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Close Combat clones list and questions

Sandor

Novice
Joined
Aug 23, 2019
Messages
25
Question about a couple RTS tactical games
For both the Sudden Strike series and Stalingrad from 2005, can units take cover in buildings, is terrain height calculated in LOS and trajectories and are there smoke launchers etc.?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/356260/Stalingrad/

Are there any CC clones in other then WW2 settings as well?

For a list of CC clones I've found, any missing?:
Real time:
Armored Brigade (really amazing)
Firefight (free)
Graviteam Tactics, Operation Star(great)
Steel Division ?
Wargame (modern, can enter buildings, can only find it on Game
GI Combat

Turn based:
Combat Mission series
Theater of war
 

ValeVelKal

Arcane
Joined
Aug 24, 2011
Messages
1,604
Question about a couple RTS tactical games
For both the Sudden Strike series and Stalingrad from 2005, can units take cover in buildings, is terrain height calculated in LOS and trajectories and are there smoke launchers etc.?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/356260/Stalingrad/

Are there any CC clones in other then WW2 settings as well?

For a list of CC clones I've found, any missing?:
Real time:
Armored Brigade (really amazing)
Firefight (free)
Graviteam Tactics, Operation Star(great)
Steel Division ?
Wargame (modern, can enter buildings, can only find it on Game
GI Combat

Turn based:
Combat Mission series
Theater of war

Most of those games are not clones of Close Combat.

So
- Sudden Strike and Blitzkrieg
Very casual version of Close Combat, with no suppression and no morale, and armors ruling the battlefield. No calculation of terrain height. No Smoke Launcher. All units have short range. I like to say that their range is around 8 "tanks" away.
Blitzkrieg 1 also has infinite infantry : if your infantry squad has at least 1 dude left, then you can "repair" it with more infantry. It also has a bug (easy to patch, see below) where buildings block LOS but NOT shoots, provided you manage to see the target.
Blitzkrieg is still fun (and a lot more fun than Sudden Strike in my opinion), it is just super casual - see it as the Panzer General of RT WW2 combat :)

- Stalingrad is using the Blitzkrieg engine, but it corrects the "shoot through building" bugs (you can use one of the .ini file of Stalingrad to correct Blitkrieg), units still have short range but it is improved, and there is no more infinite infantry. The game is much harder. I would recommand it but still not Close Combat

- The Blitzkrieg engine was also used for "Mission Barbarossa" and "Mission Kursk" which now have realistic range, huge maps, realistic infantry-to-armor ratio, but iirc still the "shoot through buildings" bug (which can be corrected likewise). I see to remember a lot of CTD in the last missions of Barbarossa

- Since we are there, the Blitzkrieg engine also generated :
WWI : The Great War. Utterly terrible, and not "historical"
Cuban Missile Crisis I and II, which happens of course in the 60ies. Pro is that now there is a strategic map for each chapter of the campaign, with random battle. Con is that said random battles happen on tiny maps that are always more or less the same, and that the range is extra-short like in the original blitzkrieg. Only if you really want to play it.
Talvisota and Operation North": Never managed to put my hands on it



Now we are done with the Blitzkrieg clone, let's move to the other games :

Theater of War is not a close combat clone. It is NOT turn-based, and most scenario focus way more on armor than on infantry. I mean, you will have a LOT of infantry, that you will be able to micromanage in a stupidly detailed way "take the grenade. Take the rifle from your dead comrades. Move 50m and launch the grenade on that tank" but in reality in 90% of the scenariis tanks will decide who win and who loses due to the design of the maps (open country, very very few buildings). Tank combat is realistic, with individual components that can be damaged, several of shells, penetration chances depending on the angle, etc.
Theater of War is not a great game IMO, but still interesting for various reasons : it has a Polish 1939 campaign and a French 1940 campaign. TOW II has an Italian campaign. TOW III is about Korea and I did not play it much. TOW2:Africa has this annoying feature where the game pauses every time one of your soldier dies, which obviously happens a lot and it is INCREDIBLY frustrating. I remember it was fixed in TOW2:Kursk though.
No strategic layer.

Graviteam Tactics // Operation Star and its prequel Achtung Panzer + all the other spin-off I did not play (Tunisia for instance) are basically Theater of War that remove a bit of the tedious micromanagement but add a strategic layer. They are even more focused on tanks than Theater of War though.

In between the Theater of War and the Blitzkrieg sub-genre, you missed Men of War. It is fairly well-known, but it is a highly scenarized simplified tactical combat where infantry plays a real role and can be micromanaged. Ranges are fairly unrealistic but you may like it.

