I was the first player to sign up for the game when it went live about 10 years ago. I have enjoyed playing ever since. The game is now fading and the question of it's continued existence must be breached.

I would hate to see it's incredible run end.

I have been one of the more successful players and have watched many others come and go. While one can argue about specific rules driving people away, I think it is clear that what drives them away is actually spending years playing and then losing a critical battle. The thought of having to spend another year rebuilding is more than they can take.

The game is built in a way that makes it very difficult to decisively win a major victory but people seem to find ways to lose anyway. The most common reason for these loses seems to me to be a failure to understand the technology and time period of the game. Very good players try time and time again to use modern combined arms techniques in the game. The game does not offer deep interdiction nor elite rapid penetration forces but people play as if it does. In historical terms the game is set in the 1880-1920 time period of technology. Using Guderian tactics with the game's technology simply will not work. Using pre-blitzkrieg tactics works very well. However few today know such tactics.

The game will continue to be frustrating to many of today's players. Adding airpower and fast armor would bring the game into the realm of knowledge that most players have. This would require a lot of work and a lot of time balancing things however, and time is not something Jonathan has a lot of just going unused.

The game is tremendously fun to play. The problem is not with the game but with the player pool. Those interested in war games are frequently those familiar with current military events and tactics. They are not familiar with tactics used in the 1880-1920 time period and this puts them at great disadvantage to those who do. We do get the occasional player who does understand the tactics but they are not enough to allow for balanced conflicts. It is painful to watch players who are actual field officers in real life use textbook tactics in the game and get beaten soundly because they don't have the tools and technology needed to make those tactics work.

In my opinion we either must get a large pool of new players in order to find the handful of players with the knowledge/interest to play well or the game must be brought up to current military technology levels to remain viable. A restart may bring a new challenge to the game for a while but as the first three epochs have shown the game will once again be determined by tactics and by frustration and abandonment by the many

Hopefully someone else has a better idea and will post it here.

I just made it free. So I'll tidy up the web site and then mention it all over the web as a totally free game. Maybe that will work?

I must admit I hadn't really thought of Tartarus in those terms.

However I can see some resemblances now I think about. The low weapon ranges, compared to movement speeds, plus the general advantage of firepower over maneouvre.

I am a wargamer, although I'd have to say I'm not nessessarily that familiar with current (or at least relatively modern) military tactics.

Possibly this is because I started out from the Fantasy/Sci-fi end of the wargaming genre, and my interest in historical games tends to be pre-medieval rather than Renaissance and more modern.

With a lot of games, it's not to difficult to arrive at reasonably effective game tactics purely through trial and error.

However as the time scale of tartarus means that it takes weeks or possibly months to fight out a conflict. This means that time taken to work out what is and is not an effective tactic is extreme.

I'd suggest that it might be helpful for someone to write up some basic strategy and tactical pointers for the game. It wouldn't nessissarily have to be anything comprehensive. But some guidance for potential new players so that they can avoid making certain tactical or strategic errors that can take a long time to become evident, and then even longer to correct.

This could potentially cut down the frustration level of knowing you've got something wrong, but also knowing that it could take months to get to something that's more right.

Incidently my potential tactical ineptitude is not really what has caused me to lose interest in the game over the last six months.

Rather it's the low player base, and the fact that we now essentially have only two alliance groupings. This has meant that my effective choice of opposition has been very limited.

There is only a limited number of times I want to fight the same clans before it becomes less interesting.

Although I guess if I was a considerably better player and was winning most if not all of my battles, it would probably take longer for things to get dull.

GameAdmin wrote:

I just made it free. So I'll tidy up the web site and then mention it all over the web as a totally free game. Maybe that will work?

I hope so ... It would be good to see a rising population on the sphere ...

Edit : A thought from way out in left field.....
If my memory serves me (it rarely does) I've asked this question before but I'll throw it out there as a suggestion ...

Maybe if more people were involved in creating /developing the game (eg coding,artwork etc) it could be advanced / modified and not require a huge effort on Jonathan's part.
So I guess what I'm asking is can others get involved to help push things along ? Have an open source type of system to improve the game ? Or even just simply to take the load off ?

I'm not proud of the codebase! It was hacked out in 20 minute sections while on the train. Also, the fun for me with Tartarus was having the final say on rules balance and so on. i.e. involved discussion with the players, but it was my baby.

So, while OS games work well, I doubt Tart will go that way. The rules could maybe, but not the platform. I also know that touching any part of the game balance will change the game uterly. It's pretty well balanced at the moment, as you would expect after 10 years.