Nice article but u have forgot about Andosia War

I like the fact that supply routes feature in the game. I think that's a much better way of including resource management in the game (keeping the supply routes open) than sending out harvesters from the base you've constructed on the front line.

But equally things like this were a bit of a deterrent: Typo: "you'd like some read,"
Also in the above manoeuvres was spelled incorrectly.

Could've mentioned Incubation.

This sounds awesome, but it has turn limits?

Only Andosia War IIRC
Can't be 100% sure if i do remember correctly, though.

Yes and no, Mentalepsy. Battle Isle 1 (and deriviates / Histroy Line) don't have turn limits active by standard - but you can set turn limits manually. In Battle Isle I that is either 4 / 8 or 16 turns - the side that had more units left wins if turns run out. Some missions in the Battle Isle 2 and 3 campaign require you to reach a goal by a certain turn.

Battle Isle 1 is fun because it's really simple and low on rules - it plays fairly quickly. There's only two win conditions - eradicate all enemy troops or take over their HQ.

History Line was several steps further on the evolution ladder - a lot larger maps, and the AI getting a good bit smarter (i.e. not just randomly attacking but having slight priorities), and in between mission summaries of what happened next (advancing at two months at a time). These are really quite informative - very eclectic in what they mention - not just how the war developed, but also social, cultural and technological advances of the time.

Battle Isle 2 is a huge jump from the earlier games - the campaign mode introduced a lot of in map story line that was triggered as the scenario unfolds. That's one of the things that made Battle Isle 2 stand out, at the time - the campaign had a lot stronger narrative than what was usual at the time. Missions are a lot more sophisticated too - you have to capture certain villages, for example, or just traverse a map, etc. The split screen model was abandoned and moving and attacking are no longer separate rounds - which changed tactics quite a bit (hit and run attacks become possible with some units). Here's where refuelling and the like were introduced. I actually prefer Battle Isle 2 over Battle Isle 3 .

Battle Isle 3 was one of the first games to completely abandon DOS. And sadly in the transition things didn't work all that well, in my opinion. The controls feel more sluggish than in Battle Isle 2. You don't see any more what the opponent does during their round, you just get a not very informative summary. And the video sequences within the game are REALLY hammy (which wasn't a problem with the hand drawn one's in BI2) and play "full screen" taking you out of the game for a moment. Mind you - it still is a bad game, but I'd felt it wasn't an as "perfect" one as those coming before. If there'd been a proper Battle Isle 4 it'd probably have fixed these toothing issues of the switch from one OS to another.

This article gave me the impression that Advanced Wars was heavily based on this. Is that true?

The "Wars" series is older than Battle Isle, if anything its the other way around =)

But there was a proper Battle Isle 4. It's called "Battle Isle 4: Andosian War" and god knows why GOG.com dropped it out from the Battle Isle package. It's third best Battle Isle game in my opinion. I think that Advance Wars was copying the idea and feeling but there's no evidence of this other than what we can see in end results. Of course Wars is from year 1988 and Battle Isle is from 1991. Both are quite different in few aspects. For example movement in Battle Isle is Hex-based while Wars is Square-based.

Well, I liked Advance Wars. If they're similar enough, then I will wishlist the series =)

I like a lot of Battle Isle and I actually think it's wrong to compare it to Wars-series since its so much better. But of course it's a matter of personal taste. Besides I like Wars too. :)

If you like Wars games I can pretty much guarantee you will not be disappointed with Battle Isle if you decide to buy it.

I also like Advance Wars too & Fire Emblem. Battle Isle is just as good, add it to your wishlist, recommended! It gets my seal of approval :)

True. I skipped that one and can't comment on what it's like. I'd stopped buying games by that point (and stuck with that until GoG came around) and it got very mixed reviews at the time. It was also an outsourced product, not produced by BlueByte directly - so I had doubts about the whole thing :).

It's not GoG's call that Andosian War isn't included here. The Plantinum Bundle was released around the time Andosian War came out. It'd have been Ubisoft's call to add an additional game to this; as is it's just a digital copy of the retail version.

That's because the Battle Isle Platinum package never had Battle Isle Phase IV in it. I got the package on a Flea Market for 2€ at the time and it wasn't in there. It's mostly just a digital rerelease of the said Game Collection