Iron Harvest Multiplayer Review — IGN
Iron Harvest
By Jonathan Bolding
Updated: Aug 17, 2021 12:07 am
Posted: Sep 3, 2020 10:03 pm
[Editor’s Note: This review and score cover only the multiplayer of Iron Harvest; you can read our review of the single-player campaign here.]
Iron Harvest’s multiplayer is a unique take on the tactical real-time strategy game. It tries a new mix of balance of strategy, tactics, and speed that works in some ways, but is frustrating in others. Like I said in the single-player review, this is a very ambitious game, and the multiplayer has that same ambition – but it’s not quite as well realized here. There are only six maps at launch, for example, though more are promised in the coming month. As it stands at launch the bigger ideas are fun, but the deliberate balancing just isn’t there yet.
There are three factions: Light, fast, harassing Polania with its long-range units; fearsome Saxony with its damage-resistant mechs that rarely give up ground; and Rusviet, the fierce, close-range fighters who specialize in finding and exploiting an enemy’s weak points. The balance between the factions is pretty good, though some factions suffer in specific ways more than others. Rusviet, for example, has to rely on infantry or heroes for anti-armor since their mechs aren’t very good at it.
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Iron Harvest’s basic rules are familiar: You build a very simple base composed of only three kinds of buildings. You must capture points to get resources, and can win the game by getting enough victory points or by destroying the enemy base. Defense is far less important than offense, and though you can build bunkers and mines they’re too static for the fast-moving matches and rarely see play. The adage that «the best defense is a good offense» is well-used here.
Iron Harvest has the appearance of a highly tactical RTS, rather than a strategic one, but it’s really somewhere in between. The tactical elements are there: Flanking, cover, and positioning matter quite a bit in individual battles. However, the interactions between units are ultimately too simple, and almost any form of defense requires you to babysit your units.
The outcome of a fight between any given pair of units is simple enough that the importance of strategic actions, like economic management, is greater than in other tactical games because each spare unit of iron or oil could mean victory or defeat.
The adage that «the best defense is a good offense» is well-used here.
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In fact, if you’re an RTS fan, you probably already noticed that Iron Harvest looks a lot like Company of Heroes. It draws a lot of inspiration from the first Company of Heroes game, and from Relic’s first two Dawn of War games, but much less from the more nuanced, granular upgrades and combat in Company of Heroes 2.
Many of the things I spoke about in the single-player review carry over to the multiplayer: Iron Harvest looks good in motion, it’s fun to control, the terrain destructibility is unparalleled. But here, there are more interesting differences between the factions than you see in single-player.
Take the differences between basic troops: Polanians have rifles, Saxonians have SMGs, and Rusviets have shotguns. This means that, in the early game, the Rusviet benefit from aggressive rushes, the Polanians want to set up defensive ambushes from cover, and the Saxonians want to keep their enemy at mid-range.
Iron Harvest Screenshots
The tactical RTS is a subgenre where the majority of your time is spent telling units what to do, as opposed to base building, and Iron Harvest definitely focuses on fighting. Because of that, 1v1 matches usually take a little more than 20 minutes to play out, and generally you can just add 10 minutes per extra pair – up to 3v3 matches at 40 minutes. With such short matches, the sheer speed of your actions provides an advantage over others, and all else being equal, in my experience a faster player will usually beat a more strategic player.
Heroes, in particular, are not new to RTS games but are a neat addition to the tactical RTS formula.
Iron Harvest’s range of characters fills a variety of roles across every faction, enabling strategies that wouldn’t otherwise work for that group. Polania, for example, has a powerful harasser in the early game with its sniper Anna on the field, as she can hit hard at a distance and her bear Wojtek carries supplies to heal friendly infantry. Take Michal Sikorski’s cavalry unit instead and Polania’s speed comes to the fore, with Sikorski leading flank attacks to devastate slow enemies. Or maybe you’d prefer Lech Kos in his gorilla-like mech, a powerful mid-to-late-game melee combatant that’s able to take down all but the largest enemy mechs on his own.
In my experience a faster player will usually beat a more strategic player.
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Taking flags gives you victory points, while taking iron and oil mines gives you resources. Because static defenses are so weak, no source of resources is ever secure, so you must constantly move to either defend your refineries or threaten your opponent’s.
Here’s another key difference from Company of Heroes: Resource points can be taken and exploited at any time – they’re not attached to distinct map areas that can be cut off. Weapon ranges are quite short, and maps are very small, so nearly everything is under threat at all times. In contrast to that, the time-to-kill, and expense, of a unit is quite high, so retreating from a bad fight is often the best option.
