Close Combat Demos Invasion

[Dennis S.]

With the original publisher Microsoft no longer supporting the game, second publisher SSI no more an independent company, and developer Atomic Games closed, the classic strategy Close Combat game serie seems to have ended once and for all. Even the most recent attempts by its former makers to reanimate the game in 3D weren't exactly completely succesfull (see Squad Assault: West Front review and demo).

Will the sixth installment of Close Combat ever come out and bring the glory of the series back again? What do you think? Chances are really slim, but for now you can indulge yourself with the five demos of Close Combat - all of them from the original, to Russian Front, to Invasion: Normandy are included in this compilation. Read the full article to grab the goodies

[h00ligan]

Will the sixth installment of Close Combat ever come out and bring the glory of the series back again? What do you think? Chances are really slim...

It may not be titled "Close Combat" but the mythical sixth installment of the series has recently been released by Take2/Bold under the title "Road to Baghdad". GamersHell was one of the first [and few] websites to publish info about and screenshots of RtB which is based on "Close Combat: Marine", an NCO training simulation currently used by the USMC. CC:M was contracted and begun before Atomic's 12/00 "implosion" but owner/series creator Keith Zabalaoui soldiered on to produce the Marine's version.

The CC community is alive and well after nearly 8 years and has produced numerous full and partial mods of every previous version [inc. mods to the demos] and many hundreds of new maps. Diehard CC fans are presently enjoying the excellent Gold-Juno-Sword mod to CC5 and are eagerly awaiting the imminent release of the long-anticipated Stalingrad conversion.

[Dennis S.]

Thanks a lot for your educated reply I'm really glad to see that the classics are still alive and kicking... I personally went on a nostalgia trip while mirroring them yesterday

Although, one small correction, even if TRtB is based on the Close Combat engine, I cannot consider it a 'true' Close Combat game... While it's operational, it is pretty castrated (only one side to play, no progression of missions, nly a handful of maps included, etc...). I am personally hoping for a fully featured product with Close Combat name licensed. TRtB is an interesting game, but it loses its charm too fast... Unless you're planning to play MP in it, but even then the Iraqi side is in heavy disadvantage... And playing a game with custom-made maps to adjust difficulty... Jus too tedious

[mooxe]

Yes very alive and well.

Alot of websites are out there still thriving...

http://www.closecombat.org/
http://www.tournamenthouse.com/
http://thforums.com/board/index.php3
http://www.wargamer.com/forums/tt.asp?forumid=34
http://www.airborneassaultclan.com/index.html
http://www.wargamer.com/Hosted/CloseCombat...atGJS/main.html <--- Most popular MOD right now. Gold, Juno, Sword.

Go to those pages & check thier links pages. Tons of other websites.

CC2 is played @ http://www.wargamer.com/battleHQ/
CC3 is played @ www.gamespy.com & www.zone.com
CC5 is played @ www.gamespy.com <-- Still very much alive and going as strong as ever. The TH ladder has seen about 120 new sign ups since mid-December.

[xenxen]

Are you sure that Atomic Games is closed

http://www.atomic.com/

[quote]Last update: January 23, 2004

Our site is currently under reconstruction—it will be back up shortly.

In the meantime, we are hiring. See the list of open job positions below.


Thank you,
Keith Zabalaoui
President, Atomic Games, Inc.[quote]

[Dennis S.]

Hrm, interesting info there.... From what I know Atomic Games were shut down in 2000 (GH news article), and a lot of the staff (including Erin Young obviously) went to form Freedom Games (GI Combat, Squad Assault: West Front, and another 3
expansion packs for it coming up), which in its turn was sold to DAS Entertainment last December (GH news article)...

Maybe, just maybe they didn't like working for Das Entertainment and went to remake Atomic Games now? Would be MEGA cool Thanks for the heads up ;)

[h00ligan]

"I am personally hoping for a fully featured product with Close Combat name licensed."

