Kharkov: Disaster on the Donets

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

 

It took me a few days to bite on this one.

I'm a sucker for an Eastern Front game, but I knew this was only going to be one scenario, not a real game.  So after bemoaning the lack of value that the game Battlefront represented with its measly four scenarios, when SSG & Matrix offered up just one scenario for the same full boat price I had a not so quiet doubting inner voice ...

A few years ago (five?  I forget) I bought Prelude to Disaster, Clash of Arms' boardgame of the same battle for thirty something dollars. $20 less than this.  That's with printed everything; a full boxed boardgame, and it was still cheaper.  The addition of an AI beckoned though, as did a new game ... new ... game ...

OK, I bit.

The shopping/downloading/installing all worked fine, & from the idea of getting the game to playing it, it was a done deal inside ten minutes for me.

PDF Follies

The installer ended by asking if I want to see the Readme; fine, that's normal.  But the Readme file had nothing in it but an exhortation to see the What's New file, and the link in the menu to the What's New file -- you knew this was going to happen -- went straight back to the Readme file again. Oh well.

Just a broken link, and not at all in the same league as Guns of August's Phase-That-Does-Nothing Phase, but still funny.  And it got me thinking: why does a PDF manual in a new game really need a separate PDF file with the changes in it? Maintenance?  Not really an excuse as any half way competent version control will work here.  Laziness?  Lack of resources?  (This is not going in a good direction).  Who knows, but the file did contain this interesting bon mot:

"SSG is pleased to announce that a new version of the popular Across the Dnepr scenario will be available as a scenario for the Kharkov system ... Pricing and release timing will be announced in due course."

I'd suggest that any price above free would mean no sale for me. I'd also suggest throwing in all the previous scenarios on detection of a valid install - Battles in Italy, Battlefront, all the rest, the way ProSim do.

The manual itself is fine & dandy: all more or less thorough & straightforward. Not much has changed in the underlying game as it turns out.  There's a bunch of stuff about sea lanes and other Battlefront things that don't apply too, but I'll let that pass.

There's also a separate manual for the editor now. The editor still looks to be a much the same bear as before, but at least there's documentation (though nowhere near as well done as the game's docs it's much better than the yawning gap there used to be). I'm not sure a few of the inevitably-AI-less user made scenarios are going to mean much, but I'll keep an open mind.

The Kharkov game scenario

OK, on to the business end of things.  12-28 May 42 is covered in daily turns.  The usual do anything in any order you want/SSG phase-less turns I might add.  Units are regiments (mostly) . There are 4km hexes.  There are slightly changed CRTs. In fact all our old friends are back with a tiny tweak or two.

If you've played any of the previous games, and especially if you (like me, also foolishly) bought Battlefront, you'll be hard pressed to spot the differences here.

There are a few minor changes to how things work to be sure, and one big-ish one that I'll discuss in a moment, but all up: any excuses from SSG and Matrix that this isn't just a Battlefront scenario that's being sold for fifty bucks are going to sound lame indeed.

The graphics have improved slightly.  The almost invisible light gray strongpoints have become blue & red and come in different sizes, so they show up much better now. The usually very busy SSG map seems slightly simpler too, and therefore prettier than usual (to my eyes at least). 

For a while I feared the open countryside came at a price. The AI is as usual very good, but when I briefly encircled Kharkov from the South & West the German AI kept trying to push eastwards against what would normally have been the main Soviet  thrust, until the 6th Army HQ was overrun from the West & the AI finally tweaked to what was going on & (to its immense credit) reopened a corridor westwards. Impressive stuff.

The counters remain the same (some would say cluttered low res mess), which you may or may not have found annoying in the past. Personally I've become kind of fond of them over the years, but some other folks find them hard to read. There's no real zoom, just SSG's Alt-magnifying glass.

On other matters aesthetic: the music's good to start with then fine for a few iterations, then there's the obligatory hunt for the no-more-music preference, but this game's not the only offender in that regard, and I'm quite taken with the Internationale/radio broadcast track.

In terms of rules (which is what you're probably more interested in): Direct fire's pared back & simplified a bit; artillery works a little bit differently, but not that much differently; replacements & supply have changed a bit ... but all these changes don't amount to very much.

I still think artillery is still rather too good at killing tanks, and it's probably still too easy to disengage, and I'm not sure a German player that doesn't totally annihilate the Russkis should really get an overwhelming victory ... and I'm sure other gamers probably have their own pet peeves too, but all up it works OK, and if you've played the other games you can play these rules without reading anything. Which leaves us with (drumroll):

The new bit

Areas of operations are meant to be the New Big Thing™ here. In a nutshell, units have an area that they can move in, and that area changes based on turns & objectives captured.  There was a spirited discussion on Usenet when this was first announced and I don't think there's anything to add to that here, other than I've softened my position a bit <blush>.  Nothing obvious has changed in the release version, I just needed to see it in action I suppose. There are problems with it, but they're not as bad as I thought they'd be.

Headquarters are still really just another counter with a few to-hit bonuses and some supply functions (the area applies to the whole formation really), but a bit less so than before.  I now see this area of operations thing is a small step in the right direction of getting some meaningful command & control into the system, albeit by implementing this the-previous-commander-drew-up-a-plan-&-then-dropped-dead-just-before-the-battle-and-got-replaced-by-you model. The worst thing it does is to stop units that might otherwise have escaped encirclement from escaping, which is just plain silly.  In attack it works slightly better.

It's optional.  It doesn't add or detract very much from the game, though it can be annoying.  While it's Not That Bad (also ™); it's still nothing that makes this anything other than a Battlefront scenario.

Vista

The quick start has the same Vista problem as War Between the States, no admin rights = no serial number. But running as admin's easy enough, so it's not a big deal.

In conclusion

There are no surprises here, so the equation's brutally simple. It's one scenario.  It costs fifty bucks. Do the math & work out whether that's worth it to you.

If this game went for sub $30 I'd say it was a three star game easily, but it's just too slim to be worth more, and at this price it's the very definition of a two star game: "Buy it if the genre or the era particularly appeal. Otherwise there are better games around."  For me it's a good game, but rather too pricey for what you get.