How do you compare this game to 'Battle of Britain II' ???

[17poundr]

Hello everybody, I'm from Helsinki, Finland. And I am completely new to these forums.
I just got my copy of TOAW III, Decisive battles of ww2 Italy & Normandy. I think there will be mucho good gaming ahead of me! Especially as I have pretty much got myself through the new millenium with the 'a century of warfare' edition of TOAW, and some downloaded scenarios!

Also the look of the Italy & Normandy games, really wetted my appetite!!! And now that MATRIX games has made ordering from them over in the US as easy as getting a game from a postal ordering shop in the middle of Finland, I will defenatelly be getting more strategy games from Matrix (the cituation for strategy gamers in Finland is pretty brutal, if a strategy game is a hit, then the importer already has a rough estimate of how many will sell, and if you miss those games of sale... Well, then you have to try and order from abroad, a deed not so happily undertaken in the old days as the Finnish banks took something like 16 Euro's per item! When doing the modern version of an international Money Order. But Matrix games have done it so easy for us, we just pay a Finnish bank account (No extra charge), and quote the referrence number, and voila! After a fiew weeks waiting from snail mail, you get your games, GREAT! [:)][:D]

Now I noticed that an upcoming game about the strategy of the ETO air war in ww2 by Norm Kroger is coming up... I must say, that I'm already sold for the idea.

But has anybody got an idea about what it's like to play???

I got the game 'Battle of Britain II', and I must say, that the flying was too complex to somebody who had been spoiled by UBI soft's great Sturmovik series, and as to the ... 'Strategy' part.. Well, maybe I'm just plain stupid, or maybe the game was just that tad too complex so that I really would have dug into the manual... But, I must say, that back in the day, before PC's were going, I travelled to Britain as I'm half British and have family there, and always would go to this great gameshop in Oxford street to get an Avalon Hill (or other such company, sorry I forgot the names by now), and I would come back to the enjoyment of my friends, and I would read the manuals of say, Squad leader, and then translate it to my friends, so we could play...

So, I dont belive I'm a total cretin as far as comprehending strategygames goes, granted the pc has made me lazy, but hey, I think it's great I dont have to rip out my hair at 2 am after doing 15 minutes of counting and subtracting and with the last stack the eight units ect, collapse creating a 'domino effect' and the whole last 15 hours are at jeopardy! Yes, I LOVE that the pc does all that and I can focus on the gameplay (by the way, I hated what they dared to call 'Cross of Iron' for PC! Shame on them!)...

Anyway, I noticed some interesting stuff about the upcoming game, but can somebody explain if it's one of those 'trying to be both a strategy game and and an airwar simulator' and ending up being neihter kind of things, or has it a 'strategy only approach' ?

Please fill me in, as I will buy it if people agree that it's better and more sencible than B of B II was... (Sadly, I have seen about three attempts at making the battle of britan into a game, way back from the spectrum days in the 80s, and nobody has succeeded. Infact the best so far was a scenario for TOAW that I downloaded!

Go figure...

Yours truly,
Mr Poundr.

Helsinki, Finland.

p.s. I'm glad to be here, and hope that I can find a pbm game buddy for toaw III, and later decisive battles ww2 Normandy and/or Italy... [:)]

[sprior]

First, Welcome to the boards Mr Pounder! Or may I call you 17?

Anyway, Norm's games do not need you any flying skills whatsoever. If you are the defender in then you are playing the role of all the GCI people involved in the battle, vectoring aircraft at the incoming enemy. If you are the attacker then you plot/plan your raids for the next 24 hours and sit back and let them run.

here's a link to a review of the original Bombing the Reich with some screenies:

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/12o ... bombingtr/

You can see some updated ones here:

tm.asp?m=1474321

Note that there are 2 seperate games in one box here. The first covers the battle of Britain and the second the allied air offensive against Germany and Italy.

Enjoy.

[harley]

ORIGINAL: 17poundr

Now I noticed that an upcoming game about the strategy of the ETO air war in ww2 by Norm Kroger is coming up... I must say, that I'm already sold for the idea.

Gary Grigsby's Eagle day to the Bombing of the Reich is a Matrix re-development of Talonsonft's Gary Grigsby's 2 seperate games "Battle of Britain" and "Twelve O'Clock High - Bombing the Reich", redeveloped by Ron (HARD_Sarge), Waynn (USS_MAINE) and me (harley).

