Build your own war games (PC preferably)

The Game Room
1

This may seem like a bit of an odd question but many moons ago when I first got a PC there was a flight-sim called ATF Gold. The flight sim part of it was fun for its time but the part of the game that I really spent time on was the mission editor, the fun part for me was that this let you build your own scenarios or battles but that you didn’t actually have to participate, you could set the mission up and then let the AI play out the battle for you.

I particularly enjoyed the fact that you could view any given plane or tank and watch to see how long it lasted before it was destroyed.

This was especially fun when you downloaded the mods for the game which gave a vast number of extra aeroplanes and military equipment.

The only downside was that it had an upper level for the maximum number of planes/ships/vehicles you could have in any given battle.

I was wondering if there are any other PC games out there today that let you do something similar?

Thanks

2

It’s theoretically possible to do that in Rome: Total War. You can rebuild or extend the map and create custom units, but it’s a huge modding hell start to finish as I understand it.

Y’know, they really ought to do that with Total War. Create a bunch of units and also let people assemble their own a unit creator. They have a lot of maps, buildings, roads n’ other architectural bits for battles and seiges. Let people create factions with unique and group unit lists, and create their own campaign maps. Put in special event triggers and things like that. Maybe have special rules for some general units, and add in options for magic spells and super-tech abilities for different style campaigns. That’s be pretty neat, I says.

3

If you’re into hard core turned based strategy games, check out the Combat Mission games. There is a pretty serious community for them with tons of player created scenarios.

4

Thanks for the answers, I really should have been more specific though, I’m more interested in modern or post-Second World War/Cold War scenarios. :slight_smile:

5

I used to do the same thing with ATF Gold, and I did similar stuff with Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far.

6

Falcon 4.0 had an excellent campaign editor and “living battlefield”. You have to patch the game a lot and study a few hundred pages of documentation to get anything out of it, but it still considered one of the best combat simulators despite being nearly 10 years old.

7

For naval warfare, check out the current incarnation of Harpoon. No idea if you can set the AI to play itself, though.