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So, I got bored and decided to replay ye olde Shadow of the Horned Rat and Dark Omen games.

Only problem is, I can't figure out how to get the crossbow to shoot at people rather than charge into combat. Does anyone know?
And in Dark Omen I can't move around the battlefield with my camera, which is kind of annoying. Anyone remember how that works?

Shadow of the Horned Rat was super clunky, only my love for the setting got me to persist for my one play through.
Dark Omen is better.

As for your questions, both were in the age of boxed games with extensive paper manuals, you need those as you wont get much functionality info in game.

Yeah, I've never played Shadow before, thought I'd try it for nostalgia's sake.

It is VERY hard to master. Never let a unit get wiped and watch your cashflow but otherwise casualties matter less than they at first appear.
EXP is important but jumps for certain units, Allor in particular.
Crows is a nuke spell and is your carry through tough battles, methinks it was ramped up to prevent the game getting stupidly difficult.

Woah, what a blast from the past... I tried playing this game a few times... but could never get into it. Awesome to see these old games are being shown some love!

What I said I said from memory of playthroughs long ago. I only fully played the game once, I did Dark Omen twice with long intervals. There were many false starts.

Dark Omen is fairly accessible, Horned Rat is very dated and very clunky, though it had a polish all of its own. Nice flat graphics and cutscenes. You need your computer to work with 256 colour graphics properly and not 'emulate' to get the game to look good. The artistry was very tight, and it was advanced game for its day. Would not run on MS-Dos but only through Win 3.1, which was unusual, it had some early optimisation. Ran smooth too, but the trouble was getting it to work via emulators is very hard. I gave up.

Some tips on the game.

1. If you lose a unit, reload. You cannot play this game hardcore unless you have very good skills, and if you have you dont need my help. When you lose a unit you dont get it back and future missions dont take account of its loss, the game 'balance' accounts fro the player having every unit in his mercenary roster.
Now in my one full playthrough I lost a key infantry unit and let that stand and got away with it because I had lots of infantry, however if you lose a cavalry, missile or a character restart the mission.

2. Dont sweat the EXP. If you havent leveled up by certain milestones the game levels you up for you. I noticed this with Allor, he gained a level and a magic level and a very nasty spell, supposedly spell allocation on level up is random. It is not. Supposedly you gain exp to level up. You dont. I was worried that I wasnt getting enough exp with Allor prior to a very tough mission I knew was coming, so I witdrew alf my army once the battle was nearly done and let him kill rats wioth amber spear. I still didnt make it even when gimping the game to powerlevel him. It didnt matter, he started the next crucial battle with a level up and Crows.

3. Crows. This is a nukes spell. 3d6 S1 hits, dont believe that, it will kill 50% of a unit of black orcs in one hit. It is supposed to, Allor is your secret weapon for havign a chance at winning the game, you will often be outnumbered 3 or 4 to 1 in points. Multiple large units of Stormvermin, Black orcs and boar boyz are common.

4. Play the manoeuver game. This is 5th ed, get the charge in, hit flanks, etc. You wont last long in a frontal fight.

5. When the elf tells you to hurry up ignore him. Do the missions for the border prince instead. You have time.

6. However when in Altdorf say you want to head out to Athel Loren immediately and ignore the side missions.

The rest I will leave you to work out.

In Dark Omen, I got as far as a siege and repeatedly got spanked like a red headed step child.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
In Dark Omen, I got as far as a siege and repeatedly got spanked like a red headed step child.

That battle didn't cause me any problems in my playthrough, though I did have trouble in the ice field battle.

Dark omen I've already played once (long ago). It was tough until I cheated and read up on where to find the magic items. That made it easier.
Still some very tough battles (Black Grail, anyone?), not even counting the last one. I think I only won that one with a lucky cannonshot.

Search the maps, make sure you dont trigger mission end prematurely. In Horned Rat magic item locations twinkle. In Dark Omen you get purple smoke which is a lot more obvious.

I remember one house with puffs of purple smoke coming from the chimney, you have to burn down the house to get the item.

Just finished playing and recording this beauty of a game.

I recorded the entire ordeal because I noticed there are not many lets play's of this game out there.
I saw 2 interesting ones, one stopped halfway and the other resorted to cheating so I decided to give it a go.
I set up a few rules for myself as to not reload the game no matter how many casualties.
and to keep playing no matter how bad I did.

After finishing it I wanted to start Dark Omen. Unfortunately, I have to try my hands on fixing the physical CD version I have. (prob needs patching for newer pc's)

Hah, I also defeated the last boss in Dark Omen with a lucky cannon shot, right at the start of the battle. I think I had like 10 guys alive apart from the cannon at that point, so I was incredibly relieved!