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Hypnobeard posted:Why is WitP such a beloved wargame? Everyone say it's a whole lot of jank, so what's overcoming that? Name another WEGO game that does the entire Pacific theatre for the entire war. Carrier warfare is also inherently fascinating - you've got these mobile airbases floating around and the side that scouts out the other first gets to take a free swing at them.
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Apr 14, 2021 15:15
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Hypnobeard posted:Why is WitP such a beloved wargame? Everyone say it's a whole lot of jank, so what's overcoming that? Operational-level wargames usually run into this problem where it feels like it's lacking because so much of the "starting situation" is locked-in to strategic-level decisions that the player has no control over. This can be mitigated somewhat by having lots of scenarios to cover multiple different set-ups and what-ifs, or by covering a scenario that's relatively even/well-matched or provides a good back-and-forth. The problem with the Pacific theater is that there's not a lot of opportunities for the latter: Pearl Harbor isn't really a "battle", and most of the late war is shooting fish in a barrel with half-a-dozen Essex'es. You've got Coral Sea, Midway, and maybe the Solomons, but even then only one out of those three scenarios will let the Japanese player run with more than two carriers. There is a third option: expand the scope of the operational-level battlefield that the strategic layer starts coming into play. You can see this in John Tiller games where on top of a single scenario that covers each individual battle of the Seven Days, he also has one giant battle that runs through all seven days, so whatever battles that play-out are essentially "organic". Or in WITE, where you can fight Fall Blau at the division level, but the grand campaign is also just the entire Eastern Front, and all of the prelude to whatever Fall Blau is going to look like in your alternate reality also has to be played out. WITP does the same thing: instead of just giving you a Coral Sea, it gives you the entire rest of the war so you might not even have a Coral Sea, or maybe this time it's Coral Sea Done Right where Yamamoto actually sends all six carriers to Port Moresby. Or maybe Coral Sea happens in Ceylon instead. And it gets especially tricky when dealing with the Pacific because you can't do the thing you do in WITE where the naval element is an afterthought: all three branches of the armed forces have to be modeled to some degree of accuracy, because it all matters in the Pacific. Most games don't even try, or are janky in at least one branch (in the case of Panzer General derivatives, usually in naval combat). WITP "clicks" with a lot of people because it actually tries to do all this, and comes close enough to create a lot of charming procedurally generated narratives despite its flaws.
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Apr 14, 2021 15:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:Operational-level wargames usually run into this problem where it feels like it's lacking because so much of the "starting situation" is locked-in to strategic-level decisions that the player has no control over. I kinda feel like the current solution- turn every operational game into a big, strategic game comes at significant costs- namely, the games become unwieldy, take forever to play out to any kind of conclusion, and often have a less effective AI opponent for it. I've always thought what would be interesting is trying to come up with procedurally generated operation- possibly with randomized geography, so you kinda have something that can be different each time. You'll never really be able to shake off the 'puzzle game' people because I think they were never really interested in operational games in the first place, but you can make something more interesting than a pure Fall Blau game.
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Apr 14, 2021 15:48
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Panzeh posted:I kinda feel like the current solution- turn every operational game into a big, strategic game comes at significant costs- namely, the games become unwieldy, take forever to play out to any kind of conclusion, and often have a less effective AI opponent for it. Oh, I agree - certainly it's a huge task to try and play out all seven days of the Seven Days Battles, at two hours per turn, and it's such a large gameplay space that the AI can't deal. One of the ways that SSG's Decisive Battles series handled this was by letting you flip a switch that randomized the strength values of units. There was even an option to make strength values simply show up as ?? to the player until they actually fought in a battle at least one time, so you still couldn't know where your "strong" units were until you'd actually engaged.
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Apr 14, 2021 15:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:Oh, I agree - certainly it's a huge task to try and play out all seven days of the Seven Days Battles, at two hours per turn, and it's such a large gameplay space that the AI can't deal. Oh hey, look what’s coming later this year: quote:Ardennes Offensive adds the Uncertainty Rule as an optional feature. If you play with this rule each Unit gets a hidden combat modifier that you will discover over time as the Unit sees more and more combat.
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Apr 14, 2021 17:08
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Pirate Radar posted:Oh hey, look what’s coming later this year: goddamn I was tempted to make a joke about how "Decisive Battles" and "Decisive Campaigns" aren't the same thing but holy poo poo that rocks
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Apr 14, 2021 17:21
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I liked the rule in Forge of Freedom (my first 'modern' grog game, curtesy of Grey doing an LP) that Generals stats would start off unknown and be gradually revealed over battles. So you couldn't optimise your command structure from the get go and had to fight a few battles not knowing if your commander was utterly worthless.
