Reply With QuoteAgreed. I believe the game manual also listed out the scenarios in chronological order. That is how I have been playing through them.Originally Posted by peterb
The irritating thing is that the scenarios are listed in alphabetical order, instead of something SENSIBLE. spelk posted a link on another forum to an analysis of scenarios by complexity, which was helpful for me.
EDIT: found the link. http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=2479970
Agreed. I believe the game manual also listed out the scenarios in chronological order. That is how I have been playing through them.
War in the East discussed on this weeks TMA Podcast #99
http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/20...r-in-the-east/
Peterb gets a mention!
Thoroughly enjoyable podcast! Joel Billings and Erik Rutins were a pleasure to listen to.
I actually bought War In the East a couple of weeks ago, but it got sidelined (other than some noodling over the manual) while I worked through a World of Warcraft binge. That podcast, and the fact that a fat new beta patch was released today for WITE, have inspired me to finally dig into the game this weekend.
For those interested in the Panther games but turned off by the price:
http://www.matrixgames.com/news/760/...r.Games.Lineup!
This seems much more logical, especially the reduced price on the older games - and this coming from someone who already owns all of them, including BftB at the full boat $80. Anyone semi-tempted by this system should definitely check out HTTR for $20.
Good. Hopefully the price reductions are successful income generators and it will lead to Matrix expanding the reductions to other titles.
And I would second the recommendation take a look at HTTR if you are remotely interested in these types of games.
Are there many new scenarios being posted for BftB, using the tools that come with the game?
I am VERY tempted to bite the bullet, as a long time wargamer, on BftB.
There are a few so far, but the good ones take a while to make, so don't expect a flood of them. Then again, I still haven't gotten through the ones that came with the game myself.
Wow, good news for those that don't already have them. There's no excuse now to not have at least HttR.
Are they still planning to port all the HttR and CotA scenarios to BftB as an expansion pack?
I was under the impression that it wasn't a wholesale conversion, because it would require too much work, but that a selection of HTTR scenarios where being re-designed to work with BftB.
Heres the thread with all the info
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=2480251
Arjuna
What we have in the works already are some scenarios covering the HTTR battles. We can't just use the old HTTR scenarios as too much has changed to salvage these. So they havge to be rebuilt from scratch. We have already converted the maps. The BFTB estabs include the HTTR estabs. We have developed five of the large scenarios so far. One option is to develop a suite of say 10 or so scenarios and release an expansion pack for HTTR. We could probably do that over the next few months.
Another option is to convert the COTA estabs. This will be a fairly big job. From there we could develop and release a COTA expansion pack. The COTA estabs would provide options to cover a lot of the pre 1943 battles on the western front. They would need to be further exanded upon to cater for specific forces in say the western desert theatre, France 1940 etc.
A further option would be to develop a set of east front estabs so we could cover a plethora of east front battles. Again it may be worth while separating this into early war years 1941/42/43 and later war years 44/45.
Thanks spelk. That's to bad that they aren't going to do a fullscale conversion.
Thanks for the heads up on the price drop. I gave HttR a spin yesterday afternoon and was very impressed. This is light years ahead of what else is going on in the genre.
Spelk - gave you a little plug in Afteractionreporter.com - keep up the good work :)
The $20 price point got me to buy HTTR on Sunday. After reading through the manual and playing through the tutorial I am very impressed. This is how to make a wargame on a PC. So much behind the scenes calculations, yet so easy to play. Also the orders delay mechanic makes the ability to think ahead and anticipate the next move of the enemy the most important skill for the player. Simply brilliant. I'd love to see this engine applied to the Civil War.
Ugh, at $20 it looks like resistance is futile.
Troy's and Lum's latest stupid podcast made me spend $80 stupid bucks on stupid War in the East.
The tutorial is hilariously bad. It's like 30 pages on administrative trivia before you get 5 pages on how to move units and perform attacks. Way to prioritize, guys!
Still, it's pretty easy to figure out how to push counters around, in marked contrast to War in Russia. I played the Road to Minsk scenario and had fun riding roughshod over the Soviet front line, but I'm probably going to need to actually read the manual before I tackle anything tougher.
Good luck with reading the manual if you didn't like the tutorial. On some level it's awesome because it goes into extreme detail with admirable precision, but it's pretty terrible at introducing general concepts then gradually adding in the grubby details. I'm still trying to work out some of the general principles by which the game operates.
