Alien Invasion Essentials In The 1890s

No matter which side you chose to play you began with a strategic WarMap of the Isles in front of you, split into sectors, each one of them representing a corresponding tactical Battle Map. Red was Martian, green Human. A clock ticked away (or pulsated...) in a corner of the screen. By pressing a number key you could accelerate the passage of time or deccelerate it depending upon the situation and your ongoing activities, or you could stop time altogether by clicking on a sector, structure, or unit, all represented within their occupied sectors. Time would also stop automatically when events took place, the player being able to selectively control which types of events (besides combat) brought such about; important transpirations would therefore not leave you behind because of a slow key press or similar finger-twitch reaction. From this WarMap you sowed the seeds of tactical victories.

By using a context-sensitive right-click-and-hold technique you accessed factory build menus by which to queue up unit production. By doing so in an empty portion of a sector you entered the tactical Battle Map, wherein any present Construction Vehicles or Sapper/Digging vehicles could construct structures or fortifications, respectively. Each such vehicle had its own production queue, and multiple vehicles could operate within any sector at a time. Structures could increase the supply benefit of the sector according to that sector's supply potential (different from game to game) or allow for the creation of new units - multiple factories meant multiple builds. By manually tracing defenses one constructed the challenge the opponent would face were they to attempt action there; each such construction was built one at a time in the order in which they were queued, each vehicle operating individually from the other. Each sector had to be developed separately.

Units - or unit groups, rather - were represented upon the WarMap by readily identifyable icons. Up to 15 units could simultaneously occupy any given sector at a time. Movement could be intiated from any friendly sector to any other friendly sector, or from a friendly sector to any adjacent enemy sector (a maximum of 15 units could participate in an attack on a single sector as well). Any sector that did not possess a basic Control Center structure, the very first building in the construction hierarchy, could not support movement through itself or movement out of itself and into enemy sectors. By forcing one to build supporting Control Centers in the foremost sectors, Rage forced a certain pace and sense of advancement, a virtual supply-catch-up necessity before further penetrations of enemy lines could be perpetrated. Thus, one not only had to take the territory, one also had to hold it for some substantial period of time versus likely inevitable counterattacks by the enemy to reclaim it until construction paved the way for successive deployments... of course they too needed to do the same once (if...) they regained it, promulgating the aforementioned seesawing melee and the general establishment and coalescence of "front lines".

Movement of units was not instantaneous, rather they had to make the trip to their destination sector over time. Each moving unit had its own rate of speed for strategic movement, roughly corresponding to their tactical capacities: scouting Armoured Lorries would arrive at a destination long before the Track Layer tanks, or especially the massive Ironclad warships. Eta's would be displayed near the respective movement arrows to give the player important timing information. When moving to attack an enemy sector, one would reference the eta to determine when the attack would take place and the resultant lighting on the tactical Battle Map - dawn, midday, twilight, or evening. Humans had spotting problems at night, so timing could be of critical importance to the attack's success. A player could also launch an attack into a sector from multiple territories, and any slower moving units directed to participate would scale back the arrival time of the others, allowing all assets to arrive simultaneously. Coordinated strikes were child's play to set up. Any number of offensive actions could be initiated at any given time - it was entirely up to the confidence of the player.

Page 3: The Balancing Factor.

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