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Achtung Spitfire! and Over the Reich.
It deals with planes, if that isn't obvious from the name, but the feeling Is similar. Turn based small scale action. You control a squadron of four planes (IIRC), decide their moves and maneuvers. Steep learning curve, quite realistic if one wants it to be, and hour after hour sunk into them.
Combat Mission is great but it can't hold a candle to Graviteam Tactics: Mius-Front.
A friend of mine recently recommended Steel Panthers: World at War to me. I just tried it out and it seems like a super fun strategy game to me. Think of it like Combat Mission, but it's completely turn-based, with a similar level of realism and grid-based maps. It also seems to be ridiculously well researched regarding all the units you can command or fight against.
I have also been playing a free, turn-based tactics game that I would like to recommend here: Brass & Steel
http://www.thespiritengine.com/Brass&Steel/index.html
It's no longer in development, sadly. There is no campaign mode, but it has a nice mission generator. You can only play battles with Germans vs. British forces set in 1944, but the unit variety is quite nice. I guess it's a bit more casual than the games you've mentioned here (and certainly not as impressive as Steel Panthers), but it has some tactical depth, e.g. you can use smoke to conceal your troops, call in air or artillery strikes, and use cover and line of sight to your advantage. You also want to consider which weapons to use against which units (frontal Sherman attacks against Panthers, Tigers or King Tigers usually end in tragedy, for example).
It seems fairly easy to get into for someone with some knowledge of WW2 tactics. I played the first tutorial mission earlier today (which is actually a really nice batte between US and German forces on a village map set in Normandy) and won it on my first try. It only took me a few minutes to figure out the most important stuff (hotkeys, controls etc.).
That mission was fun. The game put me straight in a situation where I had to take out some approaching Panzer IVs and a Panther with a group of Shermans and M10 Wolverines. There was also a good bit of infantry combat within the village. The key was to spread out my tanks and to deploy smoke to deny the Germans a clear line of fire. Then I took out one Panzer after the other with flanking shots from both sides and routed the German infantry with MG fire. It was quite satisfying.
It felt silly dropping $40 on an ancient game but yah I mean I think you can make the argument that any additional graphics you add to steel panthers just makes it that much harder to implement the degree of detail that steel panthers has.
I found this page researching armoured commander (which I look forward to trying!) but yah wargamer.com called winspmbt (modern warfare version of winspww2) "The once and future king" and I think I agree. You cant improve on steel panthers with better graphics or fancy engines. You could only improve it by having a deeper system and more history and details and steel panthers has like a 20 year head start so lol.
The only tip I have for steel panthers is if you move a unit its full allotted movement hexes it will be extremely vulnerable on the enemies next turn which is tactically obvious but not game mechanically obvious that your unit is still considered moving on the enemies turn even tho the game piece is stationary on the board.
The only thing I don't like about Steel Panthers so far is the way reaction fire works. There was a mission where I was trying to outflank a Tiger with Shermans and M10 Wolverines and even when I approached the Tiger from outside its cone of view, it got a reaction fire opportunity and managed to wreck most of my tanks before they even got a shot off. That was a bit harsh.
Also, the campaigns are hard: I tried out an Operation Torch campaign and the first mission was to take an airfield occupied by Vichy French troops. I actually did pretty well and inflicted twice as many casualties than I took myself (with an even better ratio regarding lost tanks), but the game still counted this as a draw and the debriefing said that Patton wasn't impressed with my performance.
At least now I know that General Patton is difficult to impress in this game. I will still come back to it, though. Steel Panthers is just really interesting and I've barely scratched the surface so far.
No, that would be worth a try next time.
I eventually defeated the Tiger by surrounding it with tanks (outside of line of sight) and flushing it out with an artillery barrage. The Tiger crew panicked, drove out into the open and I destroyed it with reaction fire. But it was a costly victory.
