These are the second and third titles in John Tiller’s award-winning Squad Battles series. Newcomers to the genre may be initially put off by the ‘old fashioned’ look of hexes and counters. Don’t be misled: these games are the most realistic-feeling squad-level military simulations to ever appear on a computer screen.
Counters represent individual vehicles, squads (up to about 15 guys), or fire teams, down to single officers. Hexes are 40m across and turns are 5 minutes. Each squad or individual has a loadout of weapons and equipment that they carry with them and can use to the enemy. Even individual weapons are modeled, so as guys die you’ll see their weapons lying across the battlefield (for re-use, if someone’s desperate enough). Oddly, given the system’s comprehensiveness (they have the Japanese officers swords), grenades are not shown but this is a pretty small quibble. Each weapon has an individual sound effect, even varying from helicopter to helicopter from the heavy chop of the UH1’s to the dragonfly buzz of OH13’s. The American player in WWII will be as delighted with the heavy boom of naval support guns as the Vietnamese player will be happy to hear the coughing whoosh of RPG’s wrecking Allied APCs.
Squads have a finite number of movement points which they expend crossing terrain or firing. Play is the igo/ugo format, with a player getting a chance to expend opportunity fire freely during his enemy’s movement.
The format is exceedingly simple, the hex/counter thing being a long-standing staple of wargaming. This is good, because it’s well understood and lends itself to quick player comprehension. John Tiller didn’t hesitate, however, to take advantage of the bookkeeping capabilities of the computer where it added to gameplay. Morale (commonly an afterthought in shallower games) is modeled in detail: units are rated from class A (gung ho troopers) to class F and worse, representing shadings of demoralization and effectiveness that play out subtly in combat.
Computers also handle the nitty-gritty of command & control well, too. Squad Battles games use a downward cascading command system to determine units rallying or re-organizing. Top commanders quality (rated A through F like morale) affects their subordinates’ chances to succeed, and so on down until the squads themselves get to take their checks. It sounds complex but is remarkably simple to keep track of in play. Basically, keep your leaders alive yet where they can still influence the action. (Good luck!)
The equipment lists are worthy of note all by themselves. To call them comprehensive is an understatement. P&F alone has 70 vehicles and almost 90 weapons systems modeled in detail, from 8” naval guns to K9s (useful for increasing a units spotting capability). Helicopters (in ToD) are a particularly novel unit, and their capabilities/vulnerabilities are well illustrated. In PF you’ll also become very acquainted with various landing craft due to the island-hopping nature of WW2 in the South Pacific.
Fog of War is available as an option, and for fun it’s essential. Both of these games represent conflicts with short encounter distances, mostly infantry, and a great deal of reaction. The battles are between very dissimilar combatants at close quarters; with one side (in both games the US) typically having a preponderance of support assets whose utility is mitigated by the quickly-intermixed fighting.
This is the crux that makes both of these games such a pleasure to play. Sure, P&F has 40 scenarios and ToD has a similar number PLUS a number of campaign games (a first for the series), either of which will keep you blissfully entertained for a long time. Sure each game comes with a comprehensive list of scenarios, giving you a handy way to choose what you have the time to play (“lessee, it’s only an hour until we land…”). But once you’ve played a scenario, you’re not finished: play it from the opposing side and it is almost a completely different game. The US side typically has to reconcile either a need to advance with a preference for keeping the enemy at arm’s length (where tactical bombers and/or naval guns can do the work with little risk to US forces), or if on defense they are usually faced with overwhelming odds. The Japanese forces in P&F are extremely high morale units with little or no support, who need to engage the Americans as closely as possible to prevent US support from operating freely. Likewise the VC/NVA generally must try to use their advantages of concealment, hidden movement (caves/tunnels are a new addition to the series) and ambush to concentrate on vulnerable US units and then disperse to concentrate elsewhere again.
If that wasn’t enough, both games come with complete and well-made editors, allowing you not only the freedom of building your own situations (remarkably easy with the OOB editor and scenario editor in tandem), but it unleashes the creativity of all those other wargamers out there. There are already many player-created scenarios out there, look particularly at the high-quality site at http://waw.wargamer.com/ (also where you can find the 1.01 minor patch).
A great deal of credit for the enjoy-ability of these games goes to a flexible and capable AI. The AI in Squad Battles is remarkably robust and doesn’t make many obvious blunders. Even in user-designed scenarios, AI units use cover most of the time and make reasonable decisions about where to allocate limited reaction fire (albeit P&F displayed a tendency to obsess about landing craft, and ToD displayed the same for helicopters). The scenarios are generally well-balanced and are fun to play for either side but I’d recommend most players play whatever force is attacking, because the AI is – as usual – far better on defense than offense. My only gripe is that most scenarios have a beautiful and huge maps, but the action takes place on less than 10% of the space – it seems like such a waste, unless it’s a deliberate effort to provide budding editors with space to exercise their imaginations.
But wait, there’s more! Of course, AI that is unchallenging at the highest levels of gameplay isn’t a surprise. The only real solution is human-to-human play. Squad Battles games completely support remote play, either on a LAN, Internet, or PBEM. Hotseat (2 players on one computer) is available as well. In each case, the AI manages your reaction fire during the other player’s turn to make everything a lot faster.
The documentation is pretty good as well. There’s no massive West Front-style manual certainly, but a lot of space is given in the documentation explaining WHY certain issues were handled certain ways. Clearly Mr. Tiller understands and respects his target audience enough to trust them with this sort of ‘inside information’. I wish more companies did.
It’s a great time to be a wargamer. I’m not talking about those casual guys who play Command & Conquer or Warcraft once in a while; I’m talking about the hardcore, I-gotta-have-hexes sort of wargamer. You know the type: willing to argue minutiae about the differences between tanks and tank-destroyers, fuzzy-minded from staying up playing games too late the night before, and with a squint perfected for spotting that 6-5-8 SS counter hiding at the bottom of a stack from 4’ away.
The major publishers seem to have forgotten wargaming. First-person shooters and realtime strategy games have been the mainstream rage for years, and even board wargaming seems to be dying a long, consumptive death. Since the mass-defections at Talonsoft, I can’t think of a ‘big’ publisher releasing a decent historically-based computer wargame title at all. And you know what? Thanks to HPS that’s perfectly fine by me.
Because when spouses and parents go out to buy someone a birthday or holiday present, frequently they’ll think, “you know, he likes that war stuff and he’s always playing on the computer, maybe I’ll try to get him a wargame?” Then they run down to Wal-Mart and grab the first thing they see or recognize with soldiers on the cover. Unfortunately in previous years, the things that got the most shelf space were games that may have been entertaining and certainly were pretty, but didn’t aim for the level of authenticity, accuracy, and historicity that serious wargamers want (PG3 comes to mind). Generally this wasn’t a long-term resident of any wargamer’s hard drive.
Not so any longer. With the departure of the ‘big publishers’, all those purchases should now going to the niche developers like HPS Simulations, and help them to flourish and produce outstanding games like Squad Battles: Tour of Duty and Squad Battles: The Proud and the Few. The more great games that come out like this, the more people will enjoy wargaming, and that’s better for the hobby in general.
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Reviewed by Steve Lieb
