The Ancient Art of War in the Skies

The Ancient Art of War in the Skies forces you to manage a full-scale World War I air campaign from an overhead map, only to throw you into the cockpit the moment your biplanes cross paths with the enemy.

Strategy meets the flight line in The Ancient Art of War in the Skies

Evryware built their earlier strategy games around ground armies and naval fleets, but taking the series into the clouds changed the entire pace of the battle. You spend most of your time looking at a top-down tactical map, drawing routes for your air squadrons, and targeting enemy positions across Western Europe. Destroying enemy factories directly delays how fast your opponent can send fresh planes to the front, making supply lines just as vital as winning dogfights.

When your aircraft finally encounter an enemy squadron or reach a ground target, the game drops the map and switches to a side-scrolling action screen. You can let the computer simulate the battle based on pilot skill statistics, or take direct control of the aircraft yourself. If you step into the cockpit, you are suddenly wrestling with biplane controls in side-scrolling dogfights or dropping payloads on enemy cities while dodging anti-aircraft flak.

Historical aces and twitchy arcade dogfights

The campaign roster matches you against a wild collection of opposing commanders. You might square off against historical icons like the Red Baron, Lord Kitchener, and Oswald Boelcke, or face comedic fictional opponents like Lou P. Deloupe. Every commander carries their own distinct personality, highlighted by digitized voice clips that talk trash directly through your Sound Blaster or PC speaker whenever a major encounter begins.

That mix of high-level strategy and real-time dogfighting is precisely where the game ran into trouble with players in 1992. Dedicated wargamers found the side-scrolling combat felt too much like an arcade game, while flight sim fans were left underwhelmed by the 2D action screens. Adding to the frustration, your friendly computer wingmen suffer from poor AI, often blundering straight into enemy fire during critical scrambles.

Why performance and execution held the game back

MicroProse published the title for 1992 MS-DOS machines, but running the engine on period hardware like a standard 386 processor could result in sluggish performance during heavy combat sequences. Contemporary reviewers were sharply divided on the execution. Dragon Magazine gave it 3 out of 5 stars, while Computer Gaming World noted its charm but felt it was a disappointing crossover attempt that missed its core target audiences.

The built-in campaign editor gave players plenty to do, letting you build custom battle scenarios long after finishing the main historical missions. Bugs and rough execution kept it out of the top tier of Evryware, Inc. releases, but it stands as a curious experiment in real-time strategy that simply tried doing too much on early nineties hardware.

Play The Ancient Art of War in the Skies online in your browser

If you want to see how it pairs World War I aviation strategy with arcade dogfighting, you can play MicroProse Software, Inc.'s classic MS-DOS strategy game right now. You can play The Ancient Art of War in the Skies free in your browser with no extra setup required.

To get started, jump straight into one of the historical scenarios from the main menu, set your flight paths on the tactical map, and see if you can land a hit on an enemy factory during your very first overhead bombing run.