Combat Mission 20th Anniversary trailer

[Bardolph]

Joined in late 99, but had been keeping an eye on it since the "Computer ASL" days. The demo blew my mind. Bought multiple copies of all three of the original Combat Mission games and gave them to my wargaming buddies. Haven't bought a thing since they went to the DRM scheme.

[Elvis]

Joined in late 99, but had been keeping an eye on it since the "Computer ASL" days. The demo blew my mind. Bought multiple copies of all three of the original Combat Mission games and gave them to my wargaming buddies. Haven't bought a thing since they went to the DRM scheme.

Just for kicks you should download the 3 WW2 demos.  They're free, you don't need the DRM and you can get a lot of replay out of them. Hours and hours of game play without spending a penny. Play'em until you feel you've had your fill or decide you don't like the engine and then move along.

[Michael Dorosh]

That was when the first full version was released to the public. A "public beta" demo was released in the fall of '99. It might have been as long as a year before that when Moon and Fionn made an Alpha AAR with screenshots and descriptions.  That still doesn't get things back to '97 but it's getting close. Dorosh likes to track these kinds of things so he probably remembers earlier stuff than I do.

I was a late comer, my forum number had 4 or 5 digits IIRC. I heard about the game from someone posting at my canadiansoldiers.com website's forum, and downloaded the demo to take a look. I was too dense to 'get' what I had to do in the demo, and actually deleted it. Something possessed me to go back and try a second time a few months later and I was hooked. The original games were extremely elegant, and you could get a great deal out of the engine (random maps, random battles, decent equipment and force matchups with array of different equipment etc.) with amazingly little work.

The new engine - they're trying hard, and some of that original magic is there. I'm very impressed with the number of quick battle maps that ship with new titles; they're consistently interesting and of high quality. Just seems like they're chasing a bunch of different directions at once now - upgrade the engine, incorporate old features that never made it into the new code, introduce new theatres (families), bring all the original nationalities from the World War II titles into those families. It's certainly ambitious. It's much harder for the fan community to contribute, though because the scenario building process is more labour intensive (you could select a random map in CMX1 and then tweak it and have something perfectly usable - in CMX2, you have to literally place every tree, shrub and rock on the map).

Always going to be hard for a sequel to outdo the original. CM probably comes the closest of any of the games I was familiar with - the oldies like M1TP, Red Baron, etc., all suffered when rebooted.