I struggled for a while this year to come up with something for TANKSgiving. In years’ passed I have done bits on rare WWI armored vehicles, early tanks…you know, the usual awesome stuff. This year for some reason I could not come up with an appropriate topic. Until I found the below picture during some online research.
A NOTE ON THIS AAR:
I used the game Tank Battle: 1944, from Hunted Cow Studios, to write up this piece. It’s a rather intense game of simple, quick, and fluid combat, on a tactical level. Unit scale is not given, but it feels as if infantry are in their own units. The game does seem to indicate, however, that tanks are individual units, which I don’t see them as. Each unit has a maximum strength of 10 (think Panzer General), and once that’s reduced to zero, they’re eliminated. There is no ‘carrying over’ of units from one mission to the next, so there’s no experience, promotions, medals, or anything like that. One must defeat the scenario to continue to the next one.
With that said, let’s get on with it!
What’s the biggest difference that players are going to see with the new FlashPoint Campaigns release?
Without a doubt it will be all the brand new maps. We had a forum member named William who was doing a brilliant job creating new map art and so we just sort of recruited him and added him to the OTS team. We went back and forth a few times on colours and elevation treatments and then he created new renderings of all the maps. This seems to be the first thing people are noticing and the consensus is that they are a distinct step up. Cap’n Darwin (creator of the original map art glyphs) and Mad Russian (who then assembled them into the maps we distributed) manned up admirably and got behind the change. I still hear a bit of a quiver in the Captain’s voice when we Skype about it though…
Other changes include a number of tweaks and improvements to the combat model. Artillery fire is more effective now and that is pretty noticeable. The What’s New document runs to 12 pages with the various changes we made.
Best of all, we have a whole new campaign (Wolves) to play thanks to Mad Russian plus a new standalone “Eyes, Ears and Teeth” scenario which we believe will be a new classic. It’s small, fun and intense like A Time to Dance.
OK, so here’s something more than a screenshot. Tanks on the range at Ft Stewart in 2004.
A screenshot review by Boggit, 21 November 2014
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to field some of the rarely seen specialist Allied vehicles, or scratch built German armoured groups that fought in Normandy? Well now you can. Drawing heavily upon Hobart’s “Funnies” of 79th Armoured Division and the “Ersatz” units created by Major Alfred Becker – a rather unique engineer – for 21st Panzer Division – Battlefront have introduced a vehicle pack that brings new vehicles and weapons into the mix for their Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy game.
The vehicle pack requires the installation of the version 3.0 game engine, which is separately available from Battlefront. V3.0 brings Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy up to the same level of development as Combat Mission: Red Thunder, which provides a lot of improvements. You can check out some of these described in my Red Thunder review here . Continue reading