Battlefront.com released their Combat Mission: Afrika Corps Demo yesterday! A very fun game series, CMAK is a very realistic turn-based World War II wargame, the third in a series. Head to the bf.c download page. I'll describe the CM series in general then the CMAK demo at the end.

The CM Series

The turns in CM are resolved simultaneously. So what happens is you give orders while your opponent does the same. Then the action for the next 60 seconds is computed and shown as a movie you can watch with pause, fast forward, and rewind. This means you can fast forward the slower initial movement to contact before you even see an enemy and re-watch those cool enemy tank brewups when your guys make hitsover and over.

There is great sound and very nice looking vehicles. The tanks rumble along, smaller vehicles have a different engine sound, distant artillery thudding can be heard (like in that scene from Saving Private Ryan where the squad is walking along at dusk), even different rifle sounds for each nationality and gun type. The infantry squads are abstracted: a three man squad representing between as few as 8 to as many as 13 men (depends on casualties and number of men per nationality and squad type). So if you have a 9-man squad and it takes 6 casualties it will show only one man left. Same with 12-man US squads: 8 casualites will show one man left. The user interface can show you the number of guys actually left, but once you know how many guys are supposed to be in a full squad you can tell at a glance if a squad is mostly whole, taken casualties, or seriously mauled.

All individual vehicles and infantry squads have morale states. So a heavy but green(useasoned) M3 Grant can shake off small caliber hits but if the action gets too hot the crew will panic and back off. If it gets really bad (shots penetrating but not disabling the tank, internal armor spalling, too many hits clanging off) the crew will abandon the tank. For an infantry squad, if it takes fire from different directions or loses their officers or they are just conscripts, they can easily go from "Ready" to "Shaken" to "Pinned" to "Panicked" and then to "Broken".

There is an amazing amount of detail. The BF.C guys really like their historical accuracy. Armor stats are different for the hull sides, turrent sides, even weak points are accounted for. There are separate soldier uniforms for different dates! You will be hard pressed to find errors in the CM series. My favorite example of their commitment to quality (and the games' fan(atic)s) was when months after the game was released someone pointed out on their forums that one type of artillery piece (out of dozens) had no smoke rounds in real life but CM had it included anyway.

Officers in command of mortars that have no line of site can spot for them. Artillery spotters can expose themselves to drop fire on enemy positions or hide behind hills and do the same at the cost of accuracy and slower responsiveness. Some platoon leaders have bonuses for combat effectiveness, stealth, command ability, and morale.

Fog of War in the game is well implemented. Enemy units are not seen until one of your guys sees it. Sometimes they won't see it but hear it, represented by a ghost unit marked "? infantry sounds" on the map. Tanks seen are not immediately identified but seen as a generic tank unit until you can tell if it's a light 20mm armed Lynx or a monster 88mm armed Tiger tank. If it disappears from view a marker is left at the last position, which disappears over time.

The TacAI in CM is excellent. This controls individual units on both sides. Scared units will either run to cover or drop down and crawl to cover. Better, more experienced units will be more determined to press on but no units are supermen. If you give orders to a squad to shoot something but a greater threat appears or threatens them, they will generally do the smart thing and shoot at the appropriate target. Tell your men to do something stupid, like charging a machine gun before supressing it and they will get shot at and drop down in fear. If your cute little 37mm toting tank suddenly sees some enemy 88mm or 90mm monster ubertanks it will pop smoke(if it can) and back off behind a hill.

The AI opponent is OK at first but as you learn its tricks you can beat it. It is better than most wargame AIs. But like most of them it is better on defense and requires a bonus when it is on the attack. It does not cheat, so that's one point in its favor. You can give the AI extra and higher quality units but this is off by default. The human can turn off "Fog of War".

But the multiplayer options shine. You can get an opponent from the Opponent Finder forums, or the Combat Mission HQ Java based chat. The game offers the following types of multiplayer:

• Play By Email (PBEM): players do their turn ordesr and email it to their opponent with the action phase movie being computed and sent every other turn
• Hotseat: players sit at the same computer and do their turns
• TCP/IP: players do their turns while sitting at different computers

Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. PBEM is longer but it can be done at your leisure. Plus you can actually save the movie files which you can't in the other forms. Hotseat requires your friend to be with you. TCP/IP is faster but CM games tend last a long time and you may need to save the game finish later, which may be difficult if you don't know the other person.

CM allows major graphical modding. You can't create or change the models themselves, but you can change their skins. You can give the buildings a new paint job, recamo the tanks, give the troops different uniforms, etc. Even the user interface can be changed.


It's easier to list what's NOT moddable. Let's see...the brown strip at the bottom (that's the edge of the map)...the blue and green unit bases (they can be shut off but make it easier to see your units)...that's it.

The smoke, fire, trees, little rocks, terrain tiles, flag, the fonts, the buttons, the sky, even the freaking flagpole are .bmp files that you can switch. Even the transparent parts are easy: copy the purple/pink color from one of the tiles that has a transparent part and there you go! CM has a huge and active mod community.

Aside from graphical changes you can make scenarios using the same editor that the game designers use. The map is created using tiles and an easy to use elevation editor lets you make hills and ridges easily. You select what units you want from a list of units. There is little you can't do. Again, there is a large and active community that builds scenarios. You will never quit CM because you've run out of battles or opponents to fight.

The CMAK Demo

The current game is set in the deserts of North Africa, Italy, and the Med. I played the desert scenario over TCP/IP. It was very fun. Spoilers follow.

The graphics are effective: fires spread, sparks fly when tanks are hit, huge clouds of dust are kicked up by tanks moving in the desert (and can be seen by the enemy). Smoke changes color as a fire changes size when a tank burns, buildings collapse and kick up more dust. More dust spurts up when an artillery round hits (yeah, yeah, I keep harping the dust. But it does look cool).

In a reverse of the later parts of World War II, this battle had numerically superior but smaller German Panzer III's take on heavier Sherman and Grant tanks. Looking at the screen shot above it looks like the desert is almost totally flat. But you have a variety of camera levels from god's view 9 to man in the trenches view 1. From view 1 you can see several ridges and a wadi that obscures line of sight. (The camera also lets you zoom in or angle up and down from each camera view for the angle you want. You can also lock your view on a particular unit if you want to see that guy's view of a particularly cool shot)

Using these I was able to move my armor and troops in close while units farther back distracted enemy guns and tanks. Since the enemy tanks were Green but tougher, I first spent my time doing long distance shoot and scoot tactics. Annoyingly, my meek little 50mm rounds kept bouncing off the Grants' and Shermans' tough(in this part of the war at least) front armor.

After a while I realized that the inexperienced enemy tanks weren't going to hit my tanks very often. So I just rushed everyone to the safe dead zones where the enemy couldn't hit me. By popping out closer and at different angles my weaker guns were able to hit the enemy tanks in their weaker side armor, with more penetrating power, and more often, which panicked the Green crews. This is one of the great things about CM: I don't have to memorize every vehicle stat to play effectively. Front armor is stronger than side armor which is stronger than rear armor. Closer = more accurate. If I do need to look at the stats, the information is easy to access. Just click on a unit and hit enter.

With the enemy tanks either destroyed or panicked I sent my troops and tanks in close to deal with the infantry. The end result can be seen in the above screenshot: my guys overwhelmed the enemy and they surrendered since without any armor they had no hope of holding out.

There is another scenario included that I haven't gotten to yet. Try it out!