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Apr 14, 2021 17:23
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Anyone have a link to a rundown on how/if you need to manage commanders in WITE2? Some of my army's have kind of rubbish command limits and I don't really know if that matters or if there's an easy fix
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Apr 14, 2021 17:26
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Panzeh posted:
Shadow Empire is pretty close to this tbh and a blast
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Apr 14, 2021 17:27
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pointsofdata posted:Anyone have a link to a rundown on how/if you need to manage commanders in WITE2? Some of my army's have kind of rubbish command limits and I don't really know if that matters or if there's an easy fix Commanders won't affect command limits, all armies should have the same limits. You can boost it by setting the army as an assault army but that prevents the units from fortifying. E: commanders improve combat performance and I think movement. You absolutely should be swapping out commanders, it's the #1 thing you're spending pp on in '41, it just doesn't help with command limits. uPen fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Apr 14, 2021 |
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Apr 14, 2021 17:31
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Alchenar posted:I liked the rule in Forge of Freedom (my first 'modern' grog game, curtesy of Grey doing an LP) that Generals stats would start off unknown and be gradually revealed over battles. So you couldn't optimise your command structure from the get go and had to fight a few battles not knowing if your commander was utterly worthless. AGEOD could randomize leader stats, but wouldn't hide them, but leaders would also have a Seniority stat so you couldn't just float the best dudes to the top of the heap on Day One.
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Apr 14, 2021 17:37
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Alchenar posted:I liked the rule in Forge of Freedom (my first 'modern' grog game, curtesy of Grey doing an LP) that Generals stats would start off unknown and be gradually revealed over battles. So you couldn't optimise your command structure from the get go and had to fight a few battles not knowing if your commander was utterly worthless. This is how every American Civil War game should be, because it is absolutely a key component of what both Lincoln and Davis had to deal with. The problem is, as an American who has a strong association and weird affinity for every one of the well known officer in the American Civil War, I absolutely never play American Civil War games with this option turned on.
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Apr 14, 2021 17:44
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Alchenar posted:I liked the rule in Forge of Freedom (my first 'modern' grog game, curtesy of Grey doing an LP) that Generals stats would start off unknown and be gradually revealed over battles. So you couldn't optimise your command structure from the get go and had to fight a few battles not knowing if your commander was utterly worthless. I still have a massive soft spot for FOF. Finding out which generals were the good ones was amazing.
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Apr 14, 2021 19:05
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Grey Hunter posted:I still have a massive soft spot for FOF. Finding out which generals were the good ones was amazing. The other problem with this system—and all American Civil War strategic level games generally—is balance. On paper the American Civil War should have lasted a year, at most, both in terms of manpower, industrial capacity, and strength of the armed forces of the combatants. This doesn’t really matter that much though if you are playing the Union against an AI; however for MP games or Confederate vs AI games... It is already hard to ‘balance’ American Civil War games in a way that gives someone playing as the Confederates a chance of achieving historical results; and the one advantage the Confederates stumbled onto, especially in the East, was a leadership advantage. If you take that away and randomize the qualities of generals, which are then unknown until the generals have actually led in battle a couple times... Well, it’s a problem, because the Union player can stumble onto a Sherman or Grant in 1861 while the Confederate player gets bad or mediocre generals the Confederate player is hosed; OR Both sides could end up with bad generals and the South will still get screwed; OR Both sides can stumble onto good generals right away and then it’s a coin flip; OR The Confederate player can accidentally end up in the historical position of having great generals facing bad—or mediocre—Union generals. So two of these scenarios the game balance is hosed completely in favor of the Union at the outset, and one of them it’s a coin flip whether the Confederate player is hosed at the outset, but he or she will still be hosed in the medium term. Literally only one of those scenarios gives the Confederate player a ‘chance’ of achieving semi-historical results. In any case, the balance issue generally is, I think, why there are so few good strategic level games covering the American Civil War.
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Apr 14, 2021 19:38
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So I've gotten into UA: Age of Sail and been having a lot of fun. However, whoever in history came up with the "pounder" system can go gently caress themselves. Just tell me a "12-pounder" is a 120mm gun, seriously jesus christ.
