Spring RTS Engine

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/964/M ... ation.html

This is an old but excellent turn based game, and quite original as well. Requires a lot of patience tough cause games take long and things happen at a slow pace. There is an review and some screenshots on the link beside the download. I recommend you play this using doxbox as I didnt got it to work properly winhout it.

The AI is really nice, I was surprised to, after having sent 2 enemy scouts towards the enemy that eventually were destroyed, finding a missile crawler waiting for the third in the path the other 2 had used... and this in the weakest AI avaible :)

i remember watching my friend play that game back in the day

for me, i think this game is my favourite turn based strategy game; spent countless hours playing it on one of my first computers :D

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/38/UF ... known.html

Max is a base builder, xcom is a combat sim, totally different genera's of TBS.

There are at least 2 projects to make a Windows M.A.X. clone currently active. Here's a German project, and here's a Russian one. Neither version is fully playable yet, though there is certainly some recent progress on the Russian one (as in they release new builds from time to time, once per month or so, for bughunting purposes). Both games do start up under Windows and allow you to do some basic base management, no AI in either yet AFAIK.

Thats cool :)

I couldn't get it to run in winders.

Another amazing turned based is cave wars. Nothing like fighting demons in mitril tanks while magically stealing people's food and earthquaking them to death on 9 floors of a giant cave.

You will need doxbox, you might get it to run in windows if you disable sound, but I did that once and after a while the game stoped working...

^_^

played a game of it at my friends place last night, brought back some fond memories

@ swift : you're quite right, mentioning xcom was merely a nostalgic thought

@ smoth : do i get to kill elves? i fking hate elves.

2 smoth: both the windows MAX clones need base game files from MAX to work, they won't run by themselves. Original MAX can still be launched under Windows using vdmsound or dosbox, too.
Cave wars is quite different. It has more in common with say Civilization than MAX.

dosbox sucks.

smoth wrote:dosbox sucks.

Are you kidding? I can play all games from abandonia and with sound ever since I got dosbox working! :)

yes it sucks.

No it doesnt

Hey cool! A meangliness discussion!

wow, my ignorelist keeps growing lately.

dosbox used with dosshell is a very simple way of running dos games without any fuss (once configured)
you just hatin

Uh is there any other shell available for dosbox?

No doxbox doesn't suck, unless you forgot to switch renderers and reconfigure a few other things. It's quite nice for the majority of DOS games (if you can spare the CPU power for "newer" oldies/3D titles). For everything else there's Virtual PC, if you happen to have a fancy bootable DOS image lying around like me. Win2k/XP shell + VDMSound works fine for a lot of games too btw. The only thing you don't get then are fancy filters for your video output (like a 2xSAI shader).

I can configure it to play X game and get the setting right. It is the fact that EACH time I have to go to the location of X dos game, run the shit, start the game then I get to play. I would love it if I could just create a shortcut to dosbox with params and automate it. Maybe that is in a newer version but fact of the matter is that I do not want fuck around in a command prompt every time I want to play a game. It was fine when I had an old win 95 compy with 1 hd and would type one command to start a game. I just made batch files I that could run from C: eliminating all the redundant typing but thing is I get annoyed when I cannot automate the execution of a process.

Last time I tried dosbox I was told that I could not automate it and each time I had to sit there go to the dir and run the exe with params I believe to tell it what sort of hardware to emulate... I cannot remmeber on the params bit. I did it once or twice and apparently it was not cool because I never went back to using it. Those sort of decisions where I just stop using something tells me that I do not like it. The hassle of using dosbox is why I say it sucks.

Hell, I have no idea what it is like now, maybe it integrates into the os where you can right click and just tell the shit to run with dosbox and it stores the game settings. I doubt it. As much as this community cries blood tears over the spring UI it is odd for you guys to swear by dosbox and all it's cumbersome goodness.

I would love it if I could just create a shortcut to dosbox with params and automate it.

You can by using a frontend. The frontend works like this: it provides a dosbox.conf file for each game which mounts drives/folders and runs the game through the autoexec bit.

I don't really use a frontend myself, I'm fine with automatically mounting my directory where the DOS games are at. Most games run in the same configuration anyway, only the cycles need to be fiddled with.

The Cafe Daum build of dosbox is pretty neat, comes with tons of little neat extras such as a D3D/OpenGL renderer and shader support (sai, supersai, supereagle, hqx, etc.). The same filters are available under ddraw too just that they don't run on your gpu.

You cant set DOXBOX to automatically run commands after starting, I set it to automatically mount a drive with my games folder as start and to automatically enter it...

If you want to use shortcuts, use vdmsound - that one operates just like that. Configure the settings once, it will create a shortcut, and you can simply run that to start the game. It seems to have some sound problems though, not sure if dosbox also has them - some sounds are choppy. MAX loads and plays fine however.
Does anyone else think singleplayer MAX is a very porcy game? Most games against AI turn into turret creeping very fast. I'm aware multiplayer is not like that (tried a few hotseat games before, was repeatedly beaten by a player who always went air as his first fac. Even if you manage to make a few AA turrets, he will send his radar plane first that will cause them to waste shots, then in comes the ground attack plane, kills your Constructor and that's it). But the AI (even the 'godlike' one from the last diff setting) just cannot cope with a few upgraded turrets, it cannot mass enough firepower to bring them down or upgrade its own units in a useful way to outrange them.