There is a retreat button which sends units right back to your base, but it’s important to note that retreating doesn’t make your units faster or confer any protection from damage as it does in Company of Heroes, and you can’t cancel it once you start, but it does allow them to ignore suppressive fire from automatic weapons. It’s not very intuitive, but if you’re fast enough to micromanage it then manually retreating is best. (Unless you’re using retreat to escape from machine guns!) Mechs can retreat too but it’s risky: Most mechs take extra damage when hit from behind, and with no speed boost slow mechs are just lumbering targets.
Again, it’s not very intuitive, but you’re often better off using C+Right Click to force a mech to move in reverse.
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The early minutes of each match are vital, as you skirmish with the enemy for resource points, victory flags, resource caches, and equipment crates around the map. Resource caches give you either a fast burst of the resource in question, allowing for early game strategies at the cost of long-term income. Crates drop a weapon system so your infantry can change type – the same way they can change type by picking up a fallen enemy’s weapons. Crucially, picking up a new weapon changes the entire infantry squad to the new kind of weapon. If an engineer squad picks up cannons, they lose all their building powers and become anti-armor soldiers.
On some team maps the speed of your scouts practically determines the match’s outcome: If your opponent gets to the crate with machine guns before you do then there’s nothing to be done about it. (Infantry picking up new weapons aren’t stopped by being shot.
) Since resource income is rate-based over time, if your team can’t hold or contest at least half the resource points on the map you’ll fall unrecoverably behind. It means the start of a match is tight and tense, but not so chaotic that you lose control of what’s going on.
On some team maps the speed of your scouts practically determines the match’s outcome.
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As a match goes on the pace of Iron Harvest picks up rapidly and the number of units in the fight grows significantly. Many will die simply because you can’t order them around fast enough, and the UI for controlling more than 10 or so at a time is cumbersome. Once the leader gets ahead there’s very little an opponent can do to catch up 1v1, barring a slick tactical coup (which is possible but difficult given the unit balancing).
I only ended a handful of my matches through victory points – most came from destroying my opponent’s base by either pulling off a key counter-play after seeing their strategy or denying them resources through superior micromanagement.
That’s mostly how I lost, too. For example, I liked to make lots of infantry to bait out an anti-infantry mech purchase from my opponent, but keep enough in reserve for a surprise anti-armor mech myself… and that was often enough to decide the game. It’s another big departure from Company of Heroes, and I don’t think it’s a good one.
Another other significant change from the Company of Heroes formula is much more fun: Melee combat. When ordered to, Infantry – and a few mechs – can engage each other using fists, bayonets, and blades. It’s a neat tactical option that can be used to lock down enemy units and prevent them from shooting at crucial allies. For example, engineers and medics only have pistols, but if backed up by regular infantry they can charge and distract an enemy in melee while their allies do the real damage. Plus, you can use Wojtek the bear to kill an enemy mech, and there are few things better than a bear taking down a mech.
Units are one of four «weight» classes: Unarmored, Light, Medium, or Heavy, and each unit deals a varying amount of damage to each other class.
So a heavy machine gun does good damage against an Unarmored or Light target, but barely scratches a Medium or Heavy one. Damage is also flat, with practically no randomization involved. Additionally, there aren’t many soft-counters, like an anti-tank weapon in a larger infantry squad or mixed weapon types on a single walker. That means the majority of units, especially the infantry, are so single-purpose that combat feels deterministic. You can often tell how a fight would play out absent tactics, and if you don’t have the right counter available no amount of tactics will save you. That’s true to some extent in almost every RTS, but it’s even more pronounced here.
It’s all a bit rock-paper-scissors, and just too simple for a game that’s about combat over economy and building. Infantry and light mech battles can be interesting because each does good damage to the other if the infantry is making good use of cover and swapping weapons – at least situationally.
Once machine gun teams, anti-armor cannons, and high-tier mechs come out, though? Well, suffice to say that combat gets far less interesting in the back half of a match.
For many of the units the only way to win is with a bigger mech or a much larger force, with combat devolving into a brawl determined by whomever has bigger guns rather than brains. It’s an environment where variations of a «death blob» strategy of throwing everything you have at the enemy, with minimal micromanagement, thrive. It’s not just boring to play, but actively demoralizing to play against when you think your idea should turn the tide… and has no impact.
This is the biggest place where strategy outshines tactics, and neglecting it can easily be a game-ending mistake. Putting together the right unit composition lets you shut your opponent down so effectively that they’ll never recover… because they simply can’t. The maps are small enough, and captured quick enough, that you can exploit a significant enemy defeat to seize half the map or more, which gives you all the resources they’d need to come back. Likewise, if your timing is off, or you spend resources on the wrong unit, the pace is so fast that you can’t easily recover.
High game speed puts an emphasis on overall strategy. This is supposed to be a tactical RTS, right?
Combat gets far less interesting in the back half of a match.
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Well… it is. It’s just unforgiving. It’s a clockwork of game systems that are wound so tightly they get caught on the loose bits, and that doesn’t feel like purposeful design.
