ICBM (2020)

ICBM is a smart-pause RTS with an emphasis on management. The game focuses more on balancing spending your resources (no money in this game only time) between Research with production. Researching paths will allow you to have bigger, better weapons versus producing more of them right here and now. The game plays fairly slow and all players are basically beefing up their supply and cache of arms and defense systems. Conceptually it's a great high stakes idea. A game where you never know what is around the corner and when someone loses their nerve and all havoc breaks out. The game unfortunately falls short for several reasons.

First of all, the game just isn't that fun or engaging. The main meat of the game is picking an optimal research path, planning it out and deciding what to devote and spec into. Some paths seem way better than others (more on this next), but actually moving your units around or assigning them orders (like you typically do in an RTS) is quite bad in this game. You have no real control. It's hard to select units. The UI for doing so is garbage. Units will get 'stuck' on chunks of land or whatnot. Planes can be sent to fly and will run of fuel if an airbase is full, etc. The game just falls flat as an RTS, and the R&S and production bits don't really make up for it despite them being somewhat interesting.

Second, the balance in this game is pretty bad too. Your only resource is time. Planes take about 10-20 seconds to build. Ships take several minutes. Missiles a few seconds. and buildings and research can take as much as up to ten minutes! What this means is that your units you don't have to replace as much save you time. This means ships. the offensive and defensive capabilities of the destroyer make it hands down the best unit in the game as it can do pretty much everything and you can upgrade its capabilities, range and speed. After that, you need only spam ICBM missiles for your mobile ICBM launcher and you can destroy pretty much anything you can detect and nobody can do nothing about it. I played a mod that added more units and did some interesting bits but it didn't fix the balance issue... it actually made them worse letting you capture cities to expand territory... which in the end was pointless and didn't assist in either more GDP/rate of R&D/production or raise my score (which leads me to the next bit)

third, the scoring system in this game doesn't really make sense to me. A match basically ends when the pollution level from rads gets high enough and a 10 minute timer warns that the match is about to end soon. When you start the game you can pick from three scoring modes but they all revolve around gaining points for chipping away at cities and losing points from your own cities getting hit. This is to induce you to attack people and play brazenly I suppose but actually taking out enemy units or not getting hit doesn't 'award' points. This means you are penalized by overly defending your cities and aren't rewarded for thwarting aggressors or taking out their forces. Kind of lame for an RTS...

Fourth, the game is supposedly moddable and designed to be modded, but from what i can tell it doesn't really mod so well. (at least single player) AI don't really use modded weapons properly. and some things (like the armies i mentioned that let you conquer enemy cities and expand your territory) don't have any effect other than letting you build in more places at the expense of having more territory that can actually be attacked and you must defend lest it hurt your score) the base game is plenty complicated enough with it's own balance issues and adding in more 'stuff' isn't really a good solution.

IT's still a nice idea and has enough depth to be engaging in a sim/managerial type game (at least for a few matches then i got tired of it) looks great, the map has a lot of detail in the most recent patch, and the music is really fitting for the theme as well. It feels a bit more robust than the original Defcon that its clearly inspired by but the various complexities here feel like a tradeoff for a spiritual successor of that simple premised game to be succeeded by something with numerous flaws that crop up a bit and diminish what was a pretty much perfectly functional game.