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REVIEWS

Ages ago, when Atomic Games was selected by Avalon Hill to be its partner in the writing of the computer version of Advanced Squad Leader, the wargaming community at large was ecstatic. Here was the greatest board wargame of all time being ported to the computer by the firm that had brought us the very popular "V for Victory" series. Advanced for its time, V for Victory was one of the early standouts that showed one could have a great wargame engine AND look great too.

After a while, rumors began spreading that this would be an "ultra accurate" wargame, and that "the path of virtually every bullet would be calculated." The ASL grognards paused; ASL was at heart a beer-and-pretzels wargame. Some things had been severely rationalized into the system to make it playable. But if these things were brought back into detail – would it still be ASL?

The answer was not long coming. Avalon Hill, famously incompetent in the computer gaming field, folded the project (or gave up, depending on whom you believe) and somehow the game ended up in the lap of Microsoft. "AAGH!" shrieked the gaming community. We are doomed!

The game that was begun as a port of Squad Leader became something else entirely. Squad Leader, as its title suggests, was a squad level simulation of WWII warfare. Close Combat, as the new game was called, was below even that – it was, for all intents and purposes, a skirmish-level simulation of WWII combat. True to the rumors, everything was calculated in excruciating detail. So excruciating in fact, that there were a number of cries of "code bloat" and resource hog" as the software effectively gave every actor in the game (be they individual soldiers in a squad, or even individual crew members in a tank) their own separate AI.

It was terribly slow. In fact, this reviewer was hobbled by a processor-challenged computer (486-66) and the game was so pokey I blew the demo off my hard drive in about 5 minutes and never went back. (This was the era of Steel Panthers, and I was having WAY too much fun with that to waste time with something that would barely run…)

Fast-forward to 1999. The Close Combat series has been, by most accounts, a success. CC1 did well, and its successor CC2 was also very well received. CC2 in fact garnered very high praise within the wargaming community for a realistic "feel" – something that is crucial to a game’s success but devilishly hard to quantify.

So Atomic and MS release the third installment, Close Combat 3: The Russian Front. A more ambitious project than CC2 (which simulated the Market Garden operation) CC3:TRF attempts to portray the entirety of the Russian Campaign from the point of view of a German or Russian squad leader. As Keith Zabadoulai, president of Atomic posted to USENET (I’m paraphrasing): You play the role of a fire fighter – your command is an ad-hoc agglomeration of available units which is being used to launch needed attacks or shore up sagging defenses everywhere across the front. OK, it’s a rather weak premise but it works for the purposes of building a fun wargame. (Playing reality, where you sit and do nothing for game after game after game, and then are suddenly thrown into a battle with no preparation and too-few resources probably wouldn’t garner a lot of repeat business, so the fanciful background is easily forgiven.)

Going first over the manual, it’s decent. Twenty pages of troop selection,. mission accomplishment, and unit tactics follow 23 pages of game information. Surprisingly, there are no data tables shown in the handbook. Nor is there a listing of unit types, upgrade paths, or maps available. Fortunately this is now remedied at the Atomic Games site where you can find all of this information and more, including beautiful bitmap tables of units (using the actual sprites from the game), and even downloadable sound files. Despite this, I have to admit the manual was somewhat, well, unsatisfying. I’m not Sun Tzu by any means, but I found the explanations and descriptions of unit tactics to be rather sterile, shallow and in the end, rather useless. Personally, I would have appreciated more history, and examples from real life accounts. A perfect source would have been the US Army publication "Small Unit Actions in the Russian Campaign" – this would have given the players of either side a real feel for the action. In any case, skim the manual, but go to the Atomic site for more useful hard information (as well as some interesting patches for game balance and AI unit selection!).

To start the game, you buy your starting troops. One place where CC3:TRF shines is in its troop selection – you can choose from Conscript/Average/Elite forces from any of the 4 branches: Command, Infantry, Armor, Support. There is truly a wide array of unit type to choose from, all thoroughly researched and appropriate to the time setting. According to the designers, the enemy AI makes its unit picks based on what it has "learned" from your unit distributions. If you have an armor-heavy force in one scenario, you will find yourself facing a large number of AT guns in the next. Generally the logic follows the rock/paper/scissors of armor/guns/infantry. In deciding what to field against you.

