Combat Mission Fortress Italy Announced

Bootie

Bootie

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F*cking YESSS!!!

http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=295&Itemid=509

It's going to be a Sicily hot summer!

Announcing "Combat Mission: Fortress Italy"! Better still, the development of this latest addition to the Combat Mission lineup of tactical warfare games by Battlefront.com hasn't just started, it's just finishing. In fact, Battlefront.com is also happy to announce that preorders for CM:FI are now being taken for an expected August release. You can pre-order now and get the "Tin Case" Limited Edition, and even save $10 in the process! And yes, we do mean August 2012!

Fortress Italy is a new "family" of Combat Mission games covering the Allied struggle to knock Italy out of the Second World War. This initial release deals explicitly with the battle for Sicily and sets the groundwork for future additions to simulate the hard fighting in the rugged terrain of "Europe's underbelly" up until the war's end in 1945.

Combat Mission: Fortress Italy does NOT require any of the previous Combat Mission titles to play. Both PC and Mac versions are available!

Steve Grammont from Battlefront.com comments, "We always wanted to return to the Mediterranean Theater, though figured it would be several years before we got to it. Simply put, the stars aligned last summer and work started in September. Now it is in final beta testing and it's time to tell you what to expect from it."

The combat forces immediately available to players include the full range of historically available American, Italian, and German forces which fought in Sicily. In addition to the completely new Italian forces, both the American and German organizations differ significantly from those familiar to Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy players. Some of the highlights are elite formations such as:
- Italian Bersaglieri
- American Rangers
- German Herman Göring Division

Of course, the time frame and units involved require equipment new to the Combat Mission series. A full list is available on the new Fortress Italy website, however here are some particularly fun gadgets to play with:
- R-35 Light Tank
- Semovente 90/53
- Panzer Mk III
- Grille
- M3 GMC Halftrack
-T30 HMC Halftrack

Players get to dive in and try these forces out in three (!!!) campaigns, one from the perspective of each national force (USA, Germany, Italy), a host of new stand alone battles, and of course the automatically generated QuickBattles. It won't take long for Normandy players to feel how different this time period and setting is from what they are used to. And the Italian forces are very interesting indeed! Squads the size of Platoons, almost no radios at all, few antitank weapons, proportionally few support weapons, and relatively light armored vehicles present even the best CM player with a lot of new challenges.

But wait, we didn't come to the best part yet... Fortress Italy features more than just a new setting and new units. It is also the first Combat Mission game to be upgraded with our CMx2 engine Version 2.0 features! Here's just a few of the new features you'll experience:

- Moveable Waypoints
- Target Armor Arc Command
- Expanded Floating Icon Categories
- "Fog of War" Floating Icons
- 2D Editor Map Overlay
- Auto-Assemble Road/Wall/Hedge Tool
- Camera Jump to Groups
- Target Briefly Command
- New Rendering Shaders
- Bump and Normal Mapping
- Improved Framerates
- Pausable Realtime TCP/IP Mode
- ...and more!

In all, Combat Mission: Fortress Italy packs a lot of punch and is sure to have a lot of surprises for even the most experienced wargamer. If there are any doubts about this you should check out the Demo when it is made available (near release time).

As mentioned in the introduction, you can already preorder CMFI right now. Preorder customers get benefits:

- you save $10. You only pay $55 plus Shipping & Handling and will receive a download and the physical goods by mail at no extra cost.

- if you preorder, you are guaranteed to receive the "Tin Case" Limited Edition of Combat Mission Fortress Italy, including a new printed game engine manual (~100 pages) including game engine v2.0 updated features, and the "Tin Case" all metal DVD box. The "Tin Case" is not a Steelbook(tm) and is all metal with a plastic window. It can hold up to four discs, enough room to store all your CMFI module discs in one convenient place :)

Both the printed manuals and the "Tin Cases" are limited as long as supplies last (but we'll make sure that all preorder customers get one).
 
Looking forward to returning to Italy. And the Upgrade 2.0 system has many good looking features I want to test out. Moveable waypoints, <sniff> reminds me of CMx1.
 
BF Website -
"Since the beginning of the Combat Mission, more than a dozen years ago, customers have asked for the ability to keep their favorite games up-to-date with improvements made for newer games. After years of careful planning we are happy to announce that Upgrades are soon to be a standard option for Combat Mission customers.

In regular intervals, we will release a totally new standalone game which includes a host of major and minor improvements that go way beyond bug fixes and tweaks to existing features. What sorts of features are we talking about? Read up on the new features of Combat Mission: Fortress Italy to see what we're talking about, because all those features are now part of the CMx2 Game Engine Version 2.0 standard.

A few months after the new game releases, owners of previous Combat Mission games can purchase Upgrades to add those features to CM products they already own. The delayed availability is necessary to ensure that our small team has enough time to ensure quality control (especially backwards compatibility) before releasing them.

Each distinct "family" of Combat Mission games only needs one upgrade regardless of how many Modules are already owned. New Modules (not released yet when an upgrade is available) will use features only found in the latest version, so existing customers must Upgrade if they want to use new Modules.

Upgrades are backwards compatible with all battles and campaigns, no matter who authored them or which units/terrain are used within them. Some Mods will work without modification, others may need to be updated to take advantage of game engine changes.

Once an Upgrade is released those features become standard for all new customers. Existing customers can purchase the features as a stand alone Upgrade for the game of their choice. The previous version of each game will continue being sold for some time, at a discounted price (and can of course be upgraded later on if desired).

