From: Arnaud Bouis Subject: Re: Steel Panthers Review Here Here is a review on Steel Panthers from Usenet. By the way I have tried it: As a Squad Leader enthusiast this game has absolutely seduced me. Simply superb. Arnaud. ------------------ Forwarded from : hyunyu@aol.com (HyunYu)-------------------- Steel Panthers: A Detailed Review by Hyun Yu [Note: let me apologize in advance if this gets posted with totally screwed up formatting; somehow, this newsgroup does not seem to like my AOL (gasp, I know, it's a sin to mention those three letters, let alone confess using it) editor] Steel Panthers is finally here! After months of waiting, SSI's game of tactical WWII combat is available now, and it looks like a BIG winner. In this review, I will attempt to describe the game in detail. There are four main parts in the game. They are: * Campaign games * Individual scenarios * Random battle-generators * Scenario editor After describing the above, I'll explain the actual game engine: * Game Play * Sound Effects * Artificial Intelligence * Chromes (or there lack of) * Spectacular Features Then come the bugs, gripes, suggestions, complaints: * Known bugs * Post-battle/campaign debriefing complaint * Wish list * What's next? Campaign Game ------------- For most of us wargamers out there, this is the meat of the game. Basically, you get to take your company-sized "core" units through different campaigns set throughout the war. There are two theatres of war: Europe and the Pacific. In Europe, the available campaigns (and the side you play in it) are Poland 1939 (German), France 1940 (German), Operation Market Garden (British), Russian Summer Offensive of 1944 (Russian), Battle of Bulge (German), and finally, a WW-III type campaign set in post-war Europe, pitting the US against USSR (US). In the Pacific, the only campaign included is the Japanese conquest of Philippines in 1941 (Japanese). All these campaigns have 4 to 6 scenarios linked together; you take your units through the battles, repair and replace and upgrade after each battle, and see them grow in experience and skill. In addition to these short-term campaigns, there are two "Entire-War" campaigns, one each in European and Pacific theatres. These can last as long as 20-30 scenarios, and you can take the side of one of the major powers (Germany, Britain, Japan, US, US Marine Corps, etc.). Whereas the scenarios in the shorter campaigns are pre-determined and do not change, the ones in the long campaigns are randomly generated. It is possible to continue your career after a defeat or two in the long campaign, but in the shorter ones, it usually means the end of the game. Individual Scenarios -------------------- There are some 60 (yep, sixty!) scenarios included in the game. This was a pleasant surprise for me, as I was used seeing a game with much fewer number of scenarios (such as V4V series and WatWar series--most with 4-7 scenarios each, granted they focus on a different aspect of warfare). The scenarios are organized chronologically, and each highlight a particular interesting or decisive turning points of the war. They range from the German invasion of Polan, of France, the assault on Crete, Americans vs. Italians in Scily, Kampfgruppe Peiper taking on the Russians with their new Tiger Is, etc., etc... you get the idea (there's also a whole bunch set in the Pacific, but I have not set my teeth in those yet). The scenarios range from a small skirmish with just a few units, too a massive tank battle (like Kursk). In each battle, the forces and the deployment are already set, and it's up to you to use them in such ways to win. You can also play either side. Random Battle Generator ----------------------- If you are looking for a quick battle, you can use the random battle generator. It can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be. At its simplest, you can tell the computer to randomly generate a map, and then select and deploy the opposing forces. Pretty much all you would do in this case is select what countries are fighting, what type of battle this is (i.e., advance, assault, meeting engagement, defense, etc.), and the experience level of the troops. You can deploy both sides, just yourside, or have the computer deploy all units. You also choose the time of the battle, which determines the geography and the weapons available. The program seems to restrict the terrain to what was historically accurate. For example, if you tell it to generate a battle between the British and the Germans, and set in in November of 1942, it will generate a desert terrain. If you set the time to July of 1944, then it will be a Norman countryside with beacoup de bocage and trees (nasty for attacker). I have not experimented with ahistorical settings yet--I wonder what the result would be in US vs. Britain in 1943... hmm, that could be interesting... Scenario