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Faces of War
Hexus
Stalingrad
UFO: Aftermath
UFO: Aftershock World War I
I can recommend UFO: Aftershock with Okim's masterful
UFO:Aftershock ACM. Well, it's a TCM (Total conversion), but it began life as a re-skinning and sound reworking mod. It included many new and improved models for the weapons, and much more authentic sound effects. When he was done with that, he moved on to tweaking (and expanding) the weapons available, and added some weapons to make the Cyborgs into the walking tanks that they sound like. It's no longer in active development, but it is complete. I saw one bug and reported it, and he fixed it rather quickly. He also balanced the difficulty more in favor of the AI by increasing the spawn multiplier by 3 to 1 or so for standard difficulty. I believe in one mission, I watched about 15 warriors walk by (I had a team of 5/6 folks). That same mission, I sent out a scout to pull the warriors back through a room with one way in and out (in hopefully ones and twos). That strategy worked for a bit - but some of the others knuckleheads got wise and started chucking 'nades and RPGs my way. It didn't end so well. If you have a room with two entrances, the AI will definitely try to flank you. So the AI does adapt to your strategy.
My biggest problem with the game is the crashing. That said, I was running it on an ATi video card, in a laptop that the vendor (HP) required their specific driver - why do they do this? As usual, they promptly dropped video driver support six whole months after the laptop was released. It's too bad that the Omega Driver guy fell off the face of the earth. I honestly pin most of the instability on the AMD card, because it worked just fine on an Nvidia video card - that is until the caps fell off - and of course XFX would not honor their "double lifetime" warranty. Apparently I registered it 30 days after I purchased, and it had to be registered within 15 or some crud like that.
My biggest gameplay issue is that the supply system (the yellow tracks) are not well explained. For instance, to get all resources from a province, you need only connect the track to the capitol's county. Other counties will deliver their resources to the capitol, unless there's a local track to drop them onto (in the case that the capitol is owned by someone else).
Oh yes, I also liked UFO: Aftermath with the ComboFix Beta mod. There's some graphical glitches (again, could be ATi related), and a couple of game breaking bugs. Here's a hint, though. If they tell you to carry something to the extraction point, make darn sure it is
in your hands. In your backpack is
not good enough! The game will say it is, but then the research never happen, and the game will basically stop at that point. I had to use a VFS (Virtual File System) extractor to pull my boys (and girls) out of that save game and transfer them into a new save game. Yes, technically cheating, but I wasn't giving up my experienced dudes to a game glitch.
In both games, I logged about 200 missions. Aftermath missions are short, I probably put about 100 hours into it, maybe about 30 hours more when considering the glitch. Aftershock missions can be much longer, most are one-offs, but occasionally you'll get a 2-part (and at least one 12-parter), so I probably logged closer to 300 hours in Aftershock. It helps to have an interest in small team tactical combat games, though. As for the RTS portion, well, the pausing makes it play like Baldur's Gate or Darklands, so if you pause a lot, you can learn what's happening very quickly (or slowly, as needed).