Typical. The day after I send Slitherine a slew of questions, I think of another I really should have asked: “Now you own Battlefront, why not put together a small team and start releasing new CMx1 instalments?”. How many nostalgic PC wargamers with precious memories of Beyond Overlord, Barbarossa to Berlin, and Afrika Korps, would pay medium dollar to fight in the Pacific, Korea, or Spain using the same engine? A fair number, I reckon.
In a perfect world the franchise’s new owners wouldn’t just bring new theatres to venerable CMx1, they’d overhaul the old timer’s skirmish generator, using, what I now regard as the genre benchmark, as a template.
The more I play Armored Brigade 2 the more I admire its ability to furnish me with unfamiliar yet naturalistic battlespaces whenever asked. As violence venues are tracts of real real estate plucked from large non-fictional master maps, things like road configurations, river courses, and tree coverage, invariably ring true.
I know when I place my cartographic selection square or rectangle, that the resulting 3D battlefield is going to resemble the sort of places I used to ogle regularly while criss-crossing the continent on long-distance buses and trains.
Little changed from the one in the original AB, the ‘new’ generator offers features, that used imaginatively, can inject rare character into ‘random skirmishes’. I mentioned dummy objectives in my last piece, but I didn’t point out that players can also define their own river fords, devastated areas, and no-go zones, prior to a clash. Fancy simulating an engagement close to the border of a neutral country, or near a nuclear facility that both sides don’t want to endanger? Go right ahead. Want to destroy a specific bridge, or sim a field hospital or refugee camp? It’s possible, after a fashion.
As I can’t think of any other wargames that let me decide how many non-combatants are going to complicate a skirmish location, grumbling about the fact that AB2, which does offer this facility, doesn’t go further and allow the modelling of specific things like refugee and PoW flows, seems a tad rich.
One criticism I think can be justly levelled at AB2’s fabricated-on-the-fly fights, is that, due to the game’s limited range of terrain types and building graphics, urban central Europe sometimes feels like the English Midlands at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Last might my Apaches, M1A1s, and Bradleys did most of their best work in close proximity to dark Satanic mills.
Even better, release the cmx1 code to the community. I’d kill for it.