategy, especially later in a mission, when you need to juggle between Leading a unit versus Steading/Rallying/Recovering three others. However, I often found that I forgot to use my Leadership Points before ending the turn. I would ask that if the player tries to end the turn with 3 or more Leadership Points remaining that the game would prompt the player to spend them, at least to assign Lead to a unit that is likely to be attacked during the AI's turn.
2) I felt like I had a high percentage of Recovery actions result in +0. I don't know how random this is, but I felt like at least 25% did nothing at all, which seems like a poor risk-reward given the fact that 25% of the time the command is going to Unsteady the unit. Perhaps I just had an unlucky streak, but I would tweak is so that the odds of getting blanked were not so high.
I haven't encountered a lot of bugs, although I'm pretty sure that in my last mission (Bemis Heights) I had one of my disrupted units retreat through a Crown unit. The attack came from the east and my unit retreated to the east. Not only should it not retreat to the east, but if it did it should have been knocked out by the unit that was stationed there. Instead, I ended up on the opposite side of the unit that just attacked me. This only happened once but since it happened 15 minutes ago I thought I would mention it.
Overall, good game, as usual. I'll post again once I play through as the Crown.
Thanks for the input! Yes, there were two battles at Saratoga that were fought on the same battlefield. So I understand what you mean there.
I'm happy to hear you like the new format. That's a good idea on reminding players if they have left over points. I'm not sure what's going on there with the 0 recovery coming up often. That wasn't the intention. I'll take a look at why it's favouring zero values.
Was you running the AI in fast forward when a unit retreated through an enemy unit? It may be that the game didn't register that it had passed through an enemy unit. It's something that others have noted recently so I'll need to make a few changes with the way that works.
I'm halfway through the Crown campaign so far and am still having a positive experience.
I have had a lot more +0 recoveries. Last night I had three in a row.
As for reminding the players if they have leftover points, it would also be useful if the units that were available to receive points could flash or some similar indication so that the player doesn't have to tap through them individually and manually, since the > commands won't work if every unit has already been moved (or held) prior to the player attempting to end the turn.
I was not running the AI in fast forward when my unit retreated through an enemy unit. It has not happened again in my subsequent play-through.
When you get the +0 recoveries, what does the game tell you the maximum recovery will be? Do you mainly get +0 when it's a low maximum like less than 10?
No, I don't bother with recoveries with low maximums; they aren't worth the risk of being disordered. Those +0s were all on recoveries with maximums in the 50-100 range.
An update to Saratoga has just been released (version 1.03) which should patch up the problems listed here.
Well, hi again, Kris.
Playing Saragota, i has found one intresting thing. When artillery unit counterattack unit in redoubt, village or something, like that, they dont make any breach, or damage for that type of cover. And this is not so cool. Especially , when one artillery unit, that stay in redoubt, attacking another artillery unit in same cover. It makes just next: attacking artillery unit damage cover of enemy, when counterattacking artillery- no.
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