I know I'm probably gonna get alot of crap, but here goes. Has anyone tried or been able to get Panzer Commander working on windows 7?

why would you get any crap for trying an old game on a new operating system?

I would assume the same tricks used play EAW would work for PzC.

i have a copy laying around, ill give it a try tomorrow

hmm found the manual but not the CD so far. any luck getting it to work? win95 compatibility mode do anything?

Not heard that name for many years. Used to love that sim/game.

Panzer Commander was pretty bad, consistent for that generation of WW2 games. Sometimes missions would just start with the player under fire, there was no feeling I got from being a part of an actual operation coordinating with support units or interacting with the very artificial looking environment, the only terrain that was rendered as passable was the winter themed terrain, the otherwise shocking green color pallette of the Summer or Spring missions mixed with the forest blocks and generic looking man made structures looked like grade school stage props for a play. Enemy units suffered the familiar problem of pathfinding even when following scripted goals, sometimes they wouldn't seem to shoot or even notice you at point blank range, other times they seemed to lock on to the player's brainwaves and would tag you with amazingly accurate shots outside the player's visible envelope. The computer's behavior is about as good as the bots on a single player practice mission in Red Orchestra- it's seriously that bad. You could get your cat to walk all over the keyboard, which would still issue better commands than what the computer was doing. You're just picking off targets rather than getting the feel of mobile armored warfare.

Pass on this one if you haven't played it before, maybe people like it for nostaligia, but I thought it wasn't worth the time then.

It was a good game for its time,I also have a box copy but would killed its longevity for me was the fact that there was no infantry at all.Instead they placed bunkers around with Infantry or AT guns inside them.

I think you're being a little hard on it. There wasn't much else before it. The hardware and software was limited back then. I played it a bit, I think I did a campaign in a Panzer II, but mainly played around with the Pather and tiger. It was quite a basic game. Panzer Elite SE was much better, but again its a basic enough game.

I'm not being hard on it- I played it through as much as anyone could, it wasn't a good game. This is true of nearly all tank-related games of that period or before. Most were earning poor to mediocre scores, and I think even while Panzer Elite was considered among the best of the WW2 dreck, I don't think that game was all that great, either. I'll concede that commercial hardware has only very recently begun to render ground details acceptable as a bare minimum, things like computer pathfinding and decision cycles are unaffected by hardware upgrades, and represent the fact that computer opponents are unthinking drones and do not approach the intution or intellect of a human player- whiz bang graphics cards don't help there. A programmer can't anticiapte what his units will face in the future, the units have to run off of scripts against much more dynamic and resourceful humans who can think and react in real time.

Still, the missions in PC were not designed well. Starting off in the middle of an artillery barrage whith no choice in the matter is a conceit for making missions artifically tough. Once missions were underway, they really did not look like orgainzed strokes or massed armor or anything like that, but the FPS way of proceed to this way point, attack the units defending there, proceed to the next waypoint, attack the units defending there. Even M1TP2 could sometimes react and move mobile reserves around. Every battle in PC was more the way the French fought and lost in WW2, tanks are like static artillery pillboxes sitting at established nodes. All Panzer Commander does is simply designe the mission so that you are channeled to them on after another. In M1TP2, usually considered the cream of the crop of any tank simulation of the late 90s, compensated just by throwing tons of targets at you, like Darth Vader's drones, like one platoon against a reinforced battalion each and every mission.

The problem with these earlier tank games is that that actions are represented as like a single platoon covering pretty large sectors. Units are isolated from support groups, combined arms is really limtied. For example, in PC, the player might lead a few Tiger tanks all over the map sweeping everything up, that's pretty much how it is. You don't have to worry about exposed flanks, or bypassed enemies re-taking objectives you left undefended. You just move from checkpoint to checkpoint, often getting shot up by untis outside the range of human detection- right at or beyond the edge of draw distances, you'd see main gun flashes but not the source of them.

I didn't find this game fun or ground breaking at all back then- I wonder if it's more the WW2 theme that makes players give it higher scores than what it merits, but to each his own.

That was kinda my point there were no better WW2 tank games at the time. I can't compare it with M1TP2 myself because I never played it, and never saw it for sale. It was probably done on a very small budget.

Yeah, what you don't like may well be what I like... It got straight to the action and the gunnery duels - no planning, worrying or even time limits in most cases. There were some triggers though - and enemy tanks could over-run your positions. You could also flank them. All in all, it was pretty good for the era.

I couldn't really get into the more serious tank sims - I didn't have the time. The same goes for Falcon 4 or sub sims after Aces of the Deep (I had more time in my AoD days - and even then I never finished a campaign and spent most of my time doing head-on runs against destroyers...)