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Yooper posted:Theme is important, but I've come to enjoy games that are thematic but still open to expansion. TOAW, CMANO, even Dwarf Fortress. I can only see Barbarossa kick off so many times, or invade Normandy so often. I'm not sure I could get into a game where there was orange cubes fighting brown cubes over a map I knew nothing of. Spiderweb games (maker of crappy RPG's) made a game set in pre-Roman England or some such era and it sold like poo poo, but if you add goblins, dwarves, and elves, people eat it up. It's nice to slide into a familiar battlescape and re-enact a bit of history, but it's also cool to see some dude mod in some obscure battle from 1944. Yeah, agreed. Would the Battalion Management game have a system to auto-generate campaigns, or would the developer hand-write them? I’m imagining battles as a series of events that test different values of some or all of your subordinate companies.
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Sep 16, 2019 14:09
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Pirate Radar posted:Yeah, agreed. I think a combo of both, give the player you know, Fallujah 2004, Afghanistan 2009, then also have some fictional stuff, Fulda 1984, etc. Battles would be out of the players control. Maybe you could set tactics, weapons used, range, then it just happens. There's one game like that, baseball maybe, that if you don't check the right box you don't even get to see the baseball game played, just a final score and a wall of statistics.
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Sep 16, 2019 14:23
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Yooper posted:I think a combo of both, give the player you know, Fallujah 2004, Afghanistan 2009, then also have some fictional stuff, Fulda 1984, etc. I can't help but see pixel graphics for this one. ***Private Burns has been headshot. KIA ***Private Vasquese Kills an enemy. +1XP, +1PTSD
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Sep 16, 2019 14:40
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=low0mGLeT2I
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Sep 16, 2019 14:42
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Grey Hunter posted:I can't help but see pixel graphics for this one. You'd play it. You know you would. Imagine "Kharkov 1942 - 35th Guards Tank Brigade" expansion.
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Sep 16, 2019 14:43
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I'd be down with a George Marshall personnel management simulator.
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Sep 16, 2019 14:46
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Yooper posted:You'd play it. You know you would. Erm, have we found anything I won't play yet?
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Sep 16, 2019 14:49
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Drone posted:While I think historicity is definitely a draw for a lot of people, hypothetical-but-relatively-plausible-ish scenarios are also great. I think grognards care more about the authenticity of the details (a reasonable order of battle, etc.) than about the authenticity of the events being depicted. I agree with you. The only thing I have some difficulty with, and it’s still not a deal breaker, is non-science fiction/fantasy settings that are completely made up. For example, despite many attempts I just cannot get into ATG for this reason. That being said, if you want a completely made up setting or a scenario that stretches plausibility to the extreme, for me weirdly it is all about the backstory and lore. If you can set that up and build a narrative for me I am fine. Edit COIN games never work for me. Maybe there is a game system out there that hasn’t been invented yet that would make it fun, but so far, outside tactical level games, COIN games make my eyes bleed.
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Sep 16, 2019 15:19
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ZombieLenin posted:I agree with you. The only thing I have some difficulty with, and it’s still not a deal breaker, is non-science fiction/fantasy settings that are completely made up. For example, despite many attempts I just cannot get into ATG for this reason. I love the concept of COIN but I haven't found it enjoyable. That said I have Cuba Libre and Falling Sky, but both fall flat. ATG is the same for me, it just feels blah. I feel the same for Stellaris, I just can't get into generic space people where I can totally do EUIV or CK2 where I have some basis in history. I know why the Ottomans dislike me as Portugal, I have no idea why the Federalist Sponge People dislike me.
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Sep 16, 2019 16:16
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Personally, I'm much more of a fan of games that convey the setting through their mechanics, rather than games that adhere to full accuracy to their source material. Give me Churchill over Campaign for North Africa, or to a lesser extent, DC:B over WitE (though I don't think DC:B does quite enough) I find myself tending towards grog games that uniquely utilize their game play to reflect the settings. These tend to be more "grog lite" games since they aren't as strict about conforming to the setting or realism and so I find it easier to pick them up. I'm definitely a sucker for certain settings though, if it's Age of Sail I'll probably play it no matter what.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:22
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Yooper posted:I love the concept of COIN but I haven't found it enjoyable. That said I have Cuba Libre and Falling Sky, but both fall flat. I do feel like this worked in Civ Alpha Centauri, because the archetypes were so simple and so established. There are ways to get away with it, though hardly anyone (no one?) does it as well as AC did.
