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