GMT Combat Commander--ASL Lite???

Glennbo

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I'm sure you could do an ASL design on those maps. And play it solitare.:cheeky:
 

GJK

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I sure hope that they find a better graphic for the satchel charge once they move it from the playtest mock-up graphics to the final version....
 

Aries

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A game of Combat Commander has no strict sequence of play. Each turn is divided into a variable number of Player Turns, each of which may consist of either: the active player expending one or more Fate cards from their hand for their Actions; or passing, which allows the discarding of one or more Fate cards. Players redraw up to their maximum hand size at the end of each of their own Player Turns. Additionally, Reactions may be played by either player at any time, so long as the prerequisite listed is met.

FATE CARDS: Players will take turns playing one or more “Fate” cards from their hands in order to activate their units on the mapboard for various military functions. Each nationality has its own 72-card Fate deck highlighting its historical strengths and weaknesses (lots of Smoke for the US; marksmanship bonuses for Britain; commissar events for the Soviets; broken Italian units will surrender more often; etc.). Each Fate card contains one Action and one Reaction: only one of which may be declared when the card is played. The bottom portion of each Fate card contains an Event, a random hex symbol, and a 2d6 die roll – these can never be ‘played’ from the hand, only ‘revealed’ from the top of the draw pile when a game situation instructs a player to do so.

ACTIONS include: Fire, Move, Advance, Rally, Rout, Artillery Request and Artillery Denied. Each nationality also has a varying number of Command Confusion Actions which act as duds while in hand – these cards are useless except for any possible Reaction on the card. Actions, when played, generally activate a single unit to perform that Action, unless a Leader is activated: in which case it can further activate any or all non-leaders within its Command Radius to perform the same Action. There are 15 different REACTIONS. For example:

# Sustained Fire – Add +2 when firing a Mortar or Machine Gun. If the fire roll is “doubles”, break it.
# Smoke – If a unit with boxed Movement is activated to Move or Advance, place Smoke in or adjacent to its hex.
# Grenades – Add +2 when firing at an adjacent hex.
# Dig In – Place foxholes in a friendly hex.




Hmmm if that isn't Upfront on a Squad Leader board, I am unsure what else it could be :) Looks like they got bored of waiting for Upfront to be put back into circulation and decided to just go a bit further.
 

mkirschenbaum

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I've been following the development of the game on CSW. I'm not impressed. It seems driven by gamey chrome and design for effect.

Here's an example. If you take a shot at an enemy unit only to find the LOS was blocked, your own firing unit breaks. This is supposedly due to "friendly fire" and boosters of the game celebrate it as exactly the kind of thing that can happen "in real life." Yet here you're taking the kind of event that should be sudden, shocking, and unpredictable and yoking it to a specific mechanical situation (LOS check) that one can always avoid either by having a good eye for LOS or simply not taking risky shots. Realistic? Would that it were that simple in real life.

When pressed a little further, the designer revealed that there was an another motive behind the rule: there was a hole in the game system whereby a unit could take a shot it knew was blocked but use the opportunity it to discard an unwanted card from the player's hand. Rather than delve into the system itself and create a fix for this sleeze from the inside out the solution was to break any squad that takes such a shot and then call it friendly fire. Presto, instant chrome. See how realistic Combat Commander is? It even accounts for friendly fire!

I have no problems with a lite, cartoonish WWII game. But this strikes me as an example of what's good in a game is not being new and what's new not being very good.
 

Gunner Scott

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mkirschenbaum said:
I have no problems with a lite, cartoonish WWII game. But this strikes me as an example of what's good in a game is not being new and what's new not being very good.
Hell, if you want light and cartoonish tactical level gaming, theres always ATS..............:cheeky:


Scott
 

Fred Ingram

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GJK said:
I sure hope that they find a better graphic for the satchel charge once they move it from the playtest mock-up graphics to the final version....
Yes - it l ooks like one of the game pieces from Stratego :eek:
 

L'Emperor

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mkirschenbaum said:
It seems driven by gamey chrome and design for effect.
What you describe is NOT "design for effect", it's "lazy design"! I think "design for effect" is a good thing, preventing players from doing something ahistorical but "within the capabilties" of a unit. If you model rare events in your design, they become common.
 
