RadekM.950: Hi, I could not remember any difficulty levels in original Z by Bitmap brothers. However, Z on GOG brings 3 difficulty levels - Easy, Medium, Hard. What are differences? Number of units, their damage, is there any comparison available?
Secondly - what difficulty level in GOG's Z matches original game's difficulty?
Thanks and enjoy this great game!
Hi
The difficulty levels actually came with the Win95 version of Z - if you chose slow and hard in that one, it was pretty close to the old DOS version experience. However, they did change a surprising lot of things from the DOS to the Win95 version - for a start certain unit stats were changed and buildings (incl.) bridges would now repair themselves over time - one reason why the new Win95 version bonus levels no longer featured any repair vehicle! Apart from that, the maximum number of units was increased to 50 from 40. Another thing I happened to notice at the time was that the Win 95 version appeared to be more buggy than the DOS version - for example, I remember pulling a badly shot up mortar tank to be repaired. A short while later, the computer opponent moved in to take over the sector said mortar tank was being repaired in - normally the computer opponent would have won all three: the sector, the repair facility in it, and my mortar tank (!!!) - instead, however, my mortar tank developed a sense of heroism, shot at and destroyed the attacking computer unit from within (!!!) the building and while (!!!) being repaired. Normally, it would very likely have obliterated the very building it happened to be in.
Another thing I noticed was that in the Win95 version robots no longer lost half their speed when crossing though water. As far as I am concerned, that also was a considerable game-changing bad point - after all, speed was / is important and whether or not your units reached certain buildings / sectors in time could be the deciding factors of whether or not you won or lost.
I still have both the old DOS version as well as the Win95 version (both in German and both as original and not pirated copies!!!). Nevertheless, the changes from the DOS to the Win95 version covered about two pages (!!!) in the printed manual of the latter version. They were quite considerable (and in a way also paved the way towards what came with Z`s sequel, Z: Steel Soldiers - however, what surprised me most was that Steel Soldiers does actually cheat - something that previously I had had only associated with the Command and Conquer series - for those of you who still have Steel Soldiers, I can recommend a simple test - start the first campaign level and build enough robots to destroy the computer's robot factory in the top right corner - then move your remaining force north towards the computer's HQ - now take care of the computer's soldiers and destroy the radar in the top left corner - scatter your soldiers so that you have the entire top part of the map openly visible - now you will find that seemingly out of thin air enemy soldiers will 'materialise' - even within your line of sight (although you have actually already obliterated the computer's robot factory...) - however, if you scatter too much you will get yourselves a bloody / oily nose because you will find the computer's robots often materialising in groups of four. On top of that, if you have annihilated all of the computer's forces and his HQ is nearly destroyed, it can also happen that the computer's remaining construction robot suddenly become indestructible - normally, if you shoot at a construction robot with around 20 attacking units it will very likely only last about a couple of seconds (!!! - proof number two that the computer cheats in Steel Soldiers !!! - Q.E.D.).
However, what I always loved in Steel Soldiers was the fact that you could play the 2-8-player-multiplayer maps in single-player-skirmish mode. That was something I seriously missed in the original Z / Z95 !!!
[Apart from that, Z: Steel Soldiers and its unofficial successor, World War II: Frontline Command, always showed a fundamental flaw of real time strategy games - if you were able to build, you were virtually almost always (provided the computer opponent did not cheat too much...) able to beat the computer opponent because a computer opponent in general (apart from maybe sometimes e.g. Z Dos and Z Win95 hard) is no real match for the human brain (unless of course it cheats mightily...). As of campaign mission number four(ish) in Steel Soldiers, I could not help thinking that the computer opponent was suddenly playing, as we say in German, 'mit gebremstem Schaum', which rather freely translates as not entirely to its full ability - after all, in some campaign missions the computer opponent was already fairly well established, which means that had it thrown everything at you with Z hard AI ferocity, it would have blown you sky high almost in an instant.]
(Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the Steel Soldiers remake as well...)
Cheers
Patrick
