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TBS Panzer Corps 2

Hobo Elf

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Oh, just remembered I wanted to post some broader impressions about the game after I crawled to the end of the campaign. But the thread, unsurprisingly, died so I forgot.

Anyway, I see they're doing Civ VI with this and the super duper premium edition will cover this dlc that was, all by accident I'm sure, split in two and another 24 will follow. How slitherine of them.

Never pre-order DLC when you don't even know what it'll be like. I've seen quite a few people disgruntled with their choice in purchasing the Field Marshal edition now that they saw that the first one is the Spanish Civil War.
I am happy to see spanish civil war and more obscure battles instead of same ones we always get. Seems like no matter what they choose people will complain though. One reason they said they wanted to do spanish civil war despite wanting to try and do new battles was in order to try and differentiate many types of infantry units and add that into the game. For example you will have militias, mine laying/trap laying units, and mixed units with trained soldiers mixed with untrained soldiers and then the overseas militia types who were attracted to that war. But it may allow there to be partisan and security units later in the war since they have some base for doing it here.
Some people always want the same shit for familiarity, some people are new and haven't been playing the classics for the past 30 years and just want to experience the big battles for the first time in a game. I agree that more niche battles are cool for long term fans, but I understand why they are niche. I'm waiting for the Finland DLC since that's what I'm most interested in.
 

rezaf

Cipher
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
650
I'm fine with more obscure conflicts getting more focus - I even did a SCW unit pack for PC1 a long time ago, with all those more or less obscure biplanes, their self-made tank contraptions and the italian and german support units - but I'm not sure "conflicts" like the saar offensive or czecheslovakia can make for a good DLC.
From what I understand, the fighting was pretty low-key, whilst these games are about decisiveness and defeating units en masse.
And in the spanish civil war, german ground forces were hardly a thing to begin with, were they?
I'd rather see this as an expandalone like Afrika Corps or Soviet Corps for PzC1, where you can play as the republicans or as the nationalists.

Besides, even PzC1 already had a bit of a problem with it's huge year-by-year DLCs, because they had to artifically limit XP gain so you don't end up with a corps full of 5 star XP units before the invasion of france ever began, I wonder how they'll handle this if even smaller skirmishes get their own DLC.
Well, maybe you can't actually transfer the units, but to me, that's like the most important meta-feature of the entire game...
 
Joined
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Messages
2,930
I'm fine with more obscure conflicts getting more focus - I even did a SCW unit pack for PC1 a long time ago, with all those more or less obscure biplanes, their self-made tank contraptions and the italian and german support units - but I'm not sure "conflicts" like the saar offensive or czecheslovakia can make for a good DLC.
From what I understand, the fighting was pretty low-key, whilst these games are about decisiveness and defeating units en masse.
And in the spanish civil war, german ground forces were hardly a thing to begin with, were they?
I'd rather see this as an expandalone like Afrika Corps or Soviet Corps for PzC1, where you can play as the republicans or as the nationalists.

Besides, even PzC1 already had a bit of a problem with it's huge year-by-year DLCs, because they had to artifically limit XP gain so you don't end up with a corps full of 5 star XP units before the invasion of france ever began, I wonder how they'll handle this if even smaller skirmishes get their own DLC.
Well, maybe you can't actually transfer the units, but to me, that's like the most important meta-feature of the entire game...

There are no German Infantry units, all infantry are under computer control as your allied nationalists. You play the condor legion and have to help your allies by softening up the targets using artillery, air and Armour (also AA, and Anti-Tank). You can give generic orders to your computer controlled allied troops such as "attack nearest objective hex" or "defend nearest objective hex" or "hold". You also help ferry the ground units across from Africa in the opening scenario.

The turn order goes Condor Legion (human player), then Nationalist Allied units, then computer controlled republican forces. Any enemy units you suppress with artillery or bombing during your turn remain suppressed when your allies take their turn so that they can take advantage of any help you provided with your artillery and bombing.

