Refund on Steam and then re-buy on matrix!
I, too, picked up the complete Armored Brigade.
I played a super-easy scenario earlier, American armor against badly weakened Soviet infantry, and thought it good. I started the premade partial American armored cavalry squadron vs. Soviet tank regiment scenario, but haven’t set my initial deployment yet, remembering my ignominious defeat at the hands of Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm the last time I tried to play the outnumbered Americans against the out-teched Russians and getting nervous.
Strongly recommended, based on my brief research, is this Chechnya mod.
A follow-up; the nice Slitherine / Matrix folks responded saying it was a shopping cart error on their part. They are supposed to refund the difference within the next few days.
Diego
Hello Ladies & Gentlemen of good taste!
I don’t know if self promotion is sort of frowned upon in these lands - but I know that few of you are virtual sailors who aren’t afraid to embrace CMANO for a leisure cruise - in that regard, I suppose that a WW2 3D carrier command simulation will probably hurt nobody’s senses :)
The game is named Task Force Admiral. Volume 1 is about playing the USN in a single-player environment. 30 to 40 scenarios, full 3D… But if I had to describe our project in a few lines, I would say:
- Think Carriers at War for the basic premise, with deeper gameplay ;
- Think Radio Commander for the command aspect (FPS view in a command post), the advanced C3i chaos and the total Fog of War ;
- Think Fighting Steel for the surface combat simulation ;
- Think Il-2 for the 3D environment & the graphics (somewhere in between legacy Il-2 and Great Battles)
- Think Task Force 1942 or 1942: The Pacific Air War for the overall production polish & flavor ;
Pictures being worth a thousand words, let me just post here our humble tech demo we produced for our partners. Since then it had its small success and it certainly showcases a number of interesting things and design choices. Anybody into carriers might find something worthy of attention. I’ll let you watch.
We have a twitter account and a facebook page where we regularly post smaller updates. Don’t hesitate to follow us if you wanna be kept updated realtime style.
Besides, we have a website that you can access through the link posted above - there, we give a few more details about our game design choices and vision. That is, if anybody care at all (but statistics show that some people still read walls of text in 2019, or so it seems ^^)
But having been lurking for sometime already over here in QTT, I will obviously be glad to answer questions directly on this topic - if I am not intruding, of course.
Cheers everyone and have one beautiful weekend!
Thanks! It might be a great idea to start a new thread regarding this game, and keep any Q & A there, rather than using this thread for that.
Oh well, I don’t know if our stuff really deserves its own thread just yet - we’re pretty early in development, and we don’t want to be too much of a bother to others. But I’ll give it a thought for sure, thanks Colonel :)
Is Armored Brigade all defined scenarios, or is there a procedural/random generator for scenarios? Campaigns?
This is all stuff I’ve just discovered.
Armored Brigade was originally a freeware game for 8 years. So it’s had a lot of development. In 2016, they published the final freeware update and spent two years moving it to a commercial product, which added more bells and whistles. But the core gameplay and AI has been quite good for a long time.
This is an RPS story from 2008
The game ships with about 16 scenarios and 6 maps. This sounds small, but the maps are enormous (around 61x61 km), and you can generate scenarios between various factions. You won’t use the entire map for each scenario; a battle only takes up a tiny portion of each map. But this also means that, say, the German map can give you a huge number of different locations around the Fulda Gap. The DLC each adds a new map, in addition to new factions.
There are also 6 campaigns, though apparently without unit carry-over. You can also generate your own campaigns.
And now that they have Steam support, you can expect fans to upload their own scenarios, campaigns, etc to the Steam Workshop. Although as of right now, the only one to do so is a big Chechan War fan.
The biggest map is 15km by 15km, which is well-sized for the sort of action the game seems best at simulating.
Here’s the final map view of the scenario I mentioned earlier: me, the stout Americans, holding the line between Schenklengsfeld and Großentaft 20 miles north-northeast of Fulda, against a Soviet tank regiment. The starting vehicle count, according to the after-battle summary, was about 30 on my side and about 130 on the Soviet side.
The scenario started an hour before dawn, so the Amercan vehicles, uniformly equipped with thermal viewers, had a massive edge over the Russians. Originally, I had positions on the mountain just south of Ufhausen (the unlabeled town midway between Schenklengsfeld and Großentaft), and on the heights northwest and southwest of Schenklengsfeld.
The Ufhausen position, a pair of scout Bradleys, accounted for all the tanks east of Ufhausen, but didn’t survive until dawn—eventually, return fire got them, even though the Soviet night vision systems were badly inferior.
The Schenklengsfeld position, also held by Bradleys, fell as day broke, along with the pair of M901s on the very northeast of the northern surviving position. I suspect it was the tanks coming through the forest to their direct east, which only revealed themselves to me near the end of the scenario.
Most of the fighting took place to the south, however, between Großentaft and Eiterfeld, where the Russians made their main effort. You can see the remnant of my first position on the mountains west and southwest of Großentaft. Even before dawn, the Russians were close enough to make sticking around an iffy prospect. The preplanned artillery target just west of Großentaft helped to cover the retreat northwest, to the next peak up in line. That held until dawn, at which point the Russian return fire got to be too accurate to hold any longer, at which point I retreated to the positions shown. In total, I lost four Abramses on that flank, along with a pair of M3s who failed to make the final dash quite fast enough.
The Abrams platoons did the heaviest lifting, but the Bradleys were value players—although I lost almost all of them, but for the two at the observation point victory location on the northern half of my final position, they punched well above their weight. In the end, I lost about half my force, while the Russians lost about 110 vehicles. Repeated retreating to new defensive positions around Großentaft won the day for me, and I think that’s the key insight. Yielding ground and making the Russians find you again costs them heavily in vehicles, and they can’t keep that up forever.
How do you tell which scenarios are easy? Where does a new player start with this game?
Please tell me that is a TOAW4 map.
Lmao I knew it. TOAW seems to attract the real nutters.
When I was 16, I’d have loved something like that. Now, I just look at that map and think, jeez, who would have the time or the patience?
There’s a scenario called East of Fulda that I’m using to learn the game. It’s pretty small and narrow, and you play US Armored Cav defending, so you don’t have to worry a lot about maneuvering. Most of your units are already dug-in place, so it’s a good way to learn about Arty TRP placement, and figuring out the flight paths and battle positions of helicopter support.
I’m just using the in-game tools and YouTube videos to learn. Plus lots of liberal pausing the action, as well as lots of replaying to figure out all the systems.
I made myself an easy scenario with the scenario builder, turning the opposing force level way down and using the force type selector to set it to an infantry force. (That ended up being a little tougher than might have been ideal—if I were doing it again, I’d pick forces manually for each side and fill up the enemy side with obsolete equipment.)
Otherwise, I think missions where you’re defending are a good place to start. A lot of the premade scenarios have your forces’ deployment locked, which is helpful at first, because it prevents you from making a bad deployment.
Thanks, this is helpful. :)
All they really needed was a mission called ‘tutorial’ and a section in the manual called the same that roughly describes the big picture orders you give to play it.
Or even a paragraph saying what you just did, cheers!
The current Fire in the East 2 scenario in TOAW isn’t much less impressive. It’s 5km scale instead of 2.5km, but the map covers a much larger area.
The scenario designer (who also playtests it):
Time is subjective and flows differently for different people.
(I’m not even sure if he’s joking or being serious)
It has a full procgen campaign and scenario generator/editor :) Thats one of the big selling points to me. Hope that helps!