IRON NEST
A day like any day for the superheavy walker artillery operator. I wake up from my cot, work the knobs of the coffee makers to make a passable cup and stir my glorious steel behemoth into grinding live. Engines churns, bolts rattle, piston hiss in anticipatory motions as I ascend the steps to the command core of the titanic engine of war. Clickety-clacks of the automated writing machine announce the HQ is on my back swiftly this morning, sending details of a new crucial mission, for the glory of Castille! Well, work is work! I take my clipboard, my trusty pencil and start keying in coordinates on the big war map…
Quickly calculating the degrees, the elevation, the heft of gunpowder needed to propel the colossal shells. Turn the knobs, pull the levels, switch the switches, press the buttons. Maybe tighten a few pipes that got a little hissy. Then with some pride I pull on the chain to let the machine speak with its war horn and let loose the mighty explosives to wipe up the insidious rebels from existence!
Well, there was a slight miscalculation on my end. Sort of shifted in my head my own location and now getting information that my high explosive kind of, sort of, nipped a hospital. Slightly obliterating it. HQ calls calibration a success and Ministry of Truth rapidly ensures that the gazette talks about devious terrorist attack on the hospital by the rebels! The bastards! I feel a little better than my mismatched aim already hit a hospital surely in ruin from that terrorist strike, so my innocent souls can stay pure. Glory to Castile!
This is IRON NEST. An immersive simulator of being a lonesome engineer and operator of a titanic, twin-barrelled mobile piece of superheavy artillery. And there’s a war afoot! Dastardly rebels, hateful of your beloved country, are stirring up a right proper civil war. And it is time to show them What For and by Jove with the roaring might of enormous explosions.
The sheer delight of the experience stem from two directions. The immersions of the process and the mathematical fun itself. Majority of the gameplay is stuck on the big map and to the printed pieces of paper you receive. Depending on the mission you might be given just some information about your position, position of your supporting scouts and some key targets. For the most part, you’ll always have to triangulate and calculate the targets possible spots based on the angles and distances provided. Once you’re sure of your numbers and plot everything just right on your war map it is time to play with all the fun bits of the war machine.
There’s a station for everything here and the work is very systematic. Feed the calculator your chosen munition time and distance to get the numbers of charges and gun elevation needed to hit the exact target. Load up the big shell, feed it its gunpowder blocks, shove it into the barrel using giant pistons and mechanism. Adjust your tower rotation, gun elevation. Double check everything, if time allows. And with a humongous boom let the shell loose, to rip its deadly course through the sky before landing with, hopefully, catastrophic results to your enemies.
And the best part is the sheer physicality of the tools you work with. How you can spin the wheels, turn the knobs, flick switches. How hard stopping a big wheel can be a jarring, grinding halt that snaps something inside the clanking interior, filling the room with steam. Everything clicks and clangs, rattles and wobbles with metallic groaning. The act of firing is a momentous bit, vision blurring briefly, machine shaking with the violence of the ejected projectile. And then, the tense moment of watching the trajectory of it on the map, hoping it will land as you predicted… and that your calculations were correct to begin with.
Now that alone would make for a fun loop and a fun game, but there’s more! So much more, really, in a deliciously paved difficulty curve as the campaign progresses. First, you might be unopposed on the field, but soon enemy will start deploying their own heavy guns, trying to track you down, pin your location and turn your ponderous behemoth into slag and scrap. Adding time pressure to the mix. New orders for moving your rig to new location. After you move, your own calculations now must change based on your new position.
You can send scout airplanes to make photos of the field to highlights targets. Use different munition to aid your forces and blind enemies. Bah, even proper pick of shells matters - your standard High Explosive might be fantastic in vaporizing enemy troops, but to reach their underground bunkers you need those real precise penetrators. Or, perhaps, you need to wipe a whole group of tangos, dropping a humongous explosive that can wipe a village off the map.
And your targets wont politely sit in place either. A train of enemy reinforcements is coming. On the move, you need to calculate where it will be at a proper time to have a close and inevitable date with your shell. It’s a game of time, rapid calculations, a bit of gut instincts. The terrible pleasure when your big explosion wipes an entire bunch of targets. Or your pinpoint precision sniper shot with armour piercing round eliminates the target without as much as scraping the paint of nearby friendlies.
IRON NEST manages to tickle parts of the brain I never thought I could derive enjoyment from. Math is anathema to me, a cursed subject full of esoteric knowledge and dark magics from beyond the veil of human understanding. And yet, somehow, framing math equations as a mechanical process of managing a huge gun platform makes them fun! Guess I could’ve been so much better at calculations if math lessons at school were all about aiming and finding positions of the devious enemies of the state, huh?
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