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Apr 14, 2021 19:42
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Dramicus posted:So I've gotten into UA: Age of Sail and been having a lot of fun. However, whoever in history came up with the "pounder" system can go gently caress themselves. Just tell me a "12-pounder" is a 120mm gun, seriously jesus christ. It refers to the weight of the shot, 24 pounders are 152mm guns, and the distinction between the two is much better illustrated by the weight-based naming than the measurement.
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Apr 14, 2021 19:55
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ZombieLenin posted:The other problem with this system—and all American Civil War strategic level games generally—is balance. IIRC the confederates are balanced to have a higher chance of having their good generals at the start, while he union get theirs later. But your main point stands, finding out you have a 9/9/9/9 general in 61 is gamechanging.
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Apr 14, 2021 20:10
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:It refers to the weight of the shot, 24 pounders are 152mm guns, and the distinction between the two is much better illustrated by the weight-based naming than the measurement. This is especially true when you consider that in this era, the cannonball HAD to smaller in circumference than the gun barrel. Knowing the calibre of the gun tells you little.
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Apr 14, 2021 20:12
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:It refers to the weight of the shot, 24 pounders are 152mm guns, and the distinction between the two is much better illustrated by the weight-based naming than the measurement. I don't think think so, especially when you start factoring in stuff like carronades and gunnades. I don't see how 152mm L24 would be any less descriptive. It's obviously a large, low-velocity projectile. If anything the metric system is even more descriptive for this period because it's all solid-shot, nothing explosive. So you don't even have to worry about stuff like sabot, APHE, etc. Hippocrass posted:This is especially true when you consider that in this era, the cannonball HAD to smaller in circumference than the gun barrel. Knowing the calibre of the gun tells you little. I don't see how knowing the weight of the ammo tells you more. You could have a 24-pounder that spits out the projectile at half the velocity of another 24-pounder. At least with the modern system the velocity can be reasonably assumed from the length of the gun. Dramicus fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Apr 14, 2021 |
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Apr 14, 2021 20:13
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Well, the majority of AoS takes place before the development of metric. Given the level of development of the era, the poundage system makes sense. A battery could have guns with slightly different barrel radius but as lomg as the shot is roughly the same mass and the pounder is of decent quality and the gunners know what they're doing, it's all equal. Classing artillery by barrel size doesn't make sense until the advent of breach loading guns.
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Apr 14, 2021 20:19
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Ok, that's a good point. It makes sense then if the ammunition is mostly interchangeable, then organizing guns by what kind of ammunition they fire is really logical from a logistics standpoint.
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Apr 14, 2021 20:21
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You should also keep in mind who the sailors were at the time. Sure, modern designations would work for our more educated population and more highly trained military personnel. They likely wouldn't be so effective with press ganged illiterate and innumerate men with minimal training, and of course would be harder to communicate on a very loud and highly crowded ship deck.
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Apr 14, 2021 20:23
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Another good point. The guy responsible for loading/getting ammo just needs to know the appropriate weight and nothing else, then any similarly-rated gun will be able to fire it. Alright, I suppose it's fine for it's purpose. I suppose I'm just salty from reading about ww2 where everyone on the planet is dealing with 75mm, 57mm, etc and the Brits show up with their 4-pounders and 6-pounders and I have no reference for what that's supposed to be.
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Apr 14, 2021 20:29
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CMANO proves the superiority of the PLA over imperialist running dogs https://www.eyeontaiwan.com/video-claims-china-could-invade-taiwan-in-only-24-hours
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Apr 14, 2021 22:07
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sum posted:CMANO proves the superiority of the PLA over imperialist running dogs  I host the CMO wiki and it's amazing how much traffic I get from mainland China.
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Apr 14, 2021 22:24
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If only we'd stuck to the system of classifying shells by weight we could have described BB guns as '2500 pounders' etc. An opportunity missed 
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Apr 14, 2021 23:58
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I can never stand playing as the CSA, though I do want to ask if anyone has in these strategic-level games and whether they've been able to "win the war" and what the conditions were to enable that
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Apr 15, 2021 00:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:I can never stand playing as the CSA, though I do want to ask if anyone has in these strategic-level games and whether they've been able to "win the war" and what the conditions were to enable that I play the CSA in games a lot, mostly because it is always so much more challenging. If I am being honest though, I also think the fact that I grew up knowing that 2/3rds of my third great grandparents served in the Confederate Army, and somehow the story of the trauma of how my 3rd great uncle’s death—he was a Confederate Sergeant was killed at the Battle of Corrick’s Ford—effected his family, and caused my 3rd great grandfather to enlist (who was himself wounded at Antietam), probably makes the Confederates a lot more sympathetic to me than they should be. But then again, I have zero problems playing Axis countries in games, so sometimes it seems kind of weird I feel guilty when I play the Confederacy in games, but not say Germany in WiTE.
