Rosseau
Posts: 2757
Joined: 9/13/2009
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Here's a review of the game. I'm posting it primarily because the plucky devs continue to release free content, despite a serious lack of feedback from players.
IMHO, I can recommend this game with two caveats. The first is that this product is not for players new to wargames. For those gamers, Panzer Corp 2 might be a better, albeit more expensive, choice.
For experienced players, the game comes closest to Matrix Games' The Operational Art of War III-IV, although CAOS is much simpler to pick up and play.
Here's the short-list of positives for this product:
1. The OOBs are exhaustive, and the historical units will be familiar to wargamers. The NATO symbols are a delight.
2. All the nitty-gritty details for a moderately complex operational wargame are here, including Air Units, Supply, a Comprehensive Orders Menu, Zones of Control, WEGO turn playback (10 "impulses" shown per turn) and a multi-page combat resolution display showing lists of units involved in the action and combat losses.
3. The developers continue to add the equivalent of free DLCs worth of content, including the latest WW2 Operation Husky campaign in Sicily.
4. The AI is definitely up to the task. In my experience, it may be getting a little bit of "help," but that is hard to determine, as so much is going on under-the-hood, with the movement and combat calculations hidden from the player in fog-of-war.
5. The latest version of the game, and the Operation Husky add-on, appear bug-free.
6. Many aspects of the game are text-moddable, and I have yet to "break" the game after seriously messing with the text files!
Using the Interface
- Right-click on a unit or stack on the map, and an OOB breakdown appears below. Choose the entire stack or highlight an individual company/BN/Regiment below by left clicking. Then *left-click* on a destination on the map, and right-click to exit orders for that unit.
- When deploying units at the start, or during a game (reinforcements are a new addition to the sim), left-click on the OOB box below to highlight the unit, and then *drag* it onto the map on the highlighted blue squares.
- Selecting the Air button in the lower right corner of the screen allows one to choose bombardment/air support/recon and doing the left-click to select the specific target, unit to be supported or recon square.
(Check out the images shown on the Steam purchase page to see the plethora of information available on the various unit screens.)
For those who want to "tool around" and are familiar with the Cheat Engine application, it's easy to search for (and increase) the number of build points on the deployment screen using the "double" value-type search option. I am happy to help anyone who needs it regarding use of Cheat Engine when playing against the AI. This allows one to deploy an unlimited amount of friendly units at the start, or during, the game.
And finally comes the second caveat, which applies to some players: All the stats and formulas appear to be there, but the visual resolution of combat is minimalist in the extreme. Even the old (but great) HPS and John Tiller games featured a combat resolution box during turn resolution, as each attack was made. In this game, you will have to search for the results by using the replay feature and selecting the units with "combat resolution" icons over them.
Personally, graphics and whiz-bang resolutions come a distant second in comparison to historical fidelity, lots of unit stats and formulas, etc. But I still found that the game is a bit less "exciting" than it should be, considering all that it is simulating.
For $20 USD, it is still a solid buy for most wargamers, especially because the devs continue to work hard and release free content. It's also "different" enough in its own right to find a place with a 1,000 other wargames released over the past 40 years!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466610/Combined_Arms_Operations_Series/?l=latam
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