I write about this game because of the fact that it wasn't really a big seller in the USA on the Sega Genesis. Most people had never heard of it, let alone played it. I blame a lack of advertising, the name of the game, and also lack of interest in the genre....because it didn't exist. However, this is a truly momentous game and IMO is one of the best games on the Genesis.
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We didn't call this a real time strategy game at the time because that term hadn't been coined yet, it is believed that the term didn't exist until around the early 90's when the type of game would start to become immesely popular with Dune, Warcraft, and later Starcraft.
It all had to start somewhere and most people believe that Herzog Zwei, despite being very simplistic compared to later games that incorporated resource collection, is the grandfather of all RTS games.
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The objective in every level of the game is to destroy the opponent's large base that is placed on the other side of the screen. You control unit production in order to take over a series of smaller bases that are placed throughout the board and while this isn't something you MUST do in order to win the level, it is a lot more difficult if you don't.
You play the role of the transformable mech of sorts that can fly in order to transport units to attacking positions, but this also consumes considerably more fuel. Once you run out of fuel, you explode and respawn at your home base. You are incapable of taking over any of the sub-bases without dropping off 4 human soldiers which are basically cannon fodder and need to be protected from enemy units as well as the enemy mech that can fire upon them.
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You can see the dots on the base there and the first person to get to 4 soldiers inside now controls the sub-base. This gives a huge advantage because you can now refuel at these points as well as pickup newly created ground units at these points. You must also be careful to defend your forward bases because the enemy will undoubtedly try to take it back. There are units that are designed to forward attack such as tanks and then missile launchers that will attack the enemy commander. There was one unit that was capable of both, but it is immobile and also quite costly and time-consuming to create.
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These were great, but since they have to be manually moved they were pain as far as forward assaults are concerned
The ultimate objective is to destroy the other commander's main base but you are not able to damage it directly, your units are the only thing that can do so. It becomes important to accompany your units since you are actually the strongest unit in the game and the only one that can recharge.
There is a real strategy to which of the 9 sub-bases you are going to attempt to control since not only do they offer an advantage as far as positioning is concerned, but they also give income every few seconds that is used for purchasing additional units. In many ways, this sort of resource collection is similar to Company of Heroes where there are not actual resources to collect, but control of checkpoints determines income per second.
I was the only person that I knew that owned this game but when I showed it to other people and they started to understand the gameplay, they almost always enjoyed it because no two rounds were ever the same. Unlike a lot of the "arcade style" games that were the mainstay of the Sega Genesis, memorization of patterns on levels was a waste of time, since the AI was very advanced (for the time) and would come at you differently each game through. Of course the ultimate was to play against another person but this was back in the days of split-screen only and because of this limited field of vision, the screen was a bit too busy for it to really work.
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You could also "cheat" by looking at what your opponent was up to and this eliminated a lot of the surprise attack aspects that were important to achieving victory. With me and my friends it really ended up boiling down to who could hit the attack button fastest at this point... which resulted in destroying several controllers.
This game was a commercial flop, especially in North America where the game was almost universally panned by critics. The same critics would return to talk about how they were terribly terribly wrong with their initial assessment but this is the problem with critics: They don't normally play each of the games long enough to get a good idea of how great it can be. Plus, the Genesis was primarily an arcade simulator so anything that fell outside of that realm tended to be tossed aside.
Although it is really too dated to be much fun these days, you can still poke around with the ROM HERE if you want to.
A better way to experience a more modern take on the original is to have a look at AirMech Strike which is free to play but I use the word "free" loosely here since you have to grind for ages in order to get the more advanced units or of course pay real world money for them.
Real Time Strategy is still my favorite genre of games but unfortunately not many companies are interested in making them anymore, or so it seems. It likely would have been invented by someone else in the future but as it stands, most people consider Herzog to be the first RTS game ever.
Did you play it when it was released? If so, what did you think?