Have You Played Graviteam Tactics And If Not, Why?

[Boggit]

I found this series of 101's helpful for getting into Graviteam's games...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6MWbXT4dlw (Part 1 of 7 - they each follow on in Youtube)

German Tanks and how to use them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms9oE-YhNCM&list=PLx6N3LVwgba0n_wweLFzT_r0-cKi_LIhC&index=8

Russian Tanks and how to use them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnMgOq1vZnk&list=PLx6N3LVwgba0n_wweLFzT_r0-cKi_LIhC&index=9

[Moreb]

Halloween sale 25% off.

Such an awesome game and only $26.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/312980/

[sandman2575]

Such an awesome game and only $26.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/312980/

Yeah I've been playing a lot more of Mius Front lately -- it really is a gem.

[Hartford688]

Some of the older Graviteam games/DLC at a good price at Bundlestars:

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/graviteam-tactics-bundle?utm_source=Bundle%20Stars%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=6e690db459-Endless_Legend_11_10_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3437eaaeba-6e690db459-423858005&mc_cid=6e690db459&mc_eid=c35063a82d

[acctingman]

Are the Graviteam games easier to learn than the CM x2 titles?

[Tuna]

No, the UI takes a little time to get used to. CM is more intuitive and simple to learn.

[Moreb]

Some of the older Graviteam games/DLC at a good price at Bundlestars:

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/graviteam-tactics-bundle?utm_source=Bundle%20Stars%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=6e690db459-Endless_Legend_11_10_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3437eaaeba-6e690db459-423858005&mc_cid=6e690db459&mc_eid=c35063a82d

That is a heck of a deal. Even though the UI is not as good in those older titles, they are still great games. That bundle represents 100's of hours of playing time.

[mikeck]

Are the Graviteam games easier to learn than the CM x2 titles?

Graviteam games are definitely harder to learn than CM2. The UI isn't great, calling artillery and things like that are odd and because communications is accurate modeled (if neither team has a radio they better be within shouting distance) you can't tell if your troops aren't doing what you want because of a WAD game rule or because you didn't do it right. Worse, with Mius Front. The manual is crap. It's basically an index.

BUT, learning Graviteam is worth the extra effort. I never play CM2 anymore...I can't. Graviteam games are beautiful, the graphics and damage modeling are accurate and the sounds and visuals of tracers and artillery are very immersive.

I recommend you sit down and learn the game. It is worth it

[Yooper]

I think one big draw with the CM games is the maps are hard featured. The terrain, the buildings, the hedges, all act as funnels and draws. If it's a hedge it's really obvious. If it's a river-gulley it's obvious. Whereas in GT all I see is maybe a green square or an orange one with some other color. What does that mean? There's no tooltips to help me sort it out.

When I load a map in GT I'm not entirely sure what my "win" condition is. My units might advance, or maybe they'll defend, and then after fifteen minutes of bullets and tanks the match ends. One thing I do like about GT in that regard is it doesn't feel like a puzzle. Some scenarios in CM feel like there's one way to advance through the map, it's like solving a puzzle. GT gets that right that it feels like a firefight.

With some tooltips, more info about the soldiers, and a rework of the goofy terrain square system, it could really be a great game. I also like CM having a one minute turn so I can go back and replay all of those crazy shots and moments. The game feels more cinematic and the tension is higher.

[RyanE]

I think what you are touching is the difference between a game moving towards simulation (Graviteam's) and games still with connections to board/tabltop (BFC).  BFC tried to break more of that connection with CM2 games, but it has kind of gravitated back to it over the last few updates.

[sandman2575]

For me the big -- maybe only -- advantage CMx2 has over Graviteam Tactics is CM's far better modeling of infantry combat. I'm currently slogging my way through a scenario in Red Thunder that's primarily infantry-focused. It's tense and difficult. The same scenario in GT would be pretty boring and over in under half-an-hour. There just isn't enough nuance or flexibility in commands you can give infantry in GT, and their behavior tends to be highly suicidal, as the game does a poor job at all of modeling morale - at least, I've never really noticed morale effects having an important effect in GT, even though I know the game does track this for different units.

That said, 'slog' is generally the right word for CMx2. GT is far more fluid and up-tempo, and in a good way. The table-top analogy seems right to me. CMx2 still does feel like moving each individual piece on the board. GT feels like a computer simulation.

I love both series and play both constantly. But to be honest, if GT gave us interesting, in-depth infantry combat the way CMx2 does, I'd probably play GT almost exclusively. On so many levels it just feels like the more up-to-date, still evolving game. CMx2 is unfortunately stuck in a rut, with its painfully clunky UI, its lack of dynamic campaigns that seamlessly join the operational and tactical levels.

