Squad leader computer game

England expects that every man will do his duty. Horatio Nelson October Matrix Games Forums The Colonials strike back! What PC games are nearest to Squad Leader? View related threads: in this forum in all forums. Users viewing this topic: none. Printable Version. Login Message. Hello all, Just wondering if any of you would like to give your opinions on which game is nearest to Squad Leader on the PC?

I have always been dissappointed that a true SL game was never released, and have been looking for the nearest I can get since.

Steel Panthers came close in some respects, but didn't include some of the small immersive points such as leaders, etc. Close Combat is a fairly decent attempt at something similar, and I enjoy the series but I guess I really wished that there would be a full board game version built for the PC, with the same maps, counters, etc where the computer would look after the rules, book keeping, and add in a decent AI.

What are your thoughts? Post : 1. I was about to say Close Combat but you already have that covered. That's the only game that I can think of that is close to Squad Leader. Post : 2. Conflict of Heroes is a good tactical level game. It is not ASL but it has the right feel to it without all the excessive details. With the action point system, I think the battles have a natural flow to them which I think ASL lacked.

There are no leaders, it is abstracted as CAPs or Command Action Points which can be used by any unit to modify rallying and fighting. So far I've made 3 conversions of ASL scenarios. The maps and OOBs convert fairly well, although some adjustments have to be made.

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The games you can find on our pages are no longer supported by the publishers. You will not buy them in stores anymore. The game opens with a computer animated intro that I think is pretty bad. I've always believed that animating or rendering humans in high-res 3D is a mistake in any game, and in the case of a period piece like Squad Leader, it's downright laughable.

The soldiers have no character and move in groups obviously composed of identical 3D models going through identical animated steps. I would much prefer tasteful still montages or hand-drawn art to this lifeless and imagination-crushing aesthetic, but it's rife in the gaming industry, so I shouldn't single out Squad Leader for it. And who plays a game for its cutscenes, anyway? The menu, mission briefing, and platoon and equipment selection screens are functional and well-done, with pop-up explanatory text for every button.

The player can select from four difficulty levels, the hardest one being a carryover of the Iron Man mode from Chaos Gate, one of my favorite features of that game. In this mode called General in Squad Leader , only one savegame slot is allowed, and the game automatically saves over itself every time a soldier is wounded or killed.

I wish this option was included in more games, since it really ups the tension and forces careful consideration of every action, intensifying the accomplishments and disasters of your soldiers on the battlefield. The eight available Squads come in two flavors: six of riflemen and two of heavy weapons experts, each composed of four soldiers and a squad leader.

This makes for a total of fifty different men to command, who are chosen randomly with statistics generated anew from a pool of for each nationality whenever a new game is begun. The player can freely exchange soldiers between positions, to tailor squads as he sees fit.

Each man has a name which is editable , portrait, age, town of origin, a brief biography to give him some flavor, and is rated in six statistics: Action Points, Accuracy, Morale, Initiative, Strength, and Leadership.

In addition, each holds a rating, from Green to Elite, which can increase with experience and boost the soldier's base statistics. Some good effort has been put into individualizing the soldiers through their portraits again rendered in 3D, with slightly more success than the cutscenes and bios. Soldiers' voices are generic for each nationality, which is no surprise given the large number of men in play; the German soldiers sound good, partly because they speak German subtitles can be toggled , and the British soldiers sound okay, but the Americans sound like a bunch of whiny pansies.

The statistics system is a little hard to get a handle on, because instead of establishing a standard range say, 1 to for all of them, each attribute seems to have its own scale.

For instance, 40 is a very high Accuracy, 78 is a very high Strength, and 9 is a very high Leadership. It's as if the designers approached every in-game algorithm separately from the desired end result and scaled each statistic to fit, instead of starting with a universal statistic system as a foundation and building the game rules out from there.

The best pen-and-paper RPGs apply this latter theory to good effect; it allows the characters to become the hub of the rule system and encourages greater player connection and comprehension.

A further effort to individualize soldiers takes the form of letters from home, which some of them may receive between missions, an option you can turn it off intended to add color and some extra-curricular psychological effects to the game.

The idea is that, for example, a soldier who learns a family member has passed away may lose his will to fight and refuse to respond to orders. This is an interesting inclusion and I welcome the attempt to introduce something novel to the genre, but the end results are mitigated somewhat by the fact that a soldier who receives a bad letter can simply be transferred to a squad that's not going to see any action in the near future. There are a variety of mission types, and each mission has different squad, specialist, equipment, and vehicle limitations, so they can range from single-squad engagements to large battles involving dozens of men and multiple vehicles per side.

Combined with customized maps and victory objectives, the game offers a rich array of gameplay possibilities. It all sounds quite wonderful -- all of the ingredients for a great game, really. And then you play your first mission. The flaws are legion and with you from the first turn. The resolution is fixed at x , and the game's artists were so much more absorbed with texture and detail which is lovely than any kind of overarching visual order that it's often hard to locate your troops, and well-nigh impossible to discern elevation slopes away from your point of view.

This is at the closest zoom level; the higher zooms exacerbate this problem by orders of magnitude, remaining as they do at the same x resolution. The engine allows you to cut away levels of elevation for more easy viewing, but this method was clunky in its previous incarnations and remains so here, forcing you to construct a 3D visualization of the battlefield in your own head in order to get any sort of inkling as to what parts of the map are visible from where.

The interface setup is standard for this sort of game, with soldier data and numerous buttons along the bottom of the screen, and a view of a portion of the battle map taking up the rest. The control system is simple enough, requiring the player to click on a soldier, click on an action button, and then click on an object or destination for the action.

There are hotkeys configurable for all of the onscreen buttons, so if you want you can just use the mouse to indicate the destination for a chosen action. In fact, you'd better just use it for that, because clicking on a button often has no effect, even though it may make a little noise and turn "unlit" in order to indicate that it's been pushed. A second click will turn it "lit" again, but may or may not produce the desired ingame results.

Mouse responsiveness is interminable. Apparently the game is a massive resource hog, which is astounding given its isometric, 2D aspect and limited resolution, as well as all of the time the coders have had to optimize the engine. The position of the mouse pointer on the battle map is indicated by a green box cursor outlining the terrain square or "cell" in SL parlance under it, and this cursor "hugs" the terrain as you move it around.

The same cursor in Chaos Gate gave important feedback, including a red "X" to indicate a square that was not traversable. You cannot explain the rules to someone in 10 minutes and start playing. If you have full knowledge of all the rules and are playing against someone that does not you have an unfair advantage. There is still a big fan base for these games. So you would think this would make it a prime candidate for someone to produce a computer version that can live up to the game.

To find out this information you have to do a little bit of digging. But they have done nothing with this right. Why could this be? The first reason could be that the release of their version of Diplomacy, whose digital rights they acquired at the same time as Squad Leader, was not a success. Seems reasonable right? I mean who cares about a game that was first published 40 years ago?

Well, the law prevents this.