The Perfect General

The Good
In particular, I liked the the scenarios, the ability to pick units, and the very wide variety of scenario options, triggers, and reinforcement locations. The Scenario editor was well made. Units could be damaged. TPG was a dream in that it had winners and losers, not just stalemates. It kept graphs of your performance against different scenarios (What an Idea!), and analyzed performances. We played this hundreds of times, against each other and the computer. I loved to make scenarios for it. Most of all, I loved playing the "Patton kicks Butt" scenario, and pressing the "F" for opportunity fire.

The Bad
Had TPG been a bit more like the Avalon hill games, then it might have had scores of units from scores of nations which could be pitted against each other in accurate and intense firefights. Not just Heavy Tanks, but Tigers verses Perschings. I eventually got my wish in the late 90's with the Talonsoft line. TPG involved some interesting sitting arrangements when playing with 2 people on one machine, one guy with the mouse and the other with key board...don't quite remember how we convinced ourselves that this wasn't weird.

The Bottom Line
TPG was further proof that DOS programmers of the by-gone days were better at their craft than today's Window's Object users. Constrained by the 640Kb barrier, the DOS programmer further had to deal with varying graphics platforms with no core OS ability to address them. Figures that TPG was White Wolf, as we'd already been amazed by Empire in our pre-mouse period.