The number of slots you have available also influences your unit selection. For example, you may only have 11 slots – 12 are available when you make 2^nd Lieutenant. Also, slots limit some unit selection. Once you have 12 slots, you are also now able to select from SS and Guards units. This makes for tricky planning, and a keen eye on the upgrade chart. A good unit might be cheap, but rather than spend that fraction of points filling your slots, it’s commonly wiser to save them and apply them after the battle to the (hopefully more) points you have at that time, for instance to buy a tank for that slot.

Similarly, units can be refitted, restoring them after taking damage in battle, or upgrading them to a better weapon set, or more training. Units also need rest, well handled by CC3 on an individual unit basis, not simply by "number of scenarios played in". Has your HMG team been in the thick of it for several battles in a row? They’ll need rest. But the mortar team who’s been sitting on their butts can go several more scenarios before they need any respite.

There are a lot of configurable options in CC3. The trees, for example, are actually mapped as sprites, so they can be removed for visual clarity. If the sight of your bleeding soldiers lying in the barren steppes of Mama Rossiya makes you queasy, this can be turned off, too. Perhaps my favorite options are the languages. You can have Russian units speaking Russian, and German units speaking German (default is English for both, and they are customizable separately). I happen to speak both languages, and I can honestly say that the blurbs are well done, with good, strong accents (albeit too consistent – not every German came from Hesse, and not every Russian came from Gorkiy – but you can’t have everything, I suppose!). The verisimilitude that this added was incredible.

You can also change fog of war, time limits, and even whether the units will blindly follow your orders (pessimistically rating the player’s talent, this is noted as usually ending up as a more lethal option) J .

Once you have your units selected, you move on to the first battle. This can be a learning experience. Trying to handle the battle in a "rush to contact" fashion got me thoroughly hosed. Once I restarted and settled down, making decisions based on real life military experience instead of "gamers knowledge", I did much better. The key to success is patience. As a real-time game, there are no arbitrary "turns" to keep pace by – how long must you bombard something with smoke to make a difference? Simply watch the screen. When you see the screen is thick enough, hopefully you will have had a near enough jumping-off point that your troops can rush the enemy through the smoke and seize a position without too many casualties.

The tutorials are a good, if too brief way to learn the way the game operates. The short, programmed events show the player how to move, fire, and issue orders effectively, but that’s about it. They "suggest" the idea of diversionary tactics and flanking maneuvers, but there is little enough discussion about the employment of armor, nothing about guns, and nothing about combined arms operations. New players could have used much more information here.

The play of the game is intense. At the start of most scenarios, you are out of contact with the enemy. Assuming you are playing with the standard fog-of-war options, it’s just you on an empty map. But they’re out there…somewhere. As you advance to contact (or they do), your headphones rattle with the sounds of rifle and mg fire, followed almost inevitably by screams of the wounded or dying. The sound effects are put to extremely good use in this game – a great deal of information is conveyed through your speakers. The status of your men, their opinion of situations (usually bad!) comes in their reports to you. You can even tell the type of weapon firing, as this is also represented realistically. Believe me, if you have men sneaking toward an enemy position and you hear the nearby characteristic rip of an MG42, you know you are in trouble.

I find initially that the scope of the map is rather huge, but this is realistic. You are issuing commands for a few squads over a battle area of 500m by 350m. This might seem unwieldy, but is not an uncommon operational area for troops of this number. Unfortunately, it forces the player to dispense with viewing the quite handsome and detailed unit graphics for a more strategic view (where red or blue markers represent the units). It’s clumsy, but you end up switching back and forth a lot, as enemy fire and smoke are NOT represented on the strategic map.

