Steel Panthers World War II: Cursed by Success

Occasionally we’ll step back to play the Long Campaign in Steel Panthers , a game that has stood the test of time in its near-original form like no other.  There is a free version available (WinSPWW2 – Camo Workshop). We play the CD version; in actual gameplay there is no difference. The CD version has some added features that are well worth the investment, besides the contribution to keep this fine game alive.  

As you may know we like long realistically randomized, more open-ended, multiple scenario, non-scripted campaigns. WinSPWW2 has one of the best of those in its Long Campaign feature.

Unfortunately, success has kept us from using what little play time we have for looking at the newer games lined up for evaluation. We thought we’d play a few battles and get knocked out with a score in the 20s and so move on to other things, but for months now we have been campaigning right along.  After about 14 years or so real time, we’re really starting to feel like we almost maybe know how to play the game.

With the battle frequency set around one per month we are now in July of  ‘43, playing the Germans in the East. No big fan of the Germans of the period; we’ve played the Poles, the French and, of course, the US in Europe and the Pacific in the past. And surely no fan of the Nazis (or the Soviets ) but we wonder about it ourselves, and self-justify for these reasons:

• The Germans have the most interesting equipment overall, from start to finish during the period. Besides the infamous Tigers and Panthers there’s a dizzying variety of self -propelled artillery, including the  incongruously-named Ferdinand. And along about 1943 there are helicopters, though they can’t do much else  but observe.
• The robot computer opponent simulates USSR operational “modes ” quite well. The Russians just keep coming at you,  have little concern for the loss of units, always seem to have reinforcements, are quick to rally and can sting you when you’re occupied elsewhere. And the T-34s – the tank that won the war –  along with other tracked monstrosities just keep appearing, seemingly fresh off the factory floor. If you get overconfident the Red Army will make you regret it. At times you’ll be muttering to yourself, “Where’d’ those damn tanks come from?!”  We don’ t remember which of these aspects of the robot opponent might apply to other nationalities but with the Soviets it all fits.

Flettner F-282

And so we, being afflicted with Completion Syndrome, must carry on, and soon hope to squeeze in some play of the other games we intend to review real soon now, mm hm, real soon now: Penumbra, East India Company, etc.

Since it’s about the half-way point game time-wise , and the next battle will be our 26th of the campaign, this is as good a time as any for a report.

All preferences are pretty much defaulted as found. With the faster modern computers we just slowed down the status messages a bit. Fog of war is on.

Campaign Score: 51
Decisive Defeats: 0
Marginal Defeats: 0
Draws: 2
Marginal Victories: 20
Decisive Victories: 3

So we’re one point over the Marginal Victory average. The bar for Decisive Victories is a high one. You must achieve an 8-1 advantage in Victory points.  Our tendency to pursue and risk armor (i.e. expensive ) units may have made the difference between Marginal and Decisive in a handful of battles, and we’re sure that if we’d held back about two tanks in one battle we definitely would have improved that number.

We’re trying to practice more patience. 

T-34/76c

Following are some tips that I’ve gathered that may or may not be hinted at or outlined in detail in the documentation, and an approach or two that we’ve found useful.

