Advanced Strategic Command

Advanced Strategic Command is a free and Open Source Turn-Based Strategy. It started as a Fan Remake of Battle Isle games, but became something more, thanks to its mod-friendly structure.


 * Awesome Personnel Carrier: There are a pair of proper APC and lots of other ways to deliver infantry where it can cause more trouble to the foe. Like those Zeppelins. Or, pack 3x APC and Weasel with infantry and load them on a hovercraft to move over water.
 * Baseless Mission: Many missions in campaigns have the objective is to capture an area.
 * Base on Wheels: A huge land transport (called Atuin in the basic ruleset) can be very useful, as it gives mobility to a bunch of slow units and saves fuel. Doubles as a poor commander's APC since it protects at least from snipers and moves minelaying infantry faster than pursuing tanks. Collecting materials from wrecks is a nice bonus.
 * Color-Coded Armies: It's really one sprite per unit, recolored and rotated. Buildings got no auto-rotation, and may have terrain variants (mostly for snow), vehicles may have custom Movement Sound, but it's not necessary.
 * Command and Conquer Economy: It's not as much economy as resource crisis holding back your production onslaught or even repair.
 * You Require More Vespene Gas: Material, Fuel, Electric Energy.
 * "Construct Additional Pylons" works only if you have worthwile mineral resources down there (wind and sun power stations run for free, but still cost a lot to build).
 * Resource Gathering usually helps -- found a big good rock or fried a tank, get a bulldozer or a truck over there. Though you'll need a special ship to get tasty piles of materials from the sea bottom.
 * Cool Airship: Zeppelin is more of Master of None - a fragile bomber / observer (view bonus) / fast infantry transport in one big wrap. But it may become a Lethal Joke Unit if there's no Anti-Air defence, protected by other forces or terrain from infantry zeppelin can unload just out of range: they land on a dime, carry more troops than helicopters, cheap to build, and without proper air defence fragility doesn't prevent it from using bombs and rockets - most units can't hit medium-altitude aircraft at all.
 * Defog of War: Launch Spy Satellites if you can. If you can't, use recon planes, spy submarines and/or ground radars. Failed that, anything with view bonus - zeppelins, some Anti-Air units, snipers, fast or stealthy aircraft - can be useful even if you doubt there's a target vulnerable to themselves. If the enemy got submarines, enclose sensitive areas with whole chains of sonar buoys or patrols of sonar-enabled ships. Use terrain and jammers to deny the same advantage to your enemy. View field often is the main difference between Hit and Run Tactics and delivery of materials as wreck piles. And a cruise missile with 6 to 12 hex range is completely useless if all you got is 3 hex viewfield of its launching vehicle.
 * It's sensitive at times, too - Fog of War may eat a hex or three out of your radar's visible area when you build a single anti-tank hedgehog.
 * Easy Logistics: Averted with vengeance. Simplifications such as unified resources and pipelines mostly ease the production and repair part, and units don't eat. Other than this -- transportation, supply and support usually require resource-juggling, even on relatively forgiving campaign maps.
 * Game Mod: There are several ready variant rulesets included, and it's very easy to create your own, whether separate or add-on, thanks to the object inheritance in plain text and one-sprite entities.
 * Fan Remake: Of Battle Isle series. There's BI resource mode, engine can use original BI graphics if installed separately, and considering unit names, "Mk4" ruleset seems to be intended for this purpose.
 * Garrisonable Structures: Transported units can only wait to be deployed or killed with the transport and buildings proper are indefensible, but buildable constructions such as trenches may provide attack, defence and jamming benefits, turret foundations do the same and are necessary to use turrets.
 * Geo Effects: Mostly affects movement and building, but sometimes also defence/attack/concealment adjustments.
 * Hit and Run Tactics: Anything with Feature "Move after attack" and good speed or stealth. Submarines and aircrafts have this, as well as some more specific units. Like those speedboats, which most units see only at point-blank range while their rockets have reach better than miniguns and aircraft rockets. Reaction fire may or may not nail down the problem, depending on specific units and situation.
