herwin
Posts: 6059
Joined: 5/28/2004 From: Sunderland, UK Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel War in the Atlantic would be tough to model on the scale of WitP. The cool thing about WitP is that the mobility of ships and the vast size of the ocean allows players to create feints, breakthroughs, suprise attacks, and other fun stuff. But if you try land combat on a day-to-day basis in Europe, doesn't it get bogged down in trench warfare? That was largely my impression of OaoW. I think the most enjoyable representation of the war in Europe was Avalon Hill's Advanced Third Reich. Each turn covered three months, so rather than getting bogged down in trench warfare, there were armored breakthroughs and other mayhem. There was also fun diplomacy, research, and strategic warfare. I don't know how it would be possible, but the best game ever would combine WitP in the Pacific and A3R in the Atlantic. So how do you pair a game based on daily turns with one based on three-month turns? Not possible, I suppose. It's a matter of scale. My favourite land combat games are the OCS series, with 2-4-day turns and 5-mile hexes (or thereabout). That system gets the flavour of ground combat operations right. If you scale up to 60 mile hexes, you need 1-month turns, mobile corps, and infantry armies to get the same flavour. WiTP runs with daily turns, so to model ground combat operations accurately, you have to have in-hex combat and percentage hex control. Then, to account for small islands, you also have to have percentage of the hex that's land, but that's not hard to introduce once you accept the forgoing. Note that the same issue affects air operations. On a daily basis with 60-mile hexes, the right unit is the sortie, with air units generating variable numbers of sorties based on such factors as support, logistics, morale, airframe availability, aircrew availability, repair backlog, fatigue, air base infrastructure and damage, and leadership. Then the mesh works correctly with naval TFs, and you get the real flavour of a combined arms campaign.
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Harry Erwin "For a number to make sense in the game, someone has to calibrate it and program code. There are too many significant numbers that behave non-linearly to expect that. It's just a game. Enjoy it." herwin@btinternet.com
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