Alright gentlemen, I spent two hours playing the beta (which includes six missions) and I am ready to share my findings.
As you can see from the videos above, this is a small scale TBS in WWII setting, more precisely it depicts British & Canadian troops fighting in Normandy during the Operation Overlord.
Overview:
- You control following unit types
1) Infantry: usually 3-4 men teams with various loadouts consisting of rifles, rifles + SMGs, rifles + LMG, rifles + AT weapon (PIAT, Panzerschreck), most infantry have also grenades and some have smoke grenades
2) AT guns: immobile once deployed, can be packed up and moved (slowly)
3) Vehicles: this includes tanks (Tetrarch, Stuart, Sherman, Pz. III and IV), tank destroyers (StuG, Archer), transporters (Bren Carrier, Sd.Kfz. 251, which comes bot in straight APC variant as well as a gun platform variant)
- The mission objectives are a standard fair (take and or defend certain points on the map, defeat the enemy etc)
- Important trait of the game is the moral system though, which is generally more important than the mission objectives
1) Both sides have a pool of morale points, which are removed as each side suffers loses (units cost a different amount of points depending on their worth, ie a tank costs several points, infantry units cost 1-2)
2) If one of the sides loses all morale points, it automatically loses the fight, this has considerable impact on gameplay and AI behaviour
Gameplay:
- Combat is immensely lethal, infantry units are very often wiped out in a single attack from another infantry unit or a vehicle, MGs and explosions can also sometimes suppress survivors (ie they miss the next turn)
- There is no overwatch, however the more a unit (both infantry and vehicles) moves in its turn, the bigger the accuracy penalty it gets, so moving recklessly is generally a suicide (especially for the infantry), when advancing, it is generally good to move slowly (so you can fire accurately if you spot enemy) and use smoke if you need to rush through enemy LoS)
- Infantry can occupy buildings (extra cover from small arms, but a death trap if enemy throws grenades or fires HE shells at you) and ride on top of pretty much any vehicles (ie even tanks can act like transports)
- Open topped vehicles can be killed by infantry grenades, otherwise they seem immune to all non-AT weapons
- Vehicles have fairly complex control scheme
1) You can control hull and turret separately, same goes for weapons (ie. hull/pintle MGs can be fired on different targets from the main gun/coax)
2) Crews can open hatches for better FoV (I guess they can then be shot, though I haven’t seen that happening – might not be implemented yet) and carry out repairs/replace killed crew members
3) All vehicles have armour values for each side, penetrating hits can both kill individual crew members and damage subsystems (engines, tracks etc), crew can also get stunned in some cases (the same thing as pinning for inf), critical hits can sometime blow up tanks in one hit (lighter vehicles like half-tracks usually get knocked out with single penetration), but normally a tank can take several penetrations
4) Crew can bail out on your orders (this is extremely important, since if you bail out before tank gets destroyed, you don’t suffer full loss of morale points, see bellow), AI crews bail out quite often when their vehicles get damaged, crews than act as infantry
5) Ammo types are selected automatically depending on target (ie AP for vehicles, HE + coax for inf)
- Tanks and StuGs have fairly strong front armour, so you get the classic rushes to get on their sides (obviously works really well against StuGs, since they have to pivot their hull all the time and that fucks their accuracy), fast moving vehicles also get bonus to evasion of enemy fire
- There is some visible damage on vehicles, especially Pz IVs and StuGs tend to lose their side skirts after getting hit from the side
- AT guns seem to work quite weird as targets (shots seem to target the gun itself rather than the crew) so they are IMO tougher than they should be
- Overall, since the suffering loses if both very easy and dangerous, it encourages conservative gameplay from both sides
- There is also a simple stealth system, units in cover remain invisble to the enemy until their either fire, or the enemy comes too close - this is usefull for setting up ambushes durring the defence missions (ie you have incentive to let the enemy close in as much as possible before opening fire)
AI:
- AI seems well adapted to the morale point system and focusses on force protection quite a bit, even when on the offensive the units don’t just rush you blindly and even retreat instead of firing, if their position doesn’t seem good enough, crews bail out of damaged vehicles instead of firing to the end, all in the effort to protect the morale
- AI units (especially vehicles) are fairly good in using cover and avoiding LoS of your heavy weapons. I was quite impressed when a damaged Pz IV actively moved behind another wrecked tank and then adjusted its position slightly when I tried to get a shot at it with my own tank, in the end I had to bring another tank from the other side to get it.
- AI can also use smoke grenades (though not many units seem to have them)
- I have seen enemy MG squads firing at Bren carriers which had no effect, buttoning was a legit tactic of course, so hopefully some effects will be implemented later, otherwise this seems as a mistake
There seem to be several tiers of enemy troops as well, there are Osttruppen (ie shitty mooks), regular Wehrmacht and I guess that SS will be a thing too in the full game. Brits have paratroopers and regular inf (paras have smoke grenades and are immune to pinning) in the beta, again I guess that some more stuff might be introduced in the full game.
All in all, this is incline and I will definitely get this on release. It is not a super realistic strategy game/simulation-type thingy, however it does play like a fairly complex board game, the AI is not brain dead and I had plenty of fun.
Personally I would like to see some core unit management with RPG elements in-between the mission, though even without such features this looks pretty good.
Player can crew abandoned guns, but for example when brit unit captures 50mm PAK its barks suddenly are spoken in German.
