Grognard Wargamer Thread!

Rod_Humble · November 16, 2018, 3:44am

this is easily GOTY material.

To my pleasant surprise I agree with this.

I think its like a Steel Panthers next gen but taken to pausable strategy rather than turn based. This extra richness of time increments plus the simple but effective order delay system takes Steel Panthers (or ASL et al) to a next level. It works well here, better than Close Combat in my view because it tries to do less. Less micromanagement, less focus on the meter scale and more focus on the ten meter scale.

Little details like the lovely map selection system is a neat solution if you are not confident your procgen maps will be interesting enough. The way you can put your commander into the battle field if you like, you lose if you die BUT he is also a free arty spotter and can help comms speed nearby so maybe worth the risk?

I like it a lot.

But lets end on a negative, no campaign mode in the procgen missions like Steel Panthers had. Would love to see that added. Also the GUI is competent but sometimes unintuitive.

Overall great so far. The beer goggles might wear off tomorrow but I dont think so. I think this is the real deal.

cannedwombat · November 16, 2018, 4:21am

Thanks for the review. Multiplayer issues aside, I’ll give this a shot at some point in the future. I do miss me some TacOps.

A quick question because I’m lazy… is this pausible-realtime (or impulses), built in pauses on the hour or… what?

Bardolph · November 16, 2018, 5:35am

I’d be all over an updated TacOps that worked on bigger resolution monitors.

Navaronegun · November 16, 2018, 5:47am

Good question. Is there any issue with Armored Brigade’s DPI Scaling on High Resolution Monitors, everyone? My other pet issue. I am not gonna do the buy/refund because no Multiplayer. But does anyone know?

MiquelRamirez · November 16, 2018, 6:14am

I tried on a Surface, that has a troublesome display, and you can scale up the UI up to a factor of 2x something. It also supports natively huge display form factors. Worth a try IMO.

I have just spent 5 minutes with it… So much work :(

EDIT:

@Navaronegun here’s some screenshots so you can make up your mind

that’s the game settings window, which appeared very small on my surface display. Note that you can set resolution to match the Desktop one and scale UI elements up to a 220%.

That’s the list of available resolutions

and this is how the game looks at 220% on my Surface

Rod_Humble · November 16, 2018, 6:43am

Pausable real time. Stop any moment.

This is offset by the command delay which times sometimes creates hilarious order confusion.

cannedwombat · November 16, 2018, 2:04pm

Neat. One of the few problems with TacOps was that you were playing/playing against the Borg.

Brooski · November 17, 2018, 3:43am

What a lousy trailer. More CG animation than actual gameplay. In their defense, it must be hard to make a gameplay trailer for this that won’t generate all sorts of comments from people who don’t play this type of game.

vyshka · November 17, 2018, 3:45am

Isn’t that the matrix standard?

Brooski · November 17, 2018, 4:24am

I don’t know – I don’t watch trailers, but this one was linked in an email I was deleting so I clicked on it. Mistake.

Rod_Humble · November 17, 2018, 4:29am

Been playing more of Armored Brigade. I still like it a lot. Although if you are price sensitive ymmv. Tonight I called an airstrike on top of myself which went as well as you would imagine.

@Brooski yeah the trailer seemed like a waste of money to me.

Also MMP sale is up!

http://www.multimanpublishing.com/Default.aspx

Its a good one 50% for many things. I am eyeballing Beyond the Rhine for $70 even though I know I wont play it for at least five years.

Brooski · November 17, 2018, 4:49am

Bah, when GMT has a sale they at least open it up to anything in stock. MMP says hey here is everything you wouldn’t want at regular price!

EDIT: Sorry, they do have Last Blitzkrieg. I may get that. And of course Angola which everyone already owns.

Brooski · November 17, 2018, 4:58am

Also, @Rod_Humble – convince me why I should play this over Flashpoint: Campaigns? I just pulled that one out again tonight, updated it, and thought: yep, this is really good.

vyshka · November 17, 2018, 5:30am

What has me interested in it at the moment is the ability for map selection and generating random scenarios. It seems to be a slightly lower scale as well with individual vehicles. I am eagerly awaiting the next title from the developers of Flashpoint: Campaigns though. It sounds like they are still a ways off, but making progress.

MiquelRamirez · November 17, 2018, 5:48am

“CapnDarwin” the lead programmer of FP is quite active on the Armored Brigade forums - it looks to me he likes the game.

I am actually sitting on the fence about Armored Brigade: there’s three little (or not so little) things that have put me off.

First, the limitation of only allowing 1 unit on a 30 meters square harms the game. Like in CIV, this makes a hash of pathfinding. Then, it also kind of breaks a bit tactics like doing a company level assault by bounds, as the platoon overtaking may take subotpimal paths if it finds supporting armour or heavy weapons in its way.

The second one, is that formations seems to be something of a stance, rather than be adjustable per waypoint (it may be that I haven’t figured yet the UI).

The third one is that after nearly 10 years of playing Combat Mission 2 and Graviteam’s games figuring out what is a reverse slope to put my HMGs and ATGMs on, or a good hull down position from a 2D map is just very unsatisfying (the game comes with beautiful LOS tools).

