What Military Strategy games have you played?

[freebird]

Originally Posted by parsifal

Lets see

1) War In the Pacific (1977 SPI), seven maps about 3000 counters, about 200 hours playing time. Weekly game turns, has a semi tactical air combat system. biased in favour of the japanese. A newer version is now in print, apparaently they have minimaps of every island in the Pacific, and you can fight the island battles tactically. Some people have way too much free time

2) War In Europe (SPI 1974) same as above but much simplified. It rarely plays as history

I'm surprisesd you haven't mentioned any GDW stuff? You must have played "Europa" or was it not available down under? It was perhaps the most realistic WWII game as I've heard from experts {and IMO}

They were real monsters though, the Russian front "Fire in the East" {June 41' - Mar 42'} and the follow on "Scorched Earth" {Spring 42' - end of war} were each about 2,500+ counters, division/regimental level on a 16 mile hex grid. The counters went down to batallion level for specialized units {flammpanzers, RR engineers, RR artillery, flak, police units, partisans, NKVD etc} The maps were 36" x 48" and if you set up all of Europe from Berlin - Rome - Athens - Baku - Moscow -Narvik it would fill a 4' x 8' table. {without North Africa} The air units were basically squadron level, 25 - 30 aircraft per counter. It had 2 week turns, infantry moved once, mech/mot had a second move phase. One combat phase per player/turn, but you could "overrun" weak enemy while moving. {Bane of the Soviets}

Originally Posted by parsifal

To be honest, I dont play games all that much anymore. I much prefer the design aspect. Current project of the design group i work with is working on is a playable monster (ie 150-200 hours), covering the entire war. Scale is about corps level, but smaller formations are available (you cannot do a pacific game in a serious manner at Corps level, whereas for Europe you can get away with army sized formations).

Quite true. I am a bit crazy for design myself, The guys bug me that I never found a game I didn't want to revise & re-design. I'm kinda working on a "deluxe" Axis & Allies game, trying to fix some of the obviously silly rules, while still leaving it playable in a single sitting. {Stuff like the Germans landing 1 infantry in undefended Washington D.C. to grab all of the U.S. production capacity, or Australia represented by only 1 space for the Japanese to grab}

Have attached a few examples of the counters for the new game. We think the title will probably "Might & Power"

Looks interesting

[parsifal]

Hi freebird

I have a lot of the Europa series (a mix of the 1st and second editions series). Its an older game system, very much in the 70s and 80s mould, but I do like it. I have most, except "2nd front" was just too slow to get it, and now its too expensive (in Australia, you will pay around $500 US for a copy) I aint pauing that much for any game. the most I have ever shelved out for something was $100 and that was too much.

I have played Fire In the east, and the follow on (but 1st edition, it was called Unedschneiden, sorry about the spelling). The system is somewhat unstable, but the best we could ever do with it was to go to weekly GTs in Summer. There are just too many biases against the germans otherwise. If you have a weaker Soviet Player, try going to weekly for the winter turns as well.

The problem with the Europa series is that the company and the franchise for Europa were sold, with the new company making the previous systems obsolete. Didnt seem to care about customer loyalty and such.

My friend has a series of mods for WIF I can ask him for them if you like when he gets back from holidays. i should make something a bit clearer than I did in my bio. The design group that I hang around with were the designers and playtesters of WIF. I was not a memeber at that time, but offered bits of advice over the years. The people I am friends with are no longer part of ADG (owners of WIF), because there was a disagreement some years ago. WIF in its current form has some major play balance issues, and with all the add ons that it now has, has about 4500 counters. thats a lot of cardboard, for a game system of that genre

A good game I forgot to mention is A House divided. you can play it in a single sitting, and its quite a good little simulation of the ACW

Right now we are locked in with playtesting of the new M&P simulation I was telling you about. Currently we have ETO (European Theatre Of Operations) and a PTO playtest running concurrently. It is July 1941 in Europe, and April 1942 in the Pacific. normally i dont get involved with the tests, but we were short handed, so now I am basically emperor hirohito in charge of the Japs. Allies bugged out of SE Asia, thought I wouldnt follow them, but I anticipated that they would, so I followed them to their hiding places. Have captured Fiji, American Samoa, Port Moresby and Midway. US is building up strongly in Noumea. We have had a major carrier battle, Enterprise is heavily damaged, I have a BB a cruiser and 2 DDs in a bad way (out for about 9 months...he mistook my surface fleet for carriers). We called it the battle Of Fiji, because it happened in that area. Allies are busily building up in Australia, Pearl and India. The test parameters are historical production priorities, but freestyle strategy. hard to know how it is going, its too early to say