Editor --------------- This is the same, actual tool that was used to create the 60 scenarios that come with the game. I have not had time to play around with it all that much, so at this time, I can't say much about it, except that it seems very detailed and flexible. What little I have seen, I can say this: creating a custom-map is a sheer delight, as everything is depicted in high-resolution full color SVGA. GAME PLAY --------- Steel Panthers is a beautiful gaming experience. It's detailed, consistent, realistic (well, at least for someone who's never been on the receiving (or giving, for that matter) end of a 88mm FlaK, driven through a minefield at 30mph, etc.), and above all, FUN. It really makes you feel like "you-are-there-up-close-and-personal," especially as you cringe everytime an enemy shell lands closeby your precious (and somewhat emotionally attached) units. For each battle, you command a number of units. In Steel Panthers, 1 tank unit equals 1 tank, and 1 artillery piece equals one gun, and one infantry squad (usually) equals 10 men. This makes battles a relatively small affair, but gives the player a greater sense of tactical challenge and flavor. Each unit has different "price," depending on its fighting power. A platoon of 5 Shermans cost 50 points, while a platoon of 4 Tigers cost 120 points. Infantry squads cost between 5-20 points, depending on the type of infantry (engineer, sniper, machine-gun crew, sub-machine gun squad, etc.). Off-board artillery, which can be so potent and devastating, is between 50-100 points, depending on calibre of the guns. Also, each individual units have commanders, typically a sergeant leading a single tank/squad, a lieutenant leading a platoon, and a major in charge of the company. The leaders (from the major to the lowly private) all have different ratings in 4 categories: rally, armor, infantry, and artillery. Rally is how well a leader can regroup and, well, rally the routed/retreating troops. Armor and infantry is how good of a leader that particular person is leading the respective types of troops. Artillery is how skilled the leader is in bringing the off-map artillery support. In single scenarios, you can command anywhere between 20 to 40 units. In campaign games, however, you are limited to 24 "core" units that you take through series of battles--gaining experience and skill along the way. In addition, you are allowed number of "support points" to buy support forces before each campaign battle. The battles you fight can be broken into three categories. Those in which you attack, those in which you defend, and those in which you and the enemy try to slug it out on the move--the meeting engagements. Of these, the defensive ones are by far the easiest, especially as Germans. Basically, you dig in in your prepared and entrenched positions, hidden from the enemy sight, until some poor, unsuspecting fool of an enemy unit comes within range, and then proceed to blast it to bits and pieces. And you can use geography and carefully-laid minefields (an art in itself) to channel the focus of the attack into your prepared killing zone--criss-crossed with entrenched AT guns, tanks in hull-down positions, infantry with AT weapons. Defense is especially easy (and more satisfying) when you play the German side, especially later in the war. Your 88's, Panthers and Tigers with their 75mm and 88mm guns (or even Pz-IVhs with 75mm guns), and Jagdpanthers and Jagdtigers--oh boy, those poor allied tanks don't stand a chance. I created this battle in which a platoon of 4 Panthers, and a section of 2 Tigers, supported by two Nashorns, successfully defended against an allied force of 25+ tanks (I say 25 plus, because I destroyed 25, and some more retreated behind the cover of smoke screen before I could get them). And the worst that happened to my units is that one of my Panthers was immobilized by a hit to its tracks when it got out of the prepared position to pursue the fleeing enemy tanks. Meeting engagements are somewhat harder. You can't exactly sit and wait for the enemy units to come to you, since the victory objectives are somewhere in the middle of the map, and you only have so many turns before the game is over (usually between 10 and 20). The shooting accuracy goes down when you are on the move, and the units are easier to spot when they are moving. Still, It's fun to fight one of these--a real fluid battle of movement. Assault against a prepared position can be, in most cases, a nightmare. The enemy is dug in; since you are moving, he will see you before you see him. He has had the time and the temerity to lay minefields across your most likely venue of advance. He has defensive off-map artillery to call on (and since they are off-map, they are immune to immediate retribution or counterfire). Oftentimes, you'll be forced to fight a savage battle, yard-by-yard. One