Air Power : Battle in the Skies

[Petike]

Anybody heard of this old 90s DOS flight sim from Rowan Software ?

http://www.mobygames.com/game/air-power-battle-in-the-skies

It's basically a hard fantasy version of Crimson Skies. With dieselpunkish monarchies and whatnot (kind of like some of the older projects Krall has made for his DeviantArt account). All in all, the game doesn't seem to have become a classic like most of the studios' other titles (from what I read, it's supposed to be quite buggy).

 

[zoomar]

Loved it, clunky pixels and all. It was buggy (actually the main problem was that its odd video requirements made it hard to load and play on a lot of computers) but was really a neat idea. It combined a map-based global conquest/diplomacy game with a fairly decent flight simulator - at least as good as the LucasArts SWOTL games of the period.

You were in an alternate world of competing kingdoms and airplane-carrying zeppelins were the main method of travelling to the enemy cities and attacking them (there was some backstory about this world being just one huge continent, most of which was uninhabitable desert or something like that to explain why you just didn't drive there in tanks). Your goal was to conquer (or make allies of) the other kingdoms by coercing them, buying them off, or conquering them, while a handful of AI-controlled enemies were attempting the same. When conflict arose (which it invariably would since you couldn't buy off or threaten everyone), conflict was resolved by a series of fight sim missions you had to win (bombing, air-to-air combat, zeppelin destroying, etc). It was similar to Crimson Skies in that it featured airplane-carrying zeppelins and odd-looking planes with different capabilities, but that's really the only similarity. It also predated the PC version of Crimson Skies by several years.

It also had a good classical music soundrtack, and the cutscenes (3D graphics as opposed to 2D in the game itself) were pretty neat - if awful by today's standards.

I'd realy like it if someone updated the game as a "Total War" clone. It was a really good idea.

 

[Petike]

Interesting.

Hm, but the description of the setting makes you wonder about the overall level of tech :

Given how aerocentric it is and how the zeps and planes are straight out of the 1930s, cars and trains are maybe still barely out of the 19th century and are rare (as are any non-coastal ships, since they wouldn't probably make much sence in a world with a single landmass).