Any news on when the next games in that series are expected? I believe they were working on a Middle Eastern one, and southern Germany.
Southern Front should be out…well, sometime. That’s the next one, but updates have been somewhat sparse. I get the impression it’s not a large operation.
They did something close to that, with US/Ukraine versus Russia circa 2017, called CM: Black Sea. Here you can find what some pros thought of CM
I found interesting that TACOPS 4 is so highly regarded still, 20 years on.
The user interface is painful and the match up between forces is very uneven. See the one above for an opponent that can give a fair fight. But still, the observations in the article above apply to the scenarios: they tend to be sometimes gimmicky and based around solving a “puzzle”. This is a blanket statement of sorts, some scenario makers make good stuff which doesn’t feel gimmicky at all. I need to say too that what the pros expect (basically, you attack the enemy when you have a good chance of winning not when you’re at 1:1 odds) doesn’t make necessarily either for a very exciting “game” experience.
Here’s an incomplete list of stuff that helped me wrap my head around playing NATO:
- You need to lay smoke screens to blind the Soviet forces (which lack thermal vision) and pretty much shoot them up like fish in a barrel for a little while. With luck you get like 100% casualties versus 20% casualties on that first engagement.
- After that, just fight flexibly looking for 1) potshots at their HQs with artillery and air strikes, 2) mine approaches and chokepoints, and 3) setup ambushes
- Keep your HQs on the move to avoid the Red air and arty to nail them down as you should be doing to theirs.
The click in my head came when I realised that what I needed was to get the Soviet forces grind to a halt, as their command and control collapses, rather than destroy them. You can only do that realistically using tactical nukes or chemical weapons, when those are available. Those assets are rare, since they kind of render irrelevant tactics other than congesting the road network long enough so that you can unleash WMDs on troop concentrations.
FPS is a personal favourite of mine and I find it to be an unforgiving game. Get too static or mis-deploy and you’re DEAD. On the minus side, I didn’t love the tendency of the units AI to overreact and sometimes get out of cover in plain sight of the enemy, with the result of being annihilated and/or taking losses. The game graphics also kind of get janky when you’re on very high resolutions or using high DPI scaling.
It is a very small team. I think it is 3 people (1 of which I don’t know if he is an actual member of the company or just helping with scenarios).
Yep, it’s 3 guys (programmer “CapnDarwin”, designer/military affairs expert “cbelva”, and Steve Overton “Mad Russian” of Steel Panthers, CMx1 fame designing scenarios) with some help from the community to jazz up the map graphics.
Odd thing, I was looking at some old Age of Empires strategy guides from Sybex, and noticed the author was named Mark H. Walker. Anyone know if that is the same Mark H. Walker of Lock n Load fame?
Edit: note to self, quit being lazy and google it. Yep it is the same guy.
That’s the saddest thing? I dunno, maybe it’s the most recent. There has been a lot of sadness since the original CM:SF. But people keep on buying… I think maybe it’s a cult now? Glad I bailed out after CM:AK.
NATO vs Pact would be interesting, but uh, not with this engine.
CM fans?
Thanks—that’s an excellent insight, and one which ought to help immensely next time I fire it up.
Kali ma! They’re coming for your rivets
Cheers, it’s a tough and unforgiving game, and I love it because of that. The only other strategy game I remember to feel the same kind of love/hate ambiguity is Republic of Rome.
Looking forward to read one of your delightful narrative AARs based on a Flashpoint game. If you are still into that.
I played this back in 2013 and left it after two NATO campaigns in which the Soviets were unable to win a single engagement. I remember it was mostly a matter of setting up fire zones and pot shot Soviets as they came into view. 90% or orders issued where before play starts, and then you just had to move an unit here and there once the axis of attack is identified. An axis that was showered with mines and artillery.
It was fun, but offered little need for interactivity. But it was early into the game dev cycle, and I’m guessing AI has been improved. I really liked the system.
So for those of you who have more experience. If I where to play this again (reinstalling now), which is the best NATO campaign to see the game as it’s best?
I only have played scenarios, I haven’t found the time to play the campaigns in all these years.
Out of memory, one of my favourites involve the whole of 11th Cavalry defending the Fulda “Gap”. Forge of Freedom was its name, perhaps? I would suggest to start with the smaller ones. I also quite liked the British scenarios.