There is one way to directly control some Infantry units and its by spending prestige points on Italian units as auxiliary at the start of the scenario . In each scenario you are allowed a few Auxiliary units from the Italian CTV (Corpo Truppe Volontarie), and they have infantry units availible to purchase (along with many other types of units). The only thing is Auxiliary units do not gain experience and do not travel with you from scenario to scenario so you have to to decide if its worth the points to spend to have the extra units (it usually is IMO). As the Germans there are no infantry units availible to purchase at all. So The campaign is defiantly constructed differently than anything they have done previously and they say they want to continue to try new things like that as long as customers are willing to purchase the product of course.


edit: you gain EXP very slow, much slower than in the 'Main' German campaign, and yes its capped, like a D&D module. You will be able to transfer some of then units through every DLC supposedly.
 
Last edited:

rezaf

Cipher
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
650
Thanks for the detailed description confirming some of my suspicions.
I own the entire PzC grand campaign, but this time around I'll be a late adopter. I just don't like the 3D all that much. Just a matter of personal preference.
 

ValeVelKal

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Aug 24, 2011
Messages
1,605
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 :)
 
Last edited:
Joined
Jul 8, 2006
Messages
2,930
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 :)

I like OoB, But I did get burned out playing the German campaign when I got to the large battles in Russia. They just take so long, and there are endless enemies. That happens in al iterations of Panzer General Games pretty much though. I do like the mechanic in OoB where 'energy' or 'organization' is tracked and degraded due to attacking, being attacked, going through harsh terrain etc..and can be regained by taken a turn out of the line of battle. It makes you consider reserves. Scenario Design in OoB is usually better than in PC1, or most PG games, so far in PC 2 the main game has poor and generic scenario design but the DLC so far seems to be much improved.

Also fuel and ammo is modeled much better in OoB than in PC IMO, especially PC2 where it hardly matters at all. Panzer Corps 2 Fuel and Ammo system is way too lenient, every unit in supply is fully restored each turn no matter if they moved or are involved in combat or not. Meaning a tank with 6 Ammo can fire 6 times a round and never take a turn off to re-fuel or worry about running out of ammo so long as he is not cut off from supply.

I am trying to think which is my favorite version of all these games, OoB is pretty good honestly, I have like 377 hours of playing it, and I played it before I transferred it to steam too, so I am sure its closer to 500 hours. So Obviously I like it. Pc1 is great because of the modding community it attracted, and the amount of content availible, and I do prefer crisp 2D sprites over 3D...3D hurts my eyes or something after awhile and I feel like there just won't end up being as much modding for PC 2, which is too bad, but maybe that was an actual goal of theirs in order to try and sell more of their own content.

I think PG2 might be my favorite version of these games though.
 
Last edited:

ValeVelKal

Arcane
Joined
Aug 24, 2011
Messages
1,605
I like OoB, But I did get burned out playing the German campaign when I got to the large battles in Russia. They just take so long, and there are endless enemies. That happens in al iterations of Panzer General Games pretty much though. I do like the mechanic in OoB where 'energy' or 'organization' is tracked and degraded due to attacking, being attacked, going through harsh terrain etc..and can be regained by taken a turn out of the line of battle. It makes you consider reserves. Scenario Design in OoB is usually better than in PC1, or most PG games, so far in PC 2 the main game has poor and generic scenario design but the DLC so far seems to be much improved.

Also fuel and ammo is modeled much better in OoB than in PC IMO, especially PC2 where it hardly matters at all. Panzer Corps 2 Fuel and Ammo system is way to lenient, every unit in supply is fully restored each turn no matter if they moved or are involved in combat or not. Meaning A tank with 6 Ammo can fire 6 times a round and never take a turn off to re-fuel or worry about running out of ammo so long as he is not cut off from supply.

