It's going to be a Sicily hot summer!

Announcing "Combat Mission: Fortress Italy"! Better still, the development of this latest addition to the Combat Mission lineup of tactical warfare games by Battlefront.com hasn't just started, it's just finishing. In fact, Battlefront.com is also happy to announce that preorders for CM:FI are now being taken for an expected August release. You can pre-order now and get the "Tin Case" Limited Edition, and even save $10 in the process! And yes, we do mean August 2012!

Fortress Italy is a new "family" of Combat Mission games covering the Allied struggle to knock Italy out of the Second World War. This initial release deals explicitly with the battle for Sicily and sets the groundwork for future additions to simulate the hard fighting in the rugged terrain of "Europe's underbelly" up until the war's end in 1945.

Combat Mission: Fortress Italy does NOT require any of the previous Combat Mission titles to play. Both PC and Mac versions are available!

Steve Grammont from Battlefront.com comments, "We always wanted to return to the Mediterranean Theater, though figured it would be several years before we got to it. Simply put, the stars aligned last summer and work started in September. Now it is in final beta testing and it's time to tell you what to expect from it."

The combat forces immediately available to players include the full range of historically available American, Italian, and German forces which fought in Sicily. In addition to the completely new Italian forces, both the American and German organizations differ significantly from those familiar to Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy players. Some of the highlights are elite formations such as:
- Italian Bersaglieri
- American Rangers
- German Herman Göring Division

Of course, the time frame and units involved require equipment new to the Combat Mission series. A full list is available on the new Fortress Italy website, however here are some particularly fun gadgets to play with:
- R-35 Light Tank
- Semovente 90/53
- Panzer Mk III
- Grille
- M3 GMC Halftrack
-T30 HMC Halftrack

Players get to dive in and try these forces out in three (!!!) campaigns, one from the perspective of each national force (USA, Germany, Italy), a host of new stand alone battles, and of course the automatically generated QuickBattles. It won't take long for Normandy players to feel how different this time period and setting is from what they are used to. And the Italian forces are very interesting indeed! Squads the size of Platoons, almost no radios at all, few antitank weapons, proportionally few support weapons, and relatively light armored vehicles present even the best CM player with a lot of new challenges.

But wait, we didn't come to the best part yet... Fortress Italy features more than just a new setting and new units. It is also the first Combat Mission game to be upgraded with our CMx2 engine Version 2.0 features! Here's just a few of the new features you'll experience:

- Moveable Waypoints
- Target Armor Arc Command
- Expanded Floating Icon Categories
- "Fog of War" Floating Icons
- 2D Editor Map Overlay
- Auto-Assemble Road/Wall/Hedge Tool
- Camera Jump to Groups
- Target Briefly Command
- New Rendering Shaders
- Bump and Normal Mapping
- Improved Framerates
- Pausable Realtime TCP/IP Mode
- ...and more!

In all, Combat Mission: Fortress Italy packs a lot of punch and is sure to have a lot of surprises for even the most experienced wargamer. If there are any doubts about this you should check out the Demo when it is made available (near release time).

As mentioned in the introduction, you can already preorder CMFI right now. Preorder customers get benefits:

- you save $10. You only pay $55 plus Shipping & Handling and will receive a download and the physical goods by mail at no extra cost.

- if you preorder, you are guaranteed to receive the "Tin Case" Limited Edition of Combat Mission Fortress Italy, including a new printed game engine manual (~100 pages) including game engine v2.0 updated features, and the "Tin Case" all metal DVD box. The "Tin Case" is not a Steelbook(tm) and is all metal with a plastic window. It can hold up to four discs, enough room to store all your CMFI module discs in one convenient place

Both the printed manuals and the "Tin Cases" are limited as long as supplies last (but we'll make sure that all preorder customers get one).

http://www.battlefront.com/fortressitaly

Hope they do a nice job with new engine, i never bought a CM game because i find the camera sluggish and the floating terrain annoying, besides the low FPS on EVERY rig i tested it, from high end to low end... and this is from a person who plays roguelikes, i simply can't stand bad 3d graphics. I would be nice (for them and their costumers) if they released an improved CMSF and CMBN.

Edit Well, from their forums:

I couldn't agree more. But mostly with the camera controls thing. Performance never has been a problem for me, and I've bought most of, and love nearly all the CM games, but yeah they NEED to fix the camera.

Starting by moving it to a more conventional control scheme as the default. I've read all the developer notes as to why the wonky setup they use as their default is "better", but its all doublespeak reationalization and gibberish. After many hundreds of hours in the game the camera never gets to feel "natural".

Regardless - looking forward to this one.

A resounding lack of British/Commonwealth Forces, for what was a profoundly Allied effort ! That said Im sure BF will do a commonwealth pack ?. New features sound excellent. They certainly seem to be doing an awful lot of work to polish up their games.......not that they need it, I have every on of the Combat Mission series and love them all