After Rising Sun, few people thought that Talonsoft would seriously revisit the Campaign Series. Most of the 'big names' behind the games had departed for points elsewhere, leaving Talonsoft in questionable straits. An outstanding tactical simulation of WWII combined arms, the Campaign Series (West Front, East Front II, Rising Sun) had covered every theater of the Second World War in engrossing detail. Where would they go? What was left to do? Divided Ground: Middle East Conflict 1948-1973 expands the coverage of the series into the Mideast conflicts between Israel and her neighbors.
The CS games have been covered in extensive detail elsewhere, and since the system used in DG is identical, I'll leave an extensive discussion of the nuances of the game system to other authors. Briefly summarizing, the scale is tactical/grand-tactical, with hexes covering 250m and turns representing 6 full minutes of action. Units represent platoons (of infantry or armor) or support-weapon sections, and the game works on an action-point system. Each unit starts with 100 AP's at the beginning of their turn, and each action the unit takes consumes AP's until their tally reaches 0 (or, more frequently, until the remaining AP is too low to do anything further). Firing, for example, usually takes about 35 AP so an immobile unit can usually fire twice a turn. Moving also takes a variable amount AP depending on the hex's terrain and the moving unit's mobility. Turns are IGO/UGO, but units with sufficient AP remaining at the end of their turn are granted opportunity fire which can interrupt movement during the enemy's turn. Games are typically 20 turns or less, so the action can be intense in a well-designed scenario where time is precious.
Graphically, DG is clearly a child of its parents. Backgrounds and environments are nothing especially noteworthy since we've seen the desert in West Front (or one of the battle packs, I forget) and hamada, dunes, and rocks are simply not that visually interesting. However, once again unit graphics are really great. 16-bit highcolor makes the Jordanian camouflage stand out distinctively from the 'muddier' Egyptian styles, and even the aircraft - glimpsed briefly as they attack - are very nicely done.
The interface is absolutely identical to previous versions of the CS games, which is a very good thing. The multiple iterations of this engine have allowed Talonsoft to refine it to a point of excellence. Every action is hotkeyed, making play very fast once you are over the moderate learning curve. The only negative comment one could make (and arguably, it's quibbling) is an absence of positive progress. While the interface and controls are great, that doesn't mean there aren't things that could have been improved upon. For example, buttons are available at the bottom of the screen for oft-repeated actions but it would have been nice had they eventually allowed you to customize or resize this toolbar. The front-end interface is still clunky, making the launching of a game a little more of a task than it needs to be. For the longtime player of the CS games, none of this will faze them a bit; for a newcomer these might be a slight irritant quickly lost in the play of the game. Is it gamekilling? Not at all - just worth mentioning.
The gameplay is the thing, obviously, and the Campaign Series has always provided outstanding WWII action, from the Norwegian fjords to the jungles of Guadalcanal. DG covers very specifically the battles between Israel and her neighbors in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The setting may be a different time & place from WWII, but have no doubt: the basic game is solidly still there. Tanks rumble and clank around the landscape, while platoons of infantry slug it out at close ranges. To be totally candid, I've not found a single CS game that isn't wonderful when the units get down to slugging it out. I've gotten feedback from some players that the turn-based format feels too 'detached', and the pacing of who fires in what order can seem a little cerebral at times. Be that as it may, the crack of a long gun, and the sudden blazing wreckage where once sat one of my own precious AFV's is exciting. The literal terror as your carefully planned assault is thrown awry by the predatory swoop of an enemy aircraft - this is what wargaming is about, and Divided Ground brings many of those kinds of moments to life.
This selection of time periods also involves some new ground for the CS engine, including such modernities as helicopters and ATGMs, and here the game starts to sputter. The engine was clearly designed for WWII actions, which have intrinsically different engagement ranges and threat situations than modern missile warfare. Infantry is infantry; ground surveillance radars, night vision, and RPV's are all the stuff of the future. The infantry squads of either side aren't intrinsically different from their counterparts of WWII so that action is just as good as ever. MG's rattle and assaults are brutal.