I am trying to think which is my favorite version of all these games, OoB is pretty good honestly, I have like 377 hours of playing it, and I played it before I transferred it to steam too, so I am sure its closer to 500 hours. So Obviously I like it. Pc1 is great because of the modding community it attracted, and the amount of content availible, and I do prefer crisp 2D sprites over 3D...3D hurts my eyes or something after awhile and I feel like there just won't end up being as much modding for PC 2, which is too bad, but maybe that was an actual goal of theirs in order to try and sell more of their own content.

I think PG2 might be my favorite version of these games though.

Ah, in OoB I did all the campaigns... except the Soviet and non-AK German one, as I am burned on this from all the games I played representing it (I stopped my German campaign at Barbarossa). The OoB model may be weaker for the big battle in the East. I find it perfect for the war in the Pacific (including vs China) and for the Winter war, and solid in the Desert.

My favorite of the genre are OoB, PG3SE (PG33D is terrible though) and People's General, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Feb 15, 2012
Messages
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I'm perfectly aware of the rationalizations for all the grind in OOB and I don't care much for any of it. Like I said, the numbers game is extremely important for a PG-like and I find OOB really unsatisfying in that regard. PC had a meh numbers game early on (although nowhere near the OOB level), but they've included customization and now everybody's happy. Same with the "energy" system - if you find the necessity of resting a unit because you moved it nice then that's cool. I don't. I do appreciate that the game tried many new things and some of them are really great (like the revamped core slot system or the supply system), but some just make the game a bore.

PG2 did warfare in a way that felt satisfying. You would use the mobile force to punch through enemy lines, harass and encircle and use art and inf to siege victory points. In OOB doing deep thrusts will usually just result in getting cut off and that's it. You just push the front with the enemies retreating and returning full strength time after time. You add the slow and cumbersome 3d engine on top of that and the game becomes a drag. Just let me repeat that I didn't play any dlc nor did I get very far in the vanilla campaigns so if the overall design changes later on then that's fair.

And I never really noticed the huge difference in unit numbers, it seemed completely standard for a General game and definitely not a couple hundred percent difference. Panzer Corps 2 does have a shitty scenario design with literal carpets of ai units that make it look like some retarded nu-civ mod at times and PC1 dlc did sometimes go overboard with defensive missions where you would face ridiculous zerg rushes, but at least the combat resolution is much quicker and smoother there than in OOB.
 
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I'm perfectly aware of the rationalizations for all the grind in OOB and I don't care much for any of it. Like I said, the numbers game is extremely important for a PG-like and I find OOB really unsatisfying in that regard. PC had a meh numbers game early on (although nowhere near the OOB level), but they've included customization and now everybody's happy. Same with the "energy" system - if you find the necessity of resting a unit because you moved it nice then that's cool. I don't. I do appreciate that the game tried many new things and some of them are really great (like the revamped core slot system or the supply system), but some just make the game a bore.

PG2 did warfare in a way that felt satisfying. You would use the mobile force to punch through enemy lines, harass and encircle and use art and inf to siege victory points. In OOB doing deep thrusts will usually just result in getting cut off and that's it. You just push the front with the enemies retreating and returning full strength time after time. You add the slow and cumbersome 3d engine on top of that and the game becomes a drag. Just let me repeat that I didn't play any dlc nor did I get very far in the vanilla campaigns so if the overall design changes later on then that's fair.

And I never really noticed the huge difference in unit numbers, it seemed completely standard for a General game and definitely not a couple hundred percent difference. Panzer Corps 2 does have a shitty scenario design with literal carpets of ai units that make it look like some retarded nu-civ mod at times and PC1 dlc did sometimes go overboard with defensive missions where you would face ridiculous zerg rushes, but at least the combat resolution is much quicker and smoother there than in OOB.

The PC2 main campaign designs were lame. I sort of expected that, and its too bad that its that way and I am not sure why they did not want to release more interesting scenario design in the main campaign, but I do think PC2 won't be defined by the main campaign and instead it will depend on the quality of the grand campaign DLC's.