Regarding the AI OPFOR it kind of gets fixated on very specific avenues of approach, I can’t recall seeing the AI reacting very well once committed. Kind of gets fixated on reinforcing failure… or perhaps you just killed its C2 and got stuck.
As NG says, once you feel comfortable with the mechanics - playing with Limited Staff is something I highly recommend - you will need a human opponent.
I was talking with a noted game designer on a podcast and he was asking me how many wargames I thought came out in year. I said fifty. He said over a hundred. We continued this by email, at which point he directed me to a list of “wargames” on BGG from 2016-2018 that he said was “20 pages long” and contained “real wargames, not space stuff or orcs.” He said he started counting and stopped at page two when he “got to 106.”
I don’t usually care about stuff like this, but for some reason I hate when people make unverified claims about verifiable data. I mean, there is an answer to this, right? So why not just find it instead of speculating? So, since I had the day off today and am kind of an an obsessive about data, I pulled all the 2017 games from BGG under the “Wargame” category and started putting them into an Excel spreadsheet. Just the game name, publisher, whether I thought it was a “wargame,” and a comment on why (not). I got through the numbers (“1776”, “1812”, “1945” etc.) and the letters of the alphabet through D. Then I stopped because I don’t have infinite time even on days off. But I got through 207 entries, and found some very interesting stuff.
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Of those 207 games, I counted 63 of them as “wargames” in the sense that we understand them. Historical wargames of some sort. That’s 30%. 30%
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20 of those 207 games had not been released. That’s basically 10% of the games for 2017 being incorrectly labeled for release date. I’m sure this is because a game is announced, someone makes a BGG page for it, the date goes by, it isn’t released, and it just ends up sitting there. But in my opinion, that’s a huge contaminant of the data.
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The real question so far hasn’t actually been whether or not something is a wargame. That’s actually pretty easy to decide, and I gave the benefit of the doubt to pretty much every game if it was some sort of historically based design, even if it was a stretch. No, the difficult thing was deciding if something even was a game, in the sense that I could actually get it. There are tons of things that maybe exist in theory, like there is a paper copy somewhere in somebody’s house, but there is no way anyone else is gonna get it. There is so much self-published stuff that I don’t know if this even merits being included. I mean, yeah, Lou Coatney says that this Arnhem point-to-point thing he designed is really popular in his Oslo game club, but so what? I should say that the reason we were arguing about this was that we were discussing just how “niche” wargaming is as a hobby compared to the boardgaming hobby at large. The claim was made (not by me!) that one out of every ten boardgames published is a “historical wargame.” I say no freaking way. Furthermore, if you are trying to argue that historical wargaming is not super-niche, you shouldn’t include hand-drawn self-published “games.”
I’ll attach the Excel file when I have finished.
Btw, there are 27 separate listings for Bushido miniatures in the 2017 wargames listing. Individual minis for the game Bushido.
1.) Anyone who says that Historical Board Wargaming isn’t niche needs to stop smoking PCP.
2.) I HATE unsubstantiated, lazy data claims like that. Go get 'em.
I know, right? I mean, it doesn’t really matter, but why just make thin-air claims about stuff you can actually find out? It’s not like you’re wondering how many people got executed in North Korea last year. There’s a website with data right there!
Why would you cast aspersions on the Dear Leader?
A website with a Samsung Note 7 level of quality control.
This is actually really fascinating, do keep us posted on what you find out, and thank you for the time you’re putting in!
I do agree using BGG seems kind of suspect as a reference - I mean it has it’s uses and you CAN pull some-what useful data from, but as you’ve already found out there a problems and questions that need answering first.
I wonder how many digital wargames are released in a year - doesn’t feel like even 50. 25 maybe? I’d have to try and count… stuff happens under the radar sometimes so I don’t always catch it.
I think the “1 in 10” games released every year is a wargame is a stretch, but maybe not, who knows. There are a lot of self published non-wargames on BGG too. Let us know what your data finds! I’m really interested in the results.
But using that data point, even if it turns out closish to reality, to wage whether wargame are niche is stupid. You need to look at number of games sold. There are certainly more wargames being published than one (I) would initially think, but print runs on most of them are tiny when compared to more popular board games.