Another good tactic against Tigers or similar enemies is probably to rely on Bazooka teams rather than tanks, especially if there is a lot of cover next to them.
You already have your answer, artillery isnt a power up in winspww2, it isn't a unit that sits there and spams at the enemy. In winspww2 artillery is central to how you relate to the battlefield. It is an uttetly unique element in that it compels motion. If your enemy is not moving the answer is always smoke or artillery and if isn't the question is why? Further you dont advance, see a static position and then say "aha now is the time for an artillery strike!", by then it is too late. Your artillery strikes should plot themselves out ahead of your advance with you cancelling them at the last minute until at LAST aha! you have found the target you dont cancel on (this is kinda Real Artilley Stuff, not gamey exploitation of mechanics or so i have hearddd)
Tanks arent reeallyyy for blowing up tanks, they are mobile machine gun nests even tho the fantasy of tank on tank action is fun and gets us all going lol.
focusing on tactical level:
Second Front (coming out sometime - from Microprose)
(The developer, Hexdraw, has several other games on steam that might be of interest)
Conflict of Heroes series
Flashpoint campaigns
Heroes of Normandie
Steel Division (1 and 2; but Graviteam is king in this space)
Then there is the Panzer General clones
Panzer Corps 1+2
Order of Battle
Unity of Command 1+2
Operational level:
Operational Art of War
War in the East
War in the West
Advanced Tactics
Shadow Empire - (not on steam yet) - or any of the others by this team
There are others, but they are more sci/fi or fantasy type settings; the above are generally historical.
But honestly, in spite of SEVERAL attempts to get into them, I have never personally been able to. And I think it starts out with what I feel is intolerable movement and scrolling lag, even when I shift it all the way down. Steel Panthers should never be a twitch game or focus primarily on speed, but when I issue an order, I damn well WANT it to happen immediately, not after a lag of 2-5 seconds. Which makes it supremely annoying and I think is a dealbreaker by itself.
Secondly, infantry and soft vehicles are CRAZILY durable in Shrapnel games in comparison to hard vehicles. And while I know that this might be somewhat related to their modern pedigree, I don't think that really explains it because that doesn't provide anything like a good explanation for how they handle jeeps or the like getting hit (more on that later), And while I have seen a lot of people argue that no no, I have it the other way around and indeed infantry is really just too squishy in SPWAW (which again might tie in to the lower mortality rates of firefights in the modern era), I don't think it is.
For 4hits and giggles (or rather wailing and gnashing) I have occasionally capped the values (Soft Attack, Hard Attack, Def) for one side, cratered those for the other side as low as they'll go, and either rushed the infantry like a n00b as fast as I could into the enemy's guns or let the AI do it.
I've had infantry squads that get ambushed after running right up against a stationary, entrenched, and primed MG (among others) and generally they take extremely little in the way of casualties, even in spite of how I have blatantly rigged the game against them. Like, averaging out at 0-10% casualties. And while you might say that this is chaotic reality and that sometiems that happens, I argue *No, it's not, because since when would the values between two real world antagonists be so vastly different?* SO why is it that a machine gun team from an army that makes Seal Team 6 look like the Quakers hammers an enemy that makes the average Rent a Jihad or Eastern Bloc conscript look like the Master Chief when the latter are out of cover, moving, and rat essentially point blank range, and the number of times this has actually broken the unit in question in 1-3 blows is something I can count on one finger?
Answer; A fundamental problem with the engine, or at least how it's being used. And while sure, i might get similar results OCCASIONALLY if I do this in SPWAW (especially if I am working with what I'd generously call "Short Bus" units like the militias of the Spanish Civil War, guerillas, and the like), rarely not so. Usually such a crazy and suicidal move would result in losses of somewhere between 20-70% losses (and sometimes complete), as you would expect. It feels much more organic and less padded out or artificial, especially since the game would make things like the Battle of the Somme (of trying to rush your infantry over the top at entrenched enemies) or the Factory Battles of Stalingrad (with rushes across kill zones followed by clawing and tearing away at each other at close range) feel like themselves.