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Sep 16, 2019 19:26
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Popete posted:I find myself tending towards grog games that uniquely utilize their game play to reflect the settings. These tend to be more "grog lite" games since they aren't as strict about conforming to the setting or realism and so I find it easier to pick them up. It's definitely a rule of wargame designers that being complicated is misunderstood for being complex. Modern Naval/Air Ops is a very complex simulation but works hard to avoid being complicated - you can get what you want done with a minimum of clicks and have the option to dive deeper into the detail if you want to. WitP is very complicated to play and uses an incredibly complicated set of commands and options to hide the fact that it is actually a very simple game about pushing counters across a board while aiming to get 2:1 combat odds. Barbarossa embraces the fact that its a game that's fundamentally about pushing counters across a board and makes sure that all the other decisions in the game are visibly and tangibly about your ability to push those counters.
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Sep 16, 2019 19:46
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I'm not sure what the consensus is in the Grog thread regarding HOI4, but I find it to be a good mixture of complexity and depth without being overly complicated. It's basically the opposite of WitE and although I own and am intrigued by WitE I've never been able to break thru and learn how to actually play it, where as HOI4 once you get into it makes sense for the most part and isn't as complicated as it initially appears.
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Sep 16, 2019 19:56
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As far as grog-lites go, I really hope the new Unity of Command lives up to expectations. 
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Sep 16, 2019 20:06
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Popete posted:I'm not sure what the consensus is in the Grog thread regarding HOI4, but I find it to be a good mixture of complexity and depth without being overly complicated. It's basically the opposite of WitE and although I own and am intrigued by WitE I've never been able to break thru and learn how to actually play it, where as HOI4 once you get into it makes sense for the most part and isn't as complicated as it initially appears. WiTE is fun, but my chief frustration is other players (and to some extent WiTP too) in as much as when I play games like these I am almost role playing re-fighting the war. So... I do things like actually try and defend Kiev if playing Russia in a multiplayer WiTE game, which puts me at a serious disadvantage. Similarly if I am playing Germany in said game, you will never find me using a panzer ball. Same goes for WiTP. If I am playing the Allies I defend Singapore and the DEI, and you will never catch me invading Long Beach as Japan to cancel the Allied players ship reinforcements. Not that I think there is a right or wrong way to play these games, it’s just I have to be really careful about who I play with, and I am often confused with how people define “playing historically”—since they will say that they are down for an historical MP game, then abandon Kiev/Singapore/DEI and use panzer balls.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:22
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Popete posted:I'm not sure what the consensus is in the Grog thread regarding HOI4, but I find it to be a good mixture of complexity and depth without being overly complicated. It's basically the opposite of WitE and although I own and am intrigued by WitE I've never been able to break thru and learn how to actually play it, where as HOI4 once you get into it makes sense for the most part and isn't as complicated as it initially appears. So this is where definitions get murky, but my own way of defining a grog game is that it's one that's primarily about being given a certain force structure and trying to solve a problem with it. HOI4 is fully grand strategy - the aim of the game is to manage your nations industrial output and the general-ling is just icing on top of that cake.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:22
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Maybe that's what I enjoy about HOI4 vs WitE, I don't particularly care to micromanage stacks of counters across the entire Eastern Front. But I am interested in force composition for armies and managing the supply/industry to support those armies. It's a different problem to solve and HOI4 very intentionally simplifies combat (to the point of letting you draw swathing arrows and let the AI manage the offensive movement). Of course HOI4 also doesn't have a single objective for the player, WitE your goal is to defeat the Soviets or Germany, how you go about that is up to the player but you are always going to be fighting the Eastern Front war. HOI4 if you're playing historical mode even, you have the option to take your country in a totally different route than it would have historically but within the framework of everyone else doing for the most part what they did in WW2. I figured HOI4 wasn't necessarily considered a Grog game because it rarely gets mentioned here, perhaps it's the simplification of the combat or the tendency for it to go off the rails from a historical perspective.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:31
