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[The Fifth Horseman]

If you want to play this game under Windows 7, you'll have to use DOSBox.

This game has been published 18 years ago. The developers almost certainly have no intent to release an update to make it compatible with modern systems.

Originally Posted by Guest_allen_*

What strategies do you use?
I often use the sim button. I've found I can take a volcanic country with 9 hercules by setting the
attack mode to capital. Also, I manually attack a coniferous country with hercules army. I'll take
cyborg around the outer edge of the field, and sneak around the back of the fort. Once, inside I can
pick off their cyborgs one at a time from behind, and they won't even turn around to fire. Also, if the fort
missiles are trying to get me while doing this, I will position myself in such a way that their fort missiles will
destroy their own cyborgs! This strategy takes time and patience, but it works really well!
Anyone have any other ideas?

Most of these strategies are only relevant on the hardest level:

Using the rear attack fortress coniferous strategy is extremely effective, and can be done with a lone cyborg. Mercury can be used in dense forest or weak defenses, Mars/Achilles if you need more to get past the LRMs. I consider all enemy coniferous countries to be soft targets through the entire game for this reason.

If you go in with a lone cyborg, you may not be able to conquer the country if there is overwhelming tonnage spread across the base. Decide early if you are trying to kill all the cyborgs, otherwise just go for the capital. It will kill the fortress and incur significant financial loss to your enemy.

Race to acquire cities at the beginning of the game and surround them with a ring of fortified countries to avoid having battles in them that depreciate their value. Using the Quadpost factory with 4 Mercuries as your starting build order will help you achieve this, and ration spending on early capitals to get to potential cities. In a game with several players, Titanium is pretty financially worthless due to its central location and repeated battles, don't get your hopes up for it.

For early defense in the rush phase, your capital structure can be used as cover if facing superior firepower. You can hide behind the cover of a corner of the capital and the enemy will continuously fire, typically overheating, allowing you to overtake them. When their cyborgs bunch up, they sometimes injure each other with friendly fire as well.

My cyborg tech tree is:
Mercury (first few turns)
Dragons (throughout entire game)
Mars/Achilles (mid game, may absorb damage while Dragons go in for kills)
Hercules (all mid-late game, from 2-enhancement factories)
Crossbolts (late game, take out fortresses in arctic/volcanic/desert)
Titans (late game)

Standard defense is:
Fortress
Handful of dragons (primarily under my control)
Handful of Heavy cyborgs (Hercules) to barricade in front of capital in case of LRM attacks

Beware of using cyborgs w/ LRMs as defense, your own CPU AI can inadvertently damage many defenses with their LRMs.

For espionage (esp. on fog of war), you can save money and gain much more information (type of fort, types of cyborgs) by sending a lone cyborg into the country of interest and then retreating when you've gathered your intelligence.