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Tiller's Panzer Campaigns are pretty simple: Right-click an adjacent hex to move into it. Click-drag to a farther hex to have the AI decide movement to it CTRL-right-click an enemy unit to shoot it. CTRL-ALT-right-click to shoot until all movement points are expended Right-click an enemy unit to order an assault. You can add multiple units to an assault before choosing to Resolve it Press T to toggle in and out of Travel mode, which is necessary for covering ground quickly and moving through certain terrain features like bridges If your unit's movement point text is in white, then it hasn't moved yet and it can assault, move or shoot If it's green, then it has done something this turn, but it can still do all three If it's yellow, then it cannot assault, only move or shoot If it's orange, then it cannot shoot, only possibly move Shoot a unit until it becomes Disrupted, then assault it If your own units get Disrupted or have high Fatigue, pull them out so they don't get shot at. Units that get to rest this way will lose the Disrupted status and will lose Fatigue. If it's night-time, try to avoid doing anything at all because doing stuff at night incurs extra Fatigue Units that take a real beating (high fatigue, heavy losses, lost to multiple assaults) will eventually become Broken and can also be destroyed altogether. The important part though is shoving them out of the way so you can advance That should cover maybe 9 out 10 situations you'll face in the game The age of the engine only really shows its face when you want to get into the nitty-gritty and advanced controls like bridging operations and constantly checking command radius. It also lacks modern conveniences like mouse-over tooltips and contextual right-click menus. The base 2D graphics are also ugly as sin, but the hist-mod guy fixes that; although that still leaves the 3D view leaving much to be desired. The '90s look of the game (and very high counter count) makes it look like it's a complicated grog game, but it's really not when you get right down to it. My own pet peeve is that shooting takes too long - you right-click a unit and a 5 second sound clip of *bang*ping*boom* plays and you see the result, [2 men killed]. And then you get retaliatory fire for another 5 seconds. And you shoot again, and every shot plays that explosion sound and takes 5 seconds to execute. Multiply that over several divisions' worth of units and it feels like each turn takes way more time than it should. You can make the AI execute its turn instantly, but there's no way to speed it up for you the human player shooting the enemy units. The combat isn't as transparent as say, Unity of Command or the Korsun Pocket/Battles in Italy/Normandy series, but the factors are few enough and the scale small enough that you don't really feel like you need to know exactly what's going on underneath the hood. It's always going to boil down to terrain, Fatigue, Morale and the unit('s weapons) itself, and you can see all four right from the unit info sidebar. This in contrast to a game like War in the East or The Operational Art of War where you have to consider terrain, supplies, fatigue, leader quality, unit quality, unit composition, but all those dozen factors aren't concentrated into a single screen. I can understand the game not telling exactly what caused a combat to not go my way, but at least help me discern everything I need to think about before I commit, especially when the stakes are much higher with week-long turns. Panzer Campaigns mostly avoids that particular pitfall. Ultimately though, Panzer Campaigns hits all the right notes while not being that much more complicated than UOC
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| ← # ? Jul 4, 2014 12:38 |
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