let me go oldie first...Originally Posted by Blackadar
Have you tried one of the Steel Panthers revamps? They are all great.
Or if you ever enjoyed Panzer General there are a bunch of great mods out there for that.
Command Ops is "real time" the same way Harpoon is I guess; it's a continuous time system with a wide range of speeds and it's freely pausable. In no way is it an RTS.
War in the East is ninety bucks, but arguably you do get a lot for your money. Me, I've had it since day one and, um, only played one scenario and the tutorial. Too big, too complex, too damn sprawling and with an interface only a mother could love in some respects. I keep saying I'll get to it one day.
Ditto....and ditto that to WITP.
WitE should only be purchased by people who already know that they'll love it. It's really good, but only for a specific audience, especially at that price. In response to TheWombat, I actually think it's got a far better interface for an operational turn-based game than say, The Operational Art of War or Korsun Pocket, but that's probably damning with faint praise.
Command Ops rejects so many wargaming conventions that it is essentially equally accessible to grognard and newbie alike. If you're interested, I'd actually suggest you buy either Highway to the Reich or Conquest of the Aegean, as they are essentially the same system and much cheaper at the moment.
Not bad advice, and yes, WitE does have a better interface than TOAW for sure, and probably better than KP, but yeah, faint praise indeed. As a long time player/observer of Grigsby games, I KNEW what I was getting into with WitE, and I figured it was a long-term project. That is, when I fucking retire and have oodles of time maybe I'll actually play it if my PC (will we have PCs then?) can still play it!
So I'm taking it that Command Ops (or perhaps one of the earlier ones in the series) is the consensus pick?
VfV, TAO/KP, TOAW3, Command Ops series, WtP, WitE... someone will champion anything. The definition of a gold standard would depend on what you want.
Jason, what's your favorite and why?
I haven't tried any of the new ones but am fairly impressed by what I've read of Command Ops. I didn't getting around to buying it during the holiday sale, partly because I'd like to see all of the CotA scenarios ported to BotB, I'm not really a Bulge guy.
As someone interested in the Eastern Front I'm kind of waiting - ludicrous as this is - to hear people report back about grand campaign balance, which obscurely matters to me in contemplating whether I should plow weeks of my life into that kind of mad enterprise.
Of ones I've tried I prefer the flexibility and variety of scenarios in TOAW3 to the "oldschool cred" of less sandboxy ones like TAO and VfV. I don't really get people's professed interface problem with TOAW either. I'm pretty sure I'm in a minority on both my TOAW preferences, however. A version of a (longstanding) critique of TOAW's simulationist aims appeared in a recent WitE review by Bruce Geryk on the QT3 frontpage.
Hi all,
If two is permissible, then for me it would be Conquest of the Aegean or the 'Admiral's Edition' of War in the Pacific. Rather than cover too much ground again, I'll just try and briefly compare with the two above (which would both be top 5 for me as well)
CotA is a just an overall better game than BftB, IMHO. BftB further refines the system, but the CotA scenarios just work better with it. Not that there's anything wrong with the BftB scenarios, but for some reason they just aren't as much fun, and don't present quite the same interesting tactical challenges. Maybe that's just 'Bulge fatigue', but I don't think so.
WitP is unique in that it's the only strategic wargame that feels like a true simulation of war rather than a strategy game with a war theme (e.g. Hearts of Iron) or a simulation of a complex paper/counters game (HPS, TOAW, even WitE). As such, if you can find time to learn and play it - and time you need, although contrary to popular belief it is not compulsary to only play the grand campaign; there are shorter scenarios! - the immersion factor and sense of realism are second to none. There are folks lurking in the WitP forum at Matrix that haven't bought or played another game since WitP was first released; they just haven't needed to.
In passing, I disagree with TheWombat's take on WitE (other than getting a lot for your money) as, presumably, so does TheRock. While complex, you can pretty much avoid levels of it at first and just learn as you play.. when you can move and fight and organize a little, which are suitably covered in the tutorial, just jump in. It's much easier to learn than TOAW. There are, again, smaller scenarios (which play much quicker than in WitP), and surely a full Eastern Front campaign has to be both big and sprawling?! If it wasn't it would be so dumbed down it would hardly be a wargame at all. And the UI, IMHO (and UI always is an opinion thing), is an absolute joy compared to similar games.