And at least SPWAW knows that is what it is aiming to replicate.
And this is before I get into how the engines treat VEHICLES. Simply put, one of the most damning indictments I can make of the game system is asking you to fire an 88 or some other large explosive weapon at a jeep in both games and asking you to compare the results. Well, assuming it hits of course.
Now, what would you EXPECT to happen in reality?
Well, most times would expect the jeep to get mauled or blown up, killing somewhere between "no one" and "everyone" of its passengers, with any survivors frantically bailing out.
And this is what happens in WAW. It's also what happens in the Shrapnel games..but ONLY for armored vehicles.
But for light vehicles in the shrapnel?
It will generally kill somewhere between "No one" and "everyone" among the passengers of the vehicle, and if the blast doesn't kill everyone, the vehicle will generally STILL SURVIVE,, which on some (admittedly extreme) circumstances I've spent half a turn plinking away at this one stupid jeep to kill the last living dude in the driver's seat, persistently clinging to life in a burnt out wreck surrounded by the viscera of their friends, keeping the jeep from bursting into flames from Sheer Willpower.
Now sure, this is something that can happen in real life time, and WAW's method of handling it runs into problems since it doesn't really track people inside a vehicle as separate entities, so you can't really see things like what happened in The Last Crusade (or a bunch of times in major tank battles) where a smashing bolt headshots one of the crew without otherwise destroying or crippling the vehicle and this gets more glaring if you spray a loaded truck with machine guns. So there is merit to some of Shrapnel's way of doing with it.
But chances are, WAW's sin of exaggeration in its direction is much, much less than Shrapnel's in its direction. Since again, vehicles and their crews generally behave like you'd expect them to when-say- hit by extreme fire. And the nature of the beast means that the problems iwth nobody getting hit when in an intact light truck taking fire is much less notable when that kind of fire will generally light the truck up soon, triggering the "Check for how many people got Shrek'd" check and throwing any survivors out into the exposed area where- again- the terrifyingly realistic "Squishy" nature of infantry mean that unless they're protected, they might get hosed down in the next turn or three.
Now, which sounds like it does a greater disservice to common sense and game balance?
In contrast, armored vehicles get the shorter end of the stick. For starters, not only do the Shrapnel games have a MUCH More simplified model of armor compared to WAW that abstracts far more, they also make it MUCH more possible to kill off an armored vehicle with smaller penetrations form (say) grenades or (on very thin armor) *small arms.*
Now, I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to this kind of methodology, since WAW and a lot of the older SPs really don't have a good way for modeling armor deformation and stress, in sptie of it being very crucial for stuff like Pakfronts. The problem is how this often translates in REALITY. Especially when meshed with how the game handles light vehicles.
So, you mean to tell me that my Apache sent a hellfire up the tailpipe of that Iranian tank and it penetrated, trashing the tank beyond realistic repair, killing half the crew and forcing it to bail out, but the Taliban Technical next to them that ate the other hellfire to its barely armored side feels good to go because it "only killed" 3 out of 7 r so of its crew?
Uh-Huh.
The result of this is that it devalues armor, especially in close quarters battles, far more than it SHOULD. Now don't get me wrong, an Abrams or even T-55 will generally still be far more durable and useful than Toyota McTechnical and so you'll RARELY see these blow up faster than the tanks compared to what they should.
But when you DO, you get reminded painfully hard about just all the problems with this system. And it shows how it cracks at the edges at the same time I find the infantry issue causes it to crack at the core. This is very much in contrast to SPWAW, where you have to treat even thinly armored FT-17s or BA-10s like with respect if you don't have dedicated anti-tank weapons and find yourself having to sneak up to assault or grenade it, hit it with artillery or mortars, or the like, because you can't really inconvenience it with small arms in the same way you can light vehicles.
Again, sort of like reality.