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Apr 15, 2021 01:11
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I generally play as the CSA because I enjoy quality over quantity play and despite how silly that is historically it's how a lot of games are balanced.
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Apr 15, 2021 01:19
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these are also video games playing as CSA or Germany is not an endorsement of the views expressed by those groups
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Apr 15, 2021 02:50
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Hey, Grey, any chance you can add my WitP setup guide to the OP so that it doesn't get buried in depths of this thread?
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Apr 15, 2021 02:51
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Gewehr 43 posted:Hey, Grey, any chance you can add my WitP setup guide to the OP so that it doesn't get buried in depths of this thread? Yes please this was incredibly helpful and easy to follow. Thanks again Gewehr!
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Apr 15, 2021 02:54
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In any historical game it's fun to try and 'beat history' and the way to do that is to play as the side that lost.
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Apr 15, 2021 09:08
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okay to nip this in the bud I am not at all trying to litigate my own personal preferences - my question was more like "for y'all who play the CSA, what are the victory conditions like at the strategic level to 'win', and did you find them achievable/feasible?" like, is it as simple as taking Washington DC? is there a gamey strategy where you just concentrate everything in July 1861 and beeline right for the White House?
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Apr 15, 2021 09:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:okay to nip this in the bud I am not at all trying to litigate my own personal preferences - my question was more like "for y'all who play the CSA, what are the victory conditions like at the strategic level to 'win', and did you find them achievable/feasible?" Putting aside the historical feasibility or possible effects of something like that, the easy answer is that most games will make that sort of thing impossible, either via game design/mechanics (I've never seen a strategic-level wargame that, for example, let's you pull off the Schlieffen Plan and knock France out of the war in 1914; it's just not feasible to mulch through the necessary amount of units to do that in something like Strategic Command) or artificially gimping one or both sides at the beginning of the game (think AGEOD's Civil War titles). The one exception I can think of is some of GMT's card-driven war boardgames, where theoretically you can win decisive victories as the historically losing side during the first couple of turns, but that usually requires ludicrous incompetence, bad luck, or both on the part of the guy playing the historical winning side.
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Apr 15, 2021 12:36
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Playing the losing side is more fun. Not playing as the Nazis or the Confederacy also feels better. This is why Close Combat 2 is the greatest game ever made.
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Apr 15, 2021 12:52
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Kvlt! posted:Yes please this was incredibly helpful and easy to follow. Thanks again Gewehr! You're very welcome. Glad it was helpful.  Hope you enjoy WitP!
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Apr 15, 2021 13:20
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WitP:AE question: where do the Allies source their supplies and fuel for the western theater (India, etc.)? The manual says Abadon produces fuel and Cape Town produces supplies. Are those sufficient, or should the Allies run convoys from offmap bases like UK or Eastern US?
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Apr 15, 2021 14:10
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Close Combat 2 is the greatest game ever made.  Real shame that that 3D Close Combat that came out a couple years ago supposedly wasn't very good.
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Apr 15, 2021 14:37
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HannibalBarca posted:Putting aside the historical feasibility or possible effects of something like that, the easy answer is that most games will make that sort of thing impossible, either via game design/mechanics (I've never seen a strategic-level wargame that, for example, let's you pull off the Schlieffen Plan and knock France out of the war in 1914; it's just not feasible to mulch through the necessary amount of units to do that in something like Strategic Command) or artificially gimping one or both sides at the beginning of the game (think AGEOD's Civil War titles). I pulled off a successful 1914 Schlieffen once in Guns of August, but it was not something I could ever replicate. Literally every dice roll had to go my way, and then success was measured by me as the capture of Paris as the game did not force the French surrender until the first 1915 turn. But to answer the original question, every ACW game I’ve played have made it excessively difficult to say, capture Washington as the CSA in 1861. Part of that is sometimes gimping, as you say, early war armies, but often as not you just cannot field a strong enough army in 1861 to both route the Army of the Potomac and overcome a heavily fortified (and bonused) Washington DC. Usually games measure a CSA victory by modeling the election of 1864, and if the Confederates can force a Lincoln loss, they “win” the game. I can only speak for myself here, but if this fails, I measure success as the CSA by how long into 1865 I can drag the game... hoping to reach the usual 1866 cut off.
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Apr 15, 2021 14:56
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