Grognard Wargamer Thread!

[Thraeg]

@spelk

It’s great to see a newcomer taking steps towards understanding and enjoying wargaming! Stay with it, theres a lot of hidden excitement tied up in these dusty old hex and chit games!

Thanks for the recommendations! I liked the demo of Rommel and Afrika Korps, and will probably pick up the full version soon, maybe after trying a few more demos for comparison’s sake. And I’ve added Decisive Campaigns to my wishlist for future consideration.

I’ll make sure to give Close Combat and Rise of Prussia a fair shot as well at some point. I did try out the first couple missions of Frontline. The Panzer General formula is still relatively fresh to me, but the game felt pretty sloppy, and I’d rather just buy Panzer Corps than put time into a store-brand version just because it was in the bundle.

@robc04

Battle Academy is a fun fairly light war game and a good place to start. From the other games you mention, I’d go with Unity of Command. Very simple to understand but still provides a challenge. Plus there is no weird UI to battle with. I played some of the earlier Close Combat games and enjoyed them a lot at the time.

Thanks. Yeah, I’m poised to pick up Unity of Command Trilogy for $4.50 and Ultimate General Gettysburg for $6 on the last day of the sale assuming they aren’t dailies. Graviteam Tactics, which is apparently the sequel to Achtung Panzer, is also 85% off / $4.50 and has very positive reviews, so I’m considering that as well.

@Tim James

And be sure to post impressions. That’s the only reason I’m such a cheerleader: I’m discovering the joys and I want to share that on the forum. Unfortunately, these genres are pretty low traffic here and I don’t want to join a new forum.

Sure thing!

Battle Academy is the only one I’ve spent much time with, and I’ve just finished the first of three included campaigns (with six more available as DLC). I’m enjoying it quite a bit, and it is indeed making for a good entry point, with pretty manageable mechanics and unit counts. I don’t know how accurate it is to the source material, but the battles definitely have a very different flavor from any other tactical game I’ve played.

Tanks are the crux of most of the battles, and they have an interesting mix of hardiness and vulnerability. Most shots have a pretty low chance of penetrating their front armor, but it only takes one lucky shot to destroy them, and if you can manage an ambush on the side or rear they have a good chance of going down. There’s also a surprisingly large gulf in ability from one model to the next. And from an educational perspective, I’ve expanded the number of tanks I can name severalfold since starting the game.

It’s interesting that many shots are actually taken as reactions on the opponent’s turn when your units see theirs moving. Trying to close in for a high-percentage shot will often result in getting destroyed before you can get there, so most engagements consist of a lot of 10-25% kill shots from several squares distance.

Infantry is fragile and easy to interrupt if crossing open ground, but can hide in buildings and forests, and is only revealed by being adjacent to other infantry (or spotted when shooting). But even hidden units an be suppressed if the enemy shoots enough at a suspicious hiding spot, which makes for an interesting dynamic of shifting from building to building, trying to get to stay safe while getting close enough for a surprise attack on enemy vehicles or guns.

The scenario design is nicely varied, with different unit availability and goals. There’s no carryover of units, so each scenario is completely self-contained. I have mixed feelings about this – from a pure game design standpoint it’s simple and pure and of course balancing it to come down to a tense and closely-fought end is a lot easier when you’re dealing with static forces. But it also reduces the sense of investment in troops, and means that casualties don’t make that big of an impression on me.

Also, it’s not strictly impressions and not sure if it belongs in this thread, but I wrote up my first multiplayer battle over in the Leaguelet thread in an attempt to recruit more players:

@Thraeg

A sleepy town strung along a highway through the North African desert awoke to find German tanks rumbling through its streets from the north, and seizing 4 out of 7 critical locations. But no sooner had they taken up positions than Dave’s British forces arrived to dislodge them. I deployed the main body of panzers on the open ground east of the town, and after a protracted battle aided by surprise assaults by infantry, AT guns hidden in the buildings, and heroic sacrifices of armored cars zipping into range to draw fire away from the tanks, they gained the upper hand there. But the situation was reversed on the west, where the British routed my forces and took full possession of a cluster of buildings away from the main town.

From there, they pressed the advantage by sending speedy APCs around behind the lines to capture unguarded victory locations, at one point holding a 6:1 advantage. With time now working against me, I scrambled to get back into position. My glass-cannon Marder tank was nearby and seemed to have a shot at taking out the troublesome vehicles, but missed both shots before being unceremoniously scrapped by a British AT gun. A mortar team hidden in the rocks kept my central infantry pinned down in the safety of buildings, but my remaining forces swept west, destroying a few more vehicles. I sent my own armored car to try and grab the north-central point, only for it to be ambushed by the same AT gun and destroyed at the moment it claimed the location.

As the final turn dawned, with each of us down to a bare few survivors, my Germans held only a couple central points, while the British had the north and south edges under control for a total of 5 victory locations. One of Dave’s cars made a run through the center of town, grabbing one of my points, but got ambushed before it could reach the other, where the bombed-out husk of my APC still smoldered. His other car made a dash for that point from the opposite direction, but reached it without enough remaining movement to clear the wreckage away and take the point itself. Finally, my last tank reclaimed the western outcropping, and a decimated and suppressed infantry squad managed to muster the courage to stagger out of the safety of buildings and reclaim the central intersection.

Final score, 4 victory locations to 3. Each side sustained 17 casualties. The wreck of that car holding Dave off from the north VL for just long enough proved to be the margin of victory.