Every soldier on your side is represented, and is tracked individually. This of course contributes to the tremendous processor burden. One might imagine this is information overload, but CC3 presents it in relatively well-summarized formats, easily reachable by the f-keys. You can tell the number of rounds of ammunition, their state of mind and health, and their current activity. In fact, the level of detail presented is ironic; the game does a pretty good job of representing realistically the behavior of the units. Men will refuse to cross an open area swept by fire, unless of the highest morale/experience. Units knocked about will commonly go into "defend" mode, from which you can’t break them until they’ve had some time to recover. So knowing he has 322 rounds for his machinegun and 2 grenades doesn’t help you much when Sgt. Steiner is cowering and refusing to listen to orders…

Further the AI is in my experience not terribly bright. Initially it was hard to tell – I played my first campaign as the Germans and it’s credible to believe, at least in the early war years, that the Russians were individually that bad. But as the campaign wore on and I scored "total victory" after "total victory", I began to see past my ego and have doubts. I was on the highest difficulty level – should I get my head handed to e at least once in while? Then I played the Russians, and while I did realize that they did stink in the early years, I was still able to beat the Germans time after time.

The AI is (as is common) mediocre on defense and atrocious on offense. Contrary to the "dynamic learning" touted in the prepublication press, I found repeated flanking maneuvers totally confounded the computer again and again. There was no apparent "learning" going on here – trying the same trick against a human got me toasted. No flank security is evident, and the AI ambushes are not frightening. This may have a lot to do with the limited number of units on either side (never more than 16), but judicious placement can mitigate this.

On attacks, the AI is piecemeal and doesn’t use even simple combined arms tactics. Tanks roll ahead blithely ignorant of where their infantry support is or what’s happening to them. Smoke? What’s smoke? AT guns will fire over and over from the same location, without relocating. Mortar teams are commonly found in the "visibility shadow" of the furthest back obstacle on the AI’s side – if you can rush a scout car or light AFV there, you WILL be able to remove the AI’s local arty support. Every time.

The campaigns are lackluster. Some USENET griping has been to the effect that "the players successes have no influence on the war". Well, I can’t argue with that. They don’t. You can win every battle and the war still rolls right on. But should they? In my opinion no. To paraphrase Bogey: "The success or failure of a few squads don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy war…" As a squad-level game, I personally was not surprised.

However, the campaign system could have used a good deal more sprucing, even granted the effects on the war would be minimal. While it’s nice that subsequent maps have the shattered hulks of destroyed tanks from former battles remaining, there’s little other effect. The enemy doesn’t seem to have a morale effect from getting trounced on the previous map, nor is there ever evident a "flush" of reinforcements that suddenly make one’s cowering opponent a surprise tiger. There are simply too few maps (27) – how many times can one take the same hills without learning quickly the best approaches and firing lines? Finally, while there are "news update" cutscenes, there’s little else other than a few setup screens and the next battle. It would have been nice to have a dynamic briefing, with a simple "Attaboy!" here or there after a string of tough victories.

There are some issues with the unit management between campaigns. A rifle squad reduced to 1 guy can’t be merged with other similarly crippled units (recovering the desperately valuable unit slots). The only options available to the commander suffering a mauling is to either refit this squad (for which you may not have enough points) or retire them, losing hard-earned experience. A mortar team without a vehicle just doesn’t show up until you get them one. (I wish I’d had that option myself more than a few times.) Similarly, a glaring error is the omission of any notification that your soldiers have been medalled. I only found out at the very moment before retiring a unit (it was taking a needed slot) that several of the soldiers in the unit had gotten medals, including the Iron Cross! A presentation screen ala Red baron would have been appropriate.

Single player may be adequate for a laugh, but Multiplayer is where this game really shines. In a sense I can forgive a lackluster AI – no computer will ever be as good as a human. But the best possible place for a computer is as neutral judge and game mechanics-handler. Play is mainly on the Internet through the Zone. MS has made the multiplayer hookup a virtual (pun intended) no-brainer. The Zone handles detecting the latest version of the game, downloading and installing necessary patches and updates, and gives you a simple interface to either host or play in a game. Once connected, within a few simple clicks (selecting scenario and options) you are playing. The connection is also very ping-tolerant, so those cursed with crummy modems or connections can still get great Internet play. Gamerooms are available to suit various needs, including a ladder room where the game states are sent to the Zone ranking system.

