Anyone else having as good of a time with it as I am? It's plenty difficult, the battles are engaging, the world is professionally constructed… what a game. I'm especially liking the cover system and the battle scenes. And the cutscenes. I'm going to beat this one, and I'll probably buy the one that came after this one later. If I can beat it, I heard the game gets even rougher!

I'm glad you're enjoying it, I remember it being a great game. Sadly most of us here can't actually play the game at all, so discussion might be a bit limited at the moment.

It is an excellent game. Such a pity that it did not serve as the basis for a longer running and more prolific franchise and subgenre of its own. Nothing else really captures the same feeling and balance. Too many RTS games end up being ruined by adding pointless grind or huge amounts of game time sinks that don't involve any actual RTS action (Total War being the biggest culprit of this as it steadily betrays everything that made its debut into the scene worth while). It also has a great branching storyline for the maps to add replay value.

SOTHR also got the battle atmosphere and tension right with the sounds and hectic feeling of the action and keeping track of it all.

I second what Krovlar added too.

I'm experiencing the problems also, but compatibility mode seems to be going okay for now. Maybe people are on missions that cause more problems than mine are right now. I guess I'm just excited about the title and having fun with it. I don't want to detract from the folks having problems. I know what that's like, and it's difficult. GOG will make it right, I'm sure of it.

Oh man, I wish back in the 16bit and later era in other areas they gave away more full versions. There were agreements with magazine publishers and game publishers in some places not to put any on the magazines around the late 8bit era.

Unfortunately the AI in this game is beyond redemption. I've never played a strategy game where the AI is this bad. My units are litterally running in all directions despite the one I've ordered them to walk towards to.

It's probably significant part of the infamous difficulty of this game. But it doesn't really make the game very enjoyable.

You mean the pathfinding for your units? Yeah, pretty much no real pathfinding. Especially if any obstacles are in the way. Back then pathfinding was still a dark art so you wouldn't even expect your units to navigate much beyond the next few steps or if a rare game had done well you'd be amazed and delighted. When playing this you don't click across a map and expect it to play the game for, you. Instead you frantically control the units to get any decent strategic movements. In a way it adds to the tension and frantic nature of it. I got in the habit of baby step commands unless it didn't matter (such as with a retreating order to my starting location).

I used to enjoy this game very much back in the days. It's good to see that games didn't just get 'worse' over time (that's just mostly our 'everything used to be better' perception anyways).

I enjoyed playing the first 5 missions or so up until now, but the pathfinding and the controlls in this game are atrocious and I don't know if I can still be bother these days to be honest.

The pathfinding wasn't great for the time either, but the rest of the game more than made up for it, I feel. Modern games gave me pathfinding but didn't bring back all the things that made SOTHR worth playing despite the bad parts.

When you are playing old games, you have to look past some of the small stuff like the AI pathfinding. Part of mastery is the quirks, you know?

A great game!
I remember fondly the hours spent back when it was released, and the terrible (bittersweat) defeats I suffered back then

GOG version runs smotthly without any issue on my PC (Windows 7 running in bootcamp on an iMac 27). The graphics and interface show their age, surely, but the fantastic gameplay and atmosphere are all there !

A rough and unforgiving gem, a classic !

it certainly has a steep learning curve. the interface and controls are so different from what i'm used to, plus it's just a tough game anyway. i'm glad i stuck with it though, because it ended up winning me over. my mouse probably hates me though; with no keyboard use i put a lot of miles on that mouse.

i guess i'm one of the lucky ones in that i had no technical problems all the way through the campaign.

Glad someone else is having fun with it. :D Your post reminds me very much of myself experiencing the game for the first time. This has the "it's fun to lose" charm of DF and many other brutal games. Without the high challenge level it wouldn't be nearly as fun. I felt the challenges were fair too. Even with the dice rolls as they'd roll with me and roll against me sometimes, just like with RPGs. There are several save slots so I can redo battles that go badly and cost me too much in the long run. The random elements and the different paths and choices give added replayability to it too.

Would be nice to have some keyboard shortcut controls, though. Having played the PC and PSX versions I can appreciate the changes and upsides of the two different versions. The PC version has mouse control and a nice interface outside of battle designed for it, much better detail when it comes to full listings of numbered stats for units (which I love) and being able to customise marching orders, etc. and nice crisp graphics and animations for the cutscenes and 2D elements. The army leader portraits are also much larger. The PSX version has CD quality music rather than the midi sound of the PC (which is charming but not the same quality), small gameplay tweaks I agree with (such as being told that there are men for hire rather than having to find out and maybe missing them), a full screen map mode during battle, a better pause mode, banners at the edge of the battle screens to give general directions of units which also can highlight and help with selection or targetting, fast selection keys (but no conventient mouse to combine with that!!) and a minimalistic interface to keep as much of the screen as possible open to the battle map. The PC used to have multiplayer skirmishes too, which was a big plus, but I've not heard of it with the GOG.com version.

It will likely never happen, but it'd be awesome if someone could do a repolished version of SOTHR and combined the best elements of the different versions and some fan tweaks, similar to how Ur Quan Masters became the best version of Star Control 2 from the patchwork and fan tweaks.

Yeah, Ur-Quan masters is awesome. I also played the DOS-version SC 2 on an old Pentium machine previously used by my father, an Escom Commodore Pentium 60. Escom is some German company that bought the Commodore brand in the 90s, brought out some Commodore branded IBM PCs, but went bankrupt a few years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escom_%28computer_corp%29). But I only played through it some years later with Ur Quan Masters on a newer machine.