For the next 6+ days.
https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/unity-of-command-stalingrad-campaign
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Sweet.
Well worth the cost! :cool: And worth the normal price, IF a player is okay with a different Panzer General adaptation with even more puzzly gameplay aspects.
...and random impossibilities due to random weather affecting the map and no time to adjust around it to meet goals. Which to be fair was also a real-life factor! But not so great a design choice for a hard puzzle-type game which already has significant RNG.
As an alternative view... overpriced at the current asking price, to the point that I would be hard pressed to play if it payed me to do so by the minute. I have never bounced so hard off a game I should like more than UoC.
I despise the art style, and did not enjoy the gameplay at all. I honestly never understood the praise heaped on this series, but it clearly works for a lot of people. It is in no way graphic snobbery, either, as I still enjoy Battlefront CMx1 and CMx2 games, Close Combat (in original Atomic Games and Matrix formats), Panzer General and Panzer Corps.
I never had a single session with that game that didn't leave me wondering why I wasted that time.
Quote from: Sigwolf on August 09, 2023, 07:08:50 PMAs an alternative view... overpriced at the current asking price, to the point that I would be hard pressed to play if it payed me to do so by the minute. I have never bounced so hard off a game I should like more than UoC.
I despise the art style, and did not enjoy the gameplay at all. I honestly never understood the praise heaped on this series, but it clearly works for a lot of people. It is in no way graphic snobbery, either, as I still enjoy Battlefront CMx1 and CMx2 games, Close Combat (in original Atomic Games and Matrix formats), Panzer General and Panzer Corps.
I never had a single session with that game that didn't leave me wondering why I wasted that time.
You and I share that minority view.
Bought the original and enjoyed the game play. Didn't mind the visuals but hated the time based victory conditions.
^Me too.
I never quite understood the visuals hate, since they can be turned over to standard (albeit modern?) NATO symbols. But the profile head figures etc never bothered me either.
The time constraints are DIRE, indeed, and overly constrictive regardless of which operation you're playing at any time.
The passion I have been witnessing regarding the design over the past decade (especially from its detractors) remain kind of a mystery to me. We can dislike a product without having to drive it into the ground or the mud, to be honest.
Overall it was a daring, innovative design at the time it came out, which to me sounds like a balanced & objective statement. It emulated that sort of thing you can see periodically with boardgame wargames too - when new trials, and possibly errors, come to light and end up being divisive with the existing audience. The debate about the graphics reminded me of the time I saw people criticizing blocks like being untrue to the genre even 30 years into their inception. Time flies, changes things, and thankfully enough it's not an environment where people are forced to buy or enjoy things they don't want to buy or enjoy.
I am French, I am familiar stories of Old Guard at Waterloo, so you can be sure that I am understand the value of panache in a review - but IMHO even that device has to be used in a measured fashion, especially when we're actually judging the work of others, especially if they're still bringing more to the table than they're taking away, like the 2x2 Games team always had, and probably still will.
As for UoC's innovations (that is, mainly, graphics that are kind to the eye and the emphasis on supply) they remain a very interesting study on how to innovate within the known boundaries of a genre. The depth involved by this system remains quite frankly smart in comparison of what came before and what came after in the PzG genre, and when all things are said and done regarding how faithfully any turn-driven system can hope to recreate actual combat, the chokes it puts on a commander's enthusiasm are modern-minded & efficient. That the time limits are punishing is a sure thing, and that it creates with some players the feeling that it turns the experience into a "puzzle game" (which is not exactly a good allegory to begin with I'd say, considering time is never an issue in puzzles) can't be ignored either. Yet these time limits are absolutely not an after-thought, or a cheap functions, and serve an efficient victory system that is easy to play, hard to master. Whether we like them or not, they're the scale you need to be judged against, just like commanders were & still are (as the current events in Southern Ukraine abruptly show today).
