And, thanks to stellar art and crisp animations, that's never an issue. Lacking the simple visual cues of a uniting theme or aesthetic as in other strategy games, Tooth and Tail has to make each of these figures clear and recognizable in the heat of battle. The ability to understand, at a glance, which armies have what units and who has the advantage is essential. One order will have them pressing forward, another will pull them back. You only have a couple of buttons with which to command your troops. But big decisions hinge on being able to read the lay of a battle in an instant. Medics, transports, gun nests, heavies, engineers, etc. Unit types range from defensive artillery to flamethrowers and run the gamut of classic military roles. Neither option has any impact on the other, but which critters you pick will have a huge impact on strategy. You pick your commander-who will hail from one of four factions-and then you select your roster. Unlike your StarCrafts or your Sins of a Solar Empires, though, your arrangement of units are unique each round. Short, mediocre campaign aside, there's little here to muck with the essential beauty of this streamlined RTS.Īs mentioned, at any point there could be 20 different units on the field. And, this is where Tooth and Tail begins to shine. With all four of you fielding armies of tiny, skittering squirrels and badgers or hawks and owls, things get messy fast. Tooth and Tail supports up to four players, and when everyone's in, things get chaotic. having a nigh-omniscient view of the map means that the action almost always hits at the edge of what feels manageable. This keeps the pace brisk, and, when combined with the limitations inherent in controlling one commander vs.

Food also isn't unlimited, and unless you were nabbing territory in the early game, you'll run dry (and starve) in short order. When the only thing under your control are which parts of the map you can see, what you're building, and whether or not you're advancing or retreating, each of those choices carries much more weight. They have to scout like anyone else, and they have to adapt to whichever assortment of woodland animals hit the map.Īll this does not make expertise meaningless. Instead, their play becomes much more reactive. Advanced players will, of course, have a deeper understanding of which units can cover for what weaknesses, but they won't be able to use that to counter pick either the roster or the map. Because maps are random, and you never know which six units other players will bring, most start off with similar levels of knowledge. That issue doesn't come up much in play, though. After all, without unit upgrades and heavy micromanagement, it would seem that there's not much else you can do, leaving skilled folks idle and bored. Strategy veterans may balk and think that this takes streamlining a step too far. It's a simple pattern that's welcoming to new players. This guides a core pace to the game-rush out and study before retreating to build. You can, however, burrow back at any time to queue up more soldiers before heading out again.

This keeps you from rushing or spawning tons of machine-gun-toting squirrels near your foes' farms and claiming victory. The cost, of course, is that if you're scouting, you can't build because you wouldn't be near the mill. Instead of building out specialized scout units and sending them to collect telemetry on the map, your commander does it on their own. The playing field is almost always as level as it can be, leaving commanders to compete on raw strategic/tactical prowess. That means ludicrous actions per minute no longer matter.Randomly-generated maps keep others from gaining an unfair advantage with terrain knowledge. Tooth and Tail distills strategy games to its essentials-building out armies, growing stronger, and the dynamic, puzzle-like nature of play-and gets rid of nearly everything else. Finally, you marshal units to destroy your enemies' mills. Before each match, you pick up to six units you want to be able to use from a pool of 20. Food is spent on units, making more farms, and claiming more mills to make more farms.

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