Achtung Panzer Operation Star

[CaptHawkeye]

These days it makes little difference between whether or not we’re all talking about AAA titles or indie releases on this forum. They both get the same level of attention. So today we’re going to talk about a real time tactics game I been playing for a couple of months now. Achtung Panzer Operation Star.


It's cool how the game places a lot of trust in the unit AI and the way the game is organized (WiC style) to produce a game that avoids the excessive micro-management bullshit inherent to most tactical sims. The player gets to make real decisions based on actual tactical concerns and not based on telling individual riflemen when to pick their noses and exactly what bush to get behind. It isn't perfect, the UI and command system isn't very clear and the tutorial is fucking useless. Thankfully unit control is basically centered around 4 major commands with some fine tuning elements further available if necessary. The most confusing part at first is the mission pre-positioning but it actually makes a lot of sense once you figure it out. I just wish yet again they had tu-fucking-torial to explain it to everyone who isn't on the dev team.



This picture shows the UI somewhat. It looks pretty daunting at first but it actually ends up making sense pretty fast. Since the major commands are on the bottom right menu and are mostly abstracted to simpler overall concepts.

The game is broken into a tactical and strategic level and I like the interplay between the two. Though the strategic mode feels neglected somewhat. There's also no auto-resolve button which means you have to fight every battle no matter how small, predictable, or insignificant.



It's a lot like Combat Mission overall, but minus Combat Mission's colossal complexity and exhausting move-plans. The price paid for that is that sometimes the AI does stupid shit you can't control. Like tanks turning their rear ends or sides to enemy armor charging right at them?! This genre has a long way to go before it's more something your average consumer could pick up vs. enthusiasts but it's a step in the right direction.

[Stark]

Hawks I like what you're saying and I'd like to know more... but I honestly thought your thread title was a joke. I thought you'd just taken random words from tank games and glued them together to talk about something generic.

[HMS Sophia]

Personally I thought it was Anime based...
Anywho, how does the tactical commands work? Is it go where I click? Or is it 'advance' 'fall back', that sort of thing?

[CaptHawkeye]

Hawks I like what you're saying and I'd like to know more... but I honestly thought your thread title was a joke. I thought you'd just taken random words from tank games and glued them together to talk about something generic.

Those crazy Ukrainian developers and their naming.

There's a lot to talk about. The way the game's units are organized on the tactical level is a lot like WiC. To paint a familiar picture, but it's a tactical sim with realistic weapon ranges, lines of sight, even sound detection etc.

It looks great too. It's too bad the game is only strategic because it could so be an FPS if it wanted to be. It would be better than Flashpoint. You can put the camera right down to ground level and it looks at least as good as CoD did in 03. One thing I finally also get to see in this game that is literally never in war games is POWs.

If you kill the enemy's leadership and overrun their positions fast enough they actually surrender to you! I had a nasty occurance a few weeks ago where I had an elite unit of Waffen SS dug in at a treeline for the night because I didn't want to waste them trying to attack Russian positions during the night.

I started getting nervous because the game reported an attack was coming, but the game doesn't tell you where, when, of what kind of attack it will be. It might be a recon probe or some such. I ordered some flares from the local artillery battery and my god, the Russians are 10ft away! Lost two squads because the Russians attacked so furiously they were overrun right away.

It has a demo but the demo has piss optimization and and again, no tutorial. Their is a game manual available as a PDF on their website and that's pretty much the only resource you'll have access to for the game.

Anywho, how does the tactical commands work? Is it go where I click? Or is it 'advance' 'fall back', that sort of thing?

Their are 4 major movement commands and 2 targeting commands. The movement commands are
Move: Units follow a straight line to the point you placed and will walk in formation.
March: Units will go the location via roads and tracks. This can be important since the game models stamina on men and fuel use on vehicles.
Attack: Units will engage a point and look carefully for enemies. They will advance from cover to cover and give supporting fire as they go.
Defend: Units will look for cover near the point you selected and scan for enemies in the direction you pointed in. If the unit has been present in the area for 2 turns on the strategic level, they'll dig in and make trenches and foxholes!

[Stark]

Hey Hawks I looked up some reviews and found something awesome.

