It's a different scale to H&D.
20 mile maps not 1 mile.
It's a lot laggier to play as infantry. It's not a dedicated infantry sim and performance suffers because of this. The engine is noticeably poor during CQB. Up close, buildings and bushes make it go all lurchy.
30 FPS is considered good, but the same computer gives me an FPS in the hundreds on H&D2.
On the otherhand view distances in game are up to five miles. Given the correct weapon system, (a tank cannon, artillery or a guided missile), you can engage the enemy at these distances.
I quite often design myself games with 2 or three hundred units participating. Enemies, friendlies and non combatants, even independants or a third army are possible.
As a player I perform a role as part of a brigade and not the 4 man squad found in Hidden and Dangerous.
I am able to play in 4 man squads, and many missions are designed for this, but it's the tip of the iceberg.
As I said, Armed Assault is on a different scale to H&D.
Armed Assault has got a greater longevity than H&D due to it's mission editor and modability tools. There is an endless supply of new weapons, vehicles, uniforms, missions and gametypes and multiplayer gametypes, maps and even animals, all home made and all ready for download to be found on the net.
I have a satelitte mapped area of Afghanistan, complete with local buildings, Afghans that speak Pashtun, local fauna architecture and wildlife, and also a model of every British forces piece of equipment found in theatre, for Operation Flashpoint.
I set it up as an RPG, similar to Oblivion where you can wander around and do quests and missions as you fancy, picking up new ones etc.
Some people have the game set up as a realtime strategy.
I Also have Satelitte mapped Falkland Islands, complete with the 1982 British expeditionary fleet, the Argentine forces, penguins, Newcastle Brown and all the rest. I have this set up as a campaign rather like H&D where you play a series of historical actions based on the events as they occoured.
What's available to download for Armed Assault is by no means as numerous as it's predecessors combined 5 years worth of user content. But a lot of it is getting upgraded and I am collecting new stuff everyday.
The grass isn't the greatest issue, the patch altered it a little and for the better. It's not often that I notice it. I think Once in over 2 hundred hours of play so far.
If you remember the single player mission versus the Japanese in H&D2, and all that long grass that the AI could see through but you could not, you will be relieved to find out the grass in Armed Assault is only 6 inches high.
(However, there are other annoyances as well as the grass. Updates do tend to address lots and lots of things, but there is always more issues).
AI skill is configurable, either through the difficulty settings or individually through the mission editor.
The gameplay is not so fast. It could be if it wanted to be, but mainly the travel distance between contacts is a factor. This, added to the general lagginess of FPS infantry, generally prevents you from ducking and diving, popping up and peak killing as you do more readily in H&D.
Another contributory factor is the engagement range. You have a lot more scenery to scan for targets before you dare move. Miles more.
In single player, the game has a built in time accelerator just as found in a flight simulator.
The enemy may have blown up your wheels, or as Special Forces or a Downed Pilot, you may be required to navigate 15 miles across open country using only your compass and map, but you can always speed up time to 4X to compensate in some way.
Another element of Armed Assault that is more exciting than H&D other than the flexibility of the modification tools is the use of vehicles.
They are integral to most battles. You will spend as much time commanding a tank or a jeep, flying helicopters and driving trucks as you will running around glued to the back of a rifle.
Armed Assault is a B grade Tank Simulator, a B grade Flight Simulator, and a B grade Infantry Simulator. But it is all these things at once, making it an A grade battlefield simulator.
I spent 10 hours on my LAN last night with some friends crewing a Hind helicopter, 1 pilot, 1 gunner and 8 infantry.
The Hind was user created, so was the scenario. I downloaded the Hind and made the scenario myself. The mission editor is easy to use, it took me 20 minutes.
A lot of vocal communication was required between the pilot and the gunner to operate effectively, and even the ground troops needed to chip in with the spotting of targets, and tricky landings.
We would pop coloured smoke grenades to signal our position when ready for extraction.
The gunner would spot us, and then between us, we would guide the pilot in.
While a massively more complex piece of software, Armed Assault is a much less polished game than H&D.
It very much feels like work in progress.
Updates are regular and needed.
Despite being 5 years old, I last added a new mod (The Falklands mod) to Armed Assaults predecessor Operation Flashpoint only 8 days ago. The company released it's last major update 2 years after the game released. The fan community is still releasing them daily.
Instead of playing like a storyboarded FPS, with pre-scripted adventures and missions as in H&D, Armed Assault is more like a computerised game of toy soldiers.
Set your armies out on the map and watch them fight it out, and or participate in it. A lot of the fun for me is collecting all your national units and trying them out.
For about £4,000 I can build one of these, minus the Humvee.
![Image](http://homepage.ntlworld.com/chris.bayfield/cset1.gif)
Hardware wise this game will work well with default settings on a 2000 processor with a geforce 5600 and 768 RAM, but if you wanted to, you could build a triple screen or even twelve screen 360 degree setup, it's off the shelf technology, the only issue will be your wife.
Head tracking is supported for the flight sim brigade.