A couple of years back Panzer General II appeared, an excellent follow
up to a very successful war/strategy game by SSI. Now Panzer General is
brought into the 3d world, but with a signficant shift in gameplay
style.
The original PG series echoed the early board games, using flat maps
and two dimensional units moving on a hex map grid. But in the new
version, terain has become three dimensional, and objects (towns,
tanks, aircraft) are similarly 3d.
Now the battleground has a realistic feel to it, mingling the action
game sensation, and you can spin the map or zoom in and out, and the
enemy no longer simply appears on hexes, but drives or flies to engage
you, complete with sound effects and dust rising from the tracks or
flames issuing from guns.
The game is not real time, so you make your moves (issue orders) with
your set pieces, and then click the button to take your turn and watch
the battle unfold. Animations, as above, give that real time action
game feeling, but you have the option of turning them off in the
preferences, or bypassing individual ones with a mouse click.
Gameplay
Panzer General Assault portrays World War II in Western Europe
and Africa, offering both individual battle scenarios and campaigns. If
you've always wanted to take a crack at Operation Market Garden (made
famous by the movie, "A Bridge Too Far"), here is your chance. At least
in the historical scenarios you know what you're up against!
The change over the earlier PG series is singificant, and is in the
way the armies are portrayed. The earlier series was unit focused;
Panzer General Assault is leader focused. When you enter a scenario or
campaign, you select leaders to command and then give each one
oversight of a particular unit (and thus a certain kind of equipment.)
You may choose to assign a leader from one branch a unit from a
different branch, but their performance suffers.
Furthermore, the more experience a leader has, the greater the number
of commands he can issue to a unit in a turn. In other words, strategy
now comes into play even before the fighting begins. You may choose a
highly experienced leader, but he will then occupy more "slots" in your
roster. Will you choose more green leaders, or fewer experienced?
Similarly, the units they command vary in quality and ability, and
better units can do more in a turn.
A New Battle System
The battle and command system has also changed and expanded,
granting new tactical depth and also increasing the learning curve. The
basic commands remain (move, shoot, rally, resupply, etc.), but as
leaders gain promotions and increase in rank they can issue a range of
"veteran," commands. These commands in turn vary with each unit.
For example, you can order a mechanized unit to patrol, or tell your
fighter-bombers to seek cloud cover. You can even use your fighters as
"eagle-eye" recon units, and command your fighter-bombers to use their
special tank busting abilities. Veteran Recon orders include the
ability to act as Forward Observer for your artillery, and Veteran
Artillery orders include the ability to Plot and Saturation Plotting,
increasing firepower and effectiveness. The complexity and flexibility
of engagements has increased dramatically in PG Assault.
With the focus shifting to leadership, the campaigns themselves
now follow the careers of the most famous generals. You'll find Patton,
Rommel, Kesselring and Montgomery here, as well as a bunch of others.
Operation Market Garden
I spent three of four hours with a late beta this past weekend, diving
into the Operation Market Garden scenario, as well as trying my hand in
a campaign. A tutorial is included, and the manual guides you through
the movements step by step, a great aid to getting your feet wet. I
found the gameplay involving and interesting, and discovered early on
the importance of recon and intelligence! I found the interface
effective and relatively intuitive.
Single Scenario Interface
As you can see, selecting an individual unit causes the unit
placement on the map to be highlighted in yellow, with your movement
options highlighted in green. For motorized units travel distance is
determined by terrain, ability, damage, leadership, and type of unit.
Air units can travel great distances, obviously.
Command Interface
The screen above shows most of the control interface, which varies
depending on the type of unit selected. In this case I have
paratroopers selected, and my current options are patrol, entrench, or
camouflage.
left Half of Unit Card
Right clicking on a unit brings up the Unit Card. In the case above
I have selected a fighter-bomber unit. The green dots immediately below
the image indicate that this unit has taken no damage. The yellow dots
to the right indicate that the unit has no attack ability or movement
ability left in this turn. If some of the movement and attack dots were
green, that would indicate usability.
The icons at the bottom of the card display the unit's
statistics, and the higher the number, the better the rating. From left
to right are the Hard Attack Rating, then the Defense Rating, Air
Defense Rating, Attack Range Rating, Soft Attack Rating, Air Attack
Rating, Spotting Range, Move, and Ammo Supply.
Those Air-Lift Conundrums
The only puzzle I was left involved the use of paratroopers. For the
life of me I couldn't find a way to get my paratroopers moved the
required distance. The game seems to limit movement to 18 hexes, and
that simply isn't enough distance to get from the base camp to
appropriate positions across the Rhine. I didn't read the manual
exhaustively so I may be missing something on this one.
While in the game you can also select a strategy map view. If you
have "fog of war" turned on you won't gain any information that you
shouldn't have, like the position of hidden German units or units
occupying towns where you don't have any troops or Intel.
One example of careful thinking in interface design appears
when you move to target an enemy unit. A cursor appears over the
target, with numbers on both the left and right side.
Attack Reticle
The number at the left represents estimated friendly losses; the
number on the right indicates estimated enemy losses. The figure is not
guaranteed, and can be altered by special abilities or unknown factors.
After the attack battle results are indicated for both sides. This
simple method gives you a quick way of assessing risk factors vs
potential benefit.
Naturally, Panzer General 3d Assault has multiplayer abilities,
and up to four people can play over a LAN, via TCP/IP or using the
Mplayer service. Panzer General 3d Assault has already gone gold and
will soon be on a shelf near you!
