From: Charles Reace Subject: COMP: Quick review of "W.C.S.II:Tanks!" Here's a quick review of SSI's "Wargame Construction Set II: Tanks!", based on a few days' usage. I bought the PC version, and am running it on a 486DX/33MHz machine. It requires a VGA display, and something like 607kBytes of expanded memory. I do not know if/when it is/will be on other platforms. The game comes with an order of battle database which allows gaming land warfare from 1918 to the present. Each unit generally represents 1 platoon/battery, and has "steps" equal to the number of vehicles, major weapons, or squads in the unit. The ground scale is 250m/hex, and the "board" size can be up to 20 to 60 hexes tall and 20 to 60 hexes wide, each in increments of 20 hexes -- the map scrolls, showing approximately 12x10 hexes at a time. Orders are issued by unit, stack, or formation at the player's option, through a fairly simple mouse interface: left click a destination hex to move, right click a target hex to shoot. Each increment of a unit's rate of fire uses a corresponding percentage of movement points, so you can, for instance, half move then shoot 1/2 your rate of fire (with a random fudge factor thrown in). There are 2 levels of command control difficulty, with the higher level requiring that only units of one formation may be used at a time (formations generally are a company size of 3-6 units) before proceeding to the next. Each unit operates under either an "auto fire" or "hold fire" order; the former means that if it still has movement points, it will fire at any enemy unit that moves or fires within a line of sight and effective range of the auto firing unit, while hold fire units will only fire when explicitly oredere to do so. The database emphasizes tanks, but also includes trucks, APC's, AA vehicles, support weapons (mortars, arty., etc.), as well as various infantry types. When building/editing a scenario with the construction set, you select a nationality and time period for each side, which determines what equipment/unit types are available. For instance you could have 1942 British against 1973 Israelis. (I don't know why you'd want to, but you could). You draw the map with hex "tiles" for up to 3 levels of terrain, with roads, towns, rivers, steams, etc. (several dozen tile types, in all). There are 3 tile sets to choose from: temperate, arid (streams become wadis), and winter (rivers and streams are frozen). Once the map is defined and the order of battle established, you place units on the map, define 1 to 3 objective hexes for each formation, and issue a formation order (e.g.: cautious attack, hold at all costs, normal support, . . .). The game can be played human vs. computer, human vs. human, or computer vs. computer (a neat way to test run a new scenario). The game includes fixed wing air support at a somewhat more abstract level, while helicopters in the modern OoB's are handled like additional ground units with the ability to move over any terrain at 1 MP per hex. The computer opponent seems above average for this type of game, though not perfect by any means (it's wiped me out to the last unit a couple times!). The 20 or so scenarios it comes with give a good variety of games. You can also have the computer generate random maps, OoB's, deployemnts, or complete scenarios. In fact, if you play a "campaign", each scenario after the first is a random scenario where the victor of the last battle gets the same OoB with 70% of his losses returned, while the loser gets a whole new, random force. The variety of forces, along with the ability to generate random scenarios and/or design your own should keep the re-playability pretty high on this one. The one thing I found lacking was any meaningful morale rules. Depending on a unit's "control" rating, you may not be able to issue orders to certain units at certain times, but no unit ever runs away in panic. As mentioned above, the computer has wiped me out to the last unit more than once, and I've returned the favor several times, with each side continuing to fight to the last man. __| __| __| | Charles Reace _| _| _| | | | | | Computer Sciences Corp., Integrated Systems Div. ___|____/ ___| | 304 W. Rte. 38, Moorestown, NJ 08057, USA From: Jim Harmon Subject: Warning: Wargame Constr Kit II: Tanks! After reading all the compliments about this game recently, I ordered it and received in on Monday. When I opened the box, I was shocked to read all the "conditions" that had to be met for the game to work properly, especially the memory requirements and 5.5 MB of UNCOMPRESSED hard drive. I have a 486/25 with 4 MB RAM, MS-DOS 6.2, Stacker 4.0, and NetRoom 3.0 as my memory manager (Netroom is the "superset" of the MemMaker included with DOS). Anyway, since I had about 610K free (which met the requirements), I went ahead and installed it to my compressed C: drive and ran the program, letting the computer play both sides. It played a turn and locked up. Then, I installed it to my uncompressed D: drive; however, since it only had 1.7 MB free, I first had to defragment my C: drive (which took all night) in order to expand the size of my D: drive. After installation to D:, I ran it again. Same result. Then I tried removing Smart Drive from AUTOEXEC.BAT, but that didn't help either. The ONLY way I could get it to work was to make a boot disk and run it from there. This, to me, is a major pain. I admit that I don't know much about programming, but it seems that designers would certainly know that many, if not most, people use disk compression programs by now, and that they should test it for compatibility with memory managers. Now I'll have to try the game to see if I like it. It's just a shame that you have to go to so much trouble to use it. Just my opinion. Jim Harmon (I live in White Hall, Arkansas): jharmon@fdant.nctr.fda.gov From: Charles Reace Subject: Re: Warning: Wargame Constr Kit II: Tanks! > After reading all the compliments about this game recently, I ordered > it and received in on Monday. When I opened the box, I was shocked to > read all the "conditions" that had to be met for the game to work > properly, especially the memory requirements and 5.5 MB of > UNCOMPRESSED hard drive. I'm running "Tanks!" under MS-DOS 6.1, using their dblspace disk compression. I haven't had any problems, except one time while editing the OoB of a scenario I'm creating, when the program locked up on me. But I've played at least a dozen or so scenarios so far, and messed around with the scenario editor a fair bit, and that's the only time I had a problem. But I agree with Jim Harmon: with the popularity of Stacker, dblspace, etc., it seems silly to sell programs that conflict with any such utility. __| __| __| | Charles Reace _| _| _| | | | | | Computer Sciences Corp., Integrated Systems Div. ___|____/ ___| | 304 W. Rte. 38, Moorestown, NJ 08057, USA From: Jamie Adams Subject: Re: Warning: Wargame Constr Kit II: Tanks I had no problems whatsoever installing Tanks! on my 486/33. I have QEMM as my memory manager, DOS 5 (!) and don't use compression on any of my disks. I have several SCSI devices in the box with weird drivers and an ATI SVGA card but everything went fine. Jamie Adams jadams@cap.gwu.edu