Reviewer’s Specs:

AMD Phenom II 955 BE Quad-Core Processor Overclocked @ 3.7Ghz
8GB of DDR3 RAM Overclocked @ 1666 MHz
ATI HD 6850 1GB Overclocked @ 1030 MHz GPU and 1175 MHz Memory
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

What a fucking laugh. High end gaming PC required! :V

What I see from reviews is that fat people don't like it because you can't accurately micro everything, but that the tactical stuff is pretty solid. They're gold for seeing how divorced the so called 'milhard' market is from reality - reducing their awareness and control to a staff level makes them angry because how can they penetrate 126.3mm with their zpz920 block 2 star if THEIR SOLDIERS AREN'T MINDLESS ROBOTS???

[CaptHawkeye]

These guys really think the "6 months to obsolescence" cycle still exists. Chicks dig the rig yo.

I think the super-microing horseshit just extends from the massively perverse way milsimers view war. Which is closer to a spreadsheet/table top RPG fantasy. Armies are not your fucking party, they're multilevel organizations. Where command structures are designed (ideally) to distribute workloads. Not enable despotic detail management.

Even Combat Mission gets dangerously close to that shit with its step-by-step movement plans. At least unit control in CM is done by squad and the AI has a certain amount of initiative. Band aids on bullet wounds though. (So to speak.)

In this game you can order units to hold fire, but they'll still open fire on enemies who are about to discover them. That's 100x better than them just being retards and getting massacred because "THE PLAYER DIDN'T SAY WE COULD SHOOT YET!!!!"

[Commander 598]

So I played the demo a little and after two battles and only kind of knowing what I'm doing I really like it.

I killed about 3/4 of an SS attack against a point defended by like a dozen already chewed up infantry using AT guns I had moved up on to what I was unaware was a hill on the strat map as improvised artillery. At this point in the CMBFN demo I had lost 3/4 of my force including like 4+ tanks to enemies I couldn't really identify, and was still trying to figure out how the mortars work.

Most accessible realistic WW2 strategy game I've ever played.

[CaptHawkeye]

The game makes doing normally stressful stuff like mass attacks across a wide area much less of a chore as in other games. By virtue of the fact that the main thing the player does is tell guys what area they should go to and where artillery should fall. Sometimes your workload is so minimal you can actually do things like find a good camera position and just watch the results of your decisions. It's really, really too bad you can't play FPS mode and dive in to fight with the troops.

[Stark]

I was super unimpressed by the quick battle, but the campaign scenarios really show off what the game does right. The vehicle per-man modelling is great, the flexibility of weapons is great, and shit like 'half track gets bogged trying to mount a railway and nades fly in the back and set everyone on fire' is pretty good.

TBH the biggest learning curve was un-learning RTS game ranges. Even my shitty 45mm was killing guys at 800.

[CaptHawkeye]

There's a rolling thing in RTS games that anti tank guns must be weak against infantry. Except they really aren't because they're still big guns just minus the tank. :V

What's really cool to me is how persistent everything is. Burned out vehicle hulks, destroyed buildings, cratered terrain, and trenches all carry over from battle to battle. There's great attention to detail in places where detail actually matters and isn't just pointless bullshit.

[xthetenth]

There's a rolling thing in RTS games that anti tank guns must be weak against infantry. Except they really aren't because they're still big guns just minus the tank. :V

RAWK PAEPER SCIZZORS.

I think it's because doing it that way makes them an easy fit for the role of spearmen and RTS means an everything has a very clear and easy hard counter setup. Situational soft counters are counter to the model of find what the enemy's building and hard counter that as best you can with your economy.

[Simon_Jester]

If you must have hard counters, the hard counter to AT guns ought to be indirect fire artillery; that would make a lot more sense than making it foot soldiers.

[Stark]

Artillery should be the counter to everything that isn't a tank or in a hole. But can't do that; requires too much planning and means you can't just blob up units.

BTW we can't make jokes about RTS anymore because the genre appears to have vanished beyond big-name stuff.

[CaptHawkeye]

Genre didn't feature enough one man superheroes gunning down brown people. Pretty much.

Funny enough on a lot of forums i've lurked ex-military guys have really praised this game. Shit, their criticisms about it tend to be about the UI being unintuitive. When that's what real military guys are saying about *this* game, what does that imply about the whole fucking genre?

[Stark]

The game would really benefit from more backwards orders; saying 'I want x here' rather than 'hey you do this over there'. The UI is certainly pretty bad and some of it seems dead useless.

[Sea Skimmer]

Close Combat had POWs in 1999, maybe even in the earlier ones I never played, and persistent wrecks and destruction and vehicles getting stuck, only a fraction of which would be recovered, the rest would become wrecks. This game sounds more then a little bit like that series? but scaled up and with less micromanagement of movement which is all good.