I really do not like their supply system in the new Pc2 though. Not the encirclement part, but that every unit is completely and totally restored with ammo and fuel at the start of every turn so long as they are in supply. You never worry about running out of Ammo or Fuel, nor do you need to take a turn to replenish supply. They could do so much more with the supply. Have it be more restricted, maybe allow capture of supply depots along the way allowing 'free resupply' turns for units with in 5 hexes or something. Or finding an Ammo dump which gives Artillery in range "extra ordinance" and +2 damage for next attack, allow supply trucks to tag along which give free resupply after turn ends if they are in range etc...

but instead they just give every unit total resupply at end of the turn, making ammo and fuel pointless. Might as well remove them from the game. I don't get it.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Feb 15, 2012
Messages
5,523
Supply in PC2 is completely irrelevant and it feels like it was left in only so that they could implement the negative trait connected to it. The encirclement mechanic is even more broken though, it's firaxis-level arbitrary and, for example, requires extensive house rules to make multiplayer playable. Again, seems like they implemented it just because they wanted to cover the OOB/UOC bases and show those logical game videos with splitting units (which is another absolutely pointless "feature").

And the scenario design in campaign is all sorts of fucked up. The scale is completely schizophrenic, London is much smaller than Stalingrad (did you know, btw, that ww2 strategic bombers had an effective range of couple city blocks?) and then you take the army that was used to siege one city and take over entire Eastern US AND Canada with it.
 

Galdred

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Supply in PC2 is completely irrelevant and it feels like it was left in only so that they could implement the negative trait connected to it. The encirclement mechanic is even more broken though, it's firaxis-level arbitrary and, for example, requires extensive house rules to make multiplayer playable. Again, seems like they implemented it just because they wanted to cover the OOB/UOC bases and show those logical game videos with splitting units (which is another absolutely pointless "feature").

And the scenario design in campaign is all sorts of fucked up. The scale is completely schizophrenic, London is much smaller than Stalingrad (did you know, btw, that ww2 strategic bombers had an effective range of couple city blocks?) and then you take the army that was used to siege one city and take over entire Eastern US AND Canada with it.
Scale being all over the place has been a feature of Panzer General from the beginning.
It has always been an operational game abstracted into a tactical level one, if that makes any sense.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Not really? It was pretty consistent across General games and PC1 with some exceptions. Actually, the only outstanding example I can recall from the top of my head is the UK scenario in PG2 with yuge London suburbs and that's it. PC2 is choke full of ridiculous shit like that. And that's not the only complaint about scenario design in that game, there's way more prosper there, including brilliant ideas like a battle against a boss in the form of a super-bufffed Churchill tank.
 

Raghar

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Well, first bad things about this. It has no replayabliity, no dynamic missions, everything is borrow it from friend, play it once twice and forget it.

Now the positives.
It has beautiful maps, and when these maps would be used in HoI4, it would turn HoI4 into something decent.
They managed to make naval invasion to UK feel fairly realistic, while UK main fleet is doing invasion of Italy, thus thre is only small detachment. It has 3x more ships, they are more experienced, and they have million air that's BETTER than German, at least fighters.

So it's either move in stabilise situation by a flak and kill enemy fighters, and kill enemy navy by naval bombers, or you'd get fucked by UK navy. And then there are UK ground units. The only advantage German have is UK units expected Germans can't be that stupid. Of course I roleplay THE MOST incompetent German CORPS thus I'm invading without any fear from British.

Also They managed to make Britain invasion feel quite right. Britain has 3x more ships, all are more experienced than green German ships, and it has million aircraft with better fighters.

Someone should tell me to protect Tripitz from enemy airforce. But there are some biplanes around, and I'm roleplaying the most incompetent German CORPS thus I send my fighters to kill these swordfish. Tripitz has AA and armor, they should git gut, dodge, and kills some enemy aircraft.

Thus the most incompetent German CORPS killed Brittish navy by naval bombers, and captured south Britain while Tripitz and other ships were moving around coast and bombarded whatever they could find.
 