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Aries

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mkirschenbaum said:
I've been following the development of the game on CSW. I'm not impressed. It seems driven by gamey chrome and design for effect.

Here's an example. If you take a shot at an enemy unit only to find the LOS was blocked, your own firing unit breaks. This is supposedly due to "friendly fire" and boosters of the game celebrate it as exactly the kind of thing that can happen "in real life." Yet here you're taking the kind of event that should be sudden, shocking, and unpredictable and yoking it to a specific mechanical situation (LOS check) that one can always avoid either by having a good eye for LOS or simply not taking risky shots. Realistic? Would that it were that simple in real life.

When pressed a little further, the designer revealed that there was an another motive behind the rule: there was a hole in the game system whereby a unit could take a shot it knew was blocked but use the opportunity it to discard an unwanted card from the player's hand. Rather than delve into the system itself and create a fix for this sleeze from the inside out the solution was to break any squad that takes such a shot and then call it friendly fire. Presto, instant chrome. See how realistic Combat Commander is? It even accounts for friendly fire!

I have no problems with a lite, cartoonish WWII game. But this strikes me as an example of what's good in a game is not being new and what's new not being very good.
Well I am interested in the game, but there are limits to my tolerance for design elements meant to fix a problem. The above example sounded kinda lame. I would not be inclined to consider that work around acceptable.
I recall with Upfront, they allowed the Italians to have two LMG cards in a squad when normally it is not allowed. It was done because the Italians in the game basically sucked sufficiently that it was done to lessen that. Not the end of the world in that case.

But games that use cards have to deal with intelligent playability just as much as games with dice.
I recall the Saga system made for rolegaming. It used cards too. The cards were essentially the dice roll. The problem in that design, is if your card in hand "sucked" you merely performed a "pointless action" that allowed you to "play a card" that effectively burned the "lame card" and allowed you to redraw something hopefully better.

"If you take a shot at an enemy unit only to find the LOS was blocked" This sentence should end the same way it would in ASL. Nothing happens as you never had the shot, you basically shot up the wrong real estate (granted, ASL has mechanics to simulate the near miss of rather large kabooms).
 

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The graphics on the links are not the final graphics; they are the playtesting graphics.
 

Pitman

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The thing that has irritated me the most about this game is the blatant and wanton wholesale copying from ASL. If you look at a list of the terrain types, virtually all of them are the exact same terrain type with the exact same name as in ASL. If you look at the game terminology, most of it is stolen directly from ASL, even including units "breaking."

It is a card-based system, so the underlying game engine is not a complete rip-off. However, way too much is lazily copied from ASL to make me happy about it.
 

L'Emperor

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Pitman said:
The thing that has irritated me the most about this game is the blatant and wanton wholesale copying from ASL. If you look at a list of the terrain types, virtually all of them are the exact same terrain type with the exact same name as in ASL. If you look at the game terminology, most of it is stolen directly from ASL, even including units "breaking."

It is a card-based system, so the underlying game engine is not a complete rip-off. However, way too much is lazily copied from ASL to make me happy about it.
I was more suspicous of the counter layout. But I gotta say, MMP / AH does not hold the copyright on 'Open Ground', 'Woods', 'Hills', etc. "Breaking" is a term common to many tactical games.

Still, I wonder if they are going to list ASL in their bibliography.
 

Aries

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Pitman said:
This is not a legal issue, it is an ethical issue.
It's not a legal issue nor an ethical one.

The only thing bothering me, is I didn't think of it myself :)

It's not ASL.

So what if it looks like ASL.

I love ASL, but I am no longer interested in treating ASL like a religion.

And I don't care if the competition out performs ASL any more. As long as I win that's all that matters to me. Sound selfish? (gee maybe because it was).
Call it the "you snooze you lose" rule.
 

L'Emperor

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I actually do not have a big problem with GMT publishing this game. All games, like science, build on the shoulders of giants. As hard as it is to imagine, maybe it will be a better game / simualtion than ASL. As much as I love ASL, it is possible (although the post about out-of-LOS shot would argue against that). In the meantime, I'll keep trying to roll low and keep my healthy, substantial skeptacism in place.

PS, I have no intention of buying this rip-off. ASL is still the best game ever!
 
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