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Popete posted:Maybe that's what I enjoy about HOI4 vs WitE, I don't particularly care to micromanage stacks of counters across the entire Eastern Front. But I am interested in force composition for armies and managing the supply/industry to support those armies. It's a different problem to solve and HOI4 very intentionally simplifies combat (to the point of letting you draw swathing arrows and let the AI manage the offensive movement). Of course HOI4 also doesn't have a single objective for the player, WitE your goal is to defeat the Soviets or Germany, how you go about that is up to the player but you are always going to be fighting the Eastern Front war. HOI4 if you're playing historical mode even, you have the option to take your country in a totally different route than it would have historically but within the framework of everyone else doing for the most part what they did in WW2. Well HOI4 is popular enough to have its own thread and be part of the Paradox megathread, this is a roundup for games that can't support a live thread by themselves.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:49
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ZombieLenin posted:WiTE is fun, but my chief frustration is other players (and to some extent WiTP too) in as much as when I play games like these I am almost role playing re-fighting the war. So... I do things like actually try and defend Kiev if playing Russia in a multiplayer WiTE game, which puts me at a serious disadvantage. Similarly if I am playing Germany in said game, you will never find me using a panzer ball. WitE and to some degree WitW have lost the luster for me. DC:B does a good job of requiring you to do things that are, in historical hindsight, dumb. WitE needs a mechanism that forces you to be hamstrung by political requirements. Without it the game becomes way too a-historical. That and the overly complex rendering inside of a black box. I think that with WitE2 they are reaching the point where problems pop up and even the developers don't recognize it unless it's major.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:43
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Yooper posted:WitE and to some degree WitW have lost the luster for me. DC:B does a good job of requiring you to do things that are, in historical hindsight, dumb. WitE needs a mechanism that forces you to be hamstrung by political requirements. Without it the game becomes way too a-historical. That and the overly complex rendering inside of a black box. I think that with WitE2 they are reaching the point where problems pop up and even the developers don't recognize it unless it's major. The DC:B system would be fascinating in a Pacific War setting. Allied commander can't abandon Singapore or Churchill will hate them but if they stay and fight for it hard then maybe they can keep some British ships from withdrawing to the Atlantic earlier, MacArthur is obsessed with the Philippines and you have to keep him happy, etc. There would be a ton to do around managing relationships with Allies and fighting to get resources that would otherwise go to Europe. And the Japanese side would be even wilder with the IJA/IJN rivalry.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:59
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gohuskies posted:The DC:B system would be fascinating in a Pacific War setting. Allied commander can't abandon Singapore or Churchill will hate them but if they stay and fight for it hard then maybe they can keep some British ships from withdrawing to the Atlantic earlier, MacArthur is obsessed with the Philippines and you have to keep him happy, etc. There would be a ton to do around managing relationships with Allies and fighting to get resources that would otherwise go to Europe. And the Japanese side would be even wilder with the IJA/IJN rivalry. I don't think you tie it to land objectives. What you do is have a 'fightyness' meter the Allied player has to keep up. If you don't fight, and it doesn't matter where, then Roosevelt loses faith in you and you get sacked. Your objective is to do just enough to keep Roosevelt off your back while avoiding a catastrophic defeat early in the war and waiting for the US to gear up. That results in the player being incentivised to do stuff like the doolittle raid, or fighting Midway when you only have 2 carriers ready, or sending surface ships through the slot. e: also I would have you be Nimitz (or his chief of staff) rather than Allied commander. You control the fleet, you have to get the Marines to where they need to go, but you also have to deal with MacArthur and his obnoxious demands. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 23:14
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That sounds way less interesting than having to deal with specific goals set by specific people, which in turn limit your options. Actually, it sounds like a better version of Stalin's Paranoia mechanic that just kills generals in DC:B.Alchenar posted:e: also I would have you be Nimitz (or his chief of staff) rather than Allied commander. You control the fleet, you have to get the Marines to where they need to go, but you also have to deal with MacArthur and his obnoxious demands. This though, is good. Would it also be too much to ask for PTO2 style monthly cabinet meetings?