We have re-written the game to run in a higher resolution, and removed all of the old menu art, to replace it with nice new images more like current Matrix games.

So it's a Gary Grigsby design, not Norm Kroger.

But has anybody got an idea about what it's like to play???

Well, there's the thing, see. Lots of us have an idea, as we have been playing the original since 1998 or 1999! In that time we've developed a plethora of wishes and data that we were able to implement into this rebuild.

I got the game 'Battle of Britain II', and I must say, that the flying was too complex to somebody who had been spoiled by UBI soft's great Sturmovik series, and as to the ... 'Strategy' part.. Well, maybe I'm just plain stupid, or maybe the game was just

This is a strategey game and a tactical overview game. You decide what to bomb, then let the other guy fight you off, or you decide how to hit incoming raids with your meager resources.

Tactics are limited to "Which raid do I hit, when do I hit it, who do I hit it with and how hard do I hit it?". You do not get to determine individual pilot/plane tactics, you just point a flight where you want it to be.

Please fill me in, as I will buy it if people agree that it's better and more sencible than B of B II was... (Sadly, I have seen about three attempts at making the battle of britan into a game, way back from the spectrum days in the 80s, and nobody has succeeded. Infact the best so far was a scenario for TOAW that I downloaded!

I was able to pick up a copy of Talonsoft's Battle of Britain on Ebay about 2 years ago. I bought BTR_TOH from the US in 2000 as it wasn't available in Australia at the time. Best wargame I ever played, period. You could still grab a copy on Ebay, I expect, but we are working hard to get this ready. Sadly, we are part-time developers with lives and jobs, so it's not going as fast as some gamers expect.

I hope that helps...

[Hard Sarge]

Hi 17 Welcome in
 
as has been said, this is not like BoB II, it does not have any flight simming in it (and the planning of raids and stuff for the attacker is easier to figure out then it is in BoB II)
 
read Swifts AAR on a PBEM game of the "old" game, and I got some short AARs that show or tell some of what is going on
 
or, if you have any questions, ask away, there will be somebody around to try and reply to them (just don't ask when, Harley gets touchy
 
 

[17poundr]

Thanks for the info! So there is actually a possibility to 'give 'em' the whirlwind', to quote 'Bomber' Harris?

This is great! Not that a good flying game isnt fun, I just get a bit bored by tens of minutes of flying and ten seconds of action, even on the exellent Sturmovik, and forgotten battles (sturmovik)...

Thanks for the info, and I'm happy to be here. I have been in Armchairgeneral.com until now, and before that I never have belonged to a community for a longer time (exept the odd question at the target shooting forum, which is one of my hobbies, but my longest hobby that has gone on pretty much unmolested until now, is strategy gaming.

Something which I took on when I was nine and my dad got me a hex based board game about the key battle of Kursk, called 'Armour at Prokhorovka'. It was great, and later on when we moved on to an Avalon Hill game about Barbarossa, I remember actually crying when the Russian troops just wouldnt end, and I never got to capture Moscow!!!

One time when I was throwing a moaning fit about the Russians having never endindg troops, my dad replied 'that is what the Germans probably thought too'...

Ever since then I have realized the value in strategy gaming over 'just having a good time', you can actually 'get in the shoes' of a ww2 commander, and relive those moments of history in a way that is hard to duplicate by just reading about it...

Anyway, thanks for your help guys!

Mr Poundr.

[17poundr]

p.s. I found the 12 'o'clock high game page thanks to the link, and it was looking very good! I seem to remember it being on the shelves here in Finland too, but the vendor gave me obviously misleading info, as I left it on the shelf thinking that it was a Flight simulator/air combat style game with hundreds of controls to learn...

Just shows how much trouble getting a proper strategy game can be in a small country dominated by the games that the importers see that sell the most, ie, the one person shooters that kids preferr...

In a country as large as the USA, the strategy game market is big enough for you guys to get proper info when trying to figure out where to put your hard earned sheckels...

Anyway, at least Matrix has made things very much easier, as I can now just pay a Finnish bank account the money, and quote the  referrence number, and voila! The games appear...

