Wishes of the Season

Dr. X posts this from Tula:

"Yes, it is that special time of the year, that moment when we think of that special something that enriches and enlightens us. You can't buy it in a store. It costs nothing, yet is a kind of miracle. It rose from the dead and gave us new hope...I refer, of course, to Panzer General 2.

"As the Wikipedia article notes, in 2000 PCGamer rated 1997's Panzer General 2 as the 44th-best computer game of all time. And, like so many other great titles of the 90s (Pirates!, Colonization, X-Com...), the developer, SSI, had no idea how to follow up on its breakthrough success. In 2001 SSI sold out to Ubisoft, and that was really the end.

"From a commercial standpoint, anyway. Yet, Panzer General 2 lives. Back in 2005 I revisited the game briefly, and found a small underground of enthusiasts who were keeping it alive with fresh maps and scenarios. The original game shipped with just five campaigns, limiting replayability - so people wrote new ones. There was even a shadowy programmer ("007") who was keeping the code alive.

"And surely that was it - people move on to other things, right? Well, um...no, not yet. It is its own world and it is thriving. The first step on the royal road to the NEW Panzer General 2 is here. The post-commercial game is defined by its equipment files. The original game had a good but not perfect equipment file - limited mainly to German, U.S., British, and Russian units - and several madmen have taken it upon themselves to rewrite and update it. In the early days of the resurrection, Waffenkammer was the e-file of choice, but Adlerkorps seems to be the new standard. You want to pit Slovak bicycle troops against Romanian tanks? Adlerkorps can make it happen.

"It used to be that you had to cobble the game together - and getting the .EXE file was very difficult. Now, one download gets it all, along with every Adlerkorps campaign ever created, including the French, the Romanians, the Italians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and even the Ethopians. It's not quite one-stop shopping...you'll still have to get the gargantuan map file. And you'll want to update the .EXE, which they patched a couple weeks ago, and the latest update to Adlerkorps (you can do all that here).

"And you can go to war, and think about Christmas.

"I'm only half kidding about that. It's hard for me not to think about The War this time of year. There were so many horrible Christmases: Christmas during The Blitz... Christmas at Leningrad (4,000 starved to death that day in 1941)... Christmas at Stalingrad... Christmas at Bastogne...

"But first, a word from our sponsor! Peace on earth and good will to men...except for you, totalitarian militarist aggressors. Santa's got something special for you:



"By the way, it's not too late to buy some Interwoven socks - the ones that warm the feet that kick Hitler's ass! Get them online here.

"Anyway, Panzer General 2 has taught me a few things about militarism and the nature of things. As a rule, the most arrogant Germans were dead by the end 1943. There was nothing magic about Blitzkrieg warfare. Once the Russians and Americans figured out that even lightly-armed forces could slow down an advancing column with ambushes and harassment tactics, and that infantry could hold ground if supplemented with anti-tank guns, the Blitzkrieg lost a lot of its...er, Blitziness.

"And there's a rock-paper-scissors element to the game I'd not fully appreciated before. There's no such thing as an invincible unit. Even a Tiger tank battalion is chum in the water when they're low on fuel and ammo, and the A-26s are up.

"Which is why I most admire the paras at Bastogne, who fought that Christmas Eve more or less alone. Just a few men freezing their asses off in holes, hanging tough against an experienced, well-equipped, and desperate enemy.

"In a lot of ways, that battle is the best counterexample to the things people say about American troops. They weren't soft, they weren't oversupplied (some made winter uniforms out of bedsheets), they didn't have tactical air support.

"And they held the place.

"Tactically, they might have actually been helped by the fact that there were a lot of fragmented units around. They picked up some anti-tank guns here, a few tank destroyers there, and a couple of bazooka teams...this let them put together little mobile combined arms teams to counter the probing attacks the Germans were throwing at them.

"I'm not an expert on the battle, but some commentators have criticized the Germans for not throwing everything into an all-out attack on the town. In hindsight that would have been their best chance, of course. Failing to capture Bastogne doomed the offensive because it was one of two key regional road hubs (St. Vith in the north was the other - the Americans held it for four crucial days before retiring - more on the overall strategy of holding these two hubs here). Without these hubs Germans couldn't easily resupply forward units, and the survivors of Kampfgruppe Peiper had to walk home.

"But the German commanders on the ground were preoccupied with force preservation. They knew they weren't getting more tanks any time soon. Besides, in blitz warfare you never want to win a battle the hard way - you want to hit and move, find a weak point, get your units into position to win unfair matchups. As they tried to do that at Bastogne, they kept running into experienced troops with just enough anti-tank equipment to make further progress expensive. The only way the Germans could have taken Bastogne was to totally commit - and since they really didn't know what was inside the pocket, only a madman or genius would have done so.

"And that was the end of the last Blitzkrieg. It died around Christmas, 1944, at the hands of an infantry force that looked like this:



"We bitch about our country, but it's still here, thanks to those guys, and tonight we're home and warm. A Merry Christmas to all."