Hawkeye, have a look at the WitE links under this news item, and you'll find some decent AAR's and an invaluable player made PDF Tutorial "Boot Camp" that is a life saver when it comes to learning the fundamentals of the game. Better than the manual.
http://bluntforcegamer.com/?p=3595
It wouldn't be a Grigsby game if it weren't really hard to learn how to play.
Thanks for mentioning that 'boot camp' tutorial Spelk. I hadn't come across that before and it's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I played through about half of it last night and the fog is starting to clear a little bit on how to play the game effectively.
Boy, you ain't kidding. I definitely agree with whoever it was on Troy's podcast who said something about how the manual needed a section that tells you how to play the game.
It's mystifying because for all the detail that you can delve into, the actual basics of the game are really quite simple. It'd probably take all of 4 pages to explain the basics of planning air missions, moving units, and making attacks - i.e. the stuff that makes up the majority of gameplay - but it's all buried under incredibly arcane minutae. I didn't need to know how to set HQ support levels to play through a few scenarios, so why is the tutorial telling me so much about it? Hell, I was halfway through my first non-tutorial game before I even realized I was forgetting to bomb airfields.
I don't understand why the folks who make these games are apparently opposed to people learning how to play them. Ah well, I'm enjoying it, anyway.
I actually printed out the entire umpteen hundred page manual and have it in a loose-leaf binder. But yeah, it's more an example of grog-nerd narcissism than it is a working instructional guide on playing the game. Truth be told, I haven't had the energy to do much more than the Road to Minsk scenario a few times yet, though I'm sure the bug will bite me when I have some time to spare. When I was (much) younger I'd eat stuff like this up, but now I'm often too damn tired to bother, and thus just go play some Battlefield 2 Bad Company, World of Tanks, or my MMO du jour instead.
For those of you interested in War in the East, I have a review and AAR up on my blog, Fog of Wargames. I cannot link to it because I just joined the forum, but you can reach it at fogofwargames.wordpress.com.
Also, does anyone know a good, tactical game that is not close combat or combat mission and more complex than Battlefield Academy? I'm looking for something in the twentieth (or twenty-first) century which is turn based. I have my real-time and pre-20th century bases covered.
The HPS (or now John Tiller Games) Squad Battles series covers WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and contemporary stuff. It's sorta Squad Leader-esque.
If you get Squad Battles: Modern War, don't get discouraged by the Umm Qasr tutorial. It is a tough nut to crack. I've seen 1 AAR over at the blitz where someone managed it, but with only 10 turns to clear the bunkers it is very hard.
It's a nice review. I think you're a little more forgiving of the tutorial than I am, as shown above! I also agree that the game itself makes it easy to perform the basic functions, but the manual completely falls on its face in telling you how to do so.
Something from the Steel Panthers family, perhaps? I tend to like WinSPWW2, but the Matrix Games one is good too.Also, does anyone know a good, tactical game that is not close combat or combat mission and more complex than Battlefield Academy? I'm looking for something in the twentieth (or twenty-first) century which is turn based. I have my real-time and pre-20th century bases covered.
It's the exact same way in the HPS Squad Battles: Winter War tutorial mission. As the Fins you are assaulting an entrenched Russian position. The tutorial says nothing about the barbed wire surrounding the entrenchment and its effects on your units. It's also only 10 turns long. It took me about 8 or so turns just to get within assault position, but by then my squads were so torn up it was a lost cause.
Not sure what the design logic is considering it's supposed to be the teaching scenario. I've played through the next half dozen scenarios or so and had decisive victories on all.
EDIT: for a another good tactical modern (WWII) game, also check out John Tiller's Campaign Series. It's unreal the amount of content you get for the price.
Panther Games have been building this series for well over a decade, and for all of that time I've been saying to myself (and anyone else who mentioned them) that this was the future of wargaming; the revolution in modelling made possible by playing wargames on computer. The problem is, almost no-one in wargame design has noticed the future. They're all busy building yet more hex-based boardgames and running them on computer screens.
Not that those games are all bad, it's just that there's so much potential in the computer wargaming platform that's not being explored.
One problem is that what Panther are trying to do is really hard. The Command Ops series has so many historical assumptions built into it that it isn't really any kind of general purpose wargame engine. I think it would really struggle to even transfer to the WWII eastern front without some major reprogramming; if you wanted it to cover the American civil war you'd essentially be starting again from scratch.
What are the historical assumptions you're mentioning?
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