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have they fixed the encirclemtn mechanics or are they content shitting out dlc for morans?
 
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tree from super duper ultra enterprise marschal edition
Gm3LTbz.png

worse than pc1 kek
more missions though
 

Zboj Lamignat

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have they fixed the encirclemtn mechanics or are they content shitting out dlc for morans?
It's slitherine, duh. Worst part is that it seems they aren't even interested in diversifying the experience and doing what PC1 did. Just went straight ahead to the episodic dlc bs (probably largely to capitalize on morons who bough the super-duper edition the same way Civ6 did).
 

Ol' Willy

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and they have million air that's BETTER than German, at least fighters.
That's the bullshit, by the way. If we look at one-engine fighter losses during the BoB, Germans lost ~600 and Tommies lost more than one thousand - almost two Shitfires for every Bf109. Failure of BoB was not the result of German inferiority in fighters, but of German faulty strategic bombing doctrine. As Wever died, Germany lost its chance to get decent four-engined strategic bomber - namely, Ju89 - and was forced to conduct the bombing of Britain using middle two-engined bombers which were not the best choice for such campaign. Germans tried to implement their Schnellbomber campaign, but He111 and Do17 weren't fast enough and Ju88 gained weight and lost speed because of some questionable decisions at RLM. Also, German decision to switch targets from British airbases to British cities played not the least role.

Speaking of ground forces, Tommies were short of manpower and equipment after the Battle of France; Germans didn't know about this, but the situation was severe. Home Guard was formed which is basically a British version of Volkssturm, weapons were in short supply so some simplified versions of, for example, BREN or SMLE were prepared to be introduced. If Germans weren't so shy and pushed forward at Dunkirk, Britain would have been completely naked to future invasion - as history has shown, the majority of British officers in, for example, post D-Day campaigns were veterans of BEF and would have taken part in the defense of England.

The only real advantage that Tommies had was their superiority in fleet and Germans couldn't do a jack shit about it which led to the cancellation of the invasion. Even that, the rigged 1974 wargame has shown that first German echelon would have landed in southern England without much troubles.
 
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and they have million air that's BETTER than German, at least fighters.
That's the bullshit, by the way. If we look at one-engine fighter losses during the BoB, Germans lost ~600 and Tommies lost more than one thousand - almost two Shitfires for every Bf109. Failure of BoB was not the result of German inferiority in fighters, but of German faulty strategic bombing doctrine. As Wever died, Germany lost its chance to get decent four-engined strategic bomber - namely, Ju89 - and was forced to conduct the bombing of Britain using middle two-engined bombers which were not the best choice for such campaign. Germans tried to implement their Schnellbomber campaign, but He111 and Do17 weren't fast enough and Ju88 gained weight and lost speed because of some questionable decisions at RLM. Also, German decision to switch targets from British airbases to British cities played not the least role.

Speaking of ground forces, Tommies were short of manpower and equipment after the Battle of France; Germans didn't know about this, but the situation was severe. Home Guard was formed which is basically a British version of Volkssturm, weapons were in short supply so some simplified versions of, for example, BREN or SMLE were prepared to be introduced. If Germans weren't so shy and pushed forward at Dunkirk, Britain would have been completely naked to future invasion - as history has shown, the majority of British officers in, for example, post D-Day campaigns were veterans of BEF and would have taken part in the defense of England.

The only real advantage that Tommies had was their superiority in fleet and Germans couldn't do a jack shit about it which led to the cancellation of the invasion. Even that, the rigged 1974 wargame has shown that first German echelon would have landed in southern England without much troubles.
ok wehraboo slavpig xD
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Ok, wtf is wrong with this game?:lol:

I tried playing the first dlc, spanish war. I attack 5str bomber with four 10str fighters, do like 30-40 reloads, each time it survives with with 1str while dealing 2-3str dmg to my fighters in the process.

