Combat Mission: Red Thunder - Fire and Rubble

I'll be straight with you: I came to Fire and Rubble as someone who has spent more time in fast-paced shooters than wargames, but Combat Mission has always had a weird pull on the part of my brain that respects systems depth. This expansion picks up where the base game leaves off, covering the Eastern Front's brutal final chapter from September 1944 through the fall of Berlin in May 1945. That's a meaty slice of history, and the scenario designers clearly knew which battles they wanted to put on the table. The content package is solid. You get over 20 standalone battles, two full-sized campaigns, and three shorter mini-campaigns. The scale swings from small infantry skirmishes to the kind of tank engagements that were genuinely among the last large armored actions in Europe. On the Soviet side, the new additions include partisans, Lend-Lease equipment, and late-war formations. The German roster gets a significant overhaul too, folding in Waffen SS, Volkssturm, Kriegsmarine troops pressed into land combat, and Luftwaffe ground forces. Playing either side in 1945 feels meaningfully different from the 1944 Bagration campaigns in the base game. The Germans are depleted, scraping together whatever they can, and that asymmetry comes through in how the tactical math works out. The simulation underneath all of this is still Combat Mission's core strength. Every bullet, every armor penetration, every morale check runs through a full physics and ballistics model. Your infantry get tired, pinned, and broken if you push them wrong. Real-world tactics actually work here: establish solid cover before advancing, use your machine gun teams to suppress, recon before committing your armor. The Quick Battle mode lets you set up custom skirmishes when you want to test unit matchups or just grind through an afternoon session, and the scenario editor means the community has been filling in the gaps Battlefront left open. Multiplayer exists and works as a PBEM (play-by-email) style system, which suits the pace of the game but is not what you would call a hot-seat brawl. Here is the honest part. The engine is aging and the visuals show it. Textures and animations are dated by any modern standard, and the UI has quirks that take real time to un-learn. Graviteam Tactics: Mius Front competes in roughly the same space and looks sharper, though it asks more of you in terms of learning curve. If you need slick presentation as a prerequisite, this will frustrate you. The base game launched originally in 2014 and the engine beneath Fire and Rubble is fundamentally the same one. Community sentiment accepts this as a known quantity: you are here for the simulation fidelity, not the polygon count. The trade-off is worth it if you understand what you are buying. Bottom line: this is a module for people who already know they want more Combat Mission, not an entry point. If you own the base game and the late-war Eastern Front is your thing, the new forces, the Berlin-area geography, and the asymmetric 1945 scenarios make this a worthwhile extension of the experience. Fred, Scout Team