Close Combat is one of my favorite series ever. The morale and fatigue mechanics were some of the best I've ever seen. And the graphics were fantastic for the time, really excellent aerial photography-inspired hand-made maps and sprites.

There was nothing like setting up a textbook ambush, and then having your inexperienced gunner on an MG42 panic and run off when you gave the order to fire...

Yeah i remember that one. You could order a squad to move somewhere only to find them hunkering down behind a wall or something because they were afraid that some sniper was out there.

I think the map was even "deformable" in that if you ordered a tank to move somewhere it could break down walls and such to get there, walls that soldiers could have used as cover while moving around etc.

Note though that the graphics was top down 2D, so it was "cheap" to replace a standing wall tile with a broken one.

I remember buying Close Combat a Bridge too far at Virgin Records many many years ago. All those bright red and blue tracer lines suppressing my units and launching fog. I remember how underwhelming the tanks felt sometimes

It's been a couple of years now, but I still load up A Bridge Too Far every now and then! It's the only 20-year old game I know that's still fun.

It's getting hard to run on current machines, though, with its hard-coded screen sizes and a scroll speed that's unusably fast.

It's one of my favorites as well. I haven't run it in several years, but last I tried it you could get custom screen sizes by manually editing the configuration file.

The tanks definitely felt underwhelming sometimes, but overwhelming other times. It depended a lot on the environment, the type of tank, and the enemy units, which seems pretty realistic. It was interesting and terrifying how invulnerable some of the better German tanks could be.