I just bought this recently.... it's basically a WWII RTS that focuses on squad combat during D-Day and thereafter. I read a decent writeup on it on gamespot so figured I'd check it out.

So far (I just finished scenario 3) I really like it. It's definetely an RTS, there's even gathering or resources...but resources are gathered through controlling ammo points and crap. That's all secondary, though...it's mainly about the combat.

It's squad-based combat...you contol squads of guys and run them around. There's a standard rifleman squad, but what's pretty cool is you can upgrade the bastard, or pick up machine guns and shit that the enemy drop. So your 6 man rifleman squad can be broken up into 3 2-man MG-42 squads. Or you can pick up various artillery, panzershrecks, bazookas, etc. You also get engineers, mortars (oh yea!), snipers, and other units. You can build sandbags and other crap...since I'm not too far in yet, I haven't unlocked everything, but it's looking fun.

And the graphics are ungodly. Unfortuanetly, my box is old now. I had to turn down alot of the options, but you can zoom in to the point where a single guy is the size of the scree, and it's real nice. The water effects are incredible.

...anyway, I may post screenshots later.

I played this game for a bit at a friend some time ago, really good game, and the combat can be quite fast-paced.

Sounds cool. Ill keep a look out for it. It sounds like my kinda thing.

It doesn't sound like my kind of game (well, I like all quality games, even if it's a Sub sim :p - but still) but I read some very nice things about it too...it's been getting rave reviews and the concept seems original, at the very least. Let us know how you fare. I probably won't buy it, but I just might find it somewhere and borrow it.

Got the demo. Just need to play it.

I'm thoroughly enjoying it, to be honest. It's VERY time consuming, though...but maybe that's because I believe in fortifying and building up forces, rather than just charging in.

Anyway...so the first mission is taking the beach on D-Day...I don't think you can lose, because I was screwing up all over the place and every time I lost a squad, a new one would come ashore to replace it. Which is nice, since the game's pretty unforgiving. I'm playing on easy and it's still rough.

The third mission defending Carentan from Nazi counter attack...and man, that was fun as hell. Basically there are 3 bridges, and you have to hold back a combined arms Nazi counterattack...heavy tanks and infantry. So I build mines onto it, barbed wire, sandbags, put up a machine gun nest, and build some antitank artillery for each bridge (2 pieces). I held great until the bastards started shelling me... they annihilated my western bridge defense and my HQ. I pulled back my center bridge to the church (my secondary headquarters) and while I was doing that my eastern forces were annihilated too. I ended up running back to the church with my few straggling survivors and loaded them all into the building to try to survive the tanks a bit longer. Thankfully, it was a timed mission and reinforcements showed up before I was completely wiped out.

Still no screenies. :p

some screenies... just grabbed quickly while playing.

http://clankiller.com/stuff/relic00000.jpg
http://clankiller.com/stuff/relic00001.jpg
http://clankiller.com/stuff/relic00002.jpg
http://clankiller.com/stuff/relic00003.jpg

Just played the basic training in the demo. So far ive noticed a few things i dont like, but generally good.

- The look of some of the stuff is too...girly. Like blue on the US stuff. I prefer the nice and dirty look and feel of Sudden Strike.
- AAliasing wont turn on.
- No "suppressing fire" ability. Therefore no way to execute Find, Fix, Flank WW2 manouvres.

Yeah, ok i dont think ill be buying this game.

- Too much micromanagement. (Using abilities)
- Innaccuracies. Sticky bombs, tactics, names.
- Lack of tactics.
- Infantry stand too long against tanks.
- Cant pick up multiple weapons.
- Building units is a bit lame.
- Most sounds are poor quality. No Garand magazines pinging out, mortar shots are as loud as a fart. Small arms fire is indistinguishable.

I did the Carentan mission too. Some elements I liked. I had:

- 1 para squad in a building at each bridge.
- 1 machine gun bunker at each bridge.
- Sandbags to the left and right of the bunkers.
- 1 MG/AT squad on one side of the sandbags per bridge.
- 1 AT Gun on the other side of the sandbags per bridge.
- Mortar crew at the middle bridge.
- Jeep MG at the right bridge.
- 2 Engineer squads at the left bridge.

Ended up pretty much like u there Satis. Overran as the bombardments started, i pulled back like a mofo to the church and tried to fight on the three streets remaining. Held out too, largely thanks to the AT launchers picked up earlier.

But it felt too hollywood. On a scale of realism/grittyness where 1 is best:

1. Combat Mission
2. Sudden Strike
3. Company of Heroes

I prefer a more tactical, hard and detailed game.

fair enough...I'm still digging it. I think the sound is great...explosion are loud, fountains of dirt and exploding debris look great. I love how the sound gets muted if the fighting is going on off-screen, like it's carrying across a long distance. To answer a few gripes....

1. anti-aliasing turns on for me... not sure if it's a limitation of the demo or something with your graphics card and the game or what.

2. suppressing fire becomes available when you equip your infantry with the BAR (barracks upgrade).

3. micromanagement... yep. Lots of that. I end up building alot of machinegun bunkers and putting together a QRF (quick reaction force) of light armored vehicles and hotkeying it. Lets me react to stuff quickly.

4. inaccuracies ... sure.

5. tactics ... there are some. You can slog your way through, but hitting a target from multiple directions is better. Mixed unit tactics is superior to a tank charge. Softening up a target with a sustained artillery barrage is effective. Using snipers along enemy assault routes is very effective...pins them down and can be used to spot for artillery. Anyway, I think there are tactics, though not necessarily true WWII type tactics.