 * Hover Tank: Hovercraft is a separate class of units. In the default set Hovercraft is a transport, and not that good at fighting, though infantry in ASC is no joke, so even a self-propelled armored turret with mediocre machinegun proves convenient surprisingly often.
 * It's Raining Men: And an occasionally fast armed ATV with any infantry inside. Or sonar buoys. In Mk-3 unitset, possible precipitations include radars, jammers and self-propelled antitank guns.
 * Kill Sat: Once you get spy satellites, orbital weapon platforms are not far behind. Though not as easy to reload as ground/sea units.
 * Mini-Mecha: Several variants. Sprites look like armed power loaders (of Alien sort, not Power Dolls). Counts as "light tracked vehicles", big enough to carry miniguns or torpedoes, but small enough to conquer buildings and weight 2-3 times more than an infantry unit. The downsides are - they are have Armor of a light ATV, speed barely above that of light infantry and are stopped by swamps and anti-tank hedgehogs. Of course, they are inferior as mass combat units, but the combination of abilities, e.g. to take buildings, ignore snipers, fit into armored troop transport or walk over mountains and barbed wire can be a big advantage in right circumstances.
 * Most Annoying Sound: Whrrr... Whoofshhh! Whrrr... Eh, yet another speedboat.
 * Reinventing the Wheel: Whether the previous mission allowed research or not, more advanced starting technologies may or may not be set in the next mission.
 * Ridiculously-Fast Construction: Everything is built instantly, though it's possible to set up a ruleset where building something takes longer than one turn.
 * Scripting Language: Lua-based scripting.
 * Sea Mine: Oh, yes. Anti-ship and anti-submarine. Currently due to indiscriminate engine anti-tank mines can be set on shallow water and work as anti-hovercraft (they react on everything at "ground" height).
 * Spy Satellites: Considering the whole infrastructure, expensive - but good view is almost always worth it. Especially with long-range missiles, or if an enemy employs stealthy units and/or Hit and Run Tactics.
 * Starting Units: Everything is up to the mapmaker, so even if you have production and research capabilities at all, set/spawned units and available technologies on the same map are unrelated. Technically, they could even belong to completely different rulesets.
 * Support Power: Events can do almost anything. Spawning reinforcements to any side including player's or allies on a condition, or revealing an area are common uses.
 * Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors / Crippling Overspecialization: You're not going to use, e.g. Anti-Air units for anything but shooting flyers or minor scouting. Infantry also can capture unguarded buildings or work as emergency fuel/material carriers, but that's about it. Cruisers and hunter helicopters are more flexible, but special-purpose ships and aircraft are still better.
 * Tech Tree: Technologies allowing construction of units and buildings have prerequisites (to develop an air-dropable buggy you need to know how to make a parachute and how to make a buggy), which have their own prerequisites. Basic unitsets coexist in one pack, so they are selected via allowing their root technology in the map's properties. At a long-term map you decide which troops are needed first and at all (quick maps usually have no means for R&D).
 * Tunnel Network: Pipelines. Better if buried. You can live without them, but factories would require transports eating tons of fuel just to get resources there. Since anything large requires more resources than a factory holds, it must be either in direct contact with a bigger storage or connected to it via pipelines.
 * Units Not to Scale
 * VTOL: An unit may just be allowed to reduce height without moving horizontally. And then there's also special Unit Feature "Cruiser Landing", which allows to enter certain units and buildings directly from air - helicopters and VToL planes have it, while Zeppelin doesn't.
 * Weather of War: No wind? Your wind powerplants give zero energy. Very strong wind? Your plane is killed before it got close to the enemy. Clouds or snow? Solar panels do nothing. Rain? Suffer for building cheap paths instead of good hard roads -- units are mired and crawl like slugs.
 * Worker Unit: Builders, transports, repair vehicles, icebreaker, mobile diesel generator...
 * Zerg Rush: Sometimes possible, especially against low-XP enemy. Generally, low-armor units suffer greatly, but long-range artillery tend to be helpless against point-blank attacks so those that manage to break through may do the job; also, many relatively cheap units, while fragile, can hit hard and are stealthy (infantry), useful for Hit and Run Tactics (zepellins) or both (speedboats).