[Saxxon]

Major props to Matrix games for resurrecting one of my favorite games.  While I credit Keith Z & Atomic with the creation, it seemed to me they also erred in the downfall of their entrerpise.  Specifically where in CC2 & CC3 you have the ability to customize forces to make many different scenarios and in 4 & 5 you were forced to take a selection of preformed groups.  My experience is mots gamers like to tweak and after playing a game a while "what if" scenarios become essential to continued interest.  Too bad they didn't see that back then.

Look forward to recieving my copies here shortly of the new versions.

[mooxe]

Welcome to the site Saxxon,

Resurrecting... more like rereleasing. In CC5 you actually could choose your men, it was only CC4 that forced your hand, why did they make it that way anyways?

If you still have CC5, install it. There was 20 people on Gamespy playing CC5 this past weekend, and on our monthly online meets CC5 is still the favorite. There is more mods for CC5 than any other version. WaR, COI, TLD and CCMT are played online but not nearly as much. One reason none of the popular mods work with them.

[schrecken]

All the popular mods work with Cross of Iron


Every mod ever made works with Modern tactics.


I'm playing GJS, Bloody Omaha, Meuse , Stalingrad Operation Circle, and Red Storm Rising on WaR and TLD

[Saxxon]

Actually I can tell you why CC4 forced your hand, I was at E3 the year prior to release and talked to the developers along with a couple other fans.  Keith Z. had read some gaming rag that called the Requisition Screen in CC2 & CC3 "The most confusing screen in gaming history."  He took the author's idiotic rantings at face value not discounting the fact they probably mostly reviewed Barney games for kids & had an anti-war outlook to begin with.  The vast majority of people I know that play this game, heard of it or play others like it are war gamers & history buffs.  While a few might not know what a Panzer V is, the force bars for AP & AT pretty well give the novice an idea of the units effectiveness.  In short, there was nothing confusing about the screen if you can read basic tables.  They trashed the integrity of the game to 90% of fans to satisfy 10% of whiners that can't be bothered to learn a game past the 2 minute attention span of a 5 year old.  Microsoft & Atomic parted ways, SSI picked the game up for 2 titles and the rest is history.  Kind of sad, I looked forward to many expansions and improvements.

I will say though at first play with 2 basic patches the AI is performing very poorly.  How entrenched soldiers in large numbers can be assaulted over open ground, and uniformly outshot by soldiers taking impromptu cover in an open field let alone the middle of a road is beyond me.  That aspect could use some cleaning up.  If its house to house fighting and you drop flat in the middle of the street and stay there for several minutes - you die.  In the game I've got every MG42 does it, they are impervious to return fire and shoot up whole squads in concrete buildings.  This however, only works one way, if I order men to cross the street, they do so piecemeal, get seperated and cut down.  I don't recall it happening like that in the original quite so badly, but then I didnt get to play CC5 much, 1-3 I owned, 4 & 5 my brother bought & I played at his house (part of the problem that Atomic brought on themselves pissing off fans, I liked the mutability of scenarios by being able to freely make forces on various maps).