Unfortunately I wrote a WW2 story which features the narrator getting trapped in a B-17 belly turret. Of course I never heard of the episode. Or the poem. Took a lot of research to come up with the facts the turret has to be aligned properly or a) you can’t get out of it, and b) it may get wiped right off the plane when it lands.
Still hasn’t sold, oddly enough… Sigh.
Well, the game should be available soon (less then an hour if you believe the steam page) . Let’s get those impressions in! I’ll have to wait until after work but I will be in to this today.
Tom Mc
Now I would be all over that in a nanosecond if that was updated…
And my email from Steam says the game is now out. Please game, don’t suck.
Tom Mc
How frantic does it get? From what I’ve seen of the videos I doubt it’s for me, but you never know.
Pretty frantic. I’m bad at RTS and it’s triggering those click-per-minute issues for me, but I’m hanging in there right now.
With the tagging system I understand why you can’t issue orders while paused, but if they could leave you in your bomber while paused so I can at least look around and try to find out WTF the enemy fighters are coming from, that’d be great.
A few missions in and I’ve had one or two bomber reliability issues right at take off, which seems designed to push you toward upgrades. I haven’t lost a crew member yet, but I came close on my last mission when my tail gunner was badly wounded and we just got a medkit to him on time.
I had to send my navigator back with it, which meant no new waypoints until he was done so we just kinda flew in a straight line trying not to die until everyone was up and running again. At one point I had the mechanic in the ventral turret, the radioman fixing the electrical systems and the navigator giving medical care.
I see a bad future for my crew when I have to go on something harder than a medium hazard mission.
Thanks for the heads up. Removing it from my wish list.
Thank you Mr Bismarck,
Those are exactly the kind of stories I was hoping the game would make.
Tom Mc
The one where everything caught fire and the engine fell off is pretty good too.
My crew of seven have made it through six missions now. Not exactly unscathed, but injuries don’t carry over to future missions, so close enough. There’s an achievement for getting the same seven crew through seven missions together, so now I’m nervously hoping for a milk run.
Annnnnd… the mission is an attack on St. Nazaire in support of Operation Chariot. Bugger.
I played like 4 hours of this on my stream tonight. It was a lot of fun :D Can’t believe I paid $12.50 for it!
Well reading some description (how the targeting system works, for instance), I thought the game would piss me off, but after watching part of your stream, I am quite interested.
Not to get off topic but my uncle was a navigator/bombardier on a B-17. Was awarded the Silver Star for valor, was shot down over Germany and spent a year and a half as a POW. He was in Clark Gable’s squadron (Gable made a DoD movie about his experience and my uncle was in it) and was the POW camp of Great Escape fame.
My biggest complaint at the moment is that it’s extremely finicky clicking on a turret to reload it.
I hope they don’t have any raids on Schweinfurt in the campaign series. Good luck returning intact from either of those… The second one was pretty much the end of the 8th Air Force as I recall.
That’s my biggest complaint as well. I really wish they’d just automatically reload the guns, there’s enough other stuff going on to keep you frantic without having to micromanage reloads.
Great story, Grif. My dad was a bombardier as well, mostly on missions in Italy in '43 and '44.
Once you upgrade your Lancaster enough you can have automatic belt feeders for some of the guns. You might have to give up some armour elsewhere there to keep under the flying weight limit.
I feel like there might be some real X-Com moments in the future of my campaign. Losing certain crew members and replacing them with greenhorns would be very painful, but the real loss would be the Lancaster itself. With an armoured nose and tail, armoured engine covers, fire extinguishers and belt feeders in place, having to go back to a stock Lanc would be frightening.
That’s good to know Mr_Bismarck, if I can manage to survive long enough to get them!
“Old Bill” is turning into the Lancaster of Theseus. Three of the four engines have been replaced now and the fourth - the outboard Port engine - has been on fire so many times I may as well flip the warning light to just tell me when it’s not an inferno.
The crew is still the original Magnificent Seven though - once I got the tail guns onto the auto-loader I didn’t have to worry about how fast the tail gunner could move, so I loaded him with flak jackets, improved helmets, armoured o2 canisters and tough leather boots and now he just deflects bullets. Others have as much armour as I can give them and still have them reasonably do their job.
The Engineer needs to be mobile to move around and fix the stuff that breaks all the time and the radioman is also our medic, so needs running shoes. If I could put the pilot in a lead box with an eye slit cut in it I would.
Ok so this is a buy then? Edit , sorry just saw its rts fast clicky. Not for me.
