Re: WinSP MBT: Das Reich
BETA TEST
Hello Monty, I've only managed to finish a single battle so far but I have some thoughts already. I took a fairly mixed force of mech infantry and various armor, SPA, SPAA, etc. Starting at your suggested date of May 1949 (I noticed you could force the battles to start earlier than that for OOB35 but it causes oddities like the flag on the player start screen changing to the Red Flag and you can only buy support from 35 if you select something else and then 35 again). I have to say the sprite work and the sounds are utterly fantastic, as is the attention to detail. I was quite overwhelmed, and normally I like having so many choices but this time I had to spend a long while thinking about what each formation did and its role. I'm still digesting quite a lot but I wanted to say that you've done exemplary work here, and I commend you on doing your best to make the LBM's all "hang together", even if the infantry are once again given the short end of the stick in this regard, though no fault of yours I have to say! Probably not much artwork out there of alt-history German soldiers.
On that note, I actually was perusing the opponent lists thinking "This is almost too good, the only ones who can possibly fill out an interesting roster to face this would be USA and Soviets..." which I think is the only real downside to your mod. It is abundant in detail and character matched only perhaps by the Marine OOB. Makes me sad that nobody else has the time or devotion to give us some proper opponents for this. I will say though, that the situation is probably less dire for the "Police" and colonial troops: Mujahadeen, USMC and other less "heavy" OOB's will probably stack up against them and that might be a fun campaign to try out.
As to any OOB issues I have with 35 in particular: I do think the infantry companies are over-weighted, with 4 platoons versus the WW2 and Modern standard of 3 platoons. I would suggest deleting one of the infantry platoons, unless you have a particular reason for 4? I'm very curious if there is one, and I can see the rationale if you intend them to be used as the core for a campaign force. But as part of a combined arms campaign core they do soak up a lot of points and slots, leaving less room for the other goodies (oh the goodies! So many of those). On a more positive note, the weapon platoons being built into the infantry companies is welcome, as is the integral SP-AA support; considering the number of aircraft I had coming in at me last night, I definitely appreciated this addition and I feel it would be a logical extrapolation of German experiences with low level attack aircraft in WW2. I am a little puzzled at the lack of rocket artillery though I may have simply overlooked it in the huge unit selection. Was there a particular reason for this or was there just no room for it?
The sound effects, as I said earlier, are spectacular. Machine guns especially have a lot more "heft" to them now as do rifles, and I enjoy the 'hit' sounds that play when you impact armor. The classic Steel Panthers clicking sounds on the menu were a nice easter egg, appreciated that muchly. As for errors, I did notice the ones you mentioned but the only real sprite issue I came across was Icon 8167, the Me.262 HGIII-1k which has white pixels appearing below it in the encyclopedia entry. I don't know if this happens during gameplay but it was an oddity so I thought I'd mention it.
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