In my opinion, of the main issues out there derives from the feeling that people still don't accept in 2023 to be beaten by a game system, or not able to reliably crack it open, and end up considering the system is to be faulted - even when it's offered for free. Fine. Don't buy it. Does it mean some have to destroy it though? I don't know ^^
Just my 2 cts ;)
Cheers
I liked UoC and found it addicative. I was not a fan of the "statue bust" art style for the infantry but somehow this seemed better to me than 1-5 infantry in a hex and more interesting and pleasing to the eye than the rectangle with a st andrews cross through it. But how do you represent an infantry division\brigade\regiment\battalion\company and all of it's elements. Supply, horse drawn or otherwise transport, organic artillery, tank destroyers, AT guns, bazookers, HMGs, mortars etc in a small hex? I'd almost prefer a small stylised ant like animated representation of all the elements that could be hovered over for a zoomed impression of stance as well as a more fully represented view of the elements I mentioned. I liked the way "Decisive Campaigns: The Blitzkrieg from Warsaw to Paris" represented all the elements at the bottom of the screen stemming from nato iconography. However this is still a dated non interactive method that does not give an impression of movement or sedation, digging in etc.
I stopped playing because UoC was in essense a puzzle game the way units moved one at a time and got their pips knocked off for you to then bring another unit in afterwards to finish pips off an enemy unit. It did not feel like you were creating a breakthrough but rather subscribing to a system with rigid rules for winning an engagement. A trap many wargames fall into. Formulaic victory. Mathematicians love it, but it rarely reflects the way things work in practice.
(https://www.matrixgames.com/images/screens/128/screen_5d079e445d842.png)
Sure but I wouldn't fault the system - it is, for all its qualities & limitations, faithful to the Panzer General formula. It's accessible, but gamified to a point that makes it popular to an outside demographic too (which it achieved, and Panzer Corps 2 achieved too, for instance).
As such, as far as I am concerned, I'd rather not compare it at the same level & with the same parameters as an operational wargame the likes of DC, or TOAW, or WitE. These to me are different genres (just like I wouldn't put, say, Gates of Hell & Graviteam in the same genre either despite a very similar approach on the surface of the same topic). UoC is a "step further in complexity" from the average Panzer General game, that's right, but is still firmly within the boundaries of the genre IMHO.
True. Traditional strategic wargames seem more like chess to me than war. Turn based and relying on a very simply set of statistical attrubutes to obtain what is usually a very predicatable result with an "all other things being equal" kind of outlook to any operational problems that general staff work would have to deal with. Surviving contact with the enemy is always easy when you can always rely on the stats to work.
I really enjoyed it for a while. As Destraex says, it's a kind of puzzle game and once you've found the best way to win a scenario there's isn't much point of replaying it. Imho, the time pressure was too heavy.
A puzzle game with random failure conditions. And I like the game! But it is what it is. I understand what they were going for, and why it's even realistic in that sense. But something needed to be tweaked, at least optionally. There wasn't enough flexibility for figuring out how to deal with random problems in time.
On further consideration, I suspect part of the problem is that the game isn't really simulating the Soviet side of Barbarossa (I often play the Black Turn), or rather it's simulating how they'd have normally been able to stand up to the blitz -- and so the Soviets do better than historical on a regular basis! But that doesn't really explain the same problems in the Stalingrad and Red Turn campaigns.
I do like how it was the first (maybe still only) PzG game to use the concept to simulate full frontal action, so to speak: there's no initial maneuver, you're up against a solid front at first in practically every mission (red or black), and you have to get through it and deal with the remnants behind you and the backfield in front of you.
Did someone just say, 'Full Frontal Action'? That got my attention. I would add that many players, in addition to not being willing to accept defeat by an AI opponent, that they want an AI that's good but also quick. Nobody wants to sit for minutes on end waiting on the computer to pull-off it's moves, but requiring it to do everything it needs to in the space of a few seconds kills the chance for it to play effectively. Or does it? Is that still true today? It's really hard to find a Sweet Spot of fast AND good AI behavior. I go with good but still am pretty impatient at times too.