A comment posted below this recent piece opened my eyes to the wonderful world of Armoured Commander 2 modding. Not that you’d know it from perusing AC2’s Steam page or forum (the modders share their wares via Discord) but Sudasana’s tiny (in terms of HD footprint) 2D turnbased tank sim has been heavily augmented by users.
I can’t seem to find a complete list of the vehicles, guns, infantry units, and aircraft included in YARD’s hefty ‘Overhaul’ mod, but with it installed the vanilla game’s 829 page in-game unit encyclopedia almost doubles in size.
Interestingly, another modder, jkprince, has grease-gunned fiction into AC2. His ‘Arheic Wars’ campaign has a North African setting, but the 100-strong unit roster is 100% fanciful.
Mount options in Gunner, HEAT, PC! expanded considerably last week. As well as introducing dug-in angry Häuser, four new missions, and several extra ammo types, update 20240806 provided the sim’s ‘Very Positive’ fanbase with T-64, T-72, and M60A1 variants aplenty.
The masochistic were no doubt delighted to see the bog-standard M60A1 with its unstabilised gun, and the T-72 Ural (no laser rangefinder) amongst the newcomers.
Until a plucky airlifter agrees to chaperone the French team’s Crusader tank and AT rifle team for the duration of this year’s play-by-comment CM game, said game can’t commence, so please throw your hat into the turret ring if you’ve ever sat on the sidelines during a previous communal CMathon and thought “That looks fun!”. The handsome cruiser tank and its encumbered passengers will need luck and cunning to neutralise the AI’s Panzer III, PSW 232 AC, and SPW 251/1 halftrack, but my playtests suggested the challenge facing them wasn’t completely impossible.
Picture a Panzer 38(t) equipped with a mechanical elephant’s trunk instead of a 37mm gun and you’ve imagined the star of Deep Snow Delivery, a fun finger exerciser that would certainly have made it onto this list if it had been released sooner.
In an attempt to survive a man-made ice-age, what’s left of mankind has retreated underground. The few individuals plucky enough to brave the blizzards and snowdrifts topside do so in tanks converted to collect and transport the useful items found there. Guiding one of these trundlers with WASD keys, the player roams a mountainous map collecting finds, before heading back to base to turn loot into the hard cash necessary to buy vehicle upgrades, one of which – the scanner – opens up the possibility of inter-settlement delivery jobs.
Naturalistic physics ensures slope climbing and descending is interesting. While I’ve yet to flip my scrap panzer, I’ve accidentally tobogganed on occasion, and shed cargo during skids and slides.