The Perfect General

The Good
I've been playing Perfect General since 1995, and I never grow tired of it! Since I was 10 years old, I'd been playing Avalon Hill's Panzer Leader board game. Obviously, QQP "borrowed" many of the concepts of PL for PG, making some improvements possible only in computerized simulations.

Panzer Leader's unit pieces were cumbersome and difficult to manage, especially in the larger scenarios. An inadvertent bump of the table would result in uncorrectable messes. Lines-Of-Site and unit fire effectiveness were time consuming to determine. While rules for "spotting" units prevented concealed units from being fired upon, their positions were never really secret.

My favorite features of Perfect General are as follows: 1. Ease of game play & control. I never read the instructions. 2. Surprise factor of hidden enemy units option in single-player or modem play modes. 3. Ability of AI to emulate new tactics. (The game seems to learn, utilizing my tricks.) 4. Realistic terrain effects on LOS, movement & combat effectiveness. 5. Advanced Campaign Game scenarios. 6. Ability to manipulate player handicap settings.

The Bad
My criticisms of Perfect General are: 1. Ineffectiveness of infantry type units, especially in attacks. 2. Failure of AI to use battlefield conditions to adjust strategy. (Computer player will continue to attack fortified positions, ignoring weak points, long after any chance for victory. 3. Lack of consideration of naval & air power, especially in beach invasion scenarios. 4. Absence of important ground unit types, including; mortars, anti-tank guns, field guns, tank-destroyers, trucks & jeeps. 5. Inability of engineer units to construct roadblocks, remove wreckage & repair artillery damage to roads. 6. Scenario inability to allow different unit type selections at different points of the map. (For example: Utah Beach & Arnhem scenarios should only allow infantry type units in airborne placements, while allowing all units in others. 7. Mismatch of scenario design in relation to scale. (For example: Sicily scenario allows heavy tank units to fire 1/4 of the way across the island, while artillery ranges almost 1/2.) 8. MY MOST URGENT & IMMEDIATE COMPLAINT, however, is that since getting my Pentium computer, the game no longer functions properly! When scrolling up using the main display screen, a mirror image of the top line repeats itself, not allowing me to monitor the map during friendly or enemy movement phases.

The Bottom Line
Challenging.

GREAT FUN!!!!

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.