Want to review Combat Mission for me?

[stodge]

Would anyone care to review Combat Mission for me? I'd write one, but I'm a poor wargamer, and my review skills are pretty bad as well. If you don't believe me, check out my review of Mission Impossible 2.

Readership of my site is pretty low, but its a start!

http://www.stodge.net

Thanks!

[stodge]

*bump*

My site is slowly ticking along, so I'd appreciate a subjective review from someone.

Thanks

[Michlos]

Sure, I can do it. Im gonna be away for about 5 hours but when I come home I will start working on it. Email me about where to send it and such.

------------------

< All gave some, some gave ALL>

Owner of MiNa's CMBO Page

http://www.combat-mission.com

[deanco]

ahhhh...too late, as usual.

DeanCo--

[Schugger]

Hi Stodge and all

This might save you a lot of work. John Kettler wrote an excellent review and you might want to use it. It is truly exceptional

John Kettler

Member posted 07-12-2000 04:03 AM

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(Long,detailed reply)

Chickenhawk,

To properly answer your question, let me try to give you some perspective on myself, so that you can then evaluate what I tell you about Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord. I am also one of those posters you expressed concern about.

My Background

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool wargamer, having gotten started in board wargaming in 1967 at age 12.I have wargamed with miniatures since at least 1975, playing TSR's Fast Rules and later Tractics, with many more systems to follow.

I'm the son of a defense engineer with a deep interest in military history, got into military history, technology, theory and practice in childhood, and have devoured it ever since, with particular emphasis on WWII. I also spent over eleven years with Hughes and Rockwell as a professional military analyst on numerous major weapon programs ranging from the TOW missile to the military derivatives of the National AeroSpace Plane (NASP).

My military computer gaming was initially done on an Amiga and didn't go well (SSI's Red Lightning), because I couldn't see what was happening on the 16 screens or whatever and got whomped. My next computer wargaming was on my friend's Mac playing CC2. I well remember how impressed I was watching a guy smaller than 1/285th scale belly crawling.

CM vs CC2: A Rough Comparison

Now, let me give you a rough comparison. Take CC2 as a wargaming experience and increase it by a minimum factor of ten. This is hyperconservative. Combat Mission is nothing less than a fundamental breakthrough in wargame design, a revolutionary synthesis of a multitude of individual developments into a stunning, engrossing, deeply immersive, wholly original creation.

Combat Mission & Panzer Elite: Trailblazers Both But Not At All The Same

The only thing out there comparable in creativity, ingenuity and immersiveness is Panzer Elite, a highly detailed armor sim, and the two are in no way equivalent. Combat Mission positions the player as overall battle force commander, but he is not directly

participating in the battle, which can go as high as a reinforced battalion on a side. By contrast, in Panzer Elite you ARE the platoon leader and must not only fight your tank but direct your wingmen, coordinate with adjacent units, request fire support, etc. If you screw up or are simply unlucky, the last thing you see is a big explosion. With that said, let me now justify my claim vs.CC2.

Combat Mission's Features

For starters, the entire Combat Mission game except the trees, which are sprites (major CPU hit if 3-D), is in 3-D. That includes individual men who are equipped, dressed, move and behave quite realistically. Squads are depicted with three figures (again, CPU issue), but are tracked by the computer down to the individual man for casualties, morale, ammo state, etc. Troop quality ranges from raw conscripts to elite units.

Movement is based on simultaneous mutual order issuance and execution, called WE GO, with the computer's calculating all pertinent interactions, then simultaneously executing the turn in the form of a 60-second movie, which can be endlessly replayed from any angle until the next turn is begun. This simultaneity eliminates all kinds of gaming dirty tricks which you may have learned to hate.

AI is multilayered, running everything from choosing a battle plan to the behavior of a squad under fire.Though better on defense than the attack (less to compute), it is quite capable of thrashing you at even odds and can be tailored to increase or decrease its capabilities. Play is vs. AI, hotseat, LAN (I think) and PBEM. TCP/IP will come in a few months via free patch. Otherwise, the game release date would've been greatly extended.

