Legionnaire (computer game)
Encyclopedia
Legionnaire is a computer game for the Atari 8-bit
Atari 8-bit family
The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers manufactured from 1979 to 1992. All are based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU and were the first home computers designed with custom coprocessor chips...

 series created by Chris Crawford
Chris Crawford (game designer)
Christopher Crawford is a computer game designer and writer noted for creating a number of important games in the 1980s, founding The Journal of Computer Game Design, and organizing the Computer Game Developers' Conference.- Biography :...

 in 1982
1982 in video gaming
-Events:* December 27 - Starcade, a video game television game show, debuts on TBS in the United States.-Notable releases:*October 13 - Mystique releases the Custer's Revenge adult video game for the Atari 2600 home console....

, and released through Avalon Hill
Avalon Hill
Avalon Hill was a game company that specialized in wargames and strategic board games. Its logo contained its initials "AH", and it was often referred to by this abbreviation. It also published the occasional miniature wargaming rules, role-playing game, and had a popular line of sports simulations...

.

Plot

Recreating Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....

's campaigns in a semi-historical setting, the player takes command of the Roman legion
Roman legion
A Roman legion normally indicates the basic ancient Roman army unit recruited specifically from Roman citizens. The organization of legions varied greatly over time but they were typically composed of perhaps 5,000 soldiers, divided into maniples and later into "cohorts"...

s in battles against the barbarian
Barbarian
Barbarian and savage are terms used to refer to a person who is perceived to be uncivilized. The word is often used either in a general reference to a member of a nation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage...

s.

Gameplay

Similar to the earlier groundbreaking Eastern Front (1941)
Eastern Front (computer game)
Eastern Front is a computer game for the Atari 8-bit series created by Chris Crawford in 1981. Recreating the German invasion of Russia during World War II, Eastern Front covers the historical area of operations during the 1941–1942 period...

in terms of display and general gameplay, Legionnaire added a real-time computer opponent, and is one of the earliest examples of a real-time tactics
Real-time tactics
Real-time tactics or RTT is a subgenre of tactical wargames played in real-time simulating the considerations and circumstances of operational warfare and military tactics...

 (RTT) game. The player took the side of the Romans, playing the role of Caesar, giving orders to the various legions represented in pink in real time. The computer played the barbarians, in blue. There were three types of units; infantry was represented by a sword, cavalry as a horse head, and Caesar's own Imperial Guard as an eagle. Orders were given to the units by moving a cursor over them with the joystick and then holding down the joystick button; existing commands would be displayed as a moving arrow, and new orders could be entered by pressing the joystick in the four cardinal directions.

Like Eastern Front, the Legionnaire playfield consists of a large grid of square cells with various terrain features displayed on it. Unlike Eastern Front the new map included altitude, displayed as a series of contour line
Contour line
A contour line of a function of two variables is a curve along which the function has a constant value. In cartography, a contour line joins points of equal elevation above a given level, such as mean sea level...

s. Movement was effected by the contours as well as the underlying terrain, making positional combat an important part of the overall strategy. The screen showed only a small portion of the entire map at one time, smooth-scrolling around it when the joystick
Joystick
A joystick is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. Joysticks, also known as 'control columns', are the principal control in the cockpit of many civilian and military aircraft, either as a center stick or...

-controlled cursor reached the edges of the screen. Unlike Eastern Front, the map contained no cities or strategic locations, and the game started with both forces placed at random locations on the map.

While the user was entering the orders for their units, the computer was calculating moves for its own units. A basic form of multitasking
Computer multitasking
In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...

 was implemented by having the "easy" jobs of reading the joystick and recording the user's inputs during the vertical blank interrupt
Vertical blank interrupt
A vertical blank interrupt is a programming technique used in some systems, notably video games and consoles, to allow program code to be run in the periods when the display hardware is turned off, waiting for the TV to complete its vertical blank.Since the vertical blank period occurs at the...

 (VBI), while the computer AI ran during non-interrupt time. The player was forced to search the map for the enemy, and then attempt to gather their units into a fighting line on favorable terrain. The challenge was doing this quickly enough before the enemy forces arrived and attacked your units piecemeal. As in Eastern Front the AI was not particularly strong, but the real-time action made the game more difficult, as well as eliminating several "tricks" one could use to fool the AI.

Difficulty

The game was, however, not very difficult overall. It lacked any strategic component driving the gameplay so the player could simply move to an advantageous position, form up a solid line, and wait. In combat the Roman forces were much more powerful than the barbarians, and would win any one-on-one fight. The scoring system attempted to make up for this, awarding higher points for faster victories. In pursuit of a higher score the player is forced to seek out and attack the barbarian units on terms that might not be as favorable, and without quick retreats after combat, might result in encirclement. Wargames are generally not interested in scores, however, only wins and losses. Crawford wrote in Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design is a book about computer and video game design by Chris Crawford. Although referred to as the second edition of The Art of Computer Game Design, it is in fact a completely new book. It was published by Peachpit under the New Riders imprint in 2003...

that he considered it competent, but "...certainly no masterpiece. It was good experience for me, but I would have spent my time better had I moved on to something that fired my imagination."

Development

Crawford had written an earlier Legionnaire for the Commodore PET
Commodore PET
The Commodore PET was a home/personal computer produced from 1977 by Commodore International...

 in 1979
1979 in video gaming
-Notable releases:* Richard Garriott creates Akalabeth, a computer role-playing game for the Apple IIe. It launches Garriott's career and is a precursor to his highly successful Ultima series....

, his platform before moving to Atari
Atari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...

. This was a fairly simple game using character graphics
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...

 and featuring a limited amount of logic. After writing Eastern Front Crawford was looking for ways to use the new scrolling-map technology introduced in that game, and decided to re-write Legionnaire for the Atari.

Legionnaire was the last game Crawford would release using the "classic" Eastern Front engine. His next game for the Atari was Excalibur
Excalibur (computer game)
Excalibur is a notable early resource-management/strategy computer game for the Atari 8-bit computers. It was designed by game design legend Chris Crawford, developed with the help of Larry Summers and Valerie Atkinson, and published by Atari Program Exchange in 1983.The object of the game is to...

, which used a different model of interaction based on moving from room to room within a virtual castle. When Atari collapsed in 1984 he turned his attention to the Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 computer, releasing the famous Balance of Power
Balance of Power (computer game)
Balance of Power is a computer strategy game of geopolitics during the Cold War, written by Chris Crawford and published in 1985. The game is notable for engaging the player in nail-biting brinkmanship without using any graphics more complicated than an outline map of the world.-Gameplay:The goal...

in 1985
1985 in video gaming
-Notable releases:* Brøderbund releases Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, the first game of the prolific Carmen Sandiego series* Nintendo releases Super Mario Bros. on September 13, 1985, which eventually sells 40 million copies making it the best-selling video game of all time until 2008.*...

.

External links

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