Kuroko: 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.
bofferbrauer: 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
Ah, I didn't know that. I thought this was Gog.com's own package they made out of these games.
Kuroko: 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.
Mnemon: 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 :).
My personal retro perspective opinion about Battle Isle 4 is that it's a very well designed strategy game which really gets close on what Battle Isle is really about. Unfortunately its first version is really buggy and AI is horrible. With patches it plays out well with most of the stupid AI bugs cleared and few troop balance issues are not game killers anymore. However It's best played online against human opponents. It's beautiful game with nice graphics and almost everything in it has this sense of quality. Unfortunately it ultimately would have been much more polish and fine tuning. Apparently project time run out. It was never a mainstream game and was never intended as such. Battle Isle 4 is partial continuation for Incubation story. I kind of didn't care about the story for the most parts. :)
Fun was having huge attack waves of units in a properly composed warfront with resource management and logistics. Factories produce units which you have to ship to harbors, airports or directly to warfront from there you sent them to another island for war. Maybe the oddest innovation was that you could use base anytime you wanted. There was no "resource management turns". Resource management is fully real time. Unit strategies are pure turn based combat and although Battle Isle is supposed to be "light strategy" managing all the aspects of a single mission to conquer for example one island takes time and you need your brains. That makes Battle Isle 4 pretty heavy game for some people. Forecasts should be taken more seriously than in previous Battle Isle games. Weather conditions change the game fast if your units are not prepared for winter warfare or muddy jungle ground properly. Some airplanes have problems with visibility and for example bombing run might miss because of bad weather. Worst thing which can happen in this game is that you measure power lines too thigh and enemy units cut the power. It starts race against time whenever you can fix the powers before your units start lacking in resources or not. Units hold their own energy/ammunition for probably 1-3 attack turns depending on which units are in question. I remember making lines too long and I first had to build scrappers before I could even start thinking about building new power cable poles. It was pain and lasted 5-6 turns. During that time the enemy units had destroyed most of my main attack forces. It caused almost 12-15 turn time advantage for the enemy troops. I won the game in the end but could have won it much much faster with proper planning.
I forgot to mention that the music in Battle Isle 4 are almost as good as in Battle Isle 2 if not as good. I kind of like the soundtrack of "Still Patient ?" from Battle Isle 3 too. At least the music video is really cool.