Smoke, depending on settings and system capability, is transparent or opaque, with white smoke for screening and oily pillared black smoke for vehicle kills. Explosions are frighteningly realistic and throw up all kinds of debris. House and building collapses throw up enormous expanding domes of dust. Fires can be started by artillery fire, handheld AT weapon backblast, recoilless weapons, or even flamethrowers. It's quite possible to burn down a house by firing a bazooka from it. There are bodies when squads are eliminated, but no blood. To permit sale of the game in Germany (huge gaming market) all Nazi symbology has been excised and stand-in graphics provided.

Except for wind (would take a Cray), environmental effects are modeled. You can play in broad daylight, at dawn/dusk,night;in overcast, rain or snow, with attendant effects on mobility, visibility, etc. The sun is not modeled. Don't know why.

Sound is point sourced, varies in intensity with distance, and is directional.

There are so many camera options I won't even try to list them here. Suffice it to say that you can have everything from a God's eye view to a view padlocked to a single figure, like a tank commander. You can even allow camera shake for that authentic "you are there" feel.

LOS modeling is real world, based on terrain and is automatically computed. Players have an LOS tool as part of an elegant, easy to learn interface. Speaking of modeling, a wealth of excruciatingly detailed data on weapons, armor, accuracy, projectile types, optics, armor quality, human factors and much much more (including accurate 3-D modeling of in-flight ballistics and terminal ballistics) went into this game, and tweaks are made when needed and properly justified. The people who made CM are themselves gamers, served in the military themselves, consulted with many veterans and really are devoted to what they're doing, going way beyond the extra mile to listen to their customers and field a first rate product.

Hotkeys allow you to perform a multitude of functions including removing tree renderings, smoke and such to find units and plot moves, without affecting game play in the slightest. You can select smoke rendering/building transparency options this way, thus allowing my anemic Gen One iMac w/ 64 MB RAM and 2 MB VRAM to run this incredible game, just not at high resolution with all the graphic bells and whistles those with more memory and better video boards can. Theoretically, though, it shouldn't run on my machine at all.

The troops speak in their own languages and accents. Forces in the game include U.S., British, Germans, Poles, Free French and Canadians. There are some 150 vehicle types in the game, beautifully rendered and many with camouflage so good it's almost impossible to identify them in battle unless quite close--which CAN be unhealthy--ranging from Jeeps and Kubelwagen up to Jagdtigers and Pershings.

Fire support covers the gamut from onboard platoon mortars to offboard 14" naval guns and 300 mm rockets. Several varieties of airstrikes are available, and casualties from friendly fire of all types not only are possible but happen often enough to make people plan their moves carefully.

Combat engineers have satchel charges, flamethrowers and can clear mines, which come in three types: daisy chain AT (lie atop the ground) and buried AP and AT. The Axis has several types of wood and concrete fortifications. Defenders on either side automatically start dug-in in foxholes. Target reference points are available for preregistered artillery and mortar fire.Barbed wire is also in.

Fog of war is modeled so well that the other night I lost a whole bunch of .50 cal MG armed armored cars trying to knock out a Marder SP antitank gun by shooting through its lightly armored superstructure. Unfortunately, it was a Hetzer! If you can't really see something well enough to ID it, the computer will throw up a generic ID until you can. And if you've ever read about, say, hearing movement and that triggering artillery fire or some other response, then you'll be right at home here. The game will tell you when something's heard. How cool is that?

The manual is a gem, 180 well organized,easily understood, properly spelled pages. And if you can't get your answer there, there is this board (quite a few sections) and a whole Combat Mission Webring to draw upon.

The game has a tutorial scenario, some 36 battles, a bunch of operations(six, I think), which are minicampaigns,each consisting of as many as six battles fought on one large map, with limited troop replacements and return of damaged (not destroyed) vehicles between battles. You also get the Quick Battle generator--a few mouse clicks to select troop types, date, weather, terrain and battle size, and boom! you're fighting. I have yet to play a canned battle from the game CD, since I'm so engrossed in ginning them out in the Quick Battle generator. You can even handpick your troops. Combat Mission has a full Scenario Editor and Map Editor, allowing you to build almost anything you can think of.

