Final Combat Complete combines the original book with The Expansion. However, no AFV data sheets are included (see Anthology of Armor). It is a 1:1 set of skirmish wargaming rules for role-playing and miniatures that provides a realistic close quarter battle simulation for squad to platoon level engagements of WWII.
You must be logged in to post a review.
Please log in
1
Person Reviewed This Item
By Bennett Lacy
May 31, 2008
"Final Combat (revisited) - The Complete Edition (Review by Rich Jones)" I have been in communication with Ben Lacy of Britton Publishers and Final Combat fame for many a year now. A fanatic about gaming, WWII and a good guy to boot he is the driving force behind Britton Publishers. Final Combat is a game I would love to play more, unfortunately a club set up with only a max of 3 hours to complete a game and not wanting to have the wargame loft at home out of action over a few games sessions means I don’t get to play much. If you don’t already know then Final Combat is basically WWII action taken to a role play level. It is a long game but not a game that bogs down and drags … there is always something happening, it is just the action models a very short amount of real time. An exchange of fire scenario will last you a good 3-5 hours of play and at the end of it you will feel your squad has been in a fire-fight. The wooden cover ‘you’ are hiding behind is quickly... More > disintegrating, dare you risk the sprint to dive over the harder wall. Are ‘you’ ever going to pop your head and Garand over the wall to see where the MG42 fire is coming from – ‘hell no’ not until someone calls up some heavy covering fire your not! My first piece of FC action ever was me ‘seeing how realistic the rules really were’ by having an MG42 open up on a squad gingerly advancing towards a Normandy building – well more than half the squad were down in less than a one phase (each turn in FC is a second) and the ones that made it to the nearby ditch were not coming out soon! Ok from then I went with the ‘ultra realism’ tag that Ben had given the rules, everything is 1:1 – want to know what the casualty zone of that grenade really is? Well put it like this your character better lob it quite a distance! A stray heavy mortar round once hit our 6x4 table, there were not many places to hide believe me. In my original review I did say everyone interested in WWII should have these rules for the information contained in them whether they ever get to play the rules or not – but then everyone should play the rules at some point for a ‘reality check’ at the very least! Since then Ben has fine tuned the system even more – you still need to have excel running to help work through the modifiers (although to be fair most of the time you get to know if it is worth checking a roll or not) but the activation system now has a ‘quick’ version where you activate by skill level on a general basis, not pull out a chit and see which figure goes next. This speeds up play a great deal. The Complete version includes the out of print ‘supplement’ which had the original ‘tweaks’ and optional rules (like the activation system) as well as more data for some countries. The complete book now has no vehicle data sheets in it. For this you will need the ‘Anthology of Armor’. This vehicle supplement has 195 vehicle data sheets inside its covers. Again the amount of detail that has been researched and collated here is frightening. If you are interested in WWII vehicles for ANY rules than this data alone is worth the asking price! A quick look at the homepage will reveal other goodies for purchase and download, scenario booklets and a new scenario book – ‘Medal of Honor’ where you can refight 12 scenarios which earned the soldiers concerned the Medal of Honor – can ‘you’ do as well. We will be looking forward to trying this one out in the office! So basically if you had put off getting Final Combat for any reason the time has come when you can’t hide any longer!< Less
