More Close Combat at Gog.

Started by DoctorQuest, March 21, 2018, 11:09:34 AM

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al_infierno

#45
The Bloody First is absolute dog crap and best forgotten about.  I still prefer CC2 Last Stand Arnhem over any other title (including the remake), but I'm a bit curmudgeonly like that.  :buck2:  I liked the smaller maps of the original games... Oh, and the lack of that main menu trumpet music from CC5 in Longest Day makes me quite sad.  :(

Graviteam games are good, even great in their own right, but they're much more macro focused and once you set up a battle, you're mostly just watching it play out.  I get the appeal, but I much prefer the "digital ASL" experience where I get to micro my squads a bit and choose where they shoot or throw smoke or what have you. 

I have every CM game, but I find them a little clunky and fiddly, so CC is where it's at for me: perfect combo of slow tactical realism and goop for my goopy goblin gamer brain that wants to shoot explodey guns and watch tanks go boom.
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If they made nothing but WWII games, I'd be perfectly content.  Hypothetical matchups from alternate history 1980s, asymmetrical US-bashes-some-3rd world guerillas, or minor wars between Upper Bumblescum and outer Kaboomistan hold no appeal for me.
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I guess it's sort of nice that the word "tactical" seems to refer to some kind of seriousness during your moments of mental clarity.
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GDS_Starfury

I played through the updated CC2 a few months ago and had a lot of fun with it.
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Destraex

In operation star the hunt command seems to have both sides running through each other without stopping and firing "much". Must work differently from hunt in all other games. I had all sorts of strange things happening like tanks with no crews running backwards for 100m and then forwards for 100m again. It was strange.
I just read a thread from the devs on steam as well and it seems they really really hate multiplayer. That turns me off a large amount because I believe it to be a cop out.
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Gusington

I've been wanting to get Panthers in the Fog forever and then when I read the crap reviews I just walk away. Is it really that craptacular?


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JasonPratt

Hard to say. We really need a Groghead review of it one day.

>:D


Re ComOps2 (and its prior family), yes it's more operational level, that's true. You aren't going to see individual units (unless something goes really wrong with a squad, which I recall being the least unit on the map. ;) ) And it's pushing counters around, whether NATOish or something more visually representative of the unit type as a flag.

Having said that: I found the gameplay, and how it relates to the maps, VERY similar to CC, with more bling in regard to setting up orders (if you want to -- or you can just tell your on-map boss to go 'here' and watch it devolve orders down the line to subunits.) It has the order-timing feature CC is missing, too, although on the other hand you can turn that off. Last year, or the year before -- a little after ComOps2 released on Steam, some enterprising super-grog ran some tests to discover that it's more efficient to micro things around rather than to delegate! Which is technically true, but only helpful if you're pausing the game all the time. If you're running it at a speed to better simulate the business of developing and passing orders (instead of being one guy with a keyboard and an occasional pause button) -- especially if you're playing mp (I expect) -- you need to delegate more. And of course it depends on how large the fight is. There's no point NOT to micro manage the ten units in the two tutorial-demo missions, for example.


Having said that: I'm sorry to report that, after buying into the game for a couple of decades through its iterations (since its 2nd gen release, Highway to the Reich) without ever really playing it, I sat down in 2019 to seriously learn the game by playing the flanking maneuver mission of Italy's botched invasion of Greece -- playing the Greek side myself -- and I learned that the system is AT LEAST as wonky in execution as Close Combat ever was.  ::) :P

It's super-impressive, don't get me wrong, and I had a blast playing it, but my immersion often blew right out the window watching the units do things that would never, ever happen in real life, when realistic command results is the big draw of the game.

To give one example, the Italian AI really should have won the match: they had managed to infiltrate practically an entire division past my scattered guards, despite my best efforts, and gotten them to the ex-fil zone. All they had to do was leave the map to win, and win HUGE. Sure, I might have thought the game was a tad gamey in the events leading up to that situation, but once I realized what happened, I could accept the result as plausible and fair.

The problem was that I discovered this a few days after the op started as some of my own reinforcement divisions started to arrive from off-map, and I realized I had some extra 'pieces' to go down and secure the ex-fil road. So I probed down there very properly, expecting to run into Italians trying to get there, not realizing the Italians had already gotten everyone there which the AI cared to send, more than enough to totally win.

And they had been sitting there in that grid. Doing nothing. For at least one game day, maybe two.

When I detected them there, I panicked, thinking dang I was just behind them and I hadn't moved fast enough (sort of true there), and now I'm going to have to watch them exit the board...! ...but nope. They sat there on a hill near the road leading off the map to victory, and died/surrendered in a glorious defense as I brought everyone I could down on them. Then I held the position, fending off a couple of sallies over the next few days. I still had about half the days to go in the op, and maybe some other things would happen, but I felt empty. (And frustrated over some other dippy things going on elsewhere that made no sense; like a motorized infantry unit deciding to go the long way around a river instead of fording it like everyone else in the group, and then getting stuck in the mud slightly off road, and refusing to abandon their trucks to slowwwwwly inch them along their original dumbass path anyway which I could never order them off of, as their usefulness withered and died over the days and nights they spent in their Sisiphean torments.)

...sigh. But yeah. We were talking about CC.  O:-)
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JasonPratt

Quote from: al_infierno on June 14, 2021, 01:57:34 AM
I get the appeal [of the Graviteam systems], but I much prefer the "digital ASL" experience where I get to micro my squads a bit and choose where they shoot or throw smoke or what have you.

Yep! -- and the CC series itself was originally supposed to be an official Advanced Squad Leader adaptation except in real-time. Some rights issues fell through or something.

Though personally I prefer Combat Mission and its ilk, which are much like 3D implementations of Close Combat (even down to some of the user interface designs). But there's room for both, and reasons to enjoy and gnash teeth at both.  >:D
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!