If that's not enough, dozens of new scenarios, graphic tweaks and sound mods are readily available and are free. Strongly recommend you check some of them out at Combat Mission HQ (follow link at CMHQ Update posting here on this board). Then there's the Combat Mission Metacampaign, which allows you to take command of a unit and fight from D-Day until the end of the war in blind, refereed scenarios. And let's not forget the official Combat Mission ladder series for those with intense competitive streaks.

Those Worrisome Posts

This board is awash in the thoughts, musings and sometimes rants of some very knowledgeable, often highly opinionated people, all of whom are intensely passionate about Combat Mission,many of whom served in the military (not just U.S. either) or serve now, many of whom waited two years for the game to be released. This fearsome brain trust has invested thousands of unpaid hours in an effort to make Combat Mission the best wargame ever. Period. To that end, there is an ongoing effort to provide the players with the means in the game to perform the same tactics and give them the same combat capabilities as their World War II counterparts.

Sadly, there are real limits on what can be done. This is partially because the game was designed to run on mass market computers, not 1 GHz behemoths. This in turn forces things like 3-man squad renderings to be used. Similarly, there are coding limits. Certain things could be done, were more coders available and schedule and cost not considerations. Others are practically intractable. You can't, for example, screen troops behind moving armor, as was often done in reality. The reason is that the code can't handle dynamic cover (moving cover). It does, though, model a burning wreck as cover. Certain terrain features are tough to do, too, because the game's tile size is 20 x 20 meters and many features are much smaller than a tile, trenches, for one.

Because of the above, plus partisanship,egos, language difficulties and various other factors,this board is a constantly roiling sea of demands,questions and complaints--all with the goal of further improving an incredible wargame that we all love. Ultimately, though, no matter how much we huff, puff and propose, Steve and Charles dispose. It's their game, their business, and they call the tune. They're excellent listeners, though, and their tremendous wargame fully reflects this.

So, Chickenhawk, I wouldn't worry about all those posts; I'd worry if no one was making any.

Summing Up

This game is the single biggest threat I've ever seen emerge to board wargames and battles with miniatures. You don't have to count hexes, add combat factors, hand track ammo, casualties or morale.

And you haven't lived until you've seen your Shermans, Stuarts and halftracks advance under fire, tank commanders in their spinning turrets seeking hidden enemy positions, guns blazing defiance as that last volley of suppressive fire crashes down on the town's outskirts.

You haven't lived until you've heard the dread clang that betokens a pierced tank, heard the linen ripping sound of MG-42 fire and watched with sick apprehension as a Panzerschreck rocket, tail afire, arcs right toward one of your tanks.

You haven't lived until you've desperately fought a bitter, frantically improvised defense against platoons of Allied armor and swarms of infantry, wondering whether ere long you'd be hearing a Jabo whistling down on you or the sky tearing as 105mm fire comes shrieking in.

I could go on and on, but why?

Get Combat Mission. Be happy!!!

Hope this helps.

Regards,

John Kettler

[This message has been edited by John Kettler (edited 07-12-2000).]

Here is the link to the thread

http://www.batllefront.com/discuss/Forum1/HTML/007246.html

[This message has been edited by Schugger (edited 09-24-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Schugger (edited 09-24-2000).]

[stodge]

Anyone's welcome to write a review - just go to http://www.stodge.net/submit.php?type=story and type the story in. You'll have to register an account first, but its pretty painless.

Schugger - thanks for the post, but I'd rather not copy someone else's review. I could make a link to it, but it's not right for me to cut and paste his text in. Thanks anyway!

[Schugger]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by stodge:

Schugger - thanks for the post, but I'd rather not copy someone else's review. I could make a link to it, but it's not right for me to cut and paste his text in. Thanks anyway!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Stodge

I do really think that John Kettler has nothing against it. It is simply to brilliant to be left in the archives, IMO.

If you want to get sure about it, drop him an E-Mail and ask him.