This is why I'm here, and by the looks of the helping hands I have received, I'll be here longer (I still need to ask stupid questions about the Normandy & Italy games of the 'decisive battles in Europe' series)[;)]

Mr Poundr.

[Hard Sarge]

'Armour at Prokhorovka'.

I remember that game, when I got it, it was in a plastic bag

if you have questions or what not, ask away, we be around

and most of us here were dieHARD BTR fans to begin with, so we been with it for a long time

[17poundr]

Ah! Another 'afficionado'... [:)]

Seriously, I'm not what one would call a 'serious' player, I am a devoted one though. AS I have played turn based strategy games since 1979 (at the age of nine), the very game of Prokhorovka you remembered too...

Do you remember (or perhaps you had the first edition, and therefore didnt get the letter 'pasted' onto the rulebook of the second edition), that letter from two ww2 German panzer veterans, stating that they had actually FOUGHT AT KURSK! And they commended the game for it's realism (if I remember correctly, there was a lot of 'fog of war' rules, that made seeing the enemy from afar impossible once the battle started, this ofcourse is how the crucial battle of Hoth's panzers hitting the re-inforcements coming in from the south East near the town of Prokhorovka, the greatest tank battle in the world, and sometimes confused with the larger battle of Kursk itself... A great game as It got me into stragegy turn based gaming for life!

I have asked for a link to the air war game on the forum, where people were giving great accounts about their actions...

I did find the game itself, a Gary Grisby game right? But it said that it wasnt ready yet!!!

Maybe there is an overhaul going on, like when toaw III was just arround the corner and the old acow toaw couldnt be gotten anymore???

Or am I perhaps getting confused by two different games???

Anyway, I'm happy that I have fellow 'prokhorovkan's' out there, and even though I never design my own toaw games, (I did partake in designing a fantasy game war scenario in my youth once, but was kind of booed out as my approach was apparently too militaristic and didnt take account of the plethora of rules about magic ect that I dindt really care about, you see one of the main reasons why I love historical strat-tactical games, is that I also read military history and history in general, so the two are complimentary...

Now, this doesnt mean that I never would have had ideas for great scenarios for say toaw... [;)]

It's only that I'm pretty lazy, and that most of my old time game buddy's (we had a nice handful of guys, who used to play mainly squad leader and AV's 'Panzerkrieg, Manstein on the southern steppes of Russia', if you remember that one, my favourite large scale board game of ww2 ever!

Anyway, I did the translating, and when one started to get to Cross of iron (part two of squad leader), there was just too much rules for one guy to shoulder, and our game gang started to fall appart, partly as the infamous panzer general sucked us into the false illusion that we were playing finally what we had dreamed about, a full blown hex based AH style game where the pc does the counting, ofcourse I soon realized that there was no command and control, the planes just floated in the air, you couldnt interdict ect ect, and therefore when toaw finally came along, I fell in love and have stuck to it, It's only that I realized that a proper air campaign game could now be easily done, where in the old days with the carboard chips, the idea of altitudes, and moving squadrons, or bomber fleets was just too hard to try to learn if there was games attempting it out there...

And therefore, although I know that probably I'm just being lazy (and in love with the improved toaw-3, and the decisive battles-Normandy game that I'm slowly learning the controls of as 'snacks' between toaw-3 gaming). And probably Battle of Britain 2, does have a heck of more gaming to offer, it's just that as games like toaw, are pretty complex in the end, they are soo accessible, but for some reason, so many good games, are ruined with a messy interface, take that good game about realtime combat in Market Garden that came about four years ago... A great game imho, but if it's controls had been as easy as in Shogun total war, I would have bothered to play it out, but they werent... A shame really...

Anyway, if there is a game of of toaw-3 that anybody would like to pbm me with, please let me know!

And thanks Mr 'Hard Sarge/Forge', for the info. I'll no doubt be asking something again...

Yours truly... Mr Poundr.

[decaro]

ORIGINAL: Hard Sarge
... as has been said, this is not like BoB II, it does not have any flight simming in it (and the planning of raids and stuff for the attacker is easier to figure out then it is in BoB II) ...

That's great because BoB 2 was not only expensive but "buggy" and soon required a series of patches to fix its "flying".

[17poundr]

That sounds good... I have a game from the same firm (HPS Simulations) called: "Modern airpower, WAR OVER VIETNAM", coming to me via snail mail...

