Hilarious. What game is that?
One of the Combat Mission 2 iterations?
Nah, it’s the Mius game referenced upthread I think.
Graviteam Tactics : Mius Front.
[SUB]It’s not really a victory dance, he’s sort of kicking the wounded Russian soldier to death… Shooting him would be wasteful, obviously.[/SUB]
What happens at the end of battles when two tired forces get into close combat range is interesting to watch. The game’s animations aren’t perfect at describing what’s happening, but with the context of leadership and fatigue and support you can spot some interesting behaviour.
This is at the end of a pretty small engagement really - the Germans had two infantry platoons, a weakened Engineer platoon and two StuG IIIs against three infantry platoons, (one of which was strengthened with an extra SMG squad), a lance of Armoured MG Cars and three 45mm AT guns. Numbers were slightly in the German’s favour, but the Russians were dug in at points and on the defensive.
Right at the end of the battle my right wing attack had essentially run out of steam right in front of the final Russian position. I had dead and wounded lying just a few feet from the Russian trench line, but three of the five infantry squads had lost their leaders and their men were neatly split between hiding from MG fire or just straight running away.
At that point my ground was being held only by the Engineer squads in the middle. They’d found and knocked out an armoured car and some of them were using it for cover from MG fire as they were now getting absolutely pounded. They were also losing leaders and men, but they hung in there long enough that my left flank finally arrived, featuring the two StuG.
My infantry on this side had got hung up clearing a wood on the secondary objective, but they had been following the StuGs from there, so they showed up quite rested and with their Officers alongside, into a fight between two exhausted forces with lots of missing and ad hoc leadership and this turned them into supermen.
When I gave the order to attack and the infantry spilled out from around the StuGs, they threw in smoke and grenades and cleared the left corner of the trenchline in seconds, then shooting the Russians who tried to run back to the secondary line. The Russians who had pushed forward in the middle against my engineers now found their right flank open and my supermen went bonkers, running into their middle, shooting, smashing people with the butts of their weapons and, as above, even kicking the enemy to bits.
It looked like I was going to waltz in on my left and roll the whole Russian line down when the final AT gun revealed itself. Smashing the track of one of the StuGs, which was pointing across the line and therefore unable to fire anymore, because it doesn’t have a turret, so couldn’t point its gun at any targets.
The lead StuG was then also immobilised, before the mortar team attached to the left side put several rounds on the AT gun, killing the crew. This StuG was pointing toward the enemy, so it was able to keep firing, but its right side was also exposed to Russian infantry and those guys did their best to kill the assault gun, hitting it more than 15 times with rifle grenades, anti tank rifles and Molotov cocktails. Amazingly the StuG crew survived, despite the post-battle hit report looking like this:
Without the StuG’s the attack eventually bogged down, but some of the troops on the right side had rallied and I was able to push up both sides while I told my almost-shattered Engineers to stay put. I didn’t quite capture the main objective, but the Russians weren’t really defending it any more either, so I was awarded a strong victory.
One of those victories where I thought I was solidly on the way to winning, then became convinced I was seconds away from being routed, then felt I was going to walk to final point uncontested and then had no idea what was happening.
Great AAR.
Thanks! This game practically writes its own stories.
The guy lying down in the Victory Dance video is Oberleutnant Kuttler who led the attack out from behind the StuGs on the left side.
First he landed this perfect grenade throw.
Then he clubbed a Russian down with his rifle, then shot a Russian machinegunner [SUB](fractions of a second after the Russian put his hands up, possibly to surrender… ooops)[/SUB]
Then this happened. If I’d had my mic on you would have heard me give it the full Darth Vader “Nooooooooooooooooo…”
Aw man, that last one is just brutal!
I don’t know if I just missed this in the manual, but -
On the iPad, playing the Battle of the Atlantic. Got a few weeks into that campaign, then had to quit. When I started the game back up, I did not see an option to restore the last game. When I hit continue, rather than continue at the same point in time in the game, it appears to start at Week 1 again, albeit with the reknown and sunk ships from the previous session.
