I only played the vanilla release for the record, tried both jap and kwan campaigns, but didn't get far into either.
To me it felt like a General game, only made as slow and tedious as possible on purpose. The damage felt much lower than "normal" and the number of times a unit that should die would be damaged to then reinforce and return was just ridiculous. They even boast about it like it was a feature - ie loading screen tips saying that the more damage you deal to the planes the more difficult they are to shot down. Wtf, why would you do such a thing. Then there's units losing efficiency through using exciting abilities like moving, cooldown abilities and so on. Also, a minor point, but the 3d engine was ugly and clunky, adding to the feeling of the game being slow.
See, Panzer General is a simplistic game, but it does a really decent job of portraying ww2 warfare on its scale, combined arms, breakthrough/encirclement with mobile forces, the use of different types of units and all that jazz. Panzer Corps, for all its faults, emulated it rather well. OOB to me felt more like ww1 trench warfare.
It had some decent ideas, like dynamic fronts and cutting units from supplies, but just felt like a pain to slog through. Judging by the number of dlc though, I think it was a big hit for slitherine and thus PC2 looks more like OOB2. Oh well, let's see, but after the travesty of Fantasy General 2 I'm not particularly optimistic.
Interesting. I prefer OoB several times over PC1 (
note that I am not a new to the genre and though I "missed" PG1 I played PG2, PG33D, PG3SE, FG and People General)
. I thought that OoB represented better WW2.
For the controversial rule you describe (less damage when attacking already damaged units, though it only applies vs planes, vs ships and artillery vs ground), I feel it makes for a more realistic game :
- the objective of your air force will be to chase away the enemy airforce, not annihilate it totally (though it is certainly possible in some scenarii),
- In theory, highly damaged ships are effectively dead in the water (attacks at 10% of its strength, and speed becomes 1tile/turn), but it takes an extra effort to sink them definitely (
they are very hard and slow to repair DURING a scenario anyway, so you may ignore them). I say in theory because for ships the "
damage mitigant" is fairly low and I have seen few ships saved by that rule,
- For artillery, it limits the problem of the player artillering everything to death,
Units in general are more resilient, especially as they are keener to retreat in attack or in defense and thus put that one-tile distance with the enemy, but this comes with the rest of the "ruleset" which makes for a better gameplay (imo) than PC1 :
- Units have energy/cohesion, which degrades as they figher or even for some of them as they move in difficult terrain. Low-cohesion units are basically useless, and units don't recover energy very fast. Additionnally, units that repair also lose a lot of energy
- There are overall less enemy units on the map, in PG1 there is typically 3 or 4 times your force in front of you (exception Poland maybe) and by 1943 it looks like a tile out of two except where you start is occupied by a Soviet unit. In OoB you are typically outnumbered 1:2 only,
- Except in
"attack an entrenched position" scenarii (
eg attacking Singapore in the Japanese campaign), the enemy is actually mobilizing all its units except an handful of garrisons from the beginning, not "activating" units as you encounter them as in PC1. It also tries to make you lose, rather than try to just destroy as much units as possible so you run out of steam a few scenarios later in the campaign,
This create a very fun and realistic loop where at the beginning strong forces oppose each other, but once the initial clash is decided you are pushing in front of you low energy and damaged units until you yourself run out of steam/energy (in which case the opponent will be able to rebuild a frontline) or until the opponent manage to bring some reinforcements to hold the line while the survivors R&R. During that period, only a few units would have been destroyed, but objectives will have been taken, and units will have been pushed in an area out of supply or somewhere where they are effectively neutralized. In OoB you pierce the frontline and then exploit. Again , keep in mind that repairing costs cohesion, so unlike in PG it is not something you can do the second you are one tile away from the enemy. In PG, if you pierce the frontline you have another layer of units waiting for you behind it.
Long story short, they play differently, and if you play OoB like you play PG/PC (focus on individual units to destroy them rather than push along the whole line) you will always let your enemy recover, giving you this feeling of playing a WW1 game.
it also creates situations you cannot have "dynamically" in PG, for instance the battle of the Philippines as the Americans, where you try to delay the Japanese as long as possible by "rotating" the troops holding the enemy as you slowly pull-back. In Panzer General, such a scenario would not work, first due to the prohibitive cost for the player of repairing units, but also because in PG you have no interest in creating a second line in defense because whatever you pull from the frontline means that the remaining units have a very high chance of being destroyed outright,
There are also some things it does very well :
- First, the scenario design is extremely good, way better than PG1, and between the side objectives and the "events" mid scenario they remain fresh until the end. I would qualify this statement though because this is not true for some campaigns which are a lot duller (US Marines campaign, Kriegsmarine), but even those campaigns are not worse than the PG1 campaigns.
- Second, it does naval combat well, and manage to capture well both "no carriers battles" and carrier battles. It is incredibly how the game represents well carrier battles : you first have to look for the enemy fleet, but if you allocate to much planes to looking for the enemy fleet you will not be able to strike it hard and fight before everyone is back, and then there is the attack proper, hoping that the "bleep" you see on the map is still the carrier you had detected and not some escort while the carrier escaped somewhere else. Not PERFECT, sure, submarines are terrible and AA defense a bit too efficient, but great,
- Third, it really avoids the PG1 problem with armies fully composed of the best unit of each category (for instance you say you only use Pionere for German infantry, I sure did only Pionere and Alpine troops myself). In PG1, the way they avoided all players running with 8 Königstiger at the end of the game was with the absolutely horrible and hidden "soft cap". In OoB, instead of having 1 slot = 1 unit, each unit costs a different number of "slot token", so eg light artillery cost 2 "ground slots" and heavy artillery 4 "ground slots" - tanks go from 3 slots to 5 slots iirc. In addition, heavy tanks lose a lot more energy in difficult terrain than light and medium tanks do. Prestige price also feel more balanced but YMMV.
There are still a few problems here and there (engineer units, while weak, only cost 2 slots vs 3 for normal infantry, some units are totally useless) but it is a problem only PG3 tried to tackle (fairly well from my point of view : rarity of the units determined its maximum hit points : 8 for prototypes/captured units/super rare units to 15 for base infantry)
- Dynamic frontline and nice supply model, which you know
- All the fluff like "research" between the scenarios, which is not in PG1,
Long story short, I prefer OoB