Slitherine

A number of potential customers posted they will stay away from OOB until NATO counters are available. I have been in that camp and never tried any of the “toy soldier” titles (like PzC) thinking they’re more arcade than strategy, and stuck with more traditional board game to computer ports.

When I broke out of that paradigm and purchased OOB, I was happily surprised and greedily picked up all the available DLCs. The non-NATO icons are not so terrible: they even enhance passing aspects of events and intelligence through the user interface. It isn’t a big jump from the icons of the very enjoyable Close Combat series.

Traditional computer war games have steadily incorporated sound effects and animations. The all-out OOB animations are a definite progression of that theme. Sometimes they seem over the top and make me laugh, sometimes it’s very satisfying to watch a particularly irritating enemy air squadron go down in flames…

My impression holds the three key differences in this OOB genre (compared to more traditional games like Atomic’s VFV / World at War series, Schwerpunkt’s series, DG’s Computer War In Europe, etc) are instead:

1. You are not given command of theater resources and tasked with planning and executing a winning strategy (like in an Avalon Hill board game). Instead, campaigns are scripted to lead you through a series of representative or key battles. If you lose a battle, you redo that battle or lose the campaign. It’s strictly a linear process, but there is talk of future campaign branching.

2. Unit movement and combat may be resolved individually (as in SSG’s Decisive Battles series). This facility to gang up on a portion of the line is a big shift from plotting or moving all your units, then resolving all your combats. It does promote breakout and reserve strategies, but at the cost of simulating the unknowns of events happening at the same time all along your front.

3. There is no ability to play a campaign or scenario as either side. In “US Pacific” you play as the US only. To play as the Japanese you purchase the “Rising Sun” DLC. Although there is some intersection of scenario content, that’s not the same thing as switching sides. Those are so far the only complementary titles, and there is very limited hot seat multi-player support to work around this issue. I haven't looked at multi-player PBEM.

So, it is a different experience. So far, I like it!

There is also a skirmish mode in the works as well. If that comes with single player vs AI; unit selection and placement for both sides; random and custom map capability; I will be one happy wargamer indeed. (I was going to use the term grognard but Wiktionary defines that as "Someone who enjoys playing older war-games or roleplaying games, or older versions of such games, when newer ones are available." That's not the case here!) I keep reading references to skirmish mode but nobody talks about what that will be in detail.

Ironically, I shy away from NATO icon games. I really like these graphics in OOB and also in HOI4 and PanzerCorp. I think OOB has the best unit graphics so far.
I really liked Gary Grisby's World at War World divided game, but am a bit scared of the massive new Gary Grisby games like War in the East/West which are hardcore NATO style.

And ya, branching and reversible campaigns would really be sweet. Most probably this small company can't add that much depth cause of time limitations, but they might in future as the game gets more popular.

Clarifying point #3 above: when I purchased "US Pacific" it came with "Rising Sun"- I should not have said "Rising Sun" was an additional purchase.

I still want to play each campaign and scenario from either side (dammit!), and was surprised by this key difference.

Has there ever been a game with campaigns playable from both sides?
Only full-on sandbox games like Hearts of Iron and Total War games can do that from what I know.

All of the example series I cited are playable from either side. Although in fairness, DG's monster Computer War In Europe doesn't have an AI, so it's multi-player (hot seat / solitaire / PBEM) all the time.

In my experience the ability to switch sides has been the rule. I'm starting to guess this is not the case in the PzG -> PzC -> OOB family tree. Erik pointed out in a different thread the OOB editor is powerful enough to recreate scenarios as the opp force, and chain them into campaigns, provided we supply the elbow grease.

I Played Gary Grisby's world at war world divided and ya that can be played from either side but better to chose the boosted enemy campaign when playing solo campaign and I gave Japan a supply bonus to help AI Japan keep the US occupied so I have a chance as Germany. I forgot about that one. I would have liked that game against a human but it is now forgotten with the huge War in East/West games out now.