[HoHun]

Hi Parsifal,

>nobody in their right mind as the axis will fight the BoB, no sane japanese Player ever gets Midwayed, no Soviet player hangs around at the front after barbarossa

Interesting considerations ... not a modern conflict, but the Osprey book on the Battle of Hastings mentions that it can be difficult to re-play the battle with miniature rules as the Saxon player won't break ranks as he's too well aware of what happened historically. The book suggests to use roughly equivalent pieces from a different era to get around this mental predisposition

Have you ever seen Avalon Hill's "Up Front", by the way? Card game approach to Squad Leader, no map required, tries to do away with the illusion that all decisions in war are rational and follow logically from the situation at hand. I liked it quite well, though I didn't get to play it much.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[parsifal]

Hi HoHun

I have not played Up Front, but i have seen it. The card game option is explored in a number of new games...Memoir 44 is one, but there are others. its a neat way of dealing with this sort of problem.

Being the traditionalist that I am, i have not opted for that in the new game. But there seem to be quid pro quos. As indicated in my last post, in the Pacific, the allies retrated very quickly from SE Asia, mostly with their air and naval resources. So they have more fleet units, more pilots, and more planes than they should. But the quid Pro Quo is that now they are being forced to fight in areas actually more vital to them...Midway, Fiji etc, and I have lost only 100 a/c to combat losses, because there has not been only light skirmishing in my conquest of SE Asia. This is the number one challenge to good design in my opinion, how do you anticipate and allow for the perfect historical hindsight that most players will have, without destroying playability, and without upsetting historical plausability. There is no single correct answer, in my opinion

[freebird]

Originally Posted by parsifal

This is the number one challenge to good design in my opinion, how do you anticipate and allow for the perfect historical hindsight that most players will have, without destroying playability, and without upsetting historical plausability. There is no single correct answer, in my opinion

That is indeed a problem. Because the game {like Europa} is technically & historically balanced, it does not play that way for the reasons you have mentioned. I wonder if the solution would not be to have the player as the "theatre commander" {ie Macarthur or Wavell in the Pacific} but subject to certain political directives, for example the Allies must leave a certain number of units in Dutch E. Indies etc. This would also be close to historical, because many of the "political" directives did not make good military sense {like the British intervention in Greece}

[parsifal]

Its a nice idea, and we have tackled the problem more or less in a similar vain. Because i wanted the game to be primarily a military simulation, the chromey add-ons necessarily needed to be fairly simple. But we tackled this political imperative by giving each of the major powers political points. Nations gain or lose points by gaining or losing territory, and other things. If you lose too much territory too quickly, you can be forced to the negotiating table (and lose the game).

It is impossible to force the US or Britiain to the surrender table in this way, but concessions can be extracted from them, if the axis achieves certain things in a certain time. For example, success in Europe can bring about the entry of Yugoslavia, Spain, even Turkey, as axis clients. Access to certain resources held by neutral states can be blocked if the political situation is right. Obviously a lot of this crystal ball stuff is contentious, and we have spent a lot of time analysing and verifying the thrust of a given hypothetical political event.

This system has its uses, but its not complete, nor is it perfect. We are using it, but we are still getting some anomalous results, which we are trying to address, without being too prescriptive in the rules suite.

[ummonk]

Nobody has tried chess?

[trackend]

I used to play battle chess Umonk. I also used to play Dreadnought on my Commodore 64 it was a shame it never got transfered and improved as the machines advanced. It included fall of shot, fleet construction.damage control,apart from the general tactics maps.
The graphics were S*** but the game play was brilliant. and of course being a 64 it took about 30mins to load the game off of the cassette deck.

Now I stick to Diablo I guess my oldest character (THE PIMPLE)( a barbarian) must be about 8 years old by now.