SuperPower
by Peter "Zhukov" PawelekArticle Type: Preview
Article Date: February 21, 2002
Product Info
Product Name: SuperPowerCategory: Turn-based Real-World Strategy
Developer: GolemLabs
Publisher: Dreamcatcher Interactive
Release Date: Spring 2002
Min. Spec: Pentium 200 MHz and up
Files & Links: Click Here
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Reviewed Version: Pre-release Demo
"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
Dreamcatcher Interactive is about to publish SuperPower, a geopolitics simulator developed by the Canadian studio GolemLabs. SuperPower will appeal to armchair foreign policy junkies who couldn’t get enough from Shadow President and Balance of Power.  |
| What are we going to do tonight? The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world! |
Due out in Spring 2002, SuperPower puts the player in the driver’s seat of the country of their choice in a late 1990’s geopolitical setting. The game boasts an impressive database, using the CIA World Factbook for geopolitical data along with real-world terrain maps on which battles will be played out. A playable demo is currently available, and in this article I’ll present some of my impressions of it.
SuperPower promises to deliver more than just slick graphical improvements over Shadow President or Balance of Power. As with those games, most of the time you’ll be staring at a map of the world and pointing the ‘finger of God’ at a particular country to invoke foreign policy changes. This interface allows you to conduct operations in the following spheres: Demographics, Politics, Economy, Military and Secret Services. The playable demo allows you to play as the United States for twenty turns. Because the U.S. is such a strong country, you won’t get much of a flavor for the diplomacy aspects of the game and will spend much of your time conducting military operations.
Whereas military operations in Shadow President were abstract, SuperPower allows you to deploy your forces on terrain maps and conduct detailed battles against your enemies. In fact, GolemLabs claims that SuperPower “contains the largest military database ever assembled in a strategy game” and that a number of military personnel are considering its use in their training programs.
The military aspect of the game is quite interesting. Topographical maps are included for the entire planet, so the battles won’t have such a random or generic feel. As supreme commander, you will specify the deployment and standing orders for your military units but beyond that the AI will conduct the actual battle.
Manuals? We don't need no steenking manuals!
Overall, the game interfaces are very well done, if not a bit on the heavy side in terms of graphics. If anything they are perhaps a bit inconsistent in how they present information, which may be confusing at first. Fortunately, pop-up ‘tooltips’ are available for most buttons and functions that will make life easier for those who don’t like reading manuals. The flow of information presented to you at the beginning of each turn is formidable. This data is presented in tabbed lists with no way to sort it according to your own priorities. It does, however, make one appreciate just how much is going on ‘under the hood’ in a given turn.GolemLabs claims that SuperPower uses both neural networks and expert systems in their AI programming. From what I’ve seen in the demo, the AI indeed makes appropriate responses to the player’s actions. Only extended gameplay with the full release will reveal if SuperPower has truly improved over Shadow President, in which the AI often made bizarre and inappropriate game decisions. Given the scale of this highly ambitious game, the successful implementation of a credible and challenging AI will be quite an accomplishment!
Conquer Canada in 20 Weeks or Your Money Back!
I always like to test the ‘boundary conditions’ of a simulation such as this to see how it responds to bizarre situations. Since the U.S. is the only country playable in the demo, what better boundary condition could I test than an invasion of Canada?So, in the 20-week time limit of the demo I tasked myself with: (a) severing diplomatic ties with Canada, (b) disrupting Canada's stability through covert operations and diplomatic pressure, and (c) launching a full-scale military invasion of Canada using military forces based in the Northeastern United States.
Using the Diplomatic interface, I broke my Alliance and severed all cultural exchanges with Canada. Surprisingly, this had little effect on our relationship, which is expressed as a slider scale in the lower right-hand corner of the main interface.
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| The diplomacy interface. |
In the following weeks I ramped up diplomatic pressure and launched a series of covert operations from the Secret Service interface including sabotage against industrial targets and a successful assassination attempt against a political leader. At the beginning of every turn I get to scan the world headlines to gauge the impact of my various operations. My eyebrows raised when my I discovered that my assassination attempt didn’t even make the end-of-turn headlines (I must have knocked off the Premier of Newfoundland or something…). Nonetheless, it did have a negative effect on Canada’s stability making its government less effective.
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| Engaging covert operations. |
In mid-February, I decided to take the gloves off. I changed the American government from Democracy to Monarchy in anticipation of the radical policy moves I was planning (an old habit I picked up from playing too much Civilization). Once again, this didn’t appear to have much of an effect on my domestic stability, but maybe that's just because I was such a damned good King!
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| Changing government types. |
I chugged through about five more weeks waiting for my operatives to execute their various missions against Canadian targets in order to further wear down Canadian morale (a certain period of time elapses between putting out a covert ops ‘contract’ and finding out whether it was successful).
In April I started worrying about my 20-week deadline (I had about 5 weeks left for my military operations), so I finally declared a state of war against Canada. This time I did it right since the rest of the Free World didn’t attack me straight away (in another game I tried to declare war against Canada on Turn One and was greeted with nuclear strikes from France and England!)
The diplomatic relationships seem a bit wonky in the demo. Even while in a State of War with Canada, I maintained about 50 percent favorable relations with them (this is down from an initial 80-90 percent, mind you, but Canadians are not that easy-going!).
