Steel Panthers: World at War is probably a good start - the low unit count and lack of abstraction in the statistics makes it a lot easier to get one’s head round. Plus it’s free… A few years back, it was the first Steel Panthers which really turned me on to wargaming.
I lost, so it sucked. By way of comparison, I beat him at Combat Mission, so that’s the best game ever.
If mine was the three seconds and Tom’s was the seven seconds, then yes.
Oh, got any particular favorites?[/quote]
Oh, yeah. As far as computer games go: Robert E. Lee: Civil War General, Sid’s Gettysburg, all the Talonsoft games, particularly Chickamauga, but I especially like Bull Run (the second battle in particular) for multiplayer.[/quote]
Those are grand-tactical games, Boss.
No, but in any case it’s a boardgame. I thought you were looking for a computer game. Lock’N Load ships with a Java utility for playing it against human opponents over the Internet, but it has no AI and isn’t a computer wargame. I’m not sure why Bill Trotter reviewed it in PC Gamer.
I’m not sure why Bill Trotter reviewed it in PC Gamer.
Trotter meanders a bit. In his column once he fondly recalled a book he had read as a child but couldn’t remember the title, so he described it and asked readers to send him the name if anyone recognized it. That was like half his column for that month.
My bad. Maybe I’ll just buy Combat Mission 1. I saw in in EB the other day.
Oh, got any particular favorites?[/quote]
Oh, yeah. As far as computer games go: Robert E. Lee: Civil War General, Sid’s Gettysburg, all the Talonsoft games, particularly Chickamauga, but I especially like Bull Run (the second battle in particular) for multiplayer.[/quote]
Those are grand-tactical games, Boss.
[/quote]
So they are. But now that I think about it, I can’t recall any operational level ACW computer games. I know there was one strategic level game done, whose name I can’t remember, but I think that’s about it.
I guess that does look weird. The idea is that those are time stamps where we stop the replay and sort of ruminate on what we’re doing and what we’re going to do next.
And I know I’m late to the party, but I’d like to also give a hearty whoop and holler to the boys at SSG for a job well done on Korsun Pocket. No disrespect to guys like Tiller and Grigsby, but this is hexes done right.
-Tom
The later games in the Battleground series had many, many more hexes than any board wargame ever did. According to a review I wrote when I did things like count hexes, Prelude to Waterloo has over 24,000 of them. Maybe you can set a record for most hexes in a game, unless the EU has regulated hex ceilings to protect French farmers or something.
That was my point when I said that it is a designer’s job to make a game interesting, and I completely agree with you. In the end, it’s about the decisions you make. That’s the whole goal of game design. Unfortunately, I think computer wargame design at some point turned into the idea that as long as you did the research, assigned reasonable values to the different units, and then put them all in the right places, that the result would be a good game. This is both wrong and totally backwards.
You’re thinking of American Civil War: From Sumter to Appomattox (Interactive Magic). That was a good design (by Frank Hunter) that went through massive multiple patches.
Definitely worthwhile. Get it and let us know what you think.
So as far as I can tell from the Matrix Games website, they will only ship Korsun Pocket to Australia via FedEx. As you can imagine, international FedEx is kind of pricy - to the tune of US$45. This brings the total cost of the game for Australian customers to around $140 or $150 in local currency! Kind of pricey… particularly since the game is made over here in the first place…
Good work guys.
Funnily enough, I always found defensive battles easier to fight than offensive. Objectives always seemed clearer and easier to fulfill. There was always a great sense of satisfaction in holding a position against far superior forces, (this is why the game I remember most enjoying was playing as the British at Rorke’s Drift.) Admittedly this is from my experience with tabletop wargaming so computer versions may well be diferent.
Yes, defensive battles usually have clearer objectives and I like having to play fire brigade and run around defending stuff. It would be great if the computer was better–in any game–at conducting attacks, but what the hey.
As for Korsun Pocket being “hexes done right,” from what I’ve seen and from what I know of TAO I’d probably agree for the most part. But, and here’s the kicker, I can’t ignore the fact that games like Korsun are aberrations. How many commercial wargames for the PC are there where the developer takes five years to put out the game? Very few if any developers can sustain products in the pipeline that long, and as virtually all wargame developers are shoestring operations, we can’t expect that much effort to go into most games. Also, do we really want to wait five years between games?
I guess I’m not objecting at all to kudos to SSG for what appears to be a stellar game–far from it. I’m just concerned that, as happened after Combat Mission, people will get the idea that we can now expect all wargames to be like this. The economics are prohibitive, period.
I’m new to computer wargames but I’m looking to check out some titles. I sucked at the Close Combat series, fared much better with COmbat Mission Barbarrosa to Berlin. Saw recently something about a rerelease of the first Combat Mission game. Does anyone know what’s up with that?
Will this chip wargame be on sale in general stores or will it be an online only thing?
Or, I feel compelled to blatantly plug, Steel Panthers World War 2, or Steel Panthers MBT. :D
(For the uninitiated, SPW@W and SPWW2 are kissing - or squabbling - cousins: they’re both free Squad Leader level games, with SPMBT coming in as SPWW2’s modern offspring.)
