The Shadow
Posts: 14
Joined: 1/25/2003 From: California, USA Status: offline
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Reiryc [B]First I don't know if cc1 will run on xp, but I would doubt it. I think cc1 is the best due to the game play. I think the game play of the battles is the best out of all 5. They tend towards infantry combat more than armored combat. Additionally, when playing the campaign, I felt 'attached' to my men much more so than when we could buy squads in the later itinerations. Your squads would suffer casualties and not be brought up to full strength until after a set of battles that were pre-determined. I'll address the predetermined battles in a minute. The squads would often get widdled down to 3 or 4 men through combat. I would often get attached to certain squads when this would happen. I wanted to make sure so and so would survive. So it increased the fun factor for me. The soldier monitors and information monitors were the best of the series. You knew who was having psych problems in the squad and what the problem was. You had a threat indicator so that you could tell which general direction fire was coming from for a particular squad. You had a battle replay option so that you could watch the same battle again and save them when they were something in which you were proud of. The campaign system seemed the most sensible to me out of the 5. In close combat 1, the history of the fight was not going to be changed by the actions of your one company sized or smaller force. The campaign would drive forward as your force was but a small cog in the wheel of a much greater force. Your division was going to progress regardless, as happened in the real war. The difference was whether or not you could keep up or advance faster than what happened in the real war. So your victories and defeats and how great they were would determine whether or not you would be ahead of the timeline of what really happened. Thus the battles were in a sense predetermined in that you know you'll start just after the beaches and finally end up in st lo. There was some branching as when you would win on certain maps they would take you to a map that you might bypass if you lost or vice versa. So you had some control over where you went through victories or losses, but not so much that you went out of tune with what was going on in the much larger picture ie: your victories didn't change the inexorable drive of your division through the norman hedgerows to st lo. The maps were also square tiles. This allowed the game to handle LOS with very very few issues. As the series continued, LOS issues increased with each new release as elevation started to take shape along with not perfect lines on the map itself. So you'll find at times you can shoot at something while that something can not trace an los back to you and shoot on you. Anyways, that's my take on why it's the best of the series to me. The others were all good, don't get me wrong, but for some reason, they never did quite match up to cc1 for me in gameplay even with all the new added features. Reiryc [/B][/QUOTE] Wow, dude, thanks for the in-depth post, I’m convinced, and will start an eBay search ASAP. You hit on an often overlooked aspect of war gaming, which is the immersive factor, that is, the attachment to your troops. This is a holdover form my role-playing days that if you name your char yourself, for some reason you just play better. I always wanted to see the Close Combat games with the feature of being able to name your soldiers any name you choose, and being able to “peel off” a squad member or two for a light recon or ambush. I’d like to see this feature in the Combat Mission games also. Thanks again.
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"Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't." ...Margaret Thatcher
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