Missing Sounds in Panzer Campaigns

[Philippe]

The other thing that should be pointed out about Combat Mission is that it should be compared to Squad Battles and not Panzer Campaigns.

Although Combat Mission works best when you have battalions or less fighting it out, larger scenarios have been created for division-sized engagements. Given that the basic unit in Combat Mission is a squad (that can be broken down) or an individual vehicle, a scenarion with that many units is simply not playable, even if you ignore the fact that the game engine wasn't designed to reflect the higher command and logistics functions (especially the latter). The engine was designed for reinforced company-sized engagements in an area of about one or two kilometers. Given that people seem to prefer getting to use three or four companies plus support units, what a Combat Mission scenario really is is what in Panzer Campaigns is referred to as an assault. It usually takes place in two or three Panzer Campaign hexes, and lasts a fraction of a turn.

Turn-based is only really an issue by comparison with a real time game. The original Combat Mission games were turn-based WEGO (aka simultaneous movement), which, as a system, is far superior to IGOUGO (aka sequential movement) when the scale is right. It's also a lot harder to write rules for and to program. Many of the rules connundrums that people worry about here are meaningless in a WEGO environment, because though the player is only giving an order to his units before the turn starts, and once the turn starts the tactical AI takes over and tries (or doesn't try) to carry them out. This was the system that was used by the old Atomic Games V for Victory series, and could produce some truly delightful moments -- traffic jams at choke points and units under your command that would drop out of sight if they lost touch with your headquarters or simply lost too much cohesion. And dancing in and out of a zone of control to draw opportunity fire was virtually impossible to execute.