Then you might want to considered a visit to your local USMC recruiter because the Marines are using a truly full-featured version [3 vs 3 multiplayer w/o shared LOS, 45 teams per side and 1x4km maps] that has been licensed to them as "Close Combat: Marine". I would venture to say that the reason Take2/Bold make no mention of CC in the RtB product or on its packaging and website is due to contractual stipulations imposed by the Pentagon on Keith Zabalaoui/Atomic. This agreement may have permanently removed the title "Close Combat" from [potential] future iterations of the series and possibly may temporarily or permanently prevent Atomic from being directly credited with the development of RtB or any new retail versions of what would otherwise be called "CC".

Atomic never actually ceased business following the 12/00 layoffs. Rather, it radically downsized, likely only consisting afterward of Mr. & Mrs. Z and whatever part-time or skeleton staff KZ's shoestring budget could afford. It was under these daunting conditions that the remainder of CC:M's design and production requirements were largely fulfilled. I would attribute some of the glitches in RtB to the Atomic/Take2 development transfer and some to understaffed production at Atomic. Entirely conceivable that T2 didnt have staff familiar enough with the system to catch and squash all the bugs. Also probable that the compensation KZ received from T2 for RtB [and the USMC for CC:M] is helping to finance the hiring of staff linked above with the clear intention to resurrect Atomic as a fully-fledged game production company.

There's more to the story than this veteran observer of CC/Atomic can fathom. The CC:M/RtB story would be an excellent opportunity for a recognized game reviewer and accredited web master such as yourself to follow up on with some investigative reporting. America's Army has gotten a comparative boatload of media attention yet according to one knowledgeable inside source, CC:M is the US military's only certified 'off-the-shelf' tactical training simulation. In addition to contacting KZ I'd also suggest interviewing Paul Nichols, test and liason lead for the Sverdrup MARCORSYSCOM CSLE team nicholpg@svtcsle.com

Given the enthusiastic accolades lavished on CC by Maj. Brendan McBreen, USMC and CC:M's consequent acceptance as a thrifty, effective small unit leader training tool forrr the Marines, combined with RtB's curious, almost surreptitious release - it's clear there's a lot more happening behind the CC scene than is readily apparent. Personally, it's immensely gratifying that my wargame of choice has been awarded the official USMC seal of approval. Myself, and quite a few others, are highly interested to learn the unrevealed details surrounding these recent CC-related events.

"even if TRtB is based on the Close Combat engine, I cannot consider it a 'true' Close Combat game... While it's operational, it is pretty castrated (only one side to play, no progression of missions, only a handful of maps included, etc...)."

Not based on the CC engine, it is the CC engine. The file structure and formats are nearly identical to CC5. rtB is CC6 in all but name. "Castrated" is a subjective and arguable evaluation. Altho there is no campaign, the missions do follow a chronological progression. The lack of a campaign reflects the overwhelming speed and success of the coalition invasion . Save for Nasiriyah, there just wasnt very much extensive localized combat. The vast majority of US units didnt experience prolonged periods of combat during the blitz to Baghdad and beyond. The few Iraqi units that did maintain cohesion and offer resistance were quickly annihilated. The land campaign hinged more on the difficulties of limited manpower, logistics and rear area security than defeating conventional Iraqi field units. What is now referred to as the period of "major combat" was hardly worthy of the superlative even w/r/t Desert Storm, much less the intensity seen during past wars [Tet, Korea, WW2] gamers are more familiar with. The Iraqi Army rapidly disintegrated only to be replaced by the tactics of ambush and terrorism as was resorted to by Rummy's "deadenders". This situation, closely resembling a classic guerilla insurgency, has persisted for almost a year.

Very difficult to simulate an extemely fluid operation such as Iraq in terms of what most wargamer's would expect in a game campaign. Saddam's military had no integrated strategy other than to flee for survival with a relatively small cadre of staunch Baathist loyalists attempting to snipe, boobytrap and suicide bomb after their rout. Almost from the start, the ground war degenerated into a series of isolated encounters and brief skirmishes invariably decided by overwhelming coalition firepower and air supremacy. As such, I believe the series of representative missions offered in RtB is a far more faithful abstraction of reality than a standard attack/defend game campaign would have been.