What is innovative game design, and what saves Iron Harvest’s multiplayer from stagnating into an obvious metagame, are the hero units and the reserves system. At the start of each match you choose a mix of units and a single hero out of three for each faction, to appear across two waves of reserves. These waves are purchased from HQ for large chunks of resources, and they can include stuff you don’t even have the required buildings to create yourself yet. It’s a source of units you can base your entire strategy around, and getting a hero out early or deploying a wave of super-heavy armor in the mid-game can shut your opponent down hard.
At launch, Iron Harvest’s multiplayer battles lack a considered and balanced overall design. That’s evident in the way that seemingly minor events, like infantry weapon pickups, can determine the course of an entire match before it’s even really begun. A tactical emphasis is often muddied by black-and-white, hard-counter unit matchups. I’ll still play a lot more of Iron Harvest because it has unique and inventive elements, like heroes and weird mech matchups. Iron Harvest is well within the range where a sustained barrage of balance tweaks, additional maps, and quality-of-life improvements might make a lot of difference, but that’s just not here at launch.
Iron Harvest Multiplayer Review
okay
A few odd design choices and a predictable combat model hold Iron Harvest back from multiplayer greatness.
Jonathan Bolding
Not So Massively: Checking up on multiplayer RTS Iron Harvest 1920
Last fall, this column covered Iron Harvest 1920, an alternate history RTS with a strong multiplayer emphasis and surprisingly poignant story-telling.
Once I got into the full game, it only continued to impress, and I’ve been following it since. I thought now might be a good time to take stock of how Iron Harvest has evolved since launch.
The game has been patched pretty aggressively since its release, following an initial schedule of weekly updates that eventually wound down to biweekly updates, and now more infrequent patches. Every aspect of the game and every playstyle has received at least some love in that time.
Viva la (Rusviet) Revolution
Last December saw the release of the game’s first story DLC, Rusviet Revolution. It picked up immediately after the end of the main campaign, and as the name would imply, it put the spotlight on the Rusviet faction.
I will be honest and say I didn’t find the DLC to have quite the same level of quality as the main campaign. For instance, there’s no pre-rendered cinematics, only in-game cutscenes.
That being said, if it disappoints, that’s mostly because the base game’s campaign set such a very high standard.
Rusviet Revolution continued to offer strong and morally complex story-telling, and I’d definitely recommend it to any fan of the game. Just keep your expectations realistic.
I will give Rusviet Revolution some praise for giving a lot more attention to the character of Olga Morozova. She felt rather neglected in the main campaign, which is a bit strange when you consider she’s generally the face of the Rusviet faction in marketing materials, the same way Anna and Gunter are for Polania and Saxony respectively. High time she got a starring role.
New maps and modes
When Iron Harvest launched, it took some justified heat for not having co-op support for its campaign, which had been a selling feature of the game (even listed on its Steam page). However, the good news is it took very little time to clear that up, as co-op was added only a few short weeks after launch. One wonders why the team didn’t just delay the launch a few weeks to avoid the controversy, but at least all is well on the co-op front now.
Rusviet Revolution had co-op support at launch, so we can probably assume that will be the case for any new story going forward.
Also on the subject of new ways to experience the game, a few months back a new mode was added for competitive play and skirmishes versus AI: Drop Zone. Drop Zone is similar to the Domination mode in that players must compete to earn Victory Points, with the first player/team to exceed a certain threshold achieving victory. But whereas Domination is about controlling static control points, Drop Zone features “supply drops” that appear at random locations across the map throughout the match. Each supply drop captured allows players to earn Victory Points.
For my money, Drop Zone is the best way to experience Iron Harvest (outside of the campaign, anyway). The need to react to unpredictable drops keeps the gameplay dynamic and makes the best use of Iron Harvest‘s emphasis on positioning and using terrain to your advantage.
To be fair, I might be a little biased.
I’m a Polania main, and Drop Zone really allows Polania’s mobility to shine.
Meanwhile, there’s been a steady new trickle of new maps for skirmish and competitive play covering all match sizes: 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3. A new challenge map has also been added, in which players try to seize a Saxonian fortress with a Polanian army while losing as few troops as possible. There’s a never-ending supply of reinforcements, so it’s impossible to lose, but earning a decent score is brutally difficult. Be prepared to bring your A-game.
General updates
Aside from content updates, Iron Harvest has of course also seen a bevy of bug fixes, balance changes, quality of life updates, and other minor tweaks. These are too many to cover all of them in detail here, but there are a few things I think are interesting to highlight.
One is that Iron Harvest’s balance philosophy is to favor systemic changes over constant tuning of individual factions or units. Those smaller changes still happen, but less frequently than in other competitive games.
Instead, the developers prefer to improve balance with more infrequent tweaks that target the game’s systems as a whole.
