Forged Battalion - Brings back good ol' C & C Generals Nostalgia (Early Access)

Overview

Forged Battalion is an upcoming 2018 RTS title being developed by Petroglyph Games and published by TEAM 17. Petroglyph games is a private developer actually formed from the ashes and employees from what used to be Westwood, who developed the Red Alert series which has been my favorite RTS series to date. The dissolution of Westwood into EA saw a huge layoff of employees and it led to some founding Petroglyph Games which also includes the composer of Forged Battalion's Music Klepacki. TEAM 17 is the publisher that published the very successful Worms franchise of games. Much more doesn't need to be said about TEAM 17, c'mon, they did Worms.

Design your own faction, create your own units from the ground up, build a base, and wipe the enemy, pretty much the norm for RTS these days. By winning battles both in the Campaign as well as Ranked and Unranked matches, you will earn research points to unlock weapons and parts from the Tech Tree for your faction.

Unit Builder:

The commander has the option to create his own infantry and vehicles using parts and weapons researched from the tech tree. Each weapon or component modifying the base chassis will alter the cost of the unit. And great that they tell you the general effectiveness of each weapon type against various unit types (Infantry, Light, Armored, Aircraft, turrets, Buildings respectively) A Maximum of 4 units can be chosen to be built by one type of factory. Essentially you can customise and build up your own faction or army type depending on your needs.

Tech Tree:

As you win various battles in the game, whether campaign, offline skirmish or PvP ranked / unranked, you'll earn research points based on difficulty for your faction. So basically you can skirmish everytime to earn all the points you need. Currently 3 tiers are available and as to the 4th one, I guess it'll be unlocked in the full release of the game.

The Game:

 The game is very similar to C and C generals in terms of its look and feel as well as many of the Command and Conquer series and the Dawn Of War Series of RTS games. So you'll feel at home. Of course, since the people who are developing Forged Battalion, developed Red Alert 2 and Generals. So your role, most of the time is to take out your enemy using the units you made via the Faction Creator. You can capture outposts with Infantry as soon as your Comm center is built, around a similar manner as Company of Heroes and Dawn of War, which is to move infantry next to the outpost and hold till it's captured. 

Performance:

Performance of this game is fairly light to run. And because it looks like it, I went straight to Maximum Settings as shown in the test videos below within my devices' native resolutions. 1440p for the GTX 1060 Rig, and 1080p for the GTX 860M Rig.

Test Device 1: Desktop Test Bench
Xeon X5670 6C12T
16GB DDR3 RAM
250GB Samsung EVO 850
3GB GTX 1060 EVGA ACX Gaming 'Mini' - Overclocked

Test Device 2: GTX 860M / GTX 750 Ti Bench
Core i7 4810MQ
16GB DDR3 SODIM RAM
120GB mSATA SSD
2GB GTX 860M, Slight overclocked

1080p Maximum Settings

Low End GPU Test: 
Aftershock X11 / Clevo W110ER
Core i7 3630QM
8GB RAM
GT 650M
Windows 7 Home Premium.


Although this game is relatively light on GPU power, more CPU power is definitely needed as your army grows larger as you'll very likely expect. But for most of the time, playable framerates, a GTX 860M that I had will be fine and a GTX 1060 3GB will hardly break a sweat at maximum settings at 1440p 60fps. However, old GPUs like the GT 650M can only settle at 768p at low details. Probably due to newer drivers don't really support Kepler based GPUs anymore.

More devices will be added later, as soon as I have the time to bench them.


Conclusion

Forged Battalion really brings back some of the old concepts and keep the spirit of Command And Conquer Generals alive. And being fairly light to run, it will be easy on the hardware. Since it's just went early access, the game is currently under promotional price of just over 10 USD which is pretty sweet. And considering this early stages of the game development, it is quite well optimised. And considering the price at 17 USD, and minus 15% from a promo deal, it may be worth taking a look, especially if you like real-time strategies like Dawn of War and Red Alert.