Combat Mission: Afrika Korps

Afrika Korps was my gateway drug. The anxiety of watching the turns play out, one minute at a time, as your tanks roll over the hills toward almost certain death...I loved it. Barbarossa to Berlin and Afrika Korps are a mile or two ahead of Beyond Overlord when it comes to engine improvements, and have SO much content to give. I would love widescreen support, but setting my video card to keep aspect ratio when using 4:3 resolutions instead of stretching it goes a long way. Given their history, I am absolutely shocked to see Battlefront allow the first three CM games on GOG but didn't think twice about buying them.

Great game & series. Tons of mods in the community too, but Afrika Korps, already has pretty good out-of-the box graphics (for 2003). It's really the earlier two titles that need mods to make them bearable. You can read game-info & reviews elsewhere, I'm just giving install help/advice: 1) The 1.04 patch is NOT needed! That was a Vista patch for the first port of the game into dgital download that supposedly helped some win7 users too, but has since been corrected. If you had CDV's retail DVD version like I do, it's the 1.03 version from winXP days yet installs fine on Vista, win7, and win10, without ANY special compatibility needs. However, that leaves 2 issues, screen format and fog, covered below: 2) Screen format - sorry, you are stuck with traditional 5:4 and 4:3 formats. No workarounds. Stretching the image is horrible. Play with black bars down either side if you have a widescreen. 3) Ddraw, dxcfg, and fog. If you had Nvidia or intel (integrated) graphics you couldn't get one of the weather effects, fog, unless you played on windows XP, but ATI drivers kept/reintroduced the required fog table files for Vista and win7. The ddraw.dll file & dxcfg applet are new additions which put fog (and antialiasing) back in the game for integrated graphics but at huge cost to frame-rates for dedicated cards. If you have an ATI card you don't need it anyway as you already have fog & AA! Just remove the ddraw.dll file as keeping it in the folder slows the game down massively! - and don't use the dxcfg setup applet that comes with it, just use ATI settings. If you have intel integrated graphics keep the ddraw.dll file but don't use the dxcfg applet unless your intel graphics driver can't set the graphics you want. If you have Nvidia the ddraw.dll will give you about 20 fames/second, so throw it (and the dxcfg applet) away and live without fog, it's only eye candy anyway (which you often switch off for planning moves) and you can still set AA in the Nvidia control panel.

I have now installed the first three Combat Missions ('Beyond Overlord', 'Barbarossa' to 'Berlin and 'Afrika Korps') on my Windows 10 Dell PC with an NVIDIA GTX1060 6GB graphics card. They are running like a dream. Not only that, I have been able to improve the graphics by installing the many BMP skins that I painstakingly collected several years ago over the ones in the dowloaded versions. I haven't done it yet, but based on that I should be able to add additional missions. I've not worked out how to make them work in widescreen (if possible) but who cares? I am so pleased to be able to play these wonderful games again. Thank you gog.com for giving me back three of the best tactical war games ever produced for PC.

For Windows 10, if you have slow response times /choppy graphics, the fix and one you will ALWAYS have to do when starting a new CMAK game is Ctrl+Alt+Tab from the main menu or within the game, each time you start. Then when you come back into the game, you will get the best FPS with no slow response times or choppy graphics. Why I do not know, but this works.