Panzer campaigns--a bit dated?

[76mm]

I enjoy a good East Front game but for whatever reason have not gotten to playing any of the Panzer Campaigns titles. I'm looking at them now, and note that some of them date back to 1999, so have a couple of questions:

1) I have no problem paying $50 for a good game, but am not sure about paying that much for a game that was released 13 years ago. Most game companies reduce the price after several years, so this pricing doea not seem very reasonable--am I missing something here?

2) Is there any benefit to buying one of the later games vs the earlier games? I assume (hope?) that the engine has evolved over the last 13 years, but have these changes been retrofitted to the earlier games?

 

[eastwindrain]

The best deal on HPSSIMS games is with NWS most sell at around $29.99, living in the UK postage is around $6 which works out at around £26 total with games taking about 6 to 8 days to arrive, excellent price and service.

All games are updated eventually to the latest specs although this seems to happen in stages which can be a little bit frustrating, however Windows 7 has increased the tempo recently with talk of behind the scene testing.

Would recommend you buy the game/battle which interest you the most.

I prefer the full campaigns however after playing most over the years the only " UPGRADE " I would like to see is a totally new system with each side selecting AI COMBAT ORDERS. Example highlight Army, Corps, Division or Regt HQ and select attack, defend or retire etc, each turn from the menu, the constant clicking is starting to take it's toll !!!.

Would highly recommend these games.

 

[vsadek]

Try before you buy. You can download a free fully playable demo with one small and one large scenario with variation from John Tiller's site.

Regards

 

[76mm]

Thanks for the responses; I've downloaded and modded the demo. The features look pretty good, but the interface is a bit intimidating, so I think I'll read the manual first to see what is what and then give it a spin.

 

[76mm]

A couple of more questions regarding this series. The main thing I want to use these games for is to create my own fictional scenarios, so:

1) For games set during Winter, is it possible to "summerize" the maps? Presumably this would not only involve modding how the maps look, but also movement costs, etc. I noticed that some screenshots for the Budapest '45 (Jan 45) game seem to show a green (summer?) map, and the Korsun '44 map as well, so I wanted to find out if this is generally possible.

2) Is it possible to import an OOB created in one game into a scenarios using a map from another game? In other words, could I used the Smolensk '41 map but an OOB created in Minsk '44?

 

[Sgt_Rock]

Yes, in the Scenario Editor you can pick the Current, Best and Worst GROUND conditions. The conditions are:

Normal, Soft, Mud, Snow and the ground also can Freeze under certain conditions.

In each PDT file there are movement percentages for each type of unit and under those listings you will find the penalty for each type. Obviously Normal is 100 percent. Meaning normal movement. Here is a sample line:

Movement Modifier: Tracked
Normal Conditions: 100% Soft Conditions: 130% Mud Conditions: 150%
Snow Conditions: 130% Frozen Conditions: 130%

There are a lot of values in the game. Most can be customized too. The combat routine cannot be changed of course but all of the unit values can for the most part as can terrain costs.

I highly recommend the games. The best battalion level game on the market.

My favorites:

Bulge '44
Stalingrad '42
Kharkov '43
Tunisia '43
Salerno '43

No, you cannot use maps from other games. They are coded specifically in the game engine and cannot be ported over. You can move the OB files over along with the associated folders and thus for instance you could have the British and German units of El Alamein in Russia. Not sure why someone what want to do that but it is possible.

I did use the France '40 game to build a "After the Bulge" breakout scenario. It was not very good and needed refinement.

Other ideas I have had - use the full map for the Modern Battles series in Germany and bring over an OB based on a final drive on Berlin. I would use formations from the East and West Front games to build it. I would need to change the values for the sides if they were vastly different. Most of the time the units are standard meaning that if you have a US battalion of 1944 in one game it fires with the same values in another game of the same year/similar time period.

There are some exceptions ...

 

[76mm]

You can move the OB files over along with the associated folders and thus for instance you could have the British and German units of El Alamein in Russia. Not sure why someone what want to do that but it is possible.

Great, thanks for the info. This is what I wanted to find out if I could do; not sure that I will want to but it is good to know that I could use any of the Russian maps with any of the Russian OOBs. Looks like the Russian maps for the various games cover a large part of European Russia.

For the ground conditions, I guess I could modify the ground conditions in the scenario editor and then mod the map art, and PRESTO, a summer map, correct? I've seen various map mods but not many that change winter to summer and vice-versa--do such mods exist?

 

[76mm]

Answering my own question--it looks like every game (or at least the demo) comes with map art for all seasons, and when you change ground conditions in the scenario editor, the appropriate season's map art is applied aautomatically.

 

[eastwindrain]

All the games have weather tiles for the four seasons, and the weather will change during most campaign games, remember well when it first happened as I thought I'd pressed the wrong button.
Also most East Front games have different scenarios with different ground conditions, plus scenarios and campaign mods set for earlier or latter dates.
I.E. Red Blood White Snow for Kursk and Decision in Russia for Korsun to name a few.