I gather that this game has no simulated flying (I wouldnt mind this, but they always have to make it too complex! Cannot they simply figure a three tier complexity system, so that those who just want a bit of fun, like say, the good ol' Lucas Arts SWOTL was to Sturmovik at it's easiest (even that get's a bit funny when trying to locate enemy planes in the sky with the map, and boy do they whizz past fast, makes me think of a F-16 game)! Still, Sturmovik is at least in getting the ground targets pretty ok, and then if the 'flying bug bit you, or you were already a more advanced flyer, get the medium flying options, and if you are closer to the microsoft series of ww2 flying, then the top level could be near that...

But, the main thing is to get a really good strategic-operational-tactic air war game going, now perhaps there needs to be a split to get truely good strat and tac war games going, but just to feel that you are planning the stricke packets over the dmz in 67...

Or, that you are planning the rendervouz point with the p-38s for the B-24s as the fighters have lesser range ect...

Or, that your choise to let the Germans bomb a couple of airfields, which you have just swapped over with bomber command anyway, and gather a 'big wing' in the air, and get them on the way back when their ME-109s are low on fuel anyway... And more, which kind of ordnance to carry, and what ammount does exp give to the outcome of air to air combat, and perhaps even, who get's to go back to a six month advanced air to air trainer period, so that your new pilots arent rotten in the air...

All of this, is what is needed, and finally, that thing which unexplicably is missing in so many otherwize good operational-tactical ww2 games nowadays, A GOOD INTERFACE!!!

The total lack of usage of right mouse click options, along with selected unit showing it's range, or it's chosen path if you move the mouse to a point on the map in it's range while it's still selected ect ect...

Simple things, that some good land war games have kept as a good tradition, but some seem to ignore and have all that which could be done with a right click from a selected unit's pop up menu, in a dozed buttons cramming the screen, along with stupidly inserted data, which can be displayed much more simply if wanted...

Games like TOAW, and back in the day, the original Panzer General Series, or the Combat Mission series, or even the Squad leader series, have good intuitive controls... But why oh why, does B of B II, have to be so nebulous in it's controls???

Anyway, enough of the moaning, and looking forward for the air war europe new edition!!!

Remember, circa 50 000 guys (And this is counting RAF losses only)got killed in the sky's of Europe at Night! Not to mention the Civilian losses... So, I hope that this desperate battle that was waged longer and was more costly in lives than the battle of the Atlantic (The U-boat menace from 40 to 43), should be in there as a very flexible (meaning that the player should be able to do things with the RAF bomber command fleet, differently than they used it, especially after say, mid 44, when a completely new direcion should have taken place, even daylight bombing isnt a mad idea! And there was a slightly silent, but still I think a rather irritating 'mini campaign' going on close to the Norwegian waters, where RAF Mosquito's and Beaufighters made raids on Commercial shipping...

The Mosquito alone did so many things from a Night fighter hunting German night fighers, to a Bomber that could haul a 5 tonne 'cookie' to central Germany, to a daylight figher-bomber, to a photo-recon to a long range weather monitor plane, somethign that the USAAF used to see what the weather was like over their targets too until later in the war I suppose...

It was a mossie flewn by a Canadian which gave the news to the Overlord 'crew', that there was a lull coming in the storm, that made IKE make his historical desicion to go...

And that's only one plane folks!!!

Anyway, I just hope that the European ww2 air war version 2, will be as infested with the jist of that huge combat that saw about 250 000 men die in the skies of Europe, as can be! [:)] Best of luck, and please let me know when I can order mine, meanwhile I live in hope that the Vietnam air war will arrive soon...

Mr Poundr.

[SireChaos]

FWIW, I recently found a used copy of 12 O´Clock High on Amazon.de (that is, the German division of Amazon.com). Several copies, in fact, so if you think your German is up to it, you might still get one of them there. Be prepared to pay the full game price for them, though.
 
I got BoB as part of a compilation (with quite a few other interesting games - Hidden & Dangerous, Railroad Tycoon II, Age of Wonders, Eastern Front,...) a couple of years ago.

[Denniss]

Was the game ever released in german language?
AFAIR they only translated the manual but not the ingame text.

[sauro brusch]

dear Sirs the wait wears out....................[:(]