A final word on price in relation to all those games bar CotA (which is cheaper), price really should only be an issue if it relates to your budget, not value for money. All are classic examples of 'you get what you pay for' (and more - I wouldn't trade any of the above for any other five wargame titles), no serious wargamer can really afford to be without all of them. Only the Combat Mission games are really even in the same league.
Yep, BftB is a better system than CoTA, but many of the Bulge battles just aren't that interesting (to me) Terrain chokepoints, poor weather etc. just don't let the system shine. In fact, the scenario I've played most is a hypothetical Normandy one, rather than the ones that some with the game. The CoTA scenarios, in general, are just much more fluid and dynamic, and that is when the Panther games system really shines, IMHO.
Plus Crete really was a close run thing, with lots of interesting decisions to make on both sides. Bulge? The Germans never really had a hope.
I've been an Advanced Tactics dude for a while now. I just can't get enough of that game. And the sequel/update is supposed to be out at the beginning of April!
That said, there's a freeware version of the game that you can try out to see if you like the model. You can find it here.
True, WitE is more accessible than it appears, but "accessible" for me I guess has changed over the years. I no longer have the patience to dig through a 400 page manual, though I did print the whole thing out and stick it in a binder. And yeah, while there are smaller scenarios, the whole point of the thing is the campaign. Don't get me wrong, I think if you have a really strong interest in the subject and the willingness to focus on the game fairly seriously, it's far from opaque, and compared to some earlier games it does have a decent interface. It's not, to me, terribly intuitive, and I have serious situational awareness problems with most large board-game style wargames on the computer, which the size and scope of this thing exacerbates. But I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone who really wants a German-Russian war game from avoiding it; it's very good for what it does.
I think I'm just burned out on serious heavy duty wargames after, at this point, nearly forty years of playing them.
Do you play only against the AI or do you PBEM/hotseat?
The WitE game really needs a 30 page 'how and why' manual for the basics. Personaly I don't care how many trucks I lost carrying supply throughout the Campaign or how many disabled men were returned to my units. The manual spends way to much time explaining the details that aren't needed to jump in and play reasonably well. I know it's suppose to be a detailed game but it really is tedious trying to read the damn manual.
Yeah, I think I just need to dive in and play the damn thing, and worry about the details later. I did download a map mod that improved the look of the map at least. I got that far.
The tutorial and the manual are criminal. The core gameplay simply isn't that complicated. As Bruce pointed out in his review, you can safely ignore huge amounts of the detail and still play effectively.
Is there a consensus yet German/Soviet balance in the full scenario, human vs human?
Wargamers may be interested/amused to learn that many historians view Barbarossa as "unwinnable," even absurdly so. One can't really talk of a "scholarly consensus," since counterfactual claims are seen as a discreditable parlour game anyway.
When I have time I plan to just play with it. I think I didn't help anything by actually trying to read the manual--I should have just played it like I do non wargames--dive in and see what happens, probably. I never have been a fan anyhow of the count every rifle school of design, so I really don't care much how many rifles have their bolts bent in each battle or whatnot.
Until you play someone who has read and understood the damn manual!
Once you pay the $80 then the hard part is over! At least they seem to be working on updates that take into account a lot of players suggestions. And they are updating it pretty quickly.
Maybe some of the arcane bits of detail are useful to playing competitively, like assigning support units, but the manual steadfastly refuses to give you any idea of the "big picture" of playing the game. If you didn't learn operational strategy elsewhere, you're not gonna learn it here.
Yep. That was the best review of the game I have read.
You really don't need to know most of the stuff to play it, at least as the germans. I think the Soviets require a little more understanding of the details but who WANTS to play them in 1941. You gotta lose the bet to take that beating!