Beyond infantry engagements, there's a little more to discuss. The scenarios based in the early Cold War Era - 1948 and 1956 - are great; jeeps running around with recoilless rifles are obviously the fragile/lethal precursors to the attack helicopter of the 1970's and beyond. IMO they seem extraordinarily lethal, in fact; a 106mm RR is devastating to armor even at 1000m - but I'll leave that to the wargame gearheads to argue about.
Tanks (at least the ones in use in the mideast) were largely WWII remainders or upgrades - T34/85's & Su-100's for the Arabs, M48's and the occasional Cromwell 'requisitioned' from the retreating British occupation forces; the aircraft are P51's and WWII surplus bombers. The action doesn't stray too far from the late-WWII norms, although you need to use the patch (mentioned & linked below) to realistically balance the forces.
But once the first generation ATGMs show up, things do go a little astray. The lethality of encounters in that era increased to the limits of visual range, so rather than (as was the case) a running tank battle closing to pointblank ranges (for better armor penetration and hit chances), it's common for MBTs and ATGM teams to simply pick a good vantage point and hammer away at anything that moves. This is a logical outcome of the increase in weapon range without a concurrent increase in detection ability. Frankly, it's realistic according to the real world. But the AI doesn't seem to "get it" and will routinely suicide charge into a brutal kill zone despite a litter of wrecks before it. It's almost like the idea of a threat 20+ hexes away isn't even considered.
The AP system that works so admirably otherwise also seems to get a bit 'in the way' of a modern armor battle, where reactions and the timing of events is so much quicker. Two examples: first, WWII armor (save a few later-model American AFVs) did not usually have gyrostabilized armament, so firing on the move was possible but rarely useful. The turn-based "move, halt, move" feel of the AP system really worked well in that context, and the spending of AP for movement was a representative tradeoff that WWII tankers had to suffer. Yet in DG, it's rare that a vehicle can fire even 3 times in a six minute turn, and (self evidently, since the same pool of AP's is spent no matter what a unit does) can never move full and fire even once. Granted, even very modern MBTs cannot fire accurately at top speed, so a small "opportunity cost" of moving slower can be rationalized, but no shots at all? IDF forces (especially) were extremely skilled at mobile armored war, making DG's 'simulation' of the 1967 and 1973 battles feel very hesitant.
Secondly, first-generation ATGMs forced armor (mainly Israeli) to develop novel tactics to deal with the extraordinary range and lethality of even such early weapons as the Spigot and the Sagger. In 1973, IDF tankers learned the value of keeping 'Sagger watch' - armored columns moving with turrets turned in each direction so that when the characteristic launch signature of a Sagger was spotted, immediate fire could be brought to bear on the firer, spoiling his aim and throwing off the missile. 1st-Gen ATGMs required the shooter to keep the target in the crosshairs from launch to impact and were, by modern standards extremely slow (taking as much as 25 seconds to reach their 3000m maximum range). High-caliber MG fire or better yet a nearby HE-blast would either kill the shooter or make them flinch enough to miss. In fact, this became so successful that by the end of the war ATGMs were, if not neutralized, merely another threat on the battlefield. According to one text "One tank came home after a mission with over a dozen Sagger wires draped over its hull". This is impossible in DG, as the scope of the turn forces the engine to treat ATGMs as long-ranged direct fire weapons, which they clearly are not.
ATGMs are mis-simulated in other ways as well. Every reference I can find shows the Sagger range as minimum 500m, yet it seems that the game says this is 3 x 250m hexes - rather painful to find out, since the manual doesn't include the exceptional weapon statistics charts of previous games. There are also numerous errors in the units and OOB (largely corrected by Chris Perleberg's diligent efforts at http://redarrowproductions.com/DGres.htm).
There is a good mix of quite a few scenarios and four linked campaigns, covering every aspect of the wars from major tank battles to Egyptian night commando raids. Unfortunately, the characteristically meticulously-balanced engagements that made the previous games so wonderful are lacking here. On the one hand, one can claim that's a function of history; by and large the dominance of IDF forces on the battlefield meant that Arab forces weren't much of a match. On the other, however, this has never stopped the Campaign Series designers before. They were almost always able to make a challenging scenario out of just about any situation - this was clearly part of their success.
