Combat Mission: Fortress Italy

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!

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! If you haven't heard about the new Upgrade path for Combat Mission, click here for more info. For those who have, 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).

Last updated on August 14, 2015