Thanks for the kind words. You probably are talking about this:
http://www.quartertothree.com/inhouse/columns/195/
You guys have a great discussion going. I'd love to participate except that I'm on call like 6 times in 12 days, and all I can do is those game diaries. I wrote the WITE review on my vacation, of all things, while reading for the neurosurgery boards. I'd love to discuss the Panther Games approach, which I agree is brilliant, and explain why I don't enjoy it. I had an article/analysis written a while back exactly about this, but can't seem to find it. Maybe I will have to re-write it. I also agree that Napoleon at Marengo is genius.
I'll try to address some point sometime. Argh! Work.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, the next gaming project I'd like to do is to re-write the WITE manual completely, kind of like the initial walkthrough I did for Dominions 2, so that people could actually read the manual straight through and learn something.
@TheWombat: map mods??
Yeah, some dude did a really pretty map redo--DMP mod or something. I have the file but lemme see...http://www.designmodproject.de/forum...f=1831&t=21669. Some German mod group. Looks nice. There's a whole boatload of mods now for everything from units to UI, which I haven't explored.
That's the one! Great article, changed the way I think about game design.
There is a basic first turn walk through posted here along with tips. It's not complete but it's a start. Since I don't have enough posts to give a link you'll need to add the www in front.
witewiki.com
While I think that sounds awesome, I remain completely baffled why manuals don't come like this out of the box so that the community doesn't have to fill that gap. And I know this next comment will probably get me laughed at, but as I read the ASL rulebook for the first time, I keep getting tripped up by how crappy I find it (and I haven't even gotten that far into Chapter A). I don't get why a certain section doesn't get put after another section, or why the heading will read one specific thing, but then tangents about other stuff get lumped into the middle of paragraphs. It's bad enough that hardcore games can be so complex, but to have to fight with the tools to understanding these games seems like an avoidable annoyance.
Yeah, I also like that article quite a bit. I think a number of observations that Bruce made there apply to more than just wargaming, too. Video games in general have been on a steady march towards unsimplification in nearly every aspect other than UI, becoming increasingly less like game-y and more simulation-y. I think the move away from turn-based gameplay (in every genre), with all its necessary abstractions, is one of the more unfortunate products of this trend.
I'd also like to elaborate on this bit from his article:
I'm going to go a step farther than Bruce and say that I think that an abstract presentation can sometimes be more engaging than a visceral 3D simulation, even in a thematic sense. There's a term in the visual arts called "closure," which is a fancy way of saying that it's sometimes better to leave things to the viewer's imagination rather than explicitly rendering every little detail for them. Take, for example, this landscape painting by George Inness, who is one of my personal favorite masters of closure. It's a strikingly convincing representation of place and atmosphere, made all the more striking by how the bulk of the visual detail in the scene is suggested rather than explicitly rendered. Where Inness has placed vague smears of green paint, your brain fills in the missing bits and tells you "Those are trees. That's grass."
Writers use similar tricks. I interviewed John Saul for an article once, and he made an observation that has always stuck with me: "I often get credit in my novels for giving very detailed descriptions. I give practically no detail whatsoever. If I’m going to describe a Victorian house, I just say it’s 'a Victorian house,' and the reader instantly sees his perfect vision of a Victorian house. If I tell him something about this house that doesn’t match the image in his mind, then my description has fallen down. "
That's closure.
I think that closure is a concept that applies to games as well, although arguably less so with each passing video card generation. Game developers, given the option and the budget, almost always choose literal and detailed over abstract and iconic. They don't simply tell you that you see a Victorian house, they render every shingle in pixel-perfect detail, with photorealistic shaders and lighting. They avoid closure like the plague. Which is why these days, you are much more likely to see games that look like this:
...than you are to see games that look like this:
I'm not trying to diss high-fidelity presentation, which has its place. I guess my point is that sometimes I find that an abstract, high-closure presentation like War in the East's NATO symbols-on-paper map pulls me into the game in a way that flashy, 3D graphics can't. It leaves a lot to the imagination, and through that simple trick, makes me an active participant in the game fiction, rather than a mere viewer.
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