Author: Jeff Vitous

The Wargamer is proud to present TalonSoft with our Award for Excellence, signifying it as one of the best games in the war/strategy genre. TalonSoft has enhanced and improved upon the original Operational Art of War to make this final game in the series a truely high-quality wargame.

After various gold, platinum, and "game of the year" editions, The Operational Art of War - A Century of Warfare seems to be the all-encompassing complete package. If you have been putting off purchasing any of The Operational Art of War products waiting for this date: rejoice, it has come. If you're missing either The Operational Art of War: Volume 1 (World War II and Korea), or The Operational Art of War: Volume II (modern), resist the lure of the bargain bin editions; this is the one you want. If you are an active play-by-email player, updates to the game engine will require ownership of A Century of Warfare when playing against like-equipped opponents.

Centennial Bugs

When compiling The Operational Art of War - A Century of Warfare, TalonSoft must have skimped on the quality control testing. Bugs ranging from scenarios not compiled for use with the latest engine (can be manually fixed by loading and saving the scenarios in the editor), and other problems including inexplicable slowdowns have been addressed in the patch. Save yourself some aggravation and download the patch before playing your first game. It can be found at the TalonSoft web site or at designer Norm Koger's personal web site. Post-patch, the game plays better than any iteration of the game to date (and I've played them all). Even the graphic anomalies experienced from time to time in earlier versions appear to have finally been exterminated from this version.

Starting a new scenario.	Using the map editor.

A Century of TOAW Revisited

With more than two years of shelf life and counting, much has been said of The Operational Art of War family of games. To avoid redundancy, please consult prior articles pertaining to the series.

A Century of Change

Changes included with The Operational Art of War - A Century of Warfare depend in large part on which previous titles you might already own. The only truly new element is the extension of the database to include World War I era combat units. The Wargame of the Year edition upgraded the game engine of the original The Operational Art of War to the same used by The Operational Art of War, Volume II. A Century of Warfare uses a unified engine, and still uses separate executables for battlefields less than 100x100 hexes, and those up to 300 x 300 hexes. As mentioned earlier, save-game files from A Century of Warfare are not compatible with earlier versions of the game.

Go to the next page

© 2008, The Wargamer, LLC, a TM Interactive Publishing company. All Rights Reserved. Protected under copyright and international treaties. No portion of this web site or the files contained therein may be obtained for other than personal non-commercial use nor may they be reproduced or otherwise redistributed. Violations will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law and may result in severe civil and criminal penalties. All other copyrights and products mentioned on The Wargamer are the property of their respective companies.