The new Upgrade concept offers customers, new and old, a variety of new purchase options. Existing customers can buy an Upgrade for a previous CM family they own on its own, or bundled with a new Module at a discounted price. New customers can either purchase the current version game at full price or the previous version at a discount.

As always, we will continue to release free patches to fix technical problems and improve the performance of existing features as needed. Upgrades are not paid patches, but come with major new features that offer new functionality and game play elements.

Unfortunately, we can not offer Upgrades for CMx1 games, CM Shock Force and Afghanistan. Too much has changed with the basic code, artwork, and file formats to make this practical since their releases to make backwards compatibility viable.

So, what does this mean in concrete terms for you right now, playing Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy and enviously gawking at the Combat Mission: Fortress Italy feature list? It means that once CMFI is out sometime in August, we'll work on an Upgrade 2.0 for CMBN. You will be able to buy this upgrade (the price is not yet determined), install it and voila, you will have Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy v2.0!!! The upgrade will automatically work for the base game and the Commonwealth module.

The next module in the CM:BN family (more about this in the coming days) will already be featuring CMx2 v2.0, and will *require* that upgrade."
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Disappointed to see BF feels the need to charge for upgrades, but I guess it's a sign of the times. Given the cost of their modules part of me says "Geez! Enough already!" The other part is just thankful BF has been paying attention and is working hard to make CMx2 better. In the long run I guess I'm happy. Also happy to get out of the damned hedgerows!
 
I'm excited about the new game but was really interested in this post entitled The Road Ahead which lays out a roadmap for the CM series. Beyond the expected (Market Garden and CMSF 2), the thing that really surprised me is that they announced they are making four families of Eastern Front games starting with Bagration. For Eastern Front fans, this is huge. Consider that CMBN and now CMFI are separate game families, Battlefront is sayiing that they are going to produce four of these and each will presumably include a few modules. And, they announced that they expect to release all three new titles (plus CMFI) in the next year. I hope they deliver.

The other thing that caught my eye is that the next module for CMBN will require the CMx2 v2.0 upgrade. I hope that doesn't mean the module is delayed too long. I'm anxious to get the fallschirmjagers into action sooner rather than later.
 
Great news! Despite that I feel the need to spend two more years to master CMBN as it is now in this theatre of War. Seems I have to learn much faster. Covered armor arcs. Fantastic.
 
Bit shit that on top of the $75 EU customers will have their games held by the postal sorting office and are required to pay an import tax and postal handling fees on top of it.

In sterling this game will set me back £70.

As owner of this club I cant afford not to buy it. :(
 
Well, it's one of the reasons I have so little time for CM gaming - someone's gotta do those textures! ;)

Maybe I'll find the time to do one or two PBEMs with you guys once it's out. Unless I'm required to start with yet more textures that is.
 
Good question. Officially: No. Inofficially: Kind of - I get the game for free which is already pretty nice. I MIGHT get some kind of monetary compensation, but I'm doing this mostly because of my passion for the most outstanding wargame that I know of.

If BFC considered offering me a job as a paid artist I might join up, but that's completely hypothetical at this point.
 
Bootie - Just how many campaigns do you plan on running now? ;) Try to keep up.

I'm sort of liking this release schedule and theater of war method. Maybe still a pipe dream but if BF releases such a large number of games, maybe eventually we'll be able to play the entire European War from 1939 onwards all with the same engine etc.
 
Honestly: I doubt they'll go earlier than '43. At least not in the foreseeable future. There's CMFI now which will eventually get three modules and there's CMBN with another two modules in the line.

We haven't even talked about the Bulge base game in earnest yet plus BFC have anounced that Bagration and CMSF2 will make their appearance in the not too distant future as well. Count every base game with 3 modules and compare it to the acuuracy of BFC's release forcasts and you have a pretty good idea how likley yet another CM base game is within the next five or six years... ;)
 
I first want to say how much I love this game and will ALWAYS buy anything they offer. But damn! I hope they don't have any of the colossal bugs (airplane screams, locked in 1.01 issues (love ya mTk...) and just PBEM compatibility issues in general) they have had when a new module comes out. If CMBN can be upgrade to the new engine I will be a little afraid to do it (but will of course do it; with one eye closed). If they do have these issues I'll figure out a way to deal with them. But Damn people! Test the PBEM aspect of this game and shoot us straight as to what to expect. If there are issues to big to deal with in the code, just tell us how to deal with it after the fact.

OK. That's my rant. But I just want everyone to know that I have pre-ordered. So if something screws up while playing me, just know that I have the latest version..... (Love ya also Lighthorse...) :)
 
Bootie said:
Ive pre-ordered..... fecking $75. $55 for game and $20 delivery charge!!
Click to expand...

"Bit shit that on top of the $75 EU customers will have their games held by the postal sorting office and are required to pay an import tax and postal handling fees on top of it.
In sterling this game will set me back £70."


Same here! :)
 
It looks very nice... ah Italiani :D but I`m passing over this one. Not very keen on Southern Europe Theater of Operations.
Besides I`m thinking the first module will be Tunisia 1943 (but realy well made Tunisia, not like the one in CMAK where Tunis is basicaly a copy of Egyptian/Liblyan border, well we have slightly differen climate and flora in Tunisia).

So I`m sticking with CMBfN... can`t wait to see MG-module... Polish Independent Parachute Brigade vs Königstiger `s in Driel :)
 
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