Hi everyone, I am a huuuge fan of more or less realistic modern military games, especially strategy games and games that have an editor of some sort, so that you can model potential conflicts of today, like for example smaller countries like Ukraine vs Russia, Serbia vs Croatia, Israel vs Syria,etc. instead of just boring overdone ww2 games, so can we try and make a list of at least some of them? It can be a grand strategy, a rts, fps, doesn’t matter, as long as it is 1.set in post ww2 time to today (no future ,space" stuff) or at least has a modern mod (like hearts of iron 3 or darkest hour) , that’s the only rule, but also a huge bonus would be an actual penetration system, instead of the unrealistic hitpoint one (which is in a majority of games) and a personal comment would be nice if you played it.
Here’s the ones I played, almost all of these are close to being great ,simulators", but each has a problem preventing them from being so, so let’s start
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Command:modern air/naval operations, huge database of units from even smaller african countries, units like Kilo submarine, Mig 29, Su 35, F-14, Awacs, Eurofighter, Tornado, S-300, S-400, even the old S-200, Hawk, Patriot…, but unfortunately the land fighting system is really bad, since the game uses the same logic for airplane fights and tank fights.
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Men of war assault squad 1/2 , ww2 games, but have modern mods, really fun to play, even have a penetration system, I only played MoW AS 1, so don’t know about MoW AS 2, but in the first game all weapons have a painfully small range, so for example a mortar has a max range of some 100 meters, so the enemy can easily reach him with anything he has, while in real life mortars have a minimal range of some 100-200 meters, meaning they shouldn’t even be there, so if you put 2 enemies just let’s say… 250 meters from each other, they’ll just ignore each other, which sucks, otherwise this would definitely be my favorite game, also there is way too much micromanagment, but even that wouldn’t be a problem if there wasn’t the small range issue for all weapons.
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Arma 2 OA (haven’t played Arma 3 yet, so I can only talk about Arma 2) , Fps, has a nice editor and a huge amount of vehicle mods, kind of tough to get into if you only played easier shooters like cod, but once you do start it, it is really fun, giant maps of +200 sq kilometers, a lot of different weapons from all sides, Russian, American, others, cars, tanks, helicopters, even boats…but 2 biiiig problems, 1.AI is…incredibly ,not smart" , to say the least, they sometimes drive on a straight road and stop for no reason, go over the grass a little and then return to the road, they pretty much can’t navigate in urban terrain and sometimes they even shoot at the sky because they think that the enemy is there, but that can partially be solved with some ai mods, what can’t be solved is problem number 2 , 2.Hitpoint system, ifv’s with 25mm cannons can easily destroy anything in the game, while in real life they can’t penetrate a tank. Also (some) rpg’s and even tanks can’t destroy other tanks, even if you shoot them on their weakest spot which should be the back, they (tanks&rpg’s) can however sometimes destroy other tanks after shooting at them like 4,5 or more times, not by penetration, but by hitpointing, so an rpg has a damage of lets say 333 points, a tank can tolerate 1000, so you shoot at it 3 times, no matter at which part and then it just explodes, add to that the fact that all vehicle mods have a different ,strength" the author gave them, based on who knows what, and you get a completely unrealistic armor system, so you can even have a case where you downloaded the same vehicle by 2 different authors (for example if you downloaded similar vehicle packs) and it can happen that one T-72 has 1000 hitpoints and the other one 1500, so unfortunately only infantry is realistic in arma games.
Point of Attack 2, no doubt the most realistic one, with detailed armor for each vehicle (big vehicle database btw.), detailed weapon characteristics, but really complicated to play, not exactly graphically pretty and also turn based which I personally don’t like, although some people may like that more, so I haven’t really played it yet, although I have it on my comp and I may try to learn it later, a nice thing however is that there is a tool of a sort where you can see the effects of putting 2 vehicles against each other without having to get in the game, so you can see if 30mm cannon can penetrate a t-55 tank, if 125mm cannon can penetrate a Abrams and so on.
I may add some later, but would like to hear from others too.