• Be patient.
• One remaining dead spot in our grasp of the game is in the formation organization above platoon. One item we can vouch for though is, as the documentation advises, that composing your core group of company-size units is an advantage to rallying up through the chain of command. But I’ve seen inconsistent behaviors. There may still be bugs in this thing. (See the artillery tip below.)
• Be careful with your HQ unit. If you lose it then, for you my friend, the campaign is over. But for the computer opponent the same is not true; you can capture or kill the enemy HQ and not win the campaign. This is the root of the longevity of this current campaign compared to others.  My HQ has been under fire only once, and that by oversight, yet I’ve bagged the opposing HQ possibly 8-10 times.. 
• In forming your core, take into account your own style of play and your own level of patience with the mechanics of the system. You can order the core so that using the N (Next) andP (Previous) keys march you though the units in order. So if you want to lead with your tanks then frontload your core with armor, or vice versa. And then even if you want to change that up depending on a situation, you can still click once into the roster screen, and then again anywhere in the order and start your N-P march in the middle of your organization.
• Mud and snowdrifts. Scan the map in the deployment phase for these (and other) nasty hexes. Mud is a little easier to spot. In certain seasons there may be vast oceans of it on the Eurasian steppe, as is right. To be sure of snow drifts you’ll have to hover the mouse. The maps in the Long Campaign may be random in how they are chosen from battle to battle, but the maps themselves are premade. The designers have done a good job of making sure there are at least a few openings  from left to right. Snow Drift and Mud are just two of the prominent terrain types in our current campaign. There are other types to watch for as well. Check the terrain table in the documentation.
• Deployment phase.  Save some time in the deployment phase by using the G key. This will take you to the “zero” unit (HQ) of the next platoon. Put that unit down. Then click the Deploy Entire Formation button (no hotkey) to put the rest of  the units down nearby.  Adjust as needed.
• There are some commands and buttons that may be hard to see, or easy to miss. Some are mentioned in the docs, some not. For instance, the docs mention the Use Repair Points button but doesn’t say where you’ll see it. It will be on the Support Unit purchase screen before each battle, AFTER the Fix Unit screen. Any unused fix points can be converted to support points at the rate of 1000 to 750. Another example is is for the helicopter’s altitude, you have to right-click into the info screen to get the button that changes elevation.
• You have a high degree of control over opportunity fire but the location of the commands is a bit obscure. When you have a unit selected in deployment or during the battle, press the Y key, used to set unit range. On the right will be a FILTR button. Click that and you can control what types of units will be fired upon. and from how far away. In other words, if you don’t want your machine guns to waste ammo on tanks or give away their position too soon even when firing on infantry, this is where you’d set that up.
• There must be a bug in there because a squadron of SP Artillery we’ve had from the beginning always drops its first volley on friendly territory. Changing the unit doesn’t help.  Watch out for this.
• In the Artillery/Airdrop screen, if you’ve dropped smoke and the Smoke button becomes unselected, you can switch to live ammo without losing turns. Just be sure to leave it in the same hex, then you can use the adjust button. Not sure what the timing is on when the smoke button deselects, but this gets live rounds on enemy units coming through your smoke hexes sooner.
• Use smoke. Use it not only as delivered by artillery to mask your attacks, but when moving individual squads, on the attack, perhaps, to hide themselves if they’ve found they’ve stepped out into the open in range of enemy guns. Along the same lines, units can drop smoke for each other.
• A tank’s crew will not always be able to fire all its weapons on the same shot that you have it fire the primary, which may not always be effective against infantry (more casualties when it hits but fewer hits.) By all means shoot with the big gun but if you have four shots, maybe take two and then spray with the 2nd gun using the W key and then the number 2. Once you’re down to zero shots on the primary weapon you can just use F or click to fire all the MGs that have shots left.
• Forcing surrender. Hold down the SHIFT key to move onto the same hex as any unit, friendly or enemy. An enemy doesn’t have to be routing or retreating but it helps. Fire at them in the same hex and there’s a chance the unit will surrender.  Also if you’ve managed to encircle and they see their escape route is cut off there’s  a chance. An advantage to forcing surrender on your turn is that the chance that routing units will get “extra” moves from running away is lower. Forcing surrender removes the unit from the map and avoids the need to chase them down over multiple turns. You can’t use W to choose a weapon when firing into the same hex but it seems like there’s a net ammunition savings in the long run.
• Since there’s an accuracy bonus on the second shot, just like laying the odds in craps, if you’re going to fire once and you have at least two shots left you might as well fire twice.
• Consider making a platoon of high quality tanks a “flying squad” to race down-map on one extreme flank or the other. Let some snipers go along for the ride. They will rarely be unopposed but some might get through to wreak havoc in the enemy artillery parks, as well as encircle to cut off retreat.  And even if they meet with heavy opposition, which they sometimes will,  they’ll take pressure off one of your flanks. You can rotate this duty among your veteran tank platoons. They’ll have fun.
• In Assault type missions, be prepared for mines and other obstacles, and pillboxes, yes, the damn pillboxes. In Defend battles you will have these available for purchase. You don’t have to worry about mines/obstacles/pillboxes  in any of the other battle types.
• Visibility, weather and situational factors determine whether you will have much – or any- air support available on the Misc button of the Purchase Support Unit screen. Air units for ground support are expensive and fragile. Beware of massive anti-aircraft gun concentrations.
• The key you’ll be hitting the most is the R key to rally units. Seems like a no-brainer but this simple feature goes a long way to provide some suspense in the game. Will the squad of engineers rally in the face of a tank bearing down on them? Sometimes they don’t. Also, although you can keep rallying an individual unit as long as the morale  checks are successful, as soon as you miss one check that unit can make no more attempts that turn; and if it misses, the next unit up the chain of command will roll a check whether you want it to or not. And if they fail then they cannot be used for other units later in the turn. So at times you’ll have to be judicious. Do I risk using up a company-level morale check on that elite crew that just had their tank blown away? And like that.
•  Stay off the roads. Of course. Or at least try not to end your turn on a road too often. The enemy likes to shell them and air units love to strafe them.
• As part of your core use a few points to buy some on-map artillery of the larger calibers. Your core units gain experience and veteran/elite big guns can be quite effective breaking up an attack. Then for each unit get a mobile ammunition carrier if it doesn’t already come with one. They will resupply any individual unit – not just big guns – but are particularly useful for the arty. You can have one follow along your main attack groups too and as your units run out of ammo (which they will) you can send some back to reload. Careful that the ammo trucks don’t get too close to the front and that they don’t hang out in open fields or on roads. The computer opponent will target them.
• When assaulting use the support points to fashion the basis of multiple assault teams comprising mine sweeping tanks, engineer units, as well as regular tanks and infantry. And conversely, on defense don’t  forget about mines and obstacles to funnel the attackers into good fields of fire. In meeting engagements heed the advice in the documentation, advance to good cover, sight your artillery well  and let the enemy come to you.
• Be ready for enemy counterattacks when you start to take objective hexes.
• Have a plan. But as Wellington famously said: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” 