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| Detailed information on enemy force dispositions. |
Now the fun begins. I chose Montreal as my first strategic target, mainly since I live there and was curious to see how SuperPower rendered the local terrain. I assembled an invasion force of about 16,000 troops, 500 armored vehicles, and 200 aircraft and moved them from Andrews AFB to Montreal ‘with hostile intentions’, to use the game’s lingo.
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| Vectoring an invasion force into enemy territory. |
Once my troops arrived, I was presented with the option of resolving the battle in detail or allowing the AI to perform ‘quick battle resolution’. My extensive experience with computer games has taught me to avoid ‘quick battle resolutions’ like the plague, so I put on my 'Supreme Commander' hat and presided over the Battle of Montreal!
The battle map for the Montreal area is surprisingly accurate! It’s not like I could see my house or anything, but the realistic terrain certainly gave the battle an immersive quality.
Battles in SuperPower play out as follows: you deploy your forces in allowable areas and then give them standing orders. These orders are fairly detailed, and can be things like ‘Attack a specific enemy unit’, ‘Attack an enemy unit type’, ‘Defend a geographic position’, or ‘Support a friendly unit’.
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| Mopping up at The Battle of Montreal. |
I deployed my forces to attack from what would geographically be Vermont and upstate New York. As Supreme Commander you can combine your forces in any manner you wish. I split my 16,000 troops into four 4,000 troop subunits, each supported by about two dozen F-16 Falcons. I combined my 500 Abrams tanks into an uber-armor unit and tasked it with destroying any enemy armor. This ain’t exactly realistic in terms of modern Orders of Battle, but games such as this always tend to treat military units in a generic manner.
To initiate the battle, you increase a slider on the right-hand side of the battle map. The slider determines the speed at which the battle is played out and you can pause it at any time to revise unit orders. This interface is a bit confusing and it took me a while to figure this out.
During the battle, you don’t receive a heck of a lot of feedback on the status of your units (I’ve figured out how to find out about their morale, but I still haven’t discovered how to find out things like extent of damage or fatigue).
I won the Battle of Montreal quite easily, although I suppose this wasn’t much of a surprise since I had about 4:1 overall numerical superiority. It isn’t clear how the game factors in things like troop quality or training. For example, I played another game in which I kept feeding thousands of troops into battle with Syria via Israel and due to Syrian numerical superiority they kept getting chewed up in a meatgrinder. This is implausible since American troop quality and the technological edge would easily make up for this numerical deficit as it had in Desert Storm. I’m anxious to find out more about how GolemLabs models combat and hopefully the full game will come with a detailed manual explaining everything.
In SuperPower there are two ways to conquer foreign countries: either through covert means (i.e. rigging elections) or by military force. Military conquest is achieved by successfully attacking the country’s capital. Since I won the Battle of Montreal, I now had a huge military force within striking distance of Ottawa. So, on May 7, 1997, I launched a successful lightning strike against Ottawa from Montreal and Canada fell into my hands!
Up until my conquest, the rest of the world turned a blind eye to my military aspirations. I didn’t check out how the Battle of Montreal affected my diplomatic relations with every other country, but global reaction appeared to be muted and nobody attacked me.
The Fall of Canada, however, resulted in a very strong anti-American world reaction. Forces from Germany, Spain, France and Belgium (!) attacked my military and naval bases in Europe. Also, Japan attacked my forces in the Philippines. No one launched a nuclear strike, but I feel that I came mighty close.
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| Global reaction to military conquest can be fierce! |
The game grew incredibly tedious at this point since I had to make a bunch of decisions for each force that attacked my bases; in this instance I admittedly would have appreciated some sort of ‘quick resolution' mechanism. Nevertheless, I found the AI’s reaction to my military conquest somewhat reassuring.
And so, on the final turn of the game, I hoisted the Stars and Stripes up the flagpole in Ottawa. I was now in control the inner workings of Canada. Just for kicks, I moved the capital to Montreal and changed the puppet government to a dictatorship. It is only a matter of time before I have people in the Prairies eating smoked meat and swearing in French. Yes, it is good to be The King!
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| Victory after twenty weeks..give or take a day! |
"Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!"
In summary, SuperPower is a lot of fun if you don't take it too seriously. It looks like there’s plenty of computation going on under the hood, but the game doesn't always provide you with enough feedback to know what's going on in there. This is especially true during battle resolutions.
In addition to the Diplomatic, Covert and Military ops that I discussed in this article, there are also Economic and Production spheres that one can play around with. Sadly, there does not appear to be any way to launch economic warfare (e.g., trade embargoes) against enemies as one could do in Shadow President.
SuperPower is a very ambitious game and will likely rise or fall depending on the quality of its AI. From what I’ve seen, the AI appears to be competent although somewhat docile. It is unfortunate that GolemLabs does not intend to add a multiplayer component to SuperPower in the near future. This would be a wonderful game to play online with a bunch of friends (think Diplomacy on steroids).
Nonetheless, I look forward to the release of the full game in Spring 2002. In the meantime, I think I’ll dust off Shadow President and work on my Dr. Strangelove impersonation.
Resources
Articles:- 2002/02/21: SuperPower Pre-Release Demo Preview
Files:
- Downloadable Demo 122 MB
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