Panzer Battles 2 - The Official Teaser Thread

[ComradeP]

Major river hexsides can be a bit tricky, as there's no next step up so you go from streams or narrow rivers to anything up to nearly 250 meters wide (an entire hex in PB scale). That can lead to peculiar situations that a river can, at one point, impose no penalties on assaults and only a small movement penalty to cross, but further along can be a major river that blocks movement and assaults, whilst only being a few meters wider.

A certain width needs to be selected as the line between minor and major, I understand that, but lots of major rivers might cause balance issues and might lead to reduced consistency in between titles (primarily the "natural" wider rivers in Southern and Eastern Europe and European Russia and the major rivers in Western Europe which often had their path or width (through canals or branching) changed by human intervention.

A D quality US battalion HQ doesn't seem odd, there are a number of not so hot US units in both Normandy and the Bulge.

[GerryM]

I remember the ASL HASL Kampfgruppe Peiper had a map like this with about 9 levels rising up from a river.

[Strela]

Firstly a little bit of housekeeping. We are removing the 'filter' that we used on the cover shot of the user manual. We used a particular Photoshop filter for a lot of the shots in the Kursk documentation. We've decided to dump that for this game. We have found some pretty dramatic shots and it's great to see them 'au naturel'

Here is the 'natural' cover shot;






Secondly I though this comment from Jim was interesting;

Yes that does appear to be the area encompassing Villers Bocage, the Odon River, Hill 112, down to the Orne and Laize Rivers, back across the forests of Cinglais and Grimbosq and over to Mont Pincon. There or thereabouts.

Makes sense, as this would tie into the St Lo battles a bit further over to the left of the map; the divide between the British and American fronts.

Excellent! Now that is exciting.

The map section shown is approximately 20km x 10km in size (remember each hex is 250 metres). It was zoomed out one level so you could see more of the map.

Here is the jump map showing the overall map and the section shown previously! I have scrambled the location so that won't help you

100%






And the same shot at 200% - this is a big game map!






Here is a unit from each of the different 'nationality' groups represented in game.

At 100%






And at 200%






As mentioned these updates will be sporadic. We are making progress and a lot of the documentation is in final draft. Like Kursk we have a fantastic Visual OB, extensive Players notes and a Getting started document.

Thanks,

David

[DaveMic]

Your choice of pictures is questionable when there are a lot of clichés
about the Battle of Normandy.
And why use a famous American paratrooper officer (smoking)
to represent mechanized troops ??
This is just a detail. ; )
This does not stop me from ordering this new opus ;-)

[Xaver]

I find more strange that USA mech infantry has behind the portrait the M3 when UK mech infantry has the icon of Bren carrier on top left.

Ummm even when i want see more pics and i am curious about title... any info about the AT combat system??? some changes/improvements???

Thanks.

[jimcrowley]

Hmmm.. not sure about my first location guess now.

Thinking it may be an area to the direct west of Caen -Epsom territory.

Wish I had better maps.

[Strela]

Your choice of pictures is questionable when there are a lot of clichés
about the Battle of Normandy.
And why use a famous American paratrooper officer (smoking)
to represent mechanized troops ??
This is just a detail. ; )
This does not stop me from ordering this new opus ;-)

Bugger - I didn't know that was a famous photo, but now that I look at it, it is definitely a paratrooper :(

We had a different shot, but we changed it just before we did the Visual OB, Mike Avanzini would kill me if I changed it now!

As far as the carrier for the UK mech troops, the armour divisions did not use carriers for their infantry while some platoons in infantry divisions did....

David

[DaveMic]

Captain Kenneth Johnson of the 508th PIR HQ Co interrogates
civilians in Ravenoville..bugger bugger ;-)

I found the map ! We are in the Mortrée region (visible) and Sées (Off-Board). Mortrée is 79 km southeast of Caen. To the south the forest Ecouves. This map is huge ...

[jimcrowley]

I do believe DaveMic has got it!

I had been looking at some fairly undetailed maps in various reference books and, although there were some similarities, there was a lot of differences as well. Hence my misjudgements.
I've now dug out my 1:180 000 scale road atlas of France and have more precisely located the area that DaveMic has suggested.
Everything seems to fit with this , including the little lake in the top left corner near St Christophe-le-Jaiolet.
So the game certainly covers the Falaise Pocket and given the huge size of the map, could cover almost the whole Normandy battleground. Wow!

[Outlaw Josey Wales]

If it covered all of Normandy out to Falaise, there should be a ton of scenarios.