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Sep 16, 2019 23:19
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:This though, is good. Would it also be too much to ask for PTO2 style monthly cabinet meetings? Now I want a grog game with cabinet meetings from "Yes, minister" or "Veep" E: Or from "the thick of it"
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Sep 16, 2019 23:28
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I think an interesting comparison is Dominions. It's certainly grog but isn't up there in complexity with say WitP, but I bounced off dom 3, 4 & 5 and have only just managed to get into 5 now, whereas witp I was able to dive right in. The difference to me is the setting, it's not that I don't like Dom's setting, I was desperate to like it, but with 0 frame of reference to anything even though the over all complexity is less than witp I just couldn't get a grasp of anything. I at least have some kind of expectation what happens when a wildcat and a zero meet, but is a satyr better than a centaur? Or a giant? Is recruiting either better than a mage who can throw a fireball? What even is a fireball in game effect terms? Is it better or worse than flare? Or maybe I should do archers instead? Without anything any relation at all to any prior experience it is very hard to get into. The learning ceiling is in many ways lower than witp I think, but it is absolutely a wall not a cliff. witp I could start off by knowing what a carrier was or a BB was, then learn the major plane models, then sperg out about specific variants, ect. In something like dominions you either know enough about the every system and possibility to evaluate specific options against every other possible option or you else you don't, there isn't really a curve there.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:13
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:This though, is good. Would it also be too much to ask for PTO2 style monthly cabinet meetings? It's a really interesting idea but man the card game is almost pure RNG once you understand it.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:17
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my hot take is that HOI4 might not be a grog game, but HOI3 absolutely is
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Sep 17, 2019 18:22
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My personal view rule of thumb for whether a grog game (or most games tbh) will turn out to be good is if there's a clear vision of the player as an actual person in a military/political hierarchy with a certain level of authority and ability to delegate detail. It can be implicit (in Combat Mission you are the battlegroup commander) or explicit (in Barbarossa you are deputy Chief of Staff to Halder), but it needs to be there.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:24
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Alchenar posted:Late Naval Action trip report: The final (optional) tutorial is so hard that when you pass it the game announces it in Nation Chat and everyone cheers you. Ive put in about 300 hours since they officially launched out of Early Access and wiped all the progress on the servers, bringing me up to almost 700 hours played. The unfortunate reality about the game is that it does not respect your time. Its taken that many hours to really get enough combat hours logged to feel like I know what I am doing at all, and I still get routinely clowned by players with a much higher skill level. Ive tossed around the idea of trying to write a games OP on the game, but keep putting it off as too much effort. However if you are interested in the subject matter at all, it is seriously the best option out there. They recently changed the rules to let you capture anything, and added a bunch of the "permit" (previously craftable only, and with a permit locked behind an RNG drop) to the open world. The main problem I have with the game is a social one, a lot of the people playing are horrendous garbage people, they will often go on hour long jags about how the game is damaging their "immersion" by not having slaves as a trade good. But there is very little content you can do on the PvP server without friends, it is one of those games where if you find yourself in a fair fight you hosed up. So it's hard enough to find a reasonable group of people to play with with the population so low, but the problem is exacerbated by that small player base being split into 9 god drat factions.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:26
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Alchenar posted:I don't think you tie it to land objectives. So I agree with Yooper that the DC:B system is one of the greatest additions to operational level war games ever devised and I would love to see it added to more groggy games. I also like your idea, but the Pacific war is so challenging, because on paper (as in real life) the Japanese—and by extension the Japanese player—do not have a shot at winning. For example if you tried to balance the war more historically in WiTP a competent Allied player would beat the Japanese player by early 1944 at the earliest. I think these two thoughts are connected—given that how do you balance such a game so it isn’t a walk over, while also encouraging the Allied player to risk their ships early in the war. For example, in WiTP the IJN carriers enjoy considerable bonuses over their counter parts until 1943. On top of that, the Japanese player often uses the WiTP version of the panzer ball in that they keep every Japanese flight deck in a single super Kido Butai that has the power to absolutely wreck any American carrier force. So how would we, in such a hypothetical game, both allow the Japanese player some leeway and a chance to be effective in the early war, while encouraging the Allied player to be willing to put up a naval fight, or string three carriers together and use them to defend a Midway.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:my hot take is that HOI4 might not be a grog game, but HOI3 absolutely is I think HOI3 is the only game in history to have a tutorial narrated by Hitler. To this day I still don't know what the hell they were thinking with that.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:09
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ZombieLenin posted:So how would we, in such a hypothetical game, both allow the Japanese player some leeway and a chance to be effective in the early war, while encouraging the Allied player to be willing to put up a naval fight, or string three carriers together and use them to defend a Midway. You do what Vic does with DC and just run the Pacific War till end 1942. The Japanese win if they've entrenched themselves in an outer Pacific Perimeter and still have their carriers. Don't try and build a game around the full war unless you are giving the player control over when and where to go to war and what to bring.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:31
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:I think HOI3 is the only game in history to have a tutorial narrated by Hitler. To this day I still don't know what the hell they were thinking with that. Maybe so, but this Panzer General rip-off has fully-voiced CGI Hitler cutscenes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2e-uSxzOf4
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Sep 17, 2019 23:29
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ZombieLenin posted:So how would we, in such a hypothetical game, both allow the Japanese player some leeway and a chance to be effective in the early war, while encouraging the Allied player to be willing to put up a naval fight, or string three carriers together and use them to defend a Midway. A dynamic scoring system based on relative strength at each point in the war - get more points for early US victories/late Japan victories - while also prioritizing political considerations. Alternatively, going back to the PTO2 idea, scoring based on how well your side of the war went. So what if the army's lost entirely and the country's been defeated? The navy did a good job. 