What I do like a lot is the ability of having formations and SOPs (even if the former are a bit too inflexible and ignore terrain, so you end up just using line and column), that ambient light is a critical part of the game (especially in the 1960s) and that you can play with matchups which I haven’t really dabbled with since Steel Panthers II.

Also outstanding is the amount of information that the game displays on the map letting you know what is going via pictorial symbols which seem a watered down version from the 2525B standard. If you know how to read that stuff, you get a lot of info at a glance.

As a way of comparison @Brooski I would say that AB’s veers more on “tactical problems” - i.e. how to assault a town, how to break through, how to exploit a breakthrough - than towards the “operational”, which I think is what Flashpoint actually is and plays best. I also think it plays better and way smoother than Flashpoint, which for whatever the reason, seems to get clunkier as years go by.

Rod_Humble · November 17, 2018, 6:33am

It would take me a full AAR to describe this story of a meeting engagement near a civilian airfield but hopefully a setup blurb then just images with a small selection of highlights will suffice to at least show the story and drama that can unfold

I hope it may inform a little more why I think this is worth playing as well as Flashpoint. They offer different things.

Our forces:
PT76B Scout Section (2 vehicles)
Infantry foot platoon (3 squads)
BMP2 Mech Inf Platoon (3 BMP2’s 3 squads)
BTR70 Mech Inf Platoon (3 BTR&)'s 3 squads)
9P133( “Malyutka” ) AT Section (ATGM’s ontop of a scout hull)
Air Support 2 Mig21’s with cannon and iron bombs.

There are two objectives one south further and one north closer.

Recon forces like my PT76’s deploy further into the battlefield the rest of my force I deploy on the roads. I have learnt to my cost that walking through woods actually takes a long time in this game and so should be used thoughtfully, however there are benefits from emerging from woods surprising defenders.

My orders are to advance under fast column to seize the central west of the airfield then deploy the infantry to establish a hold. If we move fast we maybe able to catch any enemy AFV’s foolish enough to drive across the tarmac towards the northern objective.

Mean while to the south our Recon PT76’s are ordered to crawl through the forest and recon very carefully to the Southern Objective.

The Northern closer objective I leave to the foot infantry who clog up there and I order my Malyutka to the woods overlooking the strip too.

Initial delployment

The approach

Enemy footscouts caught as they sprint to the Northern objective.

Civilians and the Southern objective is unoccupied.

Enemy AFV’s engaged briefly as they speed away behind a hanger

Two are caught and destroyed in the open by our now in place BMP2’s as expected vs an M113 , but whether they deployed their passengers by the hangers is unknown. So I call in the airstrike. More centrally something kills my BTR70, it died before reporting what.

In the South a still shaking pair of PT76’s realise they just destroyed a Vulcan.

Followed by being hit with a full mech platoon

Meanwhile the battle becomes building to building at the airfield.

Losses on both sides mount around the tarmac…

But the damage had been done with the central ambush at the beginning and the enemy broke, after holding out for some time in the central air traffic control building. Although the enemy was still able to command the southern objective to the end.

Or at least that’s the story I was telling myself as I played, following each twist and turn with interest.

End heightmap, with all known AI dispositions before they withdrew, living non spotted ones are not revealed post game as far as I can tell. An annoyance.

My apologies for the popup in the middle.

Anyway hopefully that can show a little why I think its different than Flashpoint and worth your time. It operates at a different scale I suppose, and feels a little more minatures wargames like than Flashpoint perhaps?

Left_Empty · November 17, 2018, 9:17am

If anybody is interested, somebody at Matrix posted the game’s manual. I took a quick look at it, but it seems to mostly describe the interface. The interesting part about the game’s concepts are thrown in a simple list in the last dozen of pages.

TheWombat · November 17, 2018, 12:10pm

I bought this largely because I love the time period and subject, and because there aren’t many games like this. I too share the thought that Flashpoint is really similar, though I also agree it’s different enough that there’s room for both types. Flashpoint is by far the better looking and more intuitive, though.One of the things I still can’t figure out is exactly how to insure that an order I give, like an Advance order, is given to all of the units in a formation. I select the HQ, give the order…and just the HQ moves. Erm, ok. Sometimes I can get all of the units highlighted, sometimes not. What usually happens is that I end up detaching units rather than moving whole formations.

The game’s visuals are a good compromise for a smallish team with limited resources, but like others have noted, the inability to clearly and quickly show elevation is problematic. The tools they have work, but they are not intuitive nor are they super clear in operation. Likewise, the LOS tool is butt-ugly and again, sort of hard to use, partly because the game’s zooming/scrolling is so non-granular that it goes it abrupt steps that always seem to bracket the exact field of view you need.

It is, though, cool to zoom in on the little tanks rolling around. And while I agree the that the granularity of the unit/terrain placement (the 30 square meters thing) might be technically limiting, in practice I’m not good enough of a commander to get too bothered by it.

vyshka · November 17, 2018, 10:42pm

@Rod_Humble and @TheWombat have either of you tried to rounds mechanic for time progression (I guess instead of pausable real-time it switches to wego for a user defined period of time)? The scale and real time aspects remind me a lot of Tacops, but with a larger unit selection opportunities plus the map and battle generators.

TheWombat · November 17, 2018, 10:57pm

Erm, I didn’t even know that was a feature…