We offer these tips based on a huge jump in our success at the game in the current campaign, but just the other week we mentioned to the long-suffering Mrs. Shears how we’ve been playing the game since early the 90s when the original was first released and still we learn something new about it almost every day, whether it be about gameplay, units or history. She had her back to us at the time but we could tell she had that look on her face, the one that all wargamer widows likely have. If you’ve read this far down in the post then you know the one.

Review: Mount & Blade

Mount & Blade - the first of the GamersGate titles we’ll review here – is an action/role-playing game independently developed by TaleWorlds and distributed by Paradox Interactive. For what it may lack in spiffy state-of-the-art graphics it more than makes up in interesting gameplay.

You’ll start as a solitary wanderer in a non-fantasy, roughly medieval world, and from this near-naked state you can improve armor, weapons, amass followers and build yourself into a powerful warlord. The same castles through which you had trouble getting past the gates may someday be the ones to which you lay siege, and conquer.

Getting there is the challenge. The tutorials are good, and combat with blade and bow, on foot and on horseback is not difficult to learn, but putting the skills into practice in the game may prove to be an early barrier to some. It’s a little bit beyond that easy-to-learn-hard-to-master threshold, as the application of what you learn will require some hand-eye coordination. And the battles have consequences. If you ‘re defeated you may lose valuable game-time while your character is enslaved or imprisoned.  And there is no option for abstracting battle results as in the Total War series.

Plenty enough of the postings on youtube.com and the trailer below will give a good idea of how fighting in the tactical screens goes…

So except for the above comment and the tip below we’ll say no more. For those who wish to devote the time and who are not debilitated by 3D action-game vertigo, like yours truly, the investment is well worth the effort, since the premise is unlike any other game, and the execution is admirable.

There’s more to the game though than the fighting.

There have been other story-style set-ups in other games but this one works better than any we remember. The handful of questions about your upbringing and misty past create your character’s background and lead right into the skills screen, with point bonuses based on the answers given. After the skill screen you get to decide what the character looks like, with some simple decisions about haircolor/style and facial shapes and sizes, and sliders to draw the features along a range between extremes. Play more than one game and you’ll have to go out of your way to make one character looks the same as another.