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Sep 17, 2019 23:38
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HannibalBarca posted:Maybe so, but this Panzer General rip-off has fully-voiced CGI Hitler cutscenes! A) That voice work is absolutely amazing and the perfect casting, so few games get him right. 2) The weird lighting artifact on that other dude's shoe every time he takes a step drives me insane.
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Sep 18, 2019 00:43
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lol what is that?
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Sep 18, 2019 01:57
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ZombieLenin posted:
Risk vs Reward. The IJN know they have to take as much ground and dig in to defend it before the Allied doomstack hits them in two years. They keep the KB together? It's that much harder to get where the USN actually is and lets the USN be a fleet in being. So the IJN in turn has to get aggressive to draw the USN out to fight. The USN stays in port? The IJN 'wins' by virtue of inflicting more damage/making it look worse to the public how they are doing. Civilian/political morale points are a good way to go at this! As has been said. The USN can want to do lots of hit and run attacks with carriers. Get the IJN to chase them everywhere, run out of fuel, and if they find the KB is out for battle they can just run. the IJN wants to control the tempo of the battle and inflict as much admage as possible. Whether the player wants to keep the KB together, split it out to cover more frontage, try and put up some operations to try and lure the USN out. basically the game spends a year or two as a game of 'chicken' where both sides try to get the other to battle. If the USN stays in port, the IJN racks up damage simply by declining morale. If the IJN is spread out and picked apart, they in turn will collapse. I personally also prefer some ahistoricalsorts of setups mind for this that are not remotely feasible to make these sorts of games harder. Often these things aren't something that would have happened (unless you went further back in time). But let the IJN not have the brutal attrition to carrier pilots and have a competent carrier training program. Or enough fuel/supplies that they're not on a near endless shoestring. Give them a decent merchant marine and doctrine tweaks. Yes, nowhere near remotely historical. But for a good Allied player it means they can't just turtle up for two years and bleed out the enemy until they start getting endless hordes of ships. And the knowledge that the enem ycan replace losses and hold it's own in attrition. If you go purely ahistorical and handwave everything ever remotely outside the boundaries of realism, setup a 1944 game where Japan has it's full empire fortified, a solid supply base/merchant marine, full strength veteran carriers, effective damage control, pilot reserves, etc. So it turns into a real war where the USN have to match the IJN toe to toe and slugging it out is a lot more tenuous. But I'm of the 'it make sfor a good scenario/setup, might as well go all out in the setting to push yourself'. I'm also really bad at these games totally mind so there's that. But, why not try and break the engine when you have 15-20 carriers on each side in War in the Pacific and see how badly it goes apocalyptic?
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Sep 18, 2019 09:16
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I wonder if it would be any fun to make a crazy ww2 setting where every "major" country is in a ffa with no alliances. Obviously would need a lot of ahistorical balancing to make them all at least fairly viable.
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Sep 18, 2019 09:49
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:A) That voice work is absolutely amazing and the perfect casting, so few games get him right. Whoever they got to do his voice should absolutely be hired to do the Downfall’s English dub of Hitler.
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Sep 18, 2019 13:06
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Yooper posted:Look at the Baseball/Hockey/Soccer Manager games, hard to get much groggier then that. If you made a "Battalion Troop Management" game in that same vein an embarrassing amount of us would buy it and love it. I think these games are a great example of what grog games could be if they had more money behind them. Championship Manager presents a huge amount of complexity with a manageable UI. Even if you don't care about soccer I recommend giving it a try just to marvel at all the different screens and mechanics.
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Sep 18, 2019 13:48
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Yooper posted:
I always thought Division Manager would be fun, you take control of a Division in training in WW2, and you pick what maneuvers to do when you are in training, then you get deployed in a dynamic Western Front as the Allies move across Europe and fight on presumably a Battalion level with "your" division that you have trained and organised.
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Sep 18, 2019 14:28
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