note: it can be dangerous to have your units too close to the airstrike target hex, especially if there's a lot of smoke... your planes CAN bomb your units by accident! And no, that's not a bug! SOUND EFFECTS ------------- Phenomenal. I was absoultely floored by the booming and thundering background music the first time I played it. Granted, I have my SB16 card hooked up to the stereo, but it doesn't have a wavetable card... just a FM synthesizer! The secret of this amazing music is that this is the actual, CD music. It comes with 3 tracks' worth of music, which total up to about 30 minutes (I think). Very fitting, good music--drum beats, marching music, suitably martial and appropriate. The sound effect is very, very good. There is no digitized speech per se, but the battlefield sound effect is very good. You hear the whistling trajectory of the incoming artillery shells. From the thundering explosion of 8" HE shells to softer, whispering thud of 75mm smoke shells, all different calibre shells have distinctive explosion sound effect. Same for the guns and cannons and mortars, too (I especially like the twin thump-thump of mortar rounds being fired). You hear sickening "thud" as your 88mm rounds slam home into the hapless allied tank, and the explosion as the tank brews up. Or as it loses its track and becomes immobile. The rat-tat-tat of submachine guns, the staccato droning of machine guns, the puff of smoke grenades... it's wonderful. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ("_A_bsolute _I_diocy"?!?!) ----------------------- From what little I have seen, the AI in Steel Panthers seems pretty good. I have only been playing as the Germans in the early war years, when the allied generalship was usually rather pathetic in the face of blitzkrieg and German military, so that may have something to do with the AI fulfilling my expectation of the military ineptitude. Even so, the AI does seem to operate in a consistent, militarily-sound manner. The computer's judicious usage of artillery is especially impressive. It lays down a heave barrage of smoke (so as to offset my superior long-range gunnery--darn! those 88s are just sitting there!), and delivers accurate counterbattery and suppression fire around the areas its forces are about assault. Even in route/retreat, it will lay smoke screen to cover the withdrawal. Air strikes being an extension of artillery in this game (you buy "air strike elements" in the same manner you buy offmap artillery), I once witnessed the enemy artillery laying down suppression fire around my HQ, of which one lucky shot destroyed the FlaKpanzer unit guarding the HQ. As if that wasn't bad enough (or maybe the computer planned it this way...?!?), right after that, two enemy ground-attack airstrikes came in, handily ignoring the burning hulk of the FlaKpanzer unit, and proceeded to bomb the crud out of the HQ unit and the surrounding units. Even if it was just a lucky artillery shot, it still showed a "shrewed" (if I may apply such a term to AI) judgement in sending in the artillery strike before the airstrike. It is rare for an artillery strike to destroy an armored unit, although it can happen; more common is the vehicles becoming immobilized through near-miss and shock (a real bummer when you are counting on that Tiger to make THE difference! Suddenly, it's a sitting duck... well, a real tough duck). It may very well be that if I play the Polish side during a 1939 battle, that the German side AI would be just as inept as the Polish and the French side are during those years (so admirably portrayed by the computer AI). If so, then at least you'll have a fabulous gaming experience playing as Germans in the game. The flavor of the game and its seamless execution does such an excellent job of putting you right there, that when the computer player mistakes, it's not a snort of disgust that comes from you at the lameness of the AI, but a gloating, gleeful delight in exploiting the enemy weakness. More on this subject as I play more and different sides. CHROMES ------- Ah, what good wargame would be without "chromes," those extra features that don't affect the gameplay a whole lot but adds enormously to our ego as armchair electronic battlefield commanders? I love Panzer General, and a big reason is that you can name your own units ("Hyun Yu" Panzer Division!), and watch it grow in experience and garner battle honors as you progress through battles and battles. Steel Panthers has some neat "chrome" features. One obvious is that you get to take your units through campaign, and watch them become better. It also keeps track of the number of kills you have made. At this point, I am not sure if your leaders improve in their ratings, too. You can rename the units, too. A mere "GE SMG Squad" (German submachine gun squad) becomes "Kampfgruppe "Yu" Squad A," or whatever your