The inability to play as the Iraqis in solo games against the AI is somewhat puzzling. Pg.9 of the user manual says:

On the right side of the Command Screen, you can choose to play as the Marines or as the Iraqi. You can also choose to play Multi-Player (you against another player on a different machine) or Single-Player (you against a computer opponent on your own machine.)

I can only surmise this is a prime example of the difficult circumstances that resulted from Atomic ceding RtB in mid-development to T2. CC:M understandably only supports solo play as the US since the Marines obviously had little desire to command the Iraqis and kill computer-controlled Marines themselves. Im sure T2 naturally just assumed RtB would permit user choice of sides. Because game mauals usually get finalized early the schedule, I can speak from experience that proofing the player's guide for goofs likely got lost in the "rush to war" - the typical last minute/late night mad scramble euphemistically known in the business as 'going gold'.

True, RtB has only 14 maps [inc. two unused winter maps] but their total map area is ~2.5x as much as CC5's 44 maps. The RtB maps are massive [960m sq in game scale] considering that each side will muster about an understrength company/reinforced platoon in any single mission. However, all this newfound 'elbow room' on the CC battlefield can be effectively utilized now that the CC engine supports a mount/dismount function. I'd caution RtB gamers not to cancel a mount order once its been issued as the vehicle to be mounted will be "confused" and assume its been loaded, thereby pre-empting subsequent mount orders on the vehicle in question with the text mssg. "Not enough seats to mount". There is another bug that occurs if an infantry team is commanded to mount a vehicle and the player click's that vehicles mount/dismount Order's menu button before the inf. is loaded. In this case the infantry team briefly dematerializes then briefly reappears in what would have been its dismount location, then disappears from the game screen entirely. From this point forward in the battle that infantry team will be invisible to the player, being hidden underneath the map layer.



After donning the 'one ring to rule them all', invisible infantry can still be selected by click&drag or clicking on its Team monitor field, and then be given orders using the familiar Z to M keyboard shortcuts. Opposing forces can spot these wraiths and will engage them as they normally would. This bug can be recovered from by dragging the green Mount command 'dot' from the vehicle originally intended to be loaded to another friendly passenger capable vehicle. The invisible infantry will immediately reappear on the map and move to mount the second vehicle. This method of recovery must be chosen before giving the invisible team any other order because once that is done the green Mount dot will be replaced by the dot/arc representing their new order status. At this point there is no way to issue them a mount command that would result in visibility because mount/dismount doesnt have an associated keyboard shortcut. The downside is that even if the team is recovered to sight, the vehicle it initially attempted to mount remains "confused" about its load status and cannot be loaded for ther remainder of the battle.

"TRtB is an interesting game, but it loses its charm too fast...[cant] adjust difficulty..."

I'd chalk the charm and difficulty factors up to outdated victory conditions. The Op orders in RtB realistically stress minimizing casualties but the US player can lose upwards of a full platoon and still win a total victory. A result like that would have been the Iraq War's equivilent of Kasserine Pass - a Pyrrhic victory for some barely known quadrant of Mesopotamia lambasted by headlines and analysts arcross the nation and around the world. Victory in RtB is too dependent on taking CC's ubiquitous VL flags while not properly penalizing the US for incurring excessive casualties. The Force Morale function is also to blame as it will terminate a battle only after copious amounts of American or Iraqi blood has been shed. Ideally this s/b patched to better reflect reality - modern US miltary commanders well understand the effect that the body bags resulting from hellholes like Mogadishu and Hue can unravel months of success and serve to undermine entire wars and presidential administrations. Any revisions to the victory conditions should include US casualties in the equation. And Force Morale needs to be adjusted upward so that many fewer US casualties will trigger battle termination and result in substantial deductions from US victory points.

My house rule is that total US victory only means a "perfect" battle - all objectives taken and no friendly KIA/Incaps. I deduct one VL for every US casualty. By these standards my W-L ratio is abyssmal. I try to consider RtB's US soldiers as people I might know - the kid from my current hometown now proudly wearing the globa and anchor, my brother's college teammate serving with the AF in Afghanistan, my other brother's nephew in the 81st AB. Doubt I could handle the guilt if it the gory game results were real. Im sure those battles would haunt me til the end of my days. I do find constant replay value in returning to missions Ive lost and altering my tactics to get a dirty job done a d@mn sight better than last time.