6. infantry vs. tanks.... yea... but tanks pwn the shit out of infantry. The whole dying thing is underdone here...anything can stand against fire for awhile, unlike the real world.

7. Multiple weapons... depends. If it's a heavy weapon, then 3 of the infantry squad will split off the main squad to man it. You can then repopulate your infantry squad via airdrop or HQ or something. If it's a light weapon, yes, only one light weapon per squad.

8. building units ... meh.... having them come out of barracks and field HQs is a definite bow to conventional RTSs, I'll give you that. Airborne missions are cooler, since you just airdrop reinforcements.

9. Disagree on the sounds. I think it sounds great.

Anyway, I might vid one of the later missions (well, part of it). Missions take a LONG time.

I demand pics and vids!

Derf, would you call RTW hard-style tactical? Just wondering. I can see what you mean with titles like Sudden Strike, but I think that (TBS!) games like Master of Orion, Alpha Centauri etc are more tactically deep and detailed than most RTS games. There are more options, diplomatic intrigues (little space for that in RTS), and a plethora of options to focus on to become a prosperous nation: research, economy, military production and so forth.

The combat itself isn't always tactically challenging in terms of actual military moves, but it just works on another 'level'. On a hexagonal battlefield you can flank and stuff just as much as in an RTS, or do a Hannibal and take the long way around over a mountain range to make a surprise attack at an opponent's undefended rear cities/troops. And of course there's the traditional "this unit does well against that unit but gets owned by that other unit" standoff stuff.

Anyway....just saying, the real deep strategy is in TBS imho. It might not be the flashy RTS stuff but it's like a really elaborate version of chess. I mean it...the level of a game like Alpha Centauri is up to two-three times the intricateness of most RTS's I ever played. I think the future is games like RTW where they blend in the TBS aspect with the RTS one...but they clearly kept the TBS aspect simple so "average joe gamer" can follow it.

I played Alpha Centauri in MP against a few pals of mine...the diplomacy was amazing. A computer can never take the place of a human in negotations over technologic and economic transactions; and the fine line you were walking with sabotaging/probing your opponents with spies was amazing. Often they're aware of the problem (when spies get caught etc) and make threats; but unlike the computer they tend to be realistic about their potential to 'punish' you. I mean, if they start rolling out military units and march an army into your territory there's a good chance they get pwned and are vulnerable to a third power -not to mention the loss of money and research development. So unless they are truly superior and can reach you easily, they often prefer to take diplomatic and/or economic measures against you. Or they just threaten you or dislike you and will stab you in the back as soon as the opportunity arises.

And it gets even MORE fun if you know that you can purposely let your spies make it look like someone else was responsible for sabotaging your opponents. And that's only one aspect of the TBS depth...you can't have that with RTS's online, cos there's no time for negotations.

Man, what a rant.

I dont know what i'd call RTW, but i know for certain that i prefer it to Company Of Heroes because it is more in-depth.

The time-setting of the game doesnt matter to me within reason. As long as its a tough and intelligent game. I played Civ2 to death but never touched Alpha Centauri. This was the time when i started looking into 3D games, mainly shooters.

Back to RTW, i think its a rather softy-softy tactical game. It is missing many of the decisive elements of warfare: Logistics, Morale, Campaign, Political climate, Technology, etc... But you probably remember me grilling RTW in its early days because I was largely unhappy with it, and still too to this day, but its better than most of the strategy crap out there.

As we know, RTW is both a RTS and TBS which generally works well. If you intend to proclaim that TBS's are generally more hard-style than RTS's, looking at averages, you may be right.

I foolishly installed a demo of Alpha Centauri in an attempt to discover its value, but all i discovered was that its a game that requires a fair bit of thinking and is relatively dated beyond use. Besides, although i mentioned that i dont mind which age the games are set for, i find it hard to get into many things SciFi.

I actually find that a game like Alpha Centauri has withstood time better than most games of its era, simply because it has always been about the game mechanics rather the graphic niceness. But sure, these days it's kinda dated. There's a good chance Firaxis (Meier's company) will release a remake one of these days, though...they had a poll up on their site asking the fans which classic they'd like to see remade by the team and AC won it about 54% of all votes (considering that there were about 7 options, that's a crushing victory ). So, never know. I'd buy it of course.




Exactly @ the stuff I put in bold. That's where I feel most RTS games fall dramatically short against TBS in terms of depth. The technology and diplomacy is pretty obvious, but morale, logistics, doctrine, climate*, anything...those are all present in your average tactical TBS game. And to iterate on what you said about the game requiring a fair bit of thinking: the AC manual was a book (not a booklet) of about 250 pages. Not all of it was info though, a part contained a geological/biological analysis of Planet and another the developers' favorite SF authors and books. In short, it was a game of love. It shows in the game too.

But enough of my loveletters to AC. Too bad you don't dig the SF thing. As a SF man I can tell you that it is 'realistic' SF though, building on the theories man is working on in this day and era -probability mechanics, string theory, teleportation. No martians.

*AC allowed you to terraform the world to one extent or another. You could 'make' hills and/or claim land on the sea. This had several potential benefits; like if you build your city on a Western slope you benefited from the rainfall on it (and the opposite on Eastern slopes). You could even try to manipulate global warming and melt icecaps, resulting in a global sea level rise. I pwned several unprepared coast cities that way. Nature comes to claim you bitches!! Other stuff included solar beds being more effective on higher altitude etc.

You want some interesting take on strategy, try space ranger 2. The major difference with games like alpha centauri and MOO is that factions dont take turns in moving, they move simotaneously in the same turn, which gives it a unique feel of alive world.