Combat Mission: Fortress Italy — Available Soon
Battlefront.com will be releasing the latest game in their WW2 Combat Mission line of tactical computer games soon. The next installment is Combat Mission: Fortress Italy featuring battles in Sicily and Italy. CM:FI is a standalone game and uses the new CMx2 engine. Combat Mission: Fortress Italy is available now. The game features:
“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! If you haven’t heard about the new Upgrade path for Combat Mission. For those who have, 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!”
[Updated: 3AUG12]
The View from the Turret 