New TacOps?

[cabal23]

Will there ever be another TacOps or is it dead? I thought the premise was great, but lacks the polish many games have these days. It was great for when it came out for sure though!

[Michael Emrys]

I thought the premise was great, but lacks the polish many games have these days.

How do you mean that? It lacks 3D graphics, but I'm not sure that would be germane to the play of the game. Otherwise, Major has refined it quite a bit over the years and expanded the things the player(s) can do with it.

It was great for when it came out for sure though!

That I will agree with.

Michael

[Vark]

I really enjoyed the demo but find the very basic terrain leads to unrealistic losses from defenders. Tanks can go into improved positions (hull-down) but then are stuck, as there is no onboard simulation of contour changes (apart from the random chance to vanish during movement) which the defender/attacker cannot predict. Tactics such as TRPing likely areas of defilade and your own defensive phase lines become redundant as you cannot predict where these folds are. Similarly attackers cannot use the recce units to find covered areas of advance, unless it is shadowed by a pancake hill and or trees.

I was tempted to buy the full game but the terrain model is so abstracted from reality I decided against it. The game though did an excellent job at showing why scout units are so important in their tripwire/counter scouting role. I well remember my first battle with the Marine taskforce, I neglected to scout and dug in and waited. I though I was doing well as Opfor units were dying in droves, but they kept coming relentlessly! No problems, an armoured counter attack will restore the position, my M1's dutifully stormed forward and were decimated by all the covering units waiting for just this response. When I pressed the run-game out option I was horrified to see streams of pink units swarm off the board!

[Michael Emrys]

True, the terrain model is perhaps the weakest part of the game. If the good Major ever wanted to start over with a clean sheet, rethinking how to model the terrain would be a good place to start.

Michael

[Vark]

I read a Q&A with the Major, looking at mainly beneath the hood calculations, but somebody asked if there was a TacOps II and he said it was always on the cards, especially looking at a new terrain model. This was quite a few years back so we live in hope? I just loved the simplicity of the game, where victory was determined by careful thought not luck. That is if you kept all the factory settings, if Opfor loose their advanced ATGM's and thermals it is laughably easy.

[Michael Emrys]

I read a Q&A with the Major, looking at mainly beneath the hood calculations, but somebody asked if there was a TacOps II and he said it was always on the cards, especially looking at a new terrain model.

I remember that. But it may have been as much as eight years ago. Or even more. My memory isn't that good and I lost all the e-mails that had that discussion.

Michael

[MajorH TacOps Developer]

Not dead, but I am not currently actively working on it either. When I do go back to work on it, it will not be to add polish.

There are plenty of worthy, high gloss, games available for company, platoon, and squad actions on tiny maps. Not so many that allow large numbers of unit markers to be in play on large maps.

I am the most comfortable with the more abstract conventions of the grand tactical scale. A scale that I admit has gone out of fashion.

[Michael Emrys]

I am the most comfortable with the more abstract conventions of the grand tactical scale. A scale that I admit has gone out of fashion.

I'm with you on that, Major. I don't know if you mean to go on with squad/platoon-sized units; cool if you do, but I'd really like to see a game or a series of games with battalion-sized units.

To bring up a different but related topic, have you read Warrior's Rage by Douglas A. Macgregor, and if you have, do you have any opinion of it you would like to share. I found it very interesting as it appears to explain some things about ODS that had puzzled me. I think he could well be right about that even though I think he was mostly wrong about OIF. The latter was a different situation requiring a different solution. It's probably unfortunate that his views were not adopted in the first case but were in the second.

Michael