For anyone really on the fence: v2 of The Ardennes Offensive is available as a free download too - SSG released it to the public a while ago. While this won’t give you all of the improvements in the Korsun box, it will certainly help you decide whether this is for you. (Especially since I still don’t think Matrix has comitted to a demo.)
I’ll second the folks who mentioned the various Panzer General games - I think this series probably let more strategy gamers figure whether or not they liked wargames than any other titles (with the Steel Panthers games probably running - a distant - second.) These days I’d say that meant looking at Scorched Earth (WWII), People’s General (modern), or Rites of War (Warhammer).
But I think subject matter is king here - if you’re going to like a wargame, it’s because you like the topic, as Bob and others said.
If you’re looking for pre-gunpowder stuff, I’d try ISI’s Medieval 2 and iMagic’s Great Battles trilogy.
For a beginner’s turn-based wargame, I’d definitely recommend Strategic Command if grand strategic (Axis & Allies level) WWII interests you.
Strategic ACW: you’re looking for Frank Hunter’s games - Road from Sumter to Appomattox, etc (various iterations of the same game.) Frank currently has his own outfit, Adanac, with a current version of this and some Nappy games. There was also a pretty abstract political strategic ACW game called, I think, The American Civil War.
And for good medieval/fantasy turn based strategy, I can’t recommend A-Sharp’s King of Dragon Pass highly enough. No hexes though. <g> (Unless you get the boardgame version!)
I think the point made above, that you will enjoy these much more if you are interested in the topic, is right on the nose. When I get a new wargame, I’ll sometimes not play it for a couple of weeks while I obtain and read as much as possible about the conflict.
The Civil War discussion is coincidental - I’m currently reading and re-reading all of my Civil War stuff, and I’ve got a major itch for some good Civil War games. I wasn’t aware that Hunter had updated his strategic game - I played and enjoyed it years ago, but there were a lot of issues and bugs. I’ll have to go try to find it if it is significantly more refined. It was a very ambitious effort. In a moment of weakness I gave all of my Civil War games away to a friend who wanted to get into wargaming and was a huge ACW buff - he moved away a year ago and took the games with him. So I need to rebuild my ACW gaming library - looking for both good treatments of individual battles and more strategic level games. Can someone give a good list of currently available games and good/bad points?
wo0t! Korsun arrived today. Just installed it (running on my laptop, hooked up to my monitor at least; my main CPU had to be yanked to be RMA’d back for warranty replacement). Looks very pretty, but it’s been so damn long since TAO that I have to actually read the manual. I might just grab my TAO manual (hard copy) and read the basics, as I think the interface is the same? I have a very hard time reading PDF files on screen for more than ten minutes.
But I’m psyched. As Mr. Lackey says, half the fun is researching the battle. I have some good works on Korsun, a new book called Hell’s Gate and the Soviet General Staff study that Glantz and others translated, so I think I’ll revisit them before diving in.
Both Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord (2000) and Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin (2002) are being published in North America by CDV. That means they should at least be lurking around your local EB (not necessarily Best Buy, however) - I found a copy of the former at CompUSA recently.
Lots of random wargame discussions, so I’ll pimp out some links for the uninitiated (plus all of these games 100% FREE):
Steel Panthers: World War II (by the SPCamo Group) - a free mod for Grisby’s Steel Panthers: http://linetap.com/www/drg/SPCamo.htm
Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank (by the SPCamo Group) - same as above, except in modern times: http://linetap.com/www/drg/SPCamo.htm
American Civil War (by Frank Hunter) - http://www.adanaccommandstudies.com/
The Ardennes Offensive 2 (by SSG) - originally a free release, and an updated version was shipped in the Korsun Pocket package: http://www.wargamer.com/wachtamrhein/
Or a direct link to the file: http://www.users.on.net/chrism/tao2.EXE
You know why I haven’t fired up Steel Panthers in a long time?
- The game runs at 60Hz in a DOS box. My eyes scream in pain.
- The screen scrolls at light speed, making it near unplayable.
Have these problems been fixed?
Heh, Xpav, I agree with you on that. I LOVED Steel Panthers when it was new, in the days of using external programs with DOS to set refresh rates etc. I only stopped playing when I got sick of its brain-dead AI that assaulted Tigers with half-tracks, etc. But I had a load of fun with it.
Then I tried both the SP mods that are floating around. Very nice pieces of work, kudos to all involved. But I hate them. Not for what they are, necessarily, but because I can’t abide the flickering graphics and general interface issues.
One question for anyone who knows. Is the screen resolution in Korsun Pocket fixed, the same as desktop, or adjustable?
I’m pretty sure that you can slow down the scroll speed in SPWAW. The main reason I don’t play any of the Steel Panthers games much any more is that I’ve been spoiled by the Combat Mission games, I find it hard to go back to hexes for for the squad/individual vehicle level. Once we get North Africa and Italy in CM:Afrika Korps, I can see SPWAW going to free up disk space.
I still find it easier, conceptually, to play hex based games rather than the CM games, as good as they are. It’s very easy to see where to put an AT gun or machinegun team with hexes; hard in 3D.