Charles2222
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Joined: 3/12/2001
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No Les, I think the general idea is you take something of a monster game (WIR for example) and you constantly have the option of going tactical with a battle. or in any case a closer battle than the strategic or operational. I once proposed this sort of idea with CL, where among other things you would have a seamless battle that could feasibly go on forever (the battle hexes could be active practically every turn and thereby you would have to decide whether you felt it worth the effort to fight it or let the computer do the operational/strategic calculations for that battle instead).
The key thing in any of these ideas isn't that you "have to" fight these lower level battles, but that you have the option. Most sensible people, for every turn of a WIR say, might want to fight one battle of the many at that lower level. I know there's a number of those opening Barbarossa battles that would ceretainly be interesting to fight. Also in the case of a WIR, there would be several weeks where I couldn't care less about doing any lower level battles. As far as any of these ideas goes it would even be a vast improvement if the computer selected a battle of the many battles every turn (no control of which one by the player) and then asked if the player wished to go lower level with it.
Suppose for example I attack 2 USSR inf divisions with 2 pnzr and 1 mot. For a SPWAW that would be too much equipment, but the computer could shrink all of that down into a much smaller force representing all of that, and then the results would stick. The other possible approach would be to play it literally, IOW, take the amount of equipment SPWAW or some other game could represent, maybe 200-300 units tops for each side, and deduct that from the true values of each side. Such that you would have 2 pzr and 1 mot divisions short 200-300 units in your charge. The computer would take your results and add them to the general Wir results of the rest of the forces you didn't command. So essentially it would allow you to see how much of a difference you could make at a lower level, whilst in large engagements having the greatest result from the rest of the forces still play out.
What would be even more bizarre, would be if you could fight a fairly large battle like that and pick and fight with each separate 200-300 units in separate battles. That would get a lot closer to micromanagement headaches, but it would be fascinating to control every single unit, no matter how long it took, if you were nutty enough to want to fight the entire thing, battle, after battle, after battle for just one typical battle which I described. Of course that will never happen, but being able to pick out one battle shrunk down in some way for each turn of the operational/strategic general game, would certainly be rewarding if it would also play out everything you didn't want to fight that way.
There have been and will continue to be games that work somewhat along these sort of themes. Star Wars Empire at War and also Space Empires III always give you options to fight every battle personally if you want. I never seen a game that had the possibility of a lot of battles that was lame enough to force you to fight all the battles at the lower levels, since most designers are usually smart enough to allow you to let the computer calculate it on just pure values or let your brain make the difference, so I think that's a pretty moot point.
If you still don't understand this reasoning, take the games SPWAW and WIR for example, assuming you have played both. Both can take a pretty long time to play, true, but if for every WIR turn you had a battle of SPWAW optional, then it wouldn't take any longer than playing WIR and SPWAW for the whole war, back-to-back, such that maybe you got bored with WIR and then for the first time started playing SPWAW. It could potentially be one of the longest games you ever played, but that would be entirely up to you. I have played a bit of SWEAW and I can tell you that as much as I pause it the tactical battles it can take well over an hour, such that I could see the game might take very long if I kept playing like that, but at least I have the option. Some things in any of these sort of games are worth fighting personally for, and others are not.
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RE: Hearts of iron - 
When I left in 1976 I ritualy burried it, in a tin box under the house I was living in at the time. 
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