Armoured Commander -- A Roguelike Tank Game

[Apocal]

I'm not really advertising anything, since this is a free game and no longer in active development, but I just found out about it a few days ago and it is quite the nice little experience. Armoured Commander (yes, spelled with a 'u').

Just to get things out of the way, it is based upon an old Avalon Hill boardgame called Patton's Best. You could consider it the computer version of the same. For those who haven't played either Patton's Best, you're basically thrust into WW2 as a tank commander in the 4th Armored Division on 27 Jul 44. You control your tank's movements on an operational map made of ragged tiles, doing such things as sending out recon to check the resistance level of adjacent tiles, calling in artillery or air strikes, requesting resupply and deciding on your route. The objective is generally to capture zones on your way to exiting off the map at a designated point, which nets you a big bonus and resets you on another map so you can continue earning points. The day ends when the sun sets, no night fighting in the game.

Along the way, you'll almost certainly encounter enemy forces consisting of anti-tank guns (tools of the devil), infantry and machine gun teams, unarmed trucks, half-tracks, armored cars and of course panzers. That's when the battle starts. Combat is a bit abstract; you won't find dynamically arranged maps for each fight. Instead there are six sectors around your tank (just like a hex) with three range bands enemies occupy. You fight it out by ordering your individual crewmen to various tasks. It is entirely possible to order your driver to reverse to a hull down position, your gunner to fire a WP round at an ATG, while your gunner and assistant driver desperately attempt to suppress approaching infantry while you as the tank commander spend your time yelling at the driver because he failed to find a decent hull down position, leaving you totally exposed. The level of detail gets right down to how many and which rounds go into your ready rack and tracking facings across the battlefield, along with a simple but effective system for figuring out what penetrates and what doesn't.

Nothing will ever overcome the sheer joy at surviving in a dry storage, plain M4 overloaded with 100+ shells, most of them HE, against a Tiger and a pair of 88s. Nothing will ever match the sheer anguish you feel when, at 20+ days into your career, your tank commander gets machine gunned after escaping from a M-killed Jumbo, one week before he would have gotten the Medal of Honor to match his two Purple Hearts.

It is the first game that really, truly made me understand why tankers might prefer the 75mm over the 76mm, why deep stores of ammo were preferred. Intellectually, I knew why but this game brought it out in fairly stark relief. You haven't lived until you've been shot at while your dry storage Sherman is still packing 120 shells and ninety of them HE. You also won't live after it either since, you know, loose ammo all around the turret basically turns your Sherman into a Viking funeral should anything penetrate.

Anyway, the real challenge is surviving 68 days of combat, stretching from the Normandy breakout, isolating Brittany, racing across France, hitting the West Wall, relieving Bastogne, crossing the Rhine and reaching Czechoslovakia. My own record so far is 25 days, four Purple hearts, ten dead or severely wounded crewmen and roughly eight tanks shot out from under my tank commander before finally being killed.

[Machor]

Thank you for this; as someone who loved the original Patton's Best, I had to check it out. Having gone over the website and the manual, I can mention two significant improvements over the original game:

- In Patton's Best, which was designed as a purely solitaire game, any spotted German tank was treated like a Tiger I and ATG as an 88 for all combat resolutions until they were identified, at which point they were most likely to turn into the far more docile Pz IV and Pak 40. I felt this placed undue emphasis on identification, since real tank crews must have known the rarity of enemy equipment. It is my understanding from Armoured Commander's manual that this problem is solved by the computer 'knowing' the true type of equipment you're facing, even if you don't.

- Armoured Commander includes two campaigns: Patton's Best with the 4th Armored Division and Canada's Best (hence the 'armoured' ) with the 4th Armoured Division. Other than serving as Canuck-bait, the inclusion of a Canadian campaign finally provides context for commanding the Firefly, which was included in the original boardgame as a hypothetical curiosity item. In the original game, Fireflies were priority targets for German gunners.