New- Your Comments Please

[Commander Bill]

I have played many war / strategy games over the years - I used to enjoy PTO (Pacific Theater of Operations) by Koie on my old sega system - no one ever picked up on those great type of games - I thought UV was maybe going to be a little like it - I will give it a fair try but miss the little battle scenes that many strategy games have even with turn based games...

Any comments on no visual battles and how to get past that so can enjoy the game??? I know there is a hard learning curve to this game so any tips on the best parts is appreciated --

Thanks so much eveyone ! Bill

[designer1]

Make sure you have the combat animation swtiched to "On" on the preferences screen. Play the Coral Sea scenario. Place a carrier task force in range of enemy land based air for a turn or two.

I guarantee you that you will never again wonder where the excitement is in this game!

[pasternakski]

the battle depictions are pretty primitive. I once meekly asked for more detail in the surface action screens (top down view, for example, with some suggestion of tactical movement), but was informed that "it ain't gonna happen," because what you see is not much different from what the game code is doing (formulas don't translate very well into visual display, I guess).

You'll note, too, the very rough semblance of reality in air combat screens. The planes are shown in top-down view and all you get to show you how many of them there are is a number just below the plane picture. Scaling is something the designers paid little or no attention to, as well, as you will see when a group of bombers appear in the same screen with fighters - the fighters almost always look larger than the bombers (B-17s in particular are tiny. P-39s are immense). Planes don't fly around the screen, they hang there motionless while some cockamamie sounds tell you that an aerial battle is taking place. Eventually, you are told that the aerial phase of the battle is over, and the aerial attack screen comes up.

Again, you'll see that the graphics are nothing to write home about. When your planes attack ships, for example, you get some more whizzing, whining, and whirring with a few "rat-a-tat-tats" and "badabing-badabong" thrown in, and sometimes you'll see bomb splashes (I have never figured out why some bombers can't even raise a splash) and even be rewarded with a satisfying explosion followed by some fire and smoke when you score a hit (although you may not really have scored a hit, see, because this is a "combat report" that may be inaccurate, even though the picture shows an actual explosion ...). When you get a torpedo hit, you get the big gout of water flying up next to the hull of the ship that was hit (again, this may or may not have been an actual hit, mind you ...)

Did I mention the bombing screen? The first time I saw it, there was something unsettlingly familiar about it - but I couldn't think of what it was. Then, one Monday morning as I awoke to my cursed alarm clock reminding me that I had to get up and go to my accursed job, it hit me (Monday mornings are a TRIP for me, brothers). When I was a kid, my mom, blessed K-Mart shopper that she was, bought a padded black vinyl toilet seat and put it on the family crappin' can. The screen where you look down to see your bombs exploding in that vaguely port-airfield-supply depot area is just like lookin' down through ma's padded black vinyl crappin' can seat (what did she buy it for? My guess is that she was sick and tired of cleanin' up after my and the old man's nasty butts, and she thought that this thing would disguise the mess for awhile - ma never was much of a housekeeper).

And so on.

I don't complain about these things (and don't see them as faults), because the emphasis in the game design was on performance, not appearance, and graphic prettiness is largely irrelevant. UV is the latest in a long string of designs by Gary Grigsby and a few others that are truly simulations, not arcade eye candy. By buying UV, you have walked through the looking glass to a place where "the game's the thing," and left behind Alice's world of visual stimulus for the sake of stimulation ("one pill makes you larger. One pill makes you small ..."). The graphic depictions are complete and competent enough to satisfy me. It's the analysis, decision-making, and test of mental skills that give me a kick. That's why I bought - and love - UV.

[Luskan]

The animations are primitive, but they're tense as hell.

Just a couple of wishes:
1. Ships sink during surface combat just fine, but when 50 bombers show up, and the first 25 sink the target, the others just say "unable to locate target". I would much prefer to see the ship settled in the water and my pilots reporting that since it is on its way to the bottom, rather than going home with their bombs, they'd find something else in the tf to blow up (some escorts perhaps?).

2. Just a tad more detail. i.e. Ships that are really smacked up bad by torpedoes (going to sink, either instantly or the next few hours sort of thing) could be shown with thier "backs" broken, sinking in two halves etc. Certainly the big one is when Akagi registers "MASSIVE EXPLOSIVE DAMAGE - AMMO STORAGE or FUEL STORAGE" etc. etc. I want to see the **** thing go up in a shower of debris that reminds me of how the Death star(s) met their fate . . .