An example would be changes to the reserve system, including reducing the number of reserve slots and reserve coins, to attempt to make deploying a reserve not be the deciding factor in a match quite so often. Balancing a complex competitive game like this will never be a perfect science, but as a more casual player I appreciate the more methodical approach to the constant rollercoaster of buffs and nerfs you find in other titles.
One final thing I want to highlight is that Iron Harvest‘s cosmetic shop has received quite a lot of updates since launch, including new unit skins, faceplates, titles, and more. This might not seem worth mentioning in this day and age except for the fact that is still an entirely un-monetized system.
I fully expected that by now there would be an option to buy coins — the currency for the cosmetic shop — for real money, and maybe that will still come eventually, but right now achievements and season goals remain the only way to earn coins.
Every cosmetic is something you earn in-game. That’s pretty rare these days.
The future
Updates for Iron Harvest have now slowed, but that’s only because the developers are focusing their efforts on the next big projects: a console release, and the first major expansion.
While details are scarce at the moment, we do know that this expansion will be free to owners of the deluxe edition and include a new playable faction. One expects this also means a new campaign featuring said faction, but I don’t believe that’s been officially confirmed yet.
The board game Scythe, which shares a universe with Iron Harvest, has a plethora of factions that are not yet playable in Iron Harvest, though many have been mentioned. We can safely assume the new faction will be one of them.
More specifically, the smart money is on the Factory, a scientifically advanced city-state established by Nikola Tesla. The Factory already features in the existing story campaign, and a few of its units even appear as NPCs.
With some of the work already done, it seems an obvious choice.
That said, I’m still holding out a little for something a bit farther afield. As someone with an interest in ancient Norse culture, I can’t help but be interested in the Nordic Kingdoms, a Scythe faction that appears to transplant the ancient pagan culture of the Norse into the 20th century. I’d also love to see some more exotic options like the Crimean Khanate or the Togawa Shogunate.
They’re not lacking for options, anyway.
The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.
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Iron Harvest — frwiki.wiki
Iron Harvest is a real-time strategy dieselpunk video game developed by King Art Games and published by Deep Silver. The game was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 1, 2020.
Summary
- 1 presentation
- 2 Development
- 3 Game system
- 4 House
- 5 See also
- 6 Links
Presentation
The game is set in an alternate story universe in 1920 created by Polish artist Jakub Ruzalski, which was popularized by the board game Scythe.
The 1920+ universe is inspired by the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 and the game’s theme is described as «dieselpunk mechs». The story focuses on the conflict between the three countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Polania, Rusviet and Saxony (respectively over Poland, the Soviet Union and Germany), which takes place in 1920s, after the First World War.
Development
The game was announced in 2016. The game successfully passed the crowdfunding round in 2018, which raised over $1.5 million. Originally scheduled for 2018, the game’s release was delayed until Q4 2019. However, in 2019, it was announced that the game would be released in 2020. A beta version was made available in March 2020 and a demo version in June. the game was released on Steam. The public release of the game is scheduled for September 1, 2020.
game system
In the game, the player can control mechs, infantry and heroes. The game is expected to feature over twenty missions and separate single-player storylines for each of the three major factions.
The game will also have multiplayer and shootout mode.
Home
Beta Review March 2020, Polygon Colin Campbell praised the game’s «smart use of units, coverage and terrain,» positively comparing ‘s game to Heroes franchise. Similarly, that same month, IGN’s Seth Macy called the game «awesome», praising the «details given to the mechanics of the brick building collapsing». In another PCGamesN debut review, Jan Boudreau praised the game for its «closeness to the origins of game design», highlighting the visuals and the realistic destruction of wooden buildings. All critics are also positive about the visuals associated with Rozalski’s 1920s diesel punk and imaginary European landscapes.
see also
- Steampunk
Recommendations
- ↑ (en-US) Roberts, « Steampunk WW1 RTS Iron Harvest was selected by Deep Silver «, PC Gamer, (accessed 19 July 2020)
- ↑ a b c and d (en-US) « Iron Harvest Interview: Crisis on Alternate Earth «, VentureBeat, (accessed 19July 2020 )
-
↑ a and b « An artist’s art turns into a video game with Dieselpunk robots», Culture.
pl (accessed April 11, 2019)
- ↑ a and b Hall, « Iron Harvest is a new punk-style diesel real-time strategy game based on the alternate history of World War I (updated) «, Polygon, (as of on April 11, 2019g.)
- ↑ and b (c) Hall, «» Dieselpunk mechan «game Iron Harvest fully funded in just 36 hours «, Polygon,
IRON HARVEST CAMPAIGN MODE:
WORLD MAP IS NOW AVAILABLE
Trenches Iron Harvest is calling again as the award-winning real-time strategy game gets even bigger with the free add-on with World Map and over 40 new missions. The first of three updates is rolling out today for PC, with a console version coming in the future.
Watch the trailer for World Map here