Games Thursday : Retro Tactical Warfare in Nectaris for Windows
Remember Battalion Nemesis featured last week? Today’s game Nectaris by Hudson Soft was one of the original forerunners of games like Battalion Nemesis.
After an unsuccessful (and admittedly half-hearted) attempt to run the DOS version of Nectaris from Abandonia, I finally settled for the 1997 Japanese version of Nectaris for Windows downloaded from Michael Freligh’s homepage. (Apparently, this 1997 Japanese version is freeware from what I read over at Base Nectaris)
Don’t worry if you can’t read Japanese since neither can I 
I’ll try to provide English translations for the more commonly used commands as we go along. In case the text in the installer is all gibberish to you, the default installation folder is C:\Program Files\HUDSON\NECTARIS.
The commands from top to bottom : Move, Attack, Unit Info and End Turn.
Ignore the [#] in the titlebar – I’m running this under Sandboxie – When you press Esc, you get this window. The three options are from top to bottom – Resume, Restart and Save.
Your units are blue and the enemy in green.
Click once to select an unit, then click again or click Move button to select your destination, and finally click Attack after moving to attack enemy units in range or click your unit again to confirm your order. For units that have not attacked an enemy, you can undo their orders by right-clicking them. You can also see the movement ranges for enemy units by double-clicking on them. As you can see, the clunky orders system does need time to get used to but persevere and you’ll find a rather good but extremely unforgiving tactical system underneath the unwieldy interface.
Terrain plays a very big importance in Nectaris e.g infantry get enormous boost to their offensive strength when attacking from mountains and green (as in inexperienced) units entrenched on favourable terrain can withstand attacks by more powerful veteran units where they would be easily decimated in the open.
Experience accured from attacking or defending increases the attack and defense of an unit while casualties does the exact opposite. While a green unit kept in the thick of fighting in the frontlines might slowly achieve elite status eventually, the successive loss of individual soldiers or vehicles in the unit from all that fighting will effectively wear down its attack strength to render it virtually useless later in the mission. Rotating your frontline to both improve the less experienced units as well as to relieve hard-pressed veterans is therefore essential since there are no replacements for casualties.
The other part that Nectaris trumps Battalion Nemesis is in the combat animation that is shown when two opposing units engage (above) – while all you see in Battalion Nemesis are sliding health bars, Nectaris gives you a visceral representation of the casualties as the two units line up for battle and start firing. It’s not as gimmicky as you might think since nothing proves your ineptitude as a commander when you see your infantry unit getsting massacred while standing foolishly in the middle of a road by a tank squadron firing down from the relative safety of hills.
Download Nectaris for Windows.
MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Combined Arms Warfare in Battalion : Nemesis
Modern Tactics 3 – Squad-based Tactical Game
Aliens – The Board Game (Flash Version)
BrikWars – War with Mini-Figs!
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lol, those bottom images look like an old version of Halo or Halo Wars…
Must be the colour scheme
Seems very intriguing, though I’m pretty sure DOS and/or language issues might steer me to actually digging into M.A.X.
This game also came out for the TurboGrafx 16 known in the US as Military Madness. I seem to remember a Windows 95 compatable version that was in english for windows I may have to poke around google and see if I can find that client as the game is very good
I know there is a MS-DOS version available at abandonia but I haven’t seen a Win95 english version before. Let me know if you find it