Odox
Posts: 34
Joined: 3/1/2006
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Greetings one and all:
Actually, I find myself in complete sympathy with what Thresh is saying and at the same time I'm in total agreement with the designers. How can this be?
After having played simulations/wargames for so many years, I've realized it all seems to come down to what you want and expect from games like this, and what you want and expect from this particular game.
In a nutshell, I feel that the game's designers haven't really done their jobs unless the game kicks my fanny thoroughly, continuously, and for a very long period of time. I want a game like this to thoroughly humiliate me, especially during the initial familiarity period (say, at least six months to a year of almost continuous play). I want to be so completely embarassed, so completely demoralized by being beaten by the designer's concepts and knowledge-base (being applied upon my empty melon by an absolutely merciless AI), that I despair of ever winning, of ever figuring it out, of ever getting rid of this horrible tightness in my chest that tells me I am dumb, incompetent, brain-dead, hopeless. I've come a long way from blaming my failures on the game itself, and I don't at all mean this as a slam on this who do. I'll explain more on this in a bit.
I've been playing wargames like these since before my voice broke. I had rejected "beer and pretzels" games on principle even before I HAD my first beer.
I've been at it long enough to have begun to see a pattern in the now decades-long struggle of "wargames versus Odox".
First off, I have to come to grips as fully as I can with exactly what it is I'm facing here. An adequate game is one which is well-designed of course; it's stable, the applications of the rules are consistent, and the concepts make sense. But I find games like these quickly become predictable, and not long after that, boring. Probably half the wargames ever made fall into this category; in all likelihood it's creators wanted to make something easily digestible and fair. Whatever innovations they might have brought to the game eventually come across not as brilliant, but merely cute. These annoy me and are quickly discarded.
Better wargames have depth, they are unpredictable, they are clever. But even these are eventually deconstructed and understood, and I have just as often shaken my head at my own blindness to the rather obvious nature of the 'cleverness' thus revealed, as felt any real respect and admiration for the designers of the thing.
I'll tell you what I look for in a wargame. I'll tell you what makes my palms sweat and my heart palpitate and my eyes bug out of their sockets: a game make by the most twisted, diabolical, inhuman genuises imaginable. No, I'm not kidding. I want somebody to put a game together that is so impossible, so conceptually lofty, and so technically vast that my hand trembles when I reach for the mouse and I become aware I'm holding my breath. I WANT to feel like I'm probably going to be getting into some very, very serious trouble very, very quickly.
Which is why I stop faulting the design or the designers. Am I such a weak player that I cannot learn to compensate for some oddity I find in the gameplay? Do I possess such a poor mind that I cannot discover some way to turn this anomaly against my opponent? Do I get up in disgust when some outcome seems unreasonable to me and disappoints me? NO - this is life, this is death even; this is WAR. Men crap their drawers and run away blindly without call. Trusted subordinates disappoint. Beloved leaders are suddenly dead. The enemy whom your scouts assured you are of low morale and small number suddenly crash into you unexpectedly with the ferocity of Huns in numbers as overwhelming as the Communist Chinese.
So!!! The creators of this wargame are starting to impress me. I begin to fathom that I am up against extremely gifted and knowledgeable historians here; I also see that there are those that are involved that possess an excellent grasp of the complexity and near-limitless interplay that many important factors can bring to the game. And I also have a sense of that inhuman intelligence too; and with it the unsettling knowledge that all my heart, all my meticulous planning and preparation, all my courage and trickery may not be enough to beat this thing. In all probability I won't even come close.
So I see the pattern unfolding once again; me suffering unspeakable and humiliating defeats for what seems an agonizingly long period of time. I suffer such defeats that in embarassment I'll never mention to a living soul.
Happily, even a hardhead like me begins to learn a thing or two from his mistakes. I have long ago accepted that it is my lot in life seemingly to have to learn everything the hard way.
But learn I do; over months and even years my wardesk becomes littered with charts and tables and post-it notes detailing the hard lessons I've suffered to learn or the crackpot theories I've tried. Yet a couple of things stick, a couple of things work, and an economic or political policy or two actually prevents my defeat from becoming a total rout. I am elated with a fool's joy!
And even more months and years pass, practicing, refining, experimenting...and I begin to see dimly at first whole new understandings of many of the processes and interactions which used to baffle me. More numbers are crunched, more calculations made, and things begin to make a little more sense; and I, a normal man in most respects, begin to grasp the scope of the technical historian's almost microcosmic, almost siliconic concepts. I can from here at least see how truly brilliant the game's designers had been, from what pinnacle these genuises had mapped it from, and how high up they had attempted the bar to be placed. I'm still getting my butt handed to me on a regular basis of course. I'm still a long way from mastery but I'm feeling a little more competent at last. As far as 'mastery' is concerned, I can only chuckle ruefully to myself. But I play on.
Years ago at a national tournament for such things, I remember one particularly cocky young man that bested even the greybeards and gurus at the game. The more victories he won the louder and cockier he became, and the more did he attract a larger and larger crowd, until finally he announced rather brashly that the winner of the tournament seemed self-evident to him. Frankly, he'd begun to grate on me. I admit I was a bit jealous too; he certainly had more skill that I did. But I just hated ungracious winners.
I mentioned it may in fact be that he'd won the contest for the weekend, but I didn't see where he'd played Biggs yet, and did he plan to? Biggs was the head judge for the tournament, and had been given that honor for the simple reason that no one had ever beaten him. I knew I was putting Biggs on the spot, but I REALLY hated that kid.
Biggs was a modest man, and he just shrugged his shoulders and began setting up the board.
I'll never forget what happened next. Our bragging self-declared champion had his clock cleaned in what I can only describe as a lesson in masterful and almost effortless finesse. Biggs had shown that boy an example of Full Spectrum Dominance in a way that seemed almost casual. It was obvious that Biggs was way, way down the road from the rest of us in the way he could play that game. It was enough to make the rest of us feel like complete beginners all over again.
Concerning FoF, my notes and conclusions are still pretty raw yet. It's only been five months since I've had the game, and I shudder to think of actually attempting a match with anybody, this year or even next. But I want to point out, as I mentioned earlier, that as perturbed as I get as I try and plumb the depths of this game, so am I also delighted with it. It's obvious this will be no easy nut to crack.
And it becomes like so many other things in life; we are inspired to become better although we are clumsy at first, pointed concentration over time brings at least some awareness of improvement, further determination can reward us with even more skill, perhaps even a measure of competence. It's good to remember that mastery too is not without it's unpleasant surprises. But for me it's all about the achievement of a breadth of comprehension, of an almost gifted, transcendent understanding of the game, where at any time I can serenely position myself across from my opponent and say, "My enemy, do your worst". I can only laugh when faced with my present bumbling ways and admit such a time is far, far in the future (which makes me deeply disgruntled and thoroughly delighted, as you can understand).
Respectfully,
Odox
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Some things still bugging me - 
RE: Some things still bugging me - 
, you can buy the troops whatever's available but I'm not sure why you expect that they would just happen to have a Springfield at home when they sign up. 
RE: Some things still bugging me - 
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