Combat Mission: Fortress Italy Review
 

"The Good: Detailed units with realistic weapon ballistics and damage, authentic behavior and communication between units, lots of specific orders, real-time or turn-based gameplay, decent number of battles and campaigns, enhanced editor, capable AI, range of realism options

The Not So Good: Some cumbersome interface elements, bare multiplayer features, non-interactive tutorials, assorted graphical shortcomings


What say you? Satisfying strategic gameplay that lacks some feature polish common in contemporary titles: 6/8"

Link:

http://www.outofeight.info/2012/08/c...ly-review.html

One big improvement is now pbem turns are ALL movie and plot turns.
No more watch and wait for return. Each e mail is a turn forward.
Only just started playing again with Gustav for CM Italy.

The new engine is growing on me. I have pbem games going in shock force, Normandy and Italy. Shock force is a bit dated compared to CMBN and CMFI/GL
There is some user made soft ware out that really simplifies pbem games.
Its called H2H Helper. It works with dropbox so that all you need do is synch the e-mail games and it does the rest. When you finish and save your turn it automatically dumps the file to a shared dropbox and will even ping the other player.
No need to e-mail anything after 1st couple of files.
Another thing that really opens up the game is each waypoint can now be given secondary commands, pop smoke , target add or change target arcs I'm just now getting the feel for it.
I gotta say its definitely worth giving another whirl now that its updated to 2.0(CMBN) and later modules.

What's the most current guestimate of them getting to the Eastern Front? I believe it's now a decade since CMBB was released.

I don't really know as I haven't been active on the forums.
I think Market Garden is next and then East Front or/and Shock Force 2.