But if playing CC3 single player was a little painful, playing CC3 multiplayer was heaven. Finally, I have a realistic WWII simulation that takes care of all the drudgery of line of sight, detection, ammunition, command radius, morale, etc – and lets me PLAY against someone. As a gamer, I can’t overstate this. The mechanics recede into the background and you are making decisions as close to reality as a game can bring. The pressure of real-time action, coupled with great immersive sound effects and some true bastard on the other end of the line (who I’m CERTAIN always gets more points to buy his troops than I did, darn it!) makes this about as fun as can be.

A scenario editor is also included in CC3, allowing for allegedly infinite replay. Limits on the feature set however mean that most scenarios will be rough approximations of each other. But let’s be honest: in implementation, the scenario editor is commonly the "forgotten stepchild" in every game. Typically, the game is developed with an in-house scenario editor which is functional but only just so, but nobody cares because it’s being used by professional programmers day after day so the idiosyncrasies are ignored. Then, near the end of development, the team realizes they have spare space on the CD to add the editor. A crash project is then thrown on someone’s desk to "revamp the editor to make it user-friendly", normally someone who has no spare time anyway. So this poor person does their best to clean up the system as quickly as possible, never knowing when the beta group is going to finally say "done" to the main game, and his or her product must be likewise immediately done. Therefore they don’t in any case dare to do a full rework of the code, since nobody is ever going to slow the release of a title waiting for a scenario editor. I don’t doubt this was the same case for CC3. The editor is functional, but that’s about it. My first use of it crashed out to Windows, but thereafter it seemed stable enough.

In any title a few gripes prevent a game from being perfect. Unfortunately in CC3 some of these are pretty serious. For example, it was common on the Eastern Front to let a half-squad cling to the outside of advancing AFV to provide some immediate infantry support on a breakthrough or redeployment. Units are, as far as I can tell, unable to ride armor, or any vehicles in CC3. In my opinion this cripples the German player more than the Russian, as their mobility even at this scale had a tremendous effect on their tactics (and success).

Further, aside from the occasional vehicle starting a scenario frozen and immobile, there is little weather effect, and certainly no transient conditions such as rain, dust or even night. Terrain conditions are locked on the map level (i.e. use this map and it’s ALWAYS mud, use this other and it’s always DEEP SNOW), and even in the editor the weather choices are limited to normal or frigid. For a real-time game that keeps track of some long-term events (The rocket launchers reportedly take 30 minutes to reload. I’ve not set up a trial scenario to see if this happens, but there’s been some doubt cast about it.) it would have been cool to see the map get darker and darker as night approached. In any case to fail to include rain or snow is a serious omission.

Even more seriously, air support is missing, as are horse troops, off-board artillery support (only added in the editor), airborne deployment, ski troops and any map having to do with water (such as a major river crossing). If you are lucky enough to have a friendly bombardment added by the scenario designer, don’t expect to have any say as to where it goes – it’s preprogrammed. Also, if you want to find out where it’s going to land (fairly useful info in most circumstances) you’ll have to quit out to the editor, and look there, then restart your game.

In sum, Close Combat 3: The Russian Front is a decent single player and great multiplayer game. Rereading the review, I brought up a lot of complaints against the single player. I must state that my final impression is not so savage. The single player game is adequate and, despite the flaws listed above, basically fun. Bullets whizzing, explosions blasting, and guys yelling – it IS fun. I simply expect that it won’t provide much of a challenge to even a moderately skilled player. Further, the omission of a number of other elements makes the replayability (even given an editor) not terribly great. But as long as you have an Internet connection, I will recommend this game. Multiplayer saves this title – it is an immersive and realistic mechanism when backed by the caprice, inventiveness and cunning of a human..

Reviewed by Steve Lieb

Summary
Pros: Realistic, immersive integration of different sensory inputs, simple interface, high sound quality; Multiplayer is GREAT. Cons: Weak AI in general, feature set limited, no weather, too-brief tutorials, campaign structure has some flaws.
Interface : 7	Gameplay : 7	Graphics : 8
Audio : 9	Multiplayer : 9	Overall : 7.8

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