Wargame (European Escalation / AirLand Battle / Red Dragon) are outstanding games with huge map, realistic range and line of sight. Units can only "enter" buildings in AirLand Battle and Red Dragon, and the scale is pretty high so infantry combat while very important to the game is simplified to each squads having a chance to inflict damage to the other squad depending on weapons / where they are / suppressions / etc - you don't see the individual soldiers running for cover. I would not call it a clone of Close Combat.
EE has a linear campaign but it is a great one (I fondly remember one of the missions where you play the French trying to defend the Plateau d'Albion, where the nuclear Force de Frappe is located, so France can launch its ICBM toward Soviet Union). The game includes France UK West Germany USA vs East Germany Poland CSSR and USSR. AirLand Battle add Sweden / Norway and Denmark, a great dynamic campaign but sadly the battles within that campaigns are poorly designed ("spawning zones" in range of each other ^^). Red Dragon add both Koreas, Japan and China (+Canada & ANZAC), the dynamic campaigns are IMO just as good as AirLand battles but the battles are well designed.
Lots and lots of smoke since you seem to like smoke.

Steel Division I & II is, if I simplify to the extreme, Wargame in WW2. I haven't played SD2, but SD1 campaign is not dynamic. Most people who played both (including me) consider SD inferior to Wargame, but it is also a question of whether you dig modern warfare


Armored Brigade is a Cold War combat game that smartly replaced its counters by nice looking units, but deep down the mechanic is really tabletop. Solid but with a bad interface. I would not call it a Close Combat clone, typically infantry management is simplified but yes, it is a great game.

Flashpoint Campaign is the Armored Brigade of people that are OK to keep playing with tabletop counters (and a terrible UI). If you liked Armored Brigade, you may like it but we stray even further away from Close Combat.

Firefight is indeed a clone... that I was going to do an AAR about. There are really two versions : the old versions allow you to take a bazillion country in a fully dynamic (with random missions only) campaigns. The new version has only 9 maps and a set of scenario, but these are really great IMO. Soliders are tracked individually, morale and smoke is a thing, and AI will make you suffer. I recommand it.

Combat Mission... well I never played it. Shame on me I know. Same with GI Combat
 
Last edited:

jebsmoker

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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In I helped put crap in Monomyth
firefight and armored brigade are the only real close combat clones on your list. graivteam tactics is basically combat mission, but much more detailed. gi combat is also like combat mission, but it's.. not very good. i remember playing the demo and being wholly unimpressed.
 

hoothoot

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Messages
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if Firefight had an exp system and some other more fleshed out mechanics I would probably not play any other games. Love advancing on tree lines in that game and then a shot splatters one your guys and like 50 people hit the deck as all hell breaks loose.
Or slowly pushing a hill with mortar support so one your guys will get enough courage to nade the AT position. Finally a nade destroys the gun and you immediately set your tanks to storm the hill, running over people or point blank killing them with the mg as your previously harassed squads start to hose the enemies in the back. Never gets old.

Also has a radio mechanic where if you go to far from your commander (who you can name and who can die, usually to random shit like HE artillery or mortar rounds) they will lose contact until you advance.
 

Burning Bridges

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As far as I know, you can either play Close Combat (2, 3 and 5) or enter a world of shit.

I personally like CC 2 most.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
As far as I know, you can either play Close Combat (2, 3 and 5) or enter a world of shit.

I personally like CC 2 most.
Last Stand Arnhem is pretty much improved CC2.

CC3 I hate with passion: too squishy infantry, fucked up simplified force organisation and harebrained attempt to try to cover whole eastern front in single campaign pretty much ruin it.
 

Burning Bridges

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CC3 is fine at first but quickly gets boring. I agree, it cannot hold a candle against CC2 which was probably the all time pinnacle of the series.

I think the reason is that in CC2 every battle is perfectly matched to the others (at least in the early stage) and it all feels like an affair on a knife's edge. Whereas CC3 is just a rushed game, it feels mostly just like increasingly imbalanced bloodbaths.

And btw, CC2 is also huge and basically three games in one. I must admit I completed only the campaigns in Eindhoven and Nijmegen and it took weeks. I never completed Arnhem and didnt even bother about the Grand Campaign.
 
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https://www.matrixgames.com/game/panzer-command-ostfront

This one, I used to like it. Not sure I would now, it might be too old. But at the time I liked it better than combat mission because you moved the tanks by sections (leaders) instead of individual units, infantry too. The rules were modeled after a tactical miniature set of war-game rules you could look up and not physics based, which I actually liked.

It was wego, both sides set orders for like 60 seconds or something maybe 2 minutes and then it played out, repeat. You played designed campaigns (liked operation winterstorm) and had group of men/tanks who gained exp and medals and you could sometimes gain points to buy more equipment. it also could build really long random campaigns you could drag a company or brigade through. But I have not played it in like 7 or 8 years, don't even know if it will work on windows 10. They are selling it though..so
 

Trash

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Nothing really ever came close to CC. Firefight is probably the best of the bunch. I prefer the older one as it had limetless maps but the new version looks nicer and plays better on a limited amount of maps. Nothing too deep but both versions are fun for a bit.

The CC games unfortunately had one mayor fault and that is poor AI. Especially the AI for vehicles is a disaster but it also seems to lack a cohesive strategical one. Every version of the games suffer from this, including the newer remakes/versions/cashgrabs. Still, the games can be fun as hell. I played them to death back in the day. My personal favourite is CC3 with the GroBDeutschland mod. It actually gives you one of the more challenging campaigns and is a meatgrinder.
 

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