Is there a “Save Game” function for that campaign? Also - had a great battle in that campaign, two of my battleships, a cruiser, and destroyer, vs. a battleship and a cruiser and two destroyers. My destoyer was hit, burning, smoking, and could not move. But when I touched my DD to look at the damage, the list of subsystems was all white - i.e. no damage. Is this just a bug?
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve looked at this game before and added it to my steam wishlist, but mostly dismissed it as it seemed too US centric for my tastes, so I didn’t look into how it plays or anything. I’ll keep an eye out for it on the next sale though.
Order of Battle: Pacific has two campaigns, one US, one Japanese. There’s an expansion too that features the Japanese in China, a conflict very rarely covered. I haven’t tried the expansion, as it doesn’t interest me that much, but it is cool to see under-represented conflicts being covered.
I’m not sure what is going on with your Battle of the Atlantic progress. On the PC, you simply click on Continue and it jumps right back where you left off. To “Save Game,” I just back out of the Pacific Map with the little back arrow in the bottom left of the screen that takes you back to the Main Menu.
That must be a bug for the damage screen, because your propulsion was completely disabled at the very least. I’m playing the Germans and have to admit I’m having 15" envy of the British guns. Can’t wait until my Bismarck class becomes available in August. I love how tough the big ships are in this game. It took a ton of rounds from a 10-ship fleet to finally take out one British Battleship. I managed to knock out its propulsion early, so it became a turkey shoot. Still, I had to start aiming for it’s guns because it was doing damage to some of my ships and I almost lost a couple in the process before finally sinking it.
So does it require CM… whatever? Or is it a standalone. I was pretty big into the original CM but the series has sort of passed me by. How is it different from the new Graviteam Tactics:Mius Front game (other than the setting, obviously)?
Standalone, I believe.
Combat Mission: Final Blitzkrieg is a STANDALONE base game. Final Blitzkrieg does not require any other Combat Mission products in order to play. Future expansions (modules and packs) will expand Final Blitzkrieg to include additional nations, forces, and equipment, and extend the timeline of the Western Front all the way to VE (Victory Europe) Day in May 1945.
I can’t remember, do the GT games do turn based wego option or real time only?
In Graviteam the operational screen is WeGo, but then any units that bump together drop to the tactical screen, which is pausable real time only.
It’d be nice if GT had the “replay last minute” option from CM, just due to the amount of insane goings on.
Ah, that’s one difference right there. CM doesn’t have any kind of campaign or even linked scenarios, I believe.
Really, so some of that stuff you captured on the previous pages was actually a ‘right time, right place’ kind of deal? For some reason I had in my mind that you could review the battle.
The correct answer is “none of the above - play Orde of Battle Pacific instead”.
That’s right - there’s no review or rewind function, it’s just about being in the right place at the right time with the camera. With the burning tank rolling down the hill, as soon as I saw it get hit, catch fire and keep on trucking I hit Enter to pause the game, set up the camera angle I wanted, turned off the UI and then unpaused.
I have the AMD Gaming Evolved thingy that records every minute of every game I play, so then it’s just a case of going to the right spot in the video to clip out the action.
Long, rambling discourse here:
When I was kid, I typed up these ancient BASIC games from Creative Computing books. Most of them were basically just high-school exercises, with the most complex being HAMMURABI or a stripped-down version of TREK.
One of them was a hockey sim. As a sim, it was terrible, typical of the RNG text “sports” games of the times. But this hockey game had flair: the writer was obviously in love with hockey. While the underlying sim was not great, he made sure that you could enter your own player teams and names. In addition, he wrote long description paragraphs: “Bob lets a big slap shot go! But Ed makes a last-minute save.”
It occurs to me that this is what some of these milsims, particularly the 3D ones, really need. TK did a decent job of this with his “action views” in EAW (which the rest of the Microprose team picked up for Falcon 4). I would love one of these tank-y sims to provide a running dialogue. “Obst. Hans lets loose with his 88, but somehow Sgt. Bennett’s front armor manages to absorb the shot!” rather than just dry numbers.
Of course, we always have Bismarck and Fishbreath here, but you know :)