Towed anti tank guns should be fairly weak against infantry because of how flat the shell trajectory is and how low to the ground the gun is, and artillery is not that effective against a hunk of round steel in a hole except for suppression. So it actually sounds like they got that stuff right from what people are saying.

[Stark]

Its got a Close Combat feel to the infantry combat, but with less micro/more independence. The armour stuff is pretty chaotic and unpredictable, which for me is a thousand times better than bullshit PEN 123 HITS ARMOUR 112 LOL U EXPLODE bullshit that passes as milhard. It also appears to model things like throwing a track if turning at high speed on a slope and getting bogged in craters for half-tracks, which is pretty sweet. However, at least at default UI stuff there's very little feedback on how your tanks are doing; lots of explosion decals but shot flight is 'realistically' obscure and what affects accuracy and performance isn't immediately clear. Still, you can drive off a probing attack and have the AI offer a ceasefire after a few seconds of well-sited machinegun fire, so it's pretty much right up there with games that model battles rather than to-hit tables.

Like Hawx said, its a game that lends itself toward narrative. I had a unit of recon (3 sections of infantry) hiding along the edge of a wood I expected the enemy to attack along to provide spotting for my AT gun. However, they'd decided to cut straight through the wood with their vehicles and my guys were alerted by the falling trees. I blobbed them up and left them on hide/hold fire and moved into contact in time to see the tail end of their column moving past. My guys broke cover and dropped molotovs into the half-tracks and took out about a section of infantry, but while they were reforming move vehicles arrived; another half-track and a stug. I moved by guys out of contact and looped them ahead of the vehicles (which appeared to have totally worthless vision in the woods) and managed to get right in close from behind them before opening fire. They managed to set the roof of the stug on fire and prevented the crew using the roof MG and basically kited around the back of it until a the crew baled out on fire and ran around (and sadly set two of my recon guys on fire). For the loss of five dead and seven wounded, the recon unit took out an assault gun, three half tracks, and two sections of infantry... and the enemy offered a ceasefire and withdrew.

NO TWO HOURS OF CHASING DOWN LAST MAN = GAME RULES

[Stark]

The game even has charming glitches.



One of the crew is hiding in the nearby trench, and as soon as this guy tried to fire the maxim it freaked out and the squad abandoned it and refused to pick it up again.

Because it's clearly fucking haunted.

[CaptHawkeye]

You've probably seen all the times tanks powerslide during road turns.

"NEED BACKUP I AM IN PURSUIT OF SUSPECT PANZER!"

[Stark]

I just love how baling out crews don't put the handbrake on, so their vehicle can keep rolling down the hill towards the enemy, drawing all the fire. :v

Shit, actually, people even fucking surrender. You can't un-surrender them which is a shame, but a carefully staged night ambush can last 10 seconds before much of the enemy simply stands up and walks towards you with their hands up. Ambushes also lead to hilarious misuses of the melee animation, like kicking people in the head as they lie prone, or meleeing people with molotovs.

[CaptHawkeye]

You can capture equipment right on the field. Depending on whether or not your guys leave it intact. They're realistically a paranoid bunch, and don't generally leave vehicles alone until they're on fire.

I'm kind of sad Engineers don't do much more in this game than repair stuff. You can't setup minefields or advanced emplacements like tank obstacles and barbed wire sadly.

[Stark]

I've had guys using an MG drop it for a second to snipe at guys off to the side, then get back on it to hose down incoming guys from in front. That's pretty good for a game.

And man a turn of laying traps or whatever would be totally choice. But how do you do stuff like fire flares or whatever if you have no on-map arty?

Also I've found in the encirlement scenarios you can manually break your guys through and exit off a mapedge, and the units involved will exit that side of the square. I've been able to get a few arty batteries and recon platoons out that way.

[CaptHawkeye]

Signal flares are an AI thing and indicate captured objectives or encounters with enemies as per standard operating procedure.

Town giving you problems? Get some rocket artillery. No town, no problem.

Breaking off the map edge is much more preferable to Fleeing. Fleeing gives up all points on the map and the units running away only might reform. They'll also end up reforming behind enemy lines, or in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.

[CaptHawkeye]

So I just found out these guys have the worst patching process ever. If you let the game install to the directory it wants it will never be able to detect downloaded patches or DLCs.

[Vympel]

From where do I acquire this charming sounding game, and how do I do it so the game doesn't fuck itself with patching as you say?