I then try playing the main campaign, planning to take different routes than first time. In second mission, during enemy turn 2(TWO!)str potato cavalry attacks my 15str pioniere. I literally reload 100 times or more like a sperg because I can't believe what I'm seeing, each single time the combat result is -1/-1.

Does anyone find it OK? Did people want this?
 

Ol' Willy

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Ok, wtf is wrong with this game?:lol:

I tried playing the first dlc, spanish war. I attack 5str bomber with four 10str fighters, do like 30-40 reloads, each time it survives with with 1str while dealing 2-3str dmg to my fighters in the process.

I then try playing the main campaign, planning to take different routes than first time. In second mission, during enemy turn 2(TWO!)str potato cavalry attacks my 15str pioniere. I literally reload 100 times or more like a sperg because I can't believe what I'm seeing, each single time the combat result is -1/-1.

Does anyone find it OK? Did people want this?
Does it have RNG between the reloads or results are always the same?
 

Zboj Lamignat

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I'm not playing on deterministic setting, no. Penultimate diff. Variation doesn't really matter here, but the fact that something like that happens at all.
 
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I'm not playing on deterministic setting, no. Penultimate diff. Variation doesn't really matter here, but the fact that something like that happens at all.
did not like the spanish civil war...all the DLC battles are crazy amount of OP enemy compared to real life, especially some of the smaller battles they chose to simulate like the saars offensive. In the game thousands and of troops and battalions of tanks perish, in real life hardly anything happened I think..but they have to keep it interesting I guess, but I feel like they could do a better job at this instead of throwing waves of enemy troops to 'balance'
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Carpets of enemy units was already there in the base game. Honestly, despite a bit more varies objectives, the overall scenario design is really bad due to unit spam, lack of victory grading, retarded scale changes and stillborn ideas like literal boss units. But it all pales in comparison to the number's game and balance, which is just hilariously bad and makes other questionable general-clones like OOB look perfectly tuned.

I just had another one in the SCW: a battered (10str I believe) inf unit attacked by a bomber, two artillery pieces, full str inf + full str tank. Again, couple dozens of reloads to check, survives every single time. It's amazing how someone looks at PG2 and thinks this is the direction to take. Actually, screw PG2, just look at PC1 which, despite occasional retardation and changes to artillery, was so much better.
 
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Carpets of enemy units was already there in the base game. Honestly, despite a bit more varies objectives, the overall scenario design is really bad due to unit spam, lack of victory grading, retarded scale changes and stillborn ideas like literal boss units. But it all pales in comparison to the number's game and balance, which is just hilariously bad and makes other questionable general-clones like OOB look perfectly tuned.

I just had another one in the SCW: a battered (10str I believe) inf unit attacked by a bomber, two artillery pieces, full str inf + full str tank. Again, couple dozens of reloads to check, survives every single time. It's amazing how someone looks at PG2 and thinks this is the direction to take. Actually, screw PG2, just look at PC1 which, despite occasional retardation and changes to artillery, was so much better.

I agree actually, I think they studio they got to design their DLC scenarios is totally missing the boat, other games like OOB and Strategic Mind have some better ideas. Strategic Mind is almost unplayable though due to the color scheme of the map, not sure WTF they were thinking. I wish somebody could take the best points of all these games and make a truly inclined panzer general clone with some advanced ideas and modern clean graphics, it still really has yet to be done. I still play PG2, but just as a mindless thing to do to wind down; it is not as good as PC1 and certainly not PG1 or 2 either. I actually am okay with the graphics though, but I guess I would prefer a 2d version..but their 3d engine is clean and clear enough it does not bother me...

Strategic Minds 3d engine is god awful eye rape which is too bad, because that game is sort of fun to play..I think..I tried it for like 30 minutes but the graphics were so jarring I had to stop..the graphics are okay I think, its mostly the colors..not entirely sure..

all that being said, I do think the Spanish Civil War DLC is the worst one, the others are slightly better, although i have not played most of 1941 and none of 1942..
 

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