"And playing a game with custom-made maps... Just too tedious"

Funny you should mention this as one of the CC tool gods just released a utility that will expedite porting the close to 1000 existing CC maps to RtB. Maps only impact difficulty if the player is completely unfamiliar with the new terrain. There are data mods to CC that make the AI ferociously aggressive. CC fans can rest assured a version of these AI mods, along with new maps and other tweaks and tricks, will soon become available for RtB.

[/soapbox :}]

[Dennis S.]

Man! You've got info, don't you? :thumbup: Count me in for an article, this is some really cool stuff... Also if I were you I'd expect an e-mail from me

But back to TRtB - you certainly made some great points, and yes, I read the manual as well, so I was fairly disappointed that there was no Iraqi side to play as... Might be because of a decision by T2 (management level) that the controversy it can create with US troops still in Iraq can cause some lawsuits, and is not worth the trouble. I think that's the only viable reason that the sp Iraqi missions were taken out, as in MP you can obviously play them That might've also been the reason the game came out without a notice and no support - Global Star's PR manager didn't reply my e-mails in which I asked for an interview to be arranged with someone regarding the game. But, back to TRtB itself...

"Castrated" is a subjective and arguable evaluation. Altho there is no campaign, the missions do follow a chronological progression. The lack of a campaign reflects the overwhelming speed and success of the coalition invasion . Save for Nasiriyah, there just wasnt very much extensive localized combat.

Let me explain myself in that case While you are right regarding the speed, etc... of the conflict - in the CC series I was used to certain things that were lacking in TRtB. Exact list (probably not full):

* Ability to play as both sides.
* Ability to plan on the map as the 'chief commander', deciding which regions you should move into next.
* A campaign. Not same as above, but a succession of missions, that are actually interconnected, as in my troops going in (aka - moving from point A to point Z on the big map, while progressively conquering territory), and a course of which I can follow. It helps if I can see dates, and a big map of Iraq with dots indicating my troops, cities, strategic points, etc, before my eyes to connect with the game. I do not like the 'mission here - mission there' approach.
* Ability to transfer individual units from one map to another - I remember how back in high school when CC3 came out me and my geeky friends used to brag about our soldiers in the game on breaks in school - like one of my Russian snipers that took out 29 Nazis in a few battles before being killed by a team of Sturmgrenadieres that assaulted him from a close distance. He still took out 2 of them, and died an honourable death, still shooting back, wounded...... See I have a lot of stories like this, and each is a memorable gameplay experience that I can look back to. Often I restarted the game because one of my most decorated units got wiped out. There's none of that in TRtB, the soldiers there are generic like in any other game.
* A large amount of maps. While the maps in TRtB are indeed much bigger than CC5's - considering the speed of modern vehicles, most of MY battles with Iraqis ended in 15 minutes. Now, considering there's 14 missions in SP that you can play as one side - how much time can I expect to spend with this game? You can replay each mission 10-20 times, but I don't see myself spending more time with it - I'd rather play CC5 instead


Now, by all means I do not consider TRtB a bad game. After playing it for the first time I actually told one of my geeky high school friends that I'm still in touch with that it's a 'modern close combat'. I was planning to do a review of the game until after an hour or so of gameplay I realized all the above problems, at which point I've decided not to review it - I would feel bad about giving it a bad review, but unfortunately its review wouldn't be favorable. While it's great that maps from CC5 will be ported to it, TRtB's "map editor" is really lacking (and CC5 map editor won't work with it).