Which I think is crucial. And why in spite of the more flexible unit modifiers, larger pool of factions, and so on, I still keep coming back to WAW. Because for all the love and attention and work the Shrapnel Engine games have had put into them (Especially by the company in comparison to Matrix), the engine *really can't* make as good use of them with extremely tough infantry, relatively fragile armored vehicles, and "What the Heck" Jeeps.
In contrast to flexible and dangerous but squishy infantry, armor that is a hard nut to crack (but which still can be, even easily if you know what to do), and light vehicles that feel light, fast, and vulnerable.
In addition, another sort of side effect where WAW has the edge over the Shrapnel games helps is the artillery factor, which you can set independently for each faction rather than one uniform one. Now, I know this rarely comes into play since you usually just leave it at the default value, and that this opens up the potential for cheating (which would be really bad in H2H). But it also allows greater flexibility and authenticity. For instance, if there was some kind of great imbalance in the artillery quantity and quality ,like Japanese artillery competing with poorer quality (and routinely concrete-filled) KMT ones.
Furthermore, there's I think the extremely passionate and accomplished fanbase, even if it is dying or on life support. They've left a vast number of scenarios and campaigns- well in excess of those currently possible for both MBT and WW2 put together, including a mind melting assortment of them ranging from the Spanish Civil War to Korea and Indochina, to even the Yom Kip War, a Steampunk Franco-Prussian War, WWI, and beyond.
Now, the Shrapnel fans do not lack for creativity (in no small part because there is a lot of bleedover), and I've seen them churn out a large number of scenarios and campaigns that from what I've heard are quite quality, including some that were touched above and others. For instance, I remember a bunch of new scenarios centering on things like the Indonesian Revbolution after WWII, the OUN, and even a sort of "Mirror Match" between a British task force and a Communist Polish one largely equipped with Commonwealth gear. And there will be a lot more. But they aren't anywhere NEAR equal sized quite yet, even if they get there.
And this makes my mouth water and periodically tempts me to come back..............
............and then I remember what infantry warfare in this game is like.
Sure, I can play a Manchukuan Imperial Guard rifle unit with Japanese support troops represented by their own flags. But what help is this, REALLY, if the assorted enemies we face don't seem to react "right" when they shoot at us or we shoot at them and so on? And that is of course WHEN they fire, due to the jankyness and lag.
I'm not going to get too much joy out of my ability to play bright and unique campaigns or scenarios or with factions not covered in it if the fundamental engine has such flaws.
And finally, there's graphics. Which you say aren't really an improvement, but I disagree. I don't think they are or ever should be the main focus for improvement, especially since I will literally game the hell out of dosbox titles. But I think there is something to be said for having a prettier surface, even if it should only ever be window dressing to strong fundamentals. And I do find WAW to be a better looking game save for the photographs sprinkled around (sounding game too, if you have heard the SFX and the Music).
And I could go on, but I think you get my points. Now of course, these are just MY Experiences and tolerances, and apparently most people don't have the same sentiment that movement is lanky and janky. And again, there are plenty of places where the Shrapnel games are indisputably superior to WAW, such as company support and core force management (which would change the ENTIRE way I buy core units in WAW). And of course, I am not trying to shame anyone who likes Shrapnel and say they need to stop enjoying it because I don't.
But I do want to explain why I feel that the king has no clothes, and that what improvements Shrapnel has made in their labor of love cannot make up for the flaws at the heart of the system and others. Some of these aren't really that relevant (like, when would you REALLY need to independently adjust artillery values for the two sides' artillery? Come on....even I rarely have). But I think cumulatively, they show big problems. So it's kind of ironic that you feel super constricted on WAW, because I feel the same but inverse on WW2/MBT, for almost opposite reasons. And I do believe that a "fancy engine" is very, very important for getting things right and running smoothly.
So ya, irrelevant rant/thread derailment over.
And as always, enjoy gaming.