composer99
Posts: 2923
Joined: 6/6/2005 From: Ottawa, Canada Status: offline
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I don't recall having said much on play balance in China except for a few comments in the map thread, but I think I shall mention my own CWiF and WiF:FE experiences playing in the China. Having had the benefit of living in the same town as (the apparently dreaded) Andrew Rader I've played a fair bit of WiF:FE in just the four years I've been playing it. I also went to WiFCon in Michigan last summer. I think, if one includes DoD games, that I've played almost 10 games of WiF (and another one on the way in a concentrated, week-long burst of playing this July here in Ottawa when Rader is back in town for a spell taking a break from being at MIT). Excluding the times in DoD when Japan did not attack China (twice, once when I was Japan), if I recall correctly, twice in WiF:FE Japan conquered China or had otherwise crippled it. Once (at WiFCon), China got so strong, and Japan lost so many units to bad attacks, that it was able to mount a counter-offensive in '43-'44 to throw Japan out and even go into Manchuria (which I know is unrealistic from a historical point of view, but there is a lot about WiF that can be argued to be unrealistic to some extent or another), and the rest of the time a sort of stalemate set in, with Japan making some gains in the early game and China making some (but not as much) gains in the late game. This actually corresponds roughly with the CWiF games I played (all solo): the Japanese got the combat results and the weather they needed to knock China out of the war (once via conquest, once just a crippling blow) twice, they got poor combat results and weather once which allowed the Chinese to start hammering at them, and the rest of the time the Japanese would make some modest gains (Si-An, Kwei-Yang, sometimes Kunming) but not have the good attack results or weather to really take it to China. I will grant that these recollections are neither a statistically significant number of samples, nor are they clear enough (except from the WiFCon game) that they could be considered conclusive. But I just thought I'd mention it. The larger map relative to the number of units may make it seem like a real war of manouevre can be waged, but since the units' movement rates do not change the new scale makes it take longer for them to get around, which means that it is not easy for either Japan or China to muster the power they need in any one location to launch major attacks.
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~ Composer99
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