Grognard Wargamer Thread!

I fired Armored Brigade up for the first time in ages last night while I was waiting for a download to finish. I remember now why I had trouble getting into it when it was new. The awkward way the map shows elevations makes it a chore for me to really “get” the battlefield, unlike with a Combat Mission type game, or even Flashpoint. I did figure out how to move a formation, but there’s a paucity of feedback in the interface to let you know that, yes, you have given a formation movement order rather than just ordered one unit. I set up TRPs, but how to actually use them was sort of opaque. Ok, I didn’t actually read the manual, so some of this is 100% on me, but the tips that pop up are only modestly helpful, and stuff like the TO&E listings are not graphically well laid out.

Still, I managed to kill some commies and get a feel for it enough to want to, ahem, read the manual and guides and maybe fiddle with it some more. I think it has potential to be really interesting for me, if I give it some effort.

Besides, at this rate, the next Flashpoint game, Southern Storm, won’t be out until 2030.

Pretty much my experience with the Finnish scenario.

Can’t somebody just bribe Gary Grigsby to rewrite Steel Panthers so it works on modern PCs properly?

(I know SPWW2 and the modern one sort of work, but Alt-Tabbing doesn’t and the scenario design is just excessive.)

The documentation is pretty poor anyway. The dashed circle when you place a TRP is the radius in which adjustments will happen faster. Outside of TRP range, they’re slower (much slower, depending on your choice of nation).

Top-down 2D maps and highly elevation-sensitive combat are a difficult pairing. (Command Ops is among my favorites, so it’s a problem I’m all too familiar with.) You can enable contour lines with one of the wee tiny buttons to the right of the minimap (I don’t recall offhand, but I think it looks like a contour line). Much more useful than that, in my experience, is the isometric view mode from the button on top of the minimap. Unfortunately, you can’t play the game from the isometric mode, but you can much more easily get a sense for the undulations of the map.

I might go make a suggestion on the Steam forums about borrowing a Command Ops innovation—the Command Ops LOS tool shows a bar graph of the terrain height relative to the reference point between it and the mouse, which is a handy shortcut.

My mapmaking exploration has turned into a mapmaking project. This is Fort Benning, along with the surrounding communities of Columbus, GA, Phenix City, AL, and to the southeast, Cusseta, GA.

Following the mapmaking tutorial helpfully provided by the developers, I downloaded QGIS and set to work. They recommended the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission dataset, whose 1-arcsecond/30-meter resolution is just about right for Armored Brigade’s 30m map cells, but it’s noisy—in particular, it’s a surface height map more than a terrain height map, so it includes trees. The USGS has a 10-meter survey dataset available which is just terrain, so I got two square degrees of that and chopped out the right part per the tutorial, to get the heightmap below, which is 42 kilometers on each edge at 30 meters per pixel.

The most notable feature is the Chattahoochee basin, which runs up the left side of the map. Fort Benning itself is heavily forested and features numerous small streams, rivers, and lakes, which make it an odd choice for an armor training school. Oh well. I didn’t put it there.

Anyway. On top of the heightmap, there’s a terrain definition map. Obviously, I have a good ways left to go, but you get the idea from this. Colors map to terrain types, on the same 30-meter scale as the heightmap. If you fiddle with a config file, you can put Armored Brigade into map editing mode, which gives you some help (square brushes of various sizes, a ‘draw line’ tool, a fill tool, and a palette of all the terrain types) in assembling the terrain bitmap.

I guess there are location labels, too, but a) happily, this is not a very heavily populated area of the world, and b) I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Wow, cool stuff! I remember going to Columbus to visit my grandfather, on my mother’s side, who had been stationed there in WWII and settled their permanently. Went on base a few times but don’t really recall much.

So, um … I went and ordered that guy’s Barbarossa thesis because whatevs man, lemme check it out, I’m a sucker for this stuff. But then this happened.

Once you behold the Fully Integrated Land and Air Resource Model, there’s no telling what will happen.

I would love to know your thoughts on this.

Armored Brigade throws Russian waves of T-72s and T-80s at me? No problem. Goddamn Russian arty? Massacres Abrams like nothing else. I’m constantly having to move them because if they sit still for more than a couple minutes there’s a barrage of rockets landing on their heads.

I wish Matrix wouldn’t use XTRG for all their Twitch streams - I’m sure he’s a great guy and people like him but I cannot stand listening to his commentary.

Bruce suggests using porcupines.

So apparently the complete edition of Tank Warfare: Tunisia 1943 is currently on sale on Steam for something crazy (under a tenner at 92% off, for me) through to the 19th of November. Having never touched a Graviteam game in the past, if someone wants to sell me on the game that would be grand. Interested but not entirely sure what I’m getting myself into, haha.

I may have slightly underestimated the amount of work this mapmaking project represents. I’ve made a slice of Fort Benning!

Points of interest: barracks at the top, tank driver training courses (I think) in the middle, TV station building with a commanding view of the surrounding area at the bottom (just above the world Obstacles in the bottom bar).

And… that’s maybe one quarter of one 15km square, which is itself about 1/8 of the overall map.

I have that one and Operation Star. I’ve never been able to get into them, but I’ve always felt like maybe I was missing out and should give them another shot. I think they will require quite a bit of time to really click, because they’ve got an awful lot going on under the hood, but at the same time seem to require a light touch on the orders front. They certainly do not go out of their way to make things obvious, I’ll tell you that much. There are plenty of videos out there, but I hate learning that way. There is a “learner’s manual” that a forum put together that wargamer linked, and I’ve uploaded it to Zippyshare if you would like to take a look, because the forum requires registration to download, and your registration has to be manually approved and it’s not really 2005 anymore.

I think Mius Front is a better place to start than Tunisia, for simply geographical reasons if nothing else - Tunisia has lots of long, flat open spaces and it turns out German 88s versus Grants and Stuarts is not a fair fight over that terrain.

In Mius Front you have lots of PZ IVs versus KVI and T34, which is a bit more fair and you have… trees!

It took me a long time to work out how the heck the campaign mode worked, but when I finally grokked that, cherubim and seraphim appeared next to my computer, singing beautiful harmonies made of squeaking tank tracks, distant rifles and Jericho trumpets.

It’s a really great (set of) game(s), but it is a beautiful madness of Eastern European design decisions and difficulty.

Is there anywhere this can be hosted that doesn’t seem designed to put viruses on a computer?

I’m grateful for the effort, but everything I click on that page to try to download it is some malicious redirect to other webpages, and god knows what.

Well, if it’s not a misprint, then it really calls the author’s judgment into question.

Sorry, I know what you meant. I’ll report back, but it may be a while.

Not sure what that means.

—Hitler, December 1940, discussing Stalin with Jodl.

Sorry. Brooski’s post upthread. He ordered a book about Russian’s fighting and got a copy of “It’s hard to hug a porcupine.”