I can understand and even accept TRtB as a budget product - if I wouldn't start playing Close Combat series since #2 came out, I'd probably like it a lot no matter how many features were left out. I still do, as the gameplay is definitely still the same (save some bugs), and there's no other game depicting a modern-day war better. But I am fairly sure that if it was released as a $49,99 Close Combat 6 it would feature more maps, maps progression, both sides, a better editor, bugs swuashed, etc... Simply putting it st the current stage of the game I cannot make myself call TRtB = CC6, as if THIS is CC6, I will not be buying CC7

[h00ligan]

I call it "CC6.1: Close Combat Marine Lite" :} Very unusual that, for marketing purposes, T2/Bold wouldnt have capitalized on the USMC connection, much less the CC relation, unless there was some hidden reason. As is, youll notice 3d Infantry Div troops on the box art and Marines in the game. The box also nimbly dances around the lack of choice in solo play ["Play single player" and "engage the enemy"]. Either sumbuddy downstream from Atomic naturally assumed there would be the usual choice of sides common to almost every other wargame or they confused choice of sides on the Multiplayer screen with US only on the Command screen.

re: 15 min battles & "There's none of that in TRtB, the soldiers there are generic like in any other game."

Gimme a short list of your buddies nicks and/or surnames and I'll hex edit one of the original RtB scenario files to make you the CO and them your soldiers. Play that and see if you feel any differently after youve "won" just as easily but turned a couple of your friends into hamburger. You can do the much the same thing by using Notepad to create a custom list of names, one per line, and inserting the total number of names at the top of that list. Save as USNames.txt and paste that file into the Data/Base folder. Any new scenarios you create will have the US force populated by those names. It shouldnt be so much about taking an otherwise worthless piece of ground and smoking some bad guys but keeping all your men alive while doing so. Thats the design philosophy I would have pursued - winning was the easy part. Making sure the troops you commanded all got safely home to their families wasnt.

RtB's editor is actually much more capable for single battles than CC4/5's. You can set custom deploy zones, position VLs, place text labels on the map, rename teams, write Op orders and add a maximum of 200 support missions [50 each for 4 types support] per side. The only features RtB is lacking from CC4/5's editor is weather effects and supply. And of course an Op/Camp mode. As for that, I'd still insist that while it would have increased the fun factor immeasurably, it wouldnt have been realistic in the least. A US unit was "lucky" to be involved in one firefight of any size. US battalions didnt drive across Iraq facing bloody battle every day. In the words of one armored cav trooper it was "hours of bone numbing boredom followed by days of tedious dust". Arty and tac air paved the way if there was the least hint of resitance. It says a lot about "major combat" in the campaign when we lost more men to friendly fire and non-combat related accidents than enemy action. Not exactly a desperate situation like the Ardennes or Normandy or one that would lend itself to strategic campaign treatment.

Agree more could have been done development-wise in re-packaging CC:M for commercial release as RtB. Your comment about lack of a strategic overview map with the RtB missions pinpointed on it is dead on. A feature like this would have gone a long way toward more firmly connecting the RtB gamer with the actual events of last years invasion. The very first RtB mission, "Across the Border", serves to illustrate that point - as US player commander - there you are on D-1, the day before the war "started", and the spearhead of coalition forces is about to be engaged while the rest of the world holds its collective breath wondering if and when the balloon will go up in Iraq. There just isnt the immersive sense of place and situation that could have been. The empty videos folder in RtB could also have been used to better create the illusion of "you are there" just with pre- and post-battle clips from the "embedded" reporters [using stock footage and voice-over acting] interspersed with comic relief from Baghdad Bob. They could have put a Saddam 'easter egg' on one of the maps like CC1's 'Kilroy was here'. They could have put Brit forces into the mix. They coulda done a lotta things but for $17.95 at Walmart and headed for the bargain bin in April, Im sure T2/B thought "why bother". CC 6.1 might not be your cuppa but from what Ive heard, the full LAN party install of the USMC's CC6 would knock your sox off.

Ive stumbled across a few more pieces of the CC:M/RtB puzzle than the avg CC grog but I have also extrapolated and interpolated others in my lengthy CC:M/RtB summaries. My 'arrows in the dark' may prove off the mark slightly in one direction or another but Im confident my shot pattern has sufficiently straddled the subject to be worthwhile info. Happy to assist further exploration of this subject in whatever capacity I can. Especially for a fellow CC player :} The CC:M story alone is desrving of wider exposure, much less CC:M Lite angle and the apparent resurgance of Atomic.