[Yooper]

I think what you are touching is the difference between a game moving towards simulation (Graviteam's) and games still with connections to board/tabltop (BFC).  BFC tried to break more of that connection with CM2 games, but it has kind of gravitated back to it over the last few updates.

I never thought of it like that, but that's a great way to describe it. It really does feel like a more flexible ASL sort of game.

For me the big -- maybe only -- advantage CMx2 has over Graviteam Tactics is CM's far better modeling of infantry combat. I'm currently slogging my way through a scenario in Red Thunder that's primarily infantry-focused. It's tense and difficult. The same scenario in GT would be pretty boring and over in under half-an-hour. There just isn't enough nuance or flexibility in commands you can give infantry in GT, and their behavior tends to be highly suicidal, as the game does a poor job at all of modeling morale - at least, I've never really noticed morale effects having an important effect in GT, even though I know the game does track this for different units.

That said, 'slog' is generally the right word for CMx2. GT is far more fluid and up-tempo, and in a good way. The table-top analogy seems right to me. CMx2 still does feel like moving each individual piece on the board. GT feels like a computer simulation.

I love both series and play both constantly. But to be honest, if GT gave us interesting, in-depth infantry combat the way CMx2 does, I'd probably play GT almost exclusively. On so many levels it just feels like the more up-to-date, still evolving game. CMx2 is unfortunately stuck in a rut, with its painfully clunky UI, its lack of dynamic campaigns that seamlessly join the operational and tactical levels.

For whatever reason it feels like I have more options regarding movement in CM. The maps don't feel quite so open.

[RyanE]

I think what you are seeing is the lack of locations in GTMF and the extreme flexibility for locations in CM games.  In CM, you can change up locations and there are a lot of different terrain types.  It also has a much larger OOB variety.  With the new GT engine, you have a limited number of maps.  Granted, they are large maps, but the terrain variety just isn't there.

CM is built to be very broad with each game engine.  GT builds its games to be pretty deep around a specific battle area and time.

[Bletchley_Geek]

For me the big -- maybe only -- advantage CMx2 has over Graviteam Tactics is CM's far better modeling of infantry combat. I'm currently slogging my way through a scenario in Red Thunder that's primarily infantry-focused. It's tense and difficult. The same scenario in GT would be pretty boring and over in under half-an-hour. There just isn't enough nuance or flexibility in commands you can give infantry in GT, and their behavior tends to be highly suicidal, as the game does a poor job at all of modeling morale - at least, I've never really noticed morale effects having an important effect in GT, even though I know the game does track this for different units.

That said, 'slog' is generally the right word for CMx2. GT is far more fluid and up-tempo, and in a good way. The table-top analogy seems right to me. CMx2 still does feel like moving each individual piece on the board. GT feels like a computer simulation.

I love both series and play both constantly. But to be honest, if GT gave us interesting, in-depth infantry combat the way CMx2 does, I'd probably play GT almost exclusively. On so many levels it just feels like the more up-to-date, still evolving game. CMx2 is unfortunately stuck in a rut, with its painfully clunky UI, its lack of dynamic campaigns that seamlessly join the operational and tactical levels.

That sums it up pretty well, to be honest. The main issue with CMx2 is that if you want to have a platoon to move towards a tree line to secure the flank of a force advancing on a town, and you want to make sure that that platoon reacts to enemy contact in anything resembling intelligent behaviour you need to 1) break down the squads in the platoon, 2) combine move and "hunt" commands for each element, moving by bounds and 3) update those commands in a timely fashion as the platoon progresses towards the objective, every single turn if you play in WEGO. Hence that "moving the pieces" feeling - you actually are! Your units very often zombies that do fun stuff like running towards an imaginary finish line when shoot at. And yes, like in the heartbreaking end of Gallipolli, they don't make it across. It is something best to play with the lowest motivation and experience settings: your troops actually react in believable ways to incoming fire, engaging in self-preserving behaviour. That there aren't anything like SOPs, either "realistic" as in TacOps  or, "impressionistic" as in PanzerCommand, or anything like support for formations at our disposal to play CMx2, after all these years... I don't know what to think about that at this stage. I know very well what Steve has to say about that, and to be honest, as with many other things in CMx2 I can't help thinking that "if it is so hard to do X because of Y, probably it is because you are just doing Y wrong". For instance, fixing the SOP to the experience and motivation levels - as CMx2 seems to do - means that sometimes your guys won't behave in a sensible manner unless a 155mm round goes off like 8 meters away from them, hosing down half the squad. On the Graviteam games there's nothing like the micro behaviours we see in CMx2 - and allow to criticise it as well, let's be fair here. You see your guys walking towards the enemy, sometimes running, sometimes kneeling and firing, sometimes going prone, but there does not seem to be a "cause and effect" relation between those animations and what actually is happening. That sincerely looks a bit like the Scourge of War approach: the animation is just a placeholder for some rolls on a table, meant to give some "crunchy texture" to the game like the fancy sprite packs DLC do in Paradox games. Don't take me wrong - faking some part of the simulation of course needs to happen, but that it happens at the very extremely low level of platoons engaging platoons is a bit distracting. I honestly prefer something like the JTS platoon level games - they don't create an expectation of being truth-to-nature which just isn't there. Graviteam games win in the immersion department - and they win big - because they follow a data driven approach to map making. They take topographic data and generate like 90% of their maps based on the digital model of elevations, etc. Probably they use some sort of procedural generation algorithm for the vegetation, towns and fields. So their scenarios look like the real thing, because they're the closest thing you can get to the real thing on a computer. On CMx2, to obtain anything like that, requires a lot of man hours of careful work preparing overlays and then manually keying in the terrain features. Again, after so many years, data input on the scenario editor is very primitive. The dynamic operational layer is good, but since the infantry game is so flimsy, many battles are just a bore. Is there a way to auto-resolve them? I had one where a battery of infantry guns pounded for half an hour a couple infantry platoons... do I really have to go through that? Maybe yes, that's guaranteed to produce more realistic outcomes than any "design for effect" trickery.

