So I've been trying out Panzer General

[kazapp]

-a few quality units are MUCH stronger than a lot of garbage units.

I loved this almost rpg-like aspect of Panzer General. Making you attach emotionally to your "hero units" is a good thing, in my book.

Lets just hope Civ5 doesn't repeat the mistakes of the latter games in the series (mainly People's General); where modern units had such high attack strengths that no unit could survive any length of focused fire.

I quickly stopped playing those games in disgust when I realized the computer could take out any unit it wished to.

I mean, I don't have a problem with this in a game like Civ4, but PG started out as a game where during your campaign your units survive and become elite.

The latter installations of the series destroyed that.

 

[kazapp]

I played the heck out of PG in its various incarnations back in the day - there was a Fantasy General with the same engine, for instance - and loved it. The best one was the last, with the Russian campaigns (Unternehmen Barbarosse in the German version, I think it was Scorched Earth in the English one). The only thing it lacked was enough replayability, because it was always the same maps - the tactical combat however was superlative; IMHO just the right level of tactics and detail to make it fun, but not the obsessive micromanagement and detail of the hard-core wargames (I don't really want to juggle supply, morale, ammunition, weather, line of sight, opportunity fire etc. etc. in Civ!).

I too loved Panzer General (especially PG2).

People's General featured lopsided combat I didn't like - too high attack values (see previous post).

Star General, on the other hand, was an utter failure that lacked any kind of depth. Crucially, the rock-paper-scissors interaction so integral to WWII-era fighting was completely lost - generally combat was reduced to simply having the larger force. Replacing the maps with bland and featureless space maps did nothing to help (among other things, it made it impossible to hide the very basic AI)... I wanted to like this game - I still do! - and I tried to play it more than once, but every time I was forced to conclude it was a complete dud - its authors can't have understood much about what made PG so good.