After that you’re placed on the strategic map, armed with little more than your wits, some food, a horse, a sword, a bow and just enough scraps of clothing to maintain modesty. This map is in three dimensions and can be zoomed and rotated, but its graphics are flattish; it’s not designed for much more than deciding what your next move will be. On the map you’ll see the castles and villages in the area, the major terrain features that may affect your movements. You will also see – and often, have a chance to avoid – other roving bands – various varieties of thieves and thugs, as well as warbands belonging to the local chieftains.

Mount & Blade Strategic Map. Use the Training Field for in-game practice.

You will also be able to enter a training area In the game where time is taken but your efforts may be rewarded by minor skills increases, and more importantly, after leaving the tutorials behind, you can continue to refine your own real-life skills. handling a sword or bow on foot or horseback.

The controls for weapons-handling are fairly straightforward and simple – for the sword, left-click to start your wind-up and left-click again to swing. On horseback though, everything changes, because you also must control the horse:

Tip: When on horseback in the tactical screens, movement and facing of the horse is controlled by the WASD key combination just like for the character alone on foot. Facing of the rider is controlled by the mouse. When on horseback and wielding a sword, you’ll need to maneuver with fingers of the left hand on the WASD to as close as possible to your target, while at the same time facing the rider and timing the mouse-click swing just right. Avoid some initial frustration around how to best achieve a hit by paying attention to the position of your mouse cursor with relation to the center-line of the horse. Your rider will swing to the opposite side of the side where the mouse cursor rests. So if your target is on the horse’s right side, you must be facing right, yes, but your mouse cursor will have to be to the left of the center of the horse to allow your rider to swing on the right side. And vice versa.

In the villages talk to any villager to get a general idea of the village’s prosperity but you’ll go to the Village Elder for any quests. Hover the mouse over the Elder himself for a handy meter showing his attitude toward you.

Mount & Blade: Entering a village

Through the Village Elder you can take on the offered tasks, or not. If you take them on you don’t have to execute them in order but they will have time limits. You may be asked to get some wheat for the village or perhaps teach the villagers to defend themselves and help them to fight marauders a la the Seven Samurai-Magnificent Seven-Bugs Life movies. The villagers will learn from you if you have mastered the skills yourself. And eventually, when you take this task, you will be faced with the reappearance the bandits, and your trained villagers, with you as their leader, will have to fight. You may also get different types of tasks from a prince of a castle, such as collecting taxes from a nearby village. In this quest you will earn part of the taxes you collect as a commission, which can be quite lucrative. Also the villages and castles will be where you recruit your followers, trade for food and weapons and pick up information about the local conditions.

Though the graphics on the strategic map are merely adequate this is where you’ll receive reports of the regional political situation – who’s at war with whom. On the tactical map the character figures are not as life-like as you’d expect in this day and age but the landscapes are stunning. Athough some of the hilly regions seem a little pointier than normal.

Audio-wise the effects are adequate but effective. Riding a horse can be fun and your mount will be quite responsive, with whinnies and snorts when appropriate; the sounds of walking, then trotting, and then galloping hooves will be feedback on speed.

Conclusion
For those with an interest in 3-D non-fantasy, Middle-Ages role playing action, though the sword fighting and horseback ridng may require some mastery of hand-eye skills to do well, a look at Mount & Blade would be well worth considering.

Spore: 2 of 5….and already played out

For the researchers of this question, whether anticipation enhances enjoyment of a consumer product  the Spore phenomenon might be an interesting topic. Apparently if you’re anticipating something good you’re okay with a delay. And, oh, oddly enough, if you end up with something bad, the delay is fine too. So that works out well.

In this case, waiting almost two years for Spore doesn’t seem to evoke much in the way of disappointment. It’s not great and it’s not horrible , so that may be just in the exact middle of the anticipation scale. We’re not upset at laying out the $50 USD for it because it is obviously a work of high craft and, covering, as we’ve said, a topic of extreme interest to us, a life simulator, we were looking forward to it for two solid years around here. Sorry to say it doesn’t look like it will have the staying power of a Civilization IV, or even X-COM, which has just been revived hereabouts, on, of all things, an old Windows 95 box.

In general, though the graphics and execution are superficially excellent, there is something a little bit off about nearly every aspect of the game, gameplay-wise. It may be a matter of blockbuster-syndrome that you see in $100 million film projects. Will Wright is a pioneer and may be one of the few designers who could pull something like Spore together, but when that much money is involved, no project can possibly be the vision of one person.