heart desires. Similarily, you can change individual leader's names. When you are custom-designing your scenario from scratch, you can change the experience/moral rating of your units, as well as the ability ratings of the leaders. Thus, it is possible to pit the veteran American rangers against the crack, nay elite, tanks and troopers of the 2nd SS "Das Reich" Panzer Division in Normandy. SPECTACULAR FEATURES -------------------- I was especially impressed with the amount of detail available on the battlefield. You'll see shell craters, houses and buildings collapsed from artillery strike (or from a panzer driving through), foxholes, trenches, sandbagged strongpoints (and sandbags gradually falling away as it gets hit and hit), burning vehicles bellowing thick, dark smoke, forest on fire, water washing on the river banks, etc., etc., all on super-stunning, visually-pleasing, SVGA graphics. The on-screen representation of the battlefield is really well-done; if the smoke is obscuring your view too much, you can toggle all smoke off--this does not remove their effects on the gameplay, it merely lets you see the units and terrain underneath. There are different levels of map zoom magnification. The biggest zoom lets you see your squads and vehicles up close, and at the largest "unzoom" level, you can see the whole battlefield at a glance (and you can still distinguish your units, smoke screens, and victory objectives). On-screen weapons encyclopedia, while not exhaustive or terribly detailed, is good enough. BUGS/GRIPES ----------- All good things come to an end, and so I have come to the end of the list of great things about Steel Panthers. Now, the bad stuff... BUGS There are surprisingly few number of known bugs (at least the ones I have come across). - when you load a saved game, the game length display changes, always to somewhere in upper 20s. This doesn't change the actual game length, though. - there's a minor text overlapping display glitch when an airstrike begins its bomb run. GRIPES I am somewhat unsatisfied with the post-battle/campaign debriefing feature Steel Panthers. Namely, there isn't one. I just finished playing the Polish campaign, and in the last battle (Warsaw), I managed to pull a draw. The screen displayed the final scores, and prompted me to press a key. It took me back to the main menu screen (where you choose a campaign, scenario, load & generate & edit scenarios). No reproaching fake-German accent admonishing me for failing to take all my objectives, no summary of the campaign showing the performances of my units, my and enemy losses, etc., etc. It seriously and literally just threw me back to the main menu--just like that. They have put so much time and effort into making this game a superb piece of work. And in the main game play, that shines through so appealingly. Why couldn't the SSI have taken some time to add some "chrome" to make it an all-around satisfying argaming experience? The scenarios, as a rule, end rather unspectacularly. No final display of stats, of the surviving units, how many units the enemy has left, etc., etc. All it tells you is that the game is over, and displays the final score. Booorrrring! Surely it can't be too difficult to capture various data throughout the battle and add some meat and flavor to post-battle ending. WISH LIST What would I like to see in future patches of Steel Panthers (let's face it, update patches are now regular features of the games)? Why , since you ask... :-) - more stats! more stats! more stats! I would love to see more stats. I think that is a common hankering that all of us megalomaniac wargame/strategy game players have. Why else would we want to conquer the country, the world, the universe? Wouldn't it be great, at a push of a button, to bring up how many enemy units of different types you have destroyed, what the shooting percentage is, how the each individual tank's shooting stats are, etc., etc. And in the campaign mode, you could even track of who's got the most kills, highest shooting accuracy, etc. (sure, it's not a "gentler, kinder" feature, and it is grisely, but hey, this isn't "Care Bears Stroll Through The Countryside," this is a WARgame, for pete's sakes! - a rather specific one, the ability to dictate what kind of terrain would be generated in the random battle generator, irrespective of the year or the opposing forces involved. - a Korean war scenario disk? It was fought only 5 years after the end of WWII, and virtually all weapons were of contemporary design as the late WW-II types (except for the jet fighters). WHAT'S NEXT? Why, what do you think? Steel Abrahams? Steel Centurions? Steel T-80s? Steel LA Police Squad Cars? I don't know... it's a great gaming engine, though. Please feel free to e-mail me with opinions, counter-opinions, etc. Thank, Hyun. ----------------------------- End forwarded message