To 'balance' DG's scenarios, designers seem to have fallen back on a couple of relatively cheap tricks - either making the maps so huge and the combatants so far apart that even if the attackers move exactly the 'right way' the setup game length (ostensibly 8 or 12 turns) really ends up being only 2 or 3 turns of action that must go perfectly or you lose the scenario. Alternately, they've got the victory point totals for the Israelis set so high that if the Arabs so much as scratch the IDF paint, the Israelis are unable to gain a major victory. This is unsatisfactory; when playing either the Arabs or the Israeli side the resulting victory or loss doesn't feel like you 'earned' it.
Another aspect of DG that's been endemic to the CS games generally is a lack of intelligence. Certainly, there's the possibility of thoughtful scenario designers' putting intel into the scenario briefing ("They are coming from the northeast!"), but with fog of war in effect, in the game there is NO tactical intelligence whatsoever. This was less significant in WWII eras where forces moved slower and weapons didn't fire as far, giving the defender a chance to redeploy. Even by 1967, weapon lethality and range is tremendous, so knowing where the enemy is coming from can be critical in terms of who gets the first shot at whom. Sadly, DG doesn't address this. If you - as many of us do - tend to skim the briefings (and worse still, even if you read many of them carefully) you can be screwed because you start the game having to set up an all-around defense when the enemy is actually approaching from a single quarter.
It's worth repeating that the core of this game is good; the solid editor (again, a result of repeated iterations) should make it possible for anyone to correct whatever deficiencies they feel are present in the scenarios. Unfortunately, if you get DG in hopes that you might be able to design a hypothetical "NATO vs. Warsaw Pact 1960" scenario with the equipment (or even anything other than the Israeli/Arab conflicts of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973), you're going to be disappointed.
The OOB provided for these forces is only that for the various conflicts, and is BLANK in-between. Want to set up an imaginary war in 1970? Sorry, you can't. Want to include anyone but the narrow list of combatants? Sorry, not available either. Overall it really feels like they gave us only "what they had to" to get the product out the door and onto shelves. Coupled with a complete lack of the random scenario generator (present in Rising Sun and earlier versions), owning DG you'd better be happy with what they give you because you don't have many alternatives.
One final request I recommend to the Talonsoft developers: subdirectories. When game files can be edited, the fact that the entire game is installed to a single directory is obtrusive at best. There are over 1700 files in my Divided Ground directory, 1300 of them 50k or less that could have gone into a single 17meg pak file.
Ending on an up-note, multiplay is still quite good. Eight players per side via Internet is an outstanding way to play DG, and having humans running the show makes the AI limitations moot. Assuming someone designs a good, balanced scenario, this is really a fantastic way to play. Multiplay against humans shows off that for all the complaints mentioned above, the core of the game is essentially as fun as it ever was.
In previous versions of the Campaign Series, Talonsoft has advanced the hobby of computer wargaming. Massive OOBs, comprehensive equipment lists, various terrain, climates, conditions, and combatants - they overwhelmed us with excellent games, fantastic scenarios, and the tools to build more great scenarios effectively forever. Divided Ground has an interesting premise, and perhaps it was handicapped by an attempt to shoehorn it into an era where it doesn't really work. Even forgiving that, the super-narrow focus not only makes the game slightly repetitive, but hobbles anyone who wants to address this period creatively.
There were plenty of conflicts during the Cold War period that collectively would have been worthy of a Campaign Series installment. It would easily have been the quantitative and qualitative equal of a "Rising Sun" or "West Front". Korea, Angola, Indo-Pakistani, Eritrea, Indochina, the list is (unfortunately) endless. Giving us a TO&E for a number of 2nd and 3rd world combatants couldn't have been a much bigger project than the Russian or German TO&E 1939-1945. Addressing the engine limitations was probably outside the scope of the project, but by focusing on limited wars and insurgencies, they could have made an expansive game even within those limits.
Talonsoft decided eschew all the other brushfire and client-state wars of the Cold War time frame, and failed to address the engine issues that would be necessary to really bring the series effectively into the near-modern era. Divided Ground is a game that is fun (but limited) - and only that for students of the theater or online players.
For the rest of us, I think we'll go back to WWII (especially now that TS is selling a single-pak bundle of all the CS games and battlepacks) and hope that Divided Ground won't be the ignominious end to an outstanding series.
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Reviewed by Steve Lieb