This review will concentrate on the gameplay. The creation of creatures, vehicle and buildings is a whole other aspect that is an activity in itself, if that appeals to you. Much of it has nothing at all to do with the playing of the game. Design one factory or spaceship and it will do you forever. This is all tied in with the game company’s effort to create a community around the game. That’s not really why we play games.  

The five games phases are actually distinct game styles that represent five genres in computer gaming.

Cellular Phase
Game genre: Early Arcade. After the opening movie, in which the cosmos is revealed and your plant is bombarded by comet debris, you’re an ostensibly one-celled animal in a tidal pool. this is not the theorized beginning-of-life-on-Earth model we had expected, that is, the Primordial Ooze. You’re in a tide pool, which would be near the shore, and long after the initial beginnings of life on the planet. So in a sense, the title of the entire software is a bit off. So you’re in the pool and you get to choose what sort of mouth you have. This is your first choice, carnivore or vegetarian. No real weight is assigned to that choice, or wasn’t in the one game I played almost-through. There may be nuances to detect upon frequent playing, but if herbivore is supposed to connote vegetarians which is supposed to imply pacifist, it didn’t work out that way in my one game.

Creature phase
Game Genre: Adventure/Roleplaying: One point for this phase. This is the cutest, and all things considered, the most fun phase. It should appeal to the furries out there. In fact any expansion concentrating on this phase might be worth checking out. (Heck, two years from now we may have forgotten our ambivalence about the initial release enough to give it a try.)

Village Phase
Genre: Real Time Strategy. Take over your continent by either defeating or befriending your neighbors. Repetitive, and, like all Real Time Strategy titles, it’s a click-fest. So if you enjoy that sort of thing you might like it. Win the continent by either allying with or defeating every other tribe on it. Quite the forgettable phase.

Civilization
Genre: Civilization: The greatest of computer games, a genre in itself. This phase is a severely hobbled form of it. Win your planet by overwhelming the cities of others, either by force, religion or commerce. Whatever vehicles you make will project that form of force. Doesn’t really matter what you start with, the cities you take over will determine what you end up with. My one pass through I started as religious but left the phase as military. The game almost gets a point for this, but at some point the AI seemed like it stopped playing. At normal difficulty levels, the game shouldn’t let you win.

Space Phase
Genre: 4X Space Strategy. Most disappointed, most anticipated, but still worth a point because it could have been the space conquest and exploration game we’ve been questing for since Master of Orion. But the random events in the short experience seemed heavily weighted toward bio-disaster, of course. And the “culling of the herd” nature of both the bio-disasters we encountered was disturbing. Two aspects killed this phase for us, one philosophical and the other physical: 1) we’re not enamored of flying around a planet killing off diseased individuals of a species, and 2) the 3D and the jumpy navigation around the planet surface and up and down into space and back activated some kind of vertigo reaction yours truly gets whenever playing a First Person Shooter or other action 3D games. Unfortunately playing through nausea and dizzyness is not my idea of fun. This may not bother others but it’s enough to set the game aside for me, and in the most promising phase too. O well. But from what we saw, and allowing for benefit of the doubt, it gets the other point for promise.

On the controversies surrounding the science versus intelligent design aspects, that’s for a longer post, if ever. There is no real science of genetics involved. Nor is it any more godlike than all the other god-games that have come along. It’s a game, not a treatise.

And also as we’ve mention in another post, as with big budget projects on favored film subjects, so much time, effort, money and genius having been spent on a topic, another attempt at is is not likely to happen for a long while, perhaps until a big orders-of-magnitude jump in  technology, like when we’re all comparing the gigabytes of RAM we have implanted in our heads.

So it gets 2 of 5. One for the Creature phase and one for the Space phase, which looked like the most ambitious gameplay, even though we couldn’t play it much. Sigh.

The ultimate evaluation on Spore around here, though? None of the Shears spawn are playing it. Lance has gone back to Europa Universalis II. Chuck bought an eight-year-old swords and sorcery with his own money, Diablo II, which I’ve set aside Civ IV for, and Escella is sharing a game of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened with Mrs. Shears.

So much for two years of anticipation.