Narcot1ck-First impressions

[Narcot1ck]

I am an old school wargamer who grew up playing Panzer General. I even have an old IBM computer set up that I still play PG on occasionally so it is very fresh in my mind. I was pleasantly surprised that Panzer Corps is very much in the same vein as the original PG. The first time I started it up I found myself playing for around 3 hours; unable to put it down. Most of the things that I had always wanted in the original PG you have incorporated and improved upon. The unit sprites are good looking as well are the maps. I'm currently playing through the various campaigns and focusing on any balancing issues that I see mainly because the overall game is working perfectly and I have found very little to gripe about in the overall game (this is great because I encounter a lot of problems with smaller company releases with my state of the art hardware, I use a quad core I7 with 6gb RAM and an NVIDIA EVGA GTX590 card). The first difference I noticed is the revised rules concerning artillery. In the original PG artillery could not be moved without mounting (not even 1 hex) and any move would subsequently forfiet any attack ability. I have yet to see if this is going to be a balance issue but it was nice to be able to fire artillery in the same round when only moved one hex. One of the only cosmetic issues concerns the background when the field map is zoomed out. Perhaps a gunmetal, textured grey or even a commanders desk would look good in the background instead of the straight black that you encounter when zoomed out. The tutorial is very adequate and a welcome addition mainly because it is so thorough. This will bring new players up to speed rather quickly. One of the other main problems with the original PG was that the timeline for new unit entry wasn't exactly consistant with the actual dates these weapons were introduced. I'm still playing through the game but so far the entry point for new weapons seem to coincide well with the actual time these weapons were available. One other issue concerns anti-air weapons and bombers/fighters. I'm not sure if its because the AA unit fired during the opponents turn before or what but many times I was able to use my stuka to attack a target that was well within enemy AA range without the enemy AA firing interception fire. I'm still testing this out to see when it will intercept and when it wont. Overall I was very impressed with this game and it has already become an instant classic in my book: the old pc with PG on it is on its way out today. Good job Slitherine! As I play through the campaign I will continue to post any inconsistancies I encounter.

[lordzimoa]

Thank you for your feedback.

[IainMcNeil]

Thanks for feedback - AA units will only defend adjacent units like artillery do. They can attack units up to 3 hexes away depending on their range but only defend those adjacent.

[Narcot1ck]

Following up on the behavior of the Anti-air, I have been pleasantly surprised that the huge losses to air units in the original PG seem to have been nerfed a little bit. It really was unlikely for anti-air guns to decimate an entire unit of bombers/fighters given the inherent difficulty of hitting a fast moving target in the air without the aid of sophisticated radar assistance. (It was common in the old PG to suffer losses upwards of -7, -8 when taking fire from AA guns) In the old PG it was also a very effective strategy to use AA units as defensive bulwarks. They were very difficult to attack and almost always resulted in heavy losses to tanks and infantry alike. Guns such as the German 88 obviously would be formidable ground opponents but the majority of other guns would not have performed as well against ground units as their stats would indicate (the ability to switch the 88 to different roles was a very welcome and historically accurate addition!). Another point that I have read in posts from others is the lack of overrun. Given the nature of armored warfare (especially in the Wermacht) the possibility of being overrun and destroyed so quickly that the defending unit would be destroyed and still leave movement points to the tanks is definitely something I think should be placed in the game. Another cosmetic change in addition to placing a background behind the zoomed out strategic map would be to make it easier to distinguish core units from scenario specific ones; this would be a great help. Nothing worse than using hard earned prestige to retain experience and/or upgrades on a unit that you don't get to keep. Concerning infantry that can negate rugged defense and entrenchment I think it would be helpful to somehow list this ability in the statistics info. I knew that Pionere infantry had this ability only because I was well versed in the nature of the different infantry types but a new player might not know that Pionere infantry has this ability but grenadiers etc. do not. Another post in the forum referred to artillery seemingly causing less damage than in PG but I tend to think the ability to move artillery one hex and still fire offsets this well mainly because artillery can be employed more often. In my opinion and also illustrated in factual data, artillery was mainly used to reduce fortifications, entrenchment, and induce suppression; not so much to cause outright casualties. I was also wondering what the community thought about allowing multiple attack aircraft to attack the same target, i.e. allowing stukas to occupy the surrounding 6 hexes of a target and all still have the ability to attack a target in the middle that already had a stuka overhead. This might have unforeseen balancing issues that I'm not considering so just a suggestion for discussion. Once again I've had a total blast playing the game and I think you guys did an incredible job. I had been wishing for a game like this for years and am truly captivated while playing. Maybe you guys could try your hand at a reproduction of the old Koei game "Pacific Theatre of Operations" (PTO) at some point in the future.

[Narcot1ck]

One more quick observation while playing this morning. I know you can see extended unit information by alt+clicking but it would be nice to have some indicator located near the move and fire icons so that you could quickly see which units had officers attached and which did not. If I remember correctly, the original PG had a german insignia on any unit that had officers which possessed special abilities attached to the unit.