With Graviteam I have the impression that I am dealing with an alien from Star Control 2. Mistifying most of the time, enlightening hardly ever. Asking simple questions such as "how can I implement fire and movement in your game?" results in the answer "no, you want to do too much micromanagement, and on top of that, war is chaotic, tactics were never actually used and xljswi opjupjdf poas dfj';j dfjw eo uwekn mjSD FKL DFK KLJW DFleli", where a "sorry, but our current engine abstracts many aspects of infantry fighting in World War 2, we think those abstractions adequately account for fire and movement, we note your objections and we'll study them but this is our game and our call" would have been perfectly fine.

As an aside, sometimes I can't help thinking that knowing too much on a specific topic detracts from having fun with wargames and simulators. That's quite a curse to be afflicted with :(

[ComradeP]

I've never played CMx2, so I can't comment on that.

Graviteam Tactics handles immersion well in terms of the terrain and the look and "feel" of your forces, as has been noted, but then breaks it in several ways.

I haven't played GT in a while, but have clocked a fair number of hours earlier in the year. I haven't played the early versions before the name change. The interface is quite functional in the latest versions, I expected it to be much worse when I started playing.

The infantry combat model isn't very complicated and though you can draw lines or areas to determine the stop line and facing of your troops after movement, their actual movement is still confusing sometimes.

The movement planning ignores terrain. I have no desire to try and remember how often half of my squad ended up getting shot because the other half, including the MG's didn't have LOS to them or the enemy. As mentioned by Bletchley Geek, the movement animations may or may not have have anything to do with what is actually happening. As the stock and DLC campaigns tend to feature gently rolling terrain, this can quickly become a problem. It also allows you to murder the AI in sadistic ways by digging in on the other side of such a slight rise and setting the fire arc to a limited area. As soon as the AI's infantry crest the hill and walk a few meters, they are butchered.

Spotting features some of the same flaws as Panzer Command and, based on comments elsewhere CMx2, where you can't always "see" what you should be able to see because the way LOS and firing lines are calculated don't use the same visibility data and are a bit wonky.

GT vehicle movement reminded me of the worst bits of CC from time to time, where it could take minutes to get a tank across a ford. For some reason, even if you want a tank to move straight, it tends to turn and will start to move out diagonally at first in GT. This might be due to how the movement system responds to the dynamic map, which might make the movement path calculation complicated.

Victory conditions are often all about capturing map locations, which can lead to silly situations. It's often wise to select the largest battle area possible in the options menu, so the battles cover a substantial part of the operational map, as in many cases you can simply let some fast unit drive straight into the enemy rear and capture flags.

I've fought costly battles where the heroes were not my bloodied but victorious troops, but the battalion/company command and field telephone halftracks capturing flags in the enemy rear. That is quite gamey in a way, but the problem is that you will quite probably lose the battle if you beat the enemy forces but don't capture more locations.

There are rarely more than a few companies involved in a battle, if that, and it's impossible to hold a several kilometre wide front with them. The AI's unit placement also isn't very intelligent, and to make things exponentially worse your own unit placement is usually not very limited.

Penetration data and the visuals of tank combat, both on the AFV models and on the "this is where the vehicle was hit" overlay at the end of the battle are top notch, that has to be mentioned.