Caltrops - Rants - Turn based tactical combat that doesn't suck?

Forum Overview :: Rants

by Bitter 05/30/2003, 9:32pm PDT

Is there such a thing anymore? Maybe it's just too much of a niche.

I get pretty tired of RTS, especially ones that turn into clickfests. For this reason, I've avoided C&C Generals (though I hear it's okay?), and other similar stuff. I mean, even Age of Empires gets kinda lame -- I get tired of seeing troops do stupid shit and having to group and try and set formations continuously and all that crap. I gave Shogun: Total War a chance, but I found the interface frustrating and my troops appearing to do random stupid shit. I have really enjoyed Total Annihilation in the past, but mostly just setting up weird ass situations and seeing what the enemy AI would do. Sadly, I've pretty much characterized that thing into the ground: blah. C&C Red Alert and associated games are simply crap.

I think I'm more of a control freak and would prefer more of an X-Com, tell every damn unit every step to take kind of outfit rather than suffer through that kind of stuff again. But on the other hand, I'd like to be at least a little abstracted away from that kind of detail, which gets tedious pretty quick. Unless you play with teeny, tiny numbers of units on really small battlefields (like Laser Squad Nemesis (flight test is Thursday, Fabio, maybe after that)), I just get worn out and start doing stupid shit to get the battle over with. I guess I should have tried Fallout Tactics, but I never did and then heard it was a little lame. I did try the Soldiers of Anarchy demo, which fucking sucked.

I would kinda like at least a reasonable sense of realism: no tanks with 40meter ranges on their main cannons or 40km ranges or a complete inability to kill infantry, ever. Restricting it to just ground combat is pretty much okay with me. I think there used to be a line of Something Something Generals -- oh, there is it, Panzer General -- nah, never mind, that looks like ass. Probably SSI would be making it today though, but I guess Ubi Soft bought them up? I played Ground Control and it was sort of okay, but not really right. Oh, I think I made my opinion known about some small WW II-type simulation that is basically along the lines of what I am thinking of: don't remember what that was. It's a step in the right direction, at least.

Things like Mech Commander appeared promising, initially, but the numbers of units you can control well is small and stupid things happen too often to really perservere. I really liked to play Battletech in games shop when I was in high school, though. Man, those were the days (drifting into nerdy bliss) -- some of the older guys had hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of miniatures and maps and shit, it was great.

What would make me happy is something like, say, Close Combat WW-II type stuff that was turn-based with a decent AI (i.e., not a Close Combat product in any way, shape, or form).

I think I'm too picky, but I'm willing to experiment with suggestions. I can probably handle some economic-type activities beforehand, but I'd prefer something more along the lines of: here's 40 points, go ye and buy units and prepare to kick ass. Multiplayer would be okay, but hours and inclinations are such that the single player has to be damn good. Is there anything, anything at all? I'm guessing that that's too small a market.

To summarize (since some stuff is probably contradictory):

Maybe 10-20 squads at a time per side, figure 4 units in a squad for tanks or 8-12 infantry.
control is at squad level and can range from vague (like Close Combat -- go over there, to anal -- move forward two feet, turn turret left 1 degree and shoot sabot to 443.23m)
elements of squads are autonomous and do not do stupid shit
it's turn based, so plenty of time for AI to not do stupid shit
reasonable level of realism, but not necessarily fascist since that can rapidly become unfun -- most important is fucking consistency here. However, I don't want something that's an emplacement or whatever to fall to two infantry guys sharing a spork. I feel like some of the C&C Red Alert 2 stuff was like this.
terrain is important and effects are understandable -- graphics should give indication of things like tree density or conditions of road or whatever. I do *not* want water to be some kind of impassible laser barrier of death, clonk, oh fuck my APC ran into an invisible wall because of this fucking overly large puddle here where someone spilled their Double Gulp of Diet Tab. Christ that bites.
graphics should be reasonable, but I'm not looking for Doom III here -- even something like Operation Flashpoint is more than enough
mostly campaign with not much stupid unit building fluff in between (more like Close Combat or Ground Control, less like Age of Empires or other RTS)
okay for compaigns to carry units through (Close Combat, Homeworld) but preferable is option to use what you brought or go with a 'standard loadout' that assumes you were competent on the last level. I didn't play Homeworld (just the demo), but I understand you had to do a lot of fucking about to ensure you brought every extra paperclip and bottle cap from mission to mission. Gay with a capital Fag. This way the anal get their jollies but even people who are otherwise decent can get through the mission on which they suck to continue the game.
Strong single player, multi-player probably co-op and/or adversarial. I think having a front or war you just join like the online TA stuff like the Boneyard or the way Enemy Engaged (Comanche vs Hokum) did stuff (also that anal F-16 sim in version 4) might be cool. Less pre-packaged and more fluid. Then the economics shit could be handled by the AI from the results of your engagements: fail to protect the factories, less points for you. Succeed in a raid on the bad guy's factory, fewer for him, and so on.
Fog of war stuff should not be fucking Gay Gay Gay. I hate games where your camera position is limited to your FOV. In general, I think having chunks of the screen be black at the beginning of a round is dumb as hell: what, they didn't have maps of Germany? Things like TA or StarCraft suffer here (TA at least had an option to turn this off). Not having exact unit placement information is fine. I'd rather be lied to and have the lies revealed as such as I roll across the battlefield then suddenly hit a corner of my camera bounding box and whirl around -- I think Shogun does this, and it is *really* irritating.
Random generation of maps is pretty much a must, I think, although I might be willing to budge. But hell, Simcity can do it.
Units build experience, and experience is *not* inconsequential. Perhaps there's some personalization -- I kind of dug that in X-Com. "Fuck, they got Captain Spunky? Those bastards!". I'd even tolerate the minor RPG tidbit of having crew people have variable gunnery/piloting/medical skills like Mech Commander. These things obviously saturate at some point.
I do not want new units or tech introduced over the course of the game, probably. That's usually pretty stupid. 'Guess, what, we managed to develop a new laser last week. Yeah, Bob was doodling at lunch and was suddenly like: fucking lasers, that'd be cool. So yeah, we did that on Tuesday. Tomorrow we're thinking maybe a tank with *two* guns, or invisibility.'
I want every turn checkpointed, and the ability to save whenever. By checkpointing, I mean that I want to be able to go back to any previous turn and make different moves from there. I have no problem with this throwing away the results of that particular battle in a campaign or whatever, but sometimes you just get that, 'Christ, what if I'd done that instead of this' moment when the Alien Space Vampires are handing you your ass based on a left turn instead of a right, and not to be able to scratch that itch is Not Good. The anytime save could be an option (like that Hardcore setting for Diablo), but sometimes you just gotta stop playing.

Now it's a design document, oh well. Man, I need to get off my ass and get to work on something. Maybe tomorrow (yeeeeeah) ...

Bitter and Tired.

One of these days I need to get a video for you guys from our Wargaming Lab. So. Fucking. Cool.