Michael the Pole
Posts: 680
Joined: 10/30/2004
From: Houston, Texas
Status: offline
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It appears that the developers are not going to honor their commitment to fix the most egregious flaws in the Naval Game, citing lack of community interest. I am heartbroken by this decision, not only because just one or two minor changes could massively improve an entire segment of the game, but as we all saw when we introduced the air/naval interaction, fixing ahistorical simulations improves ALL aspects of the game. It's kind of like lying -- when you find yourself caught in a lie, you have to defend it with other lies, which then must be supported by yet more lies, until you just want to kill yourself rather than lose another nights sleep worrying about it. In game terms, when an incorrect design decision is made (usually to save time or to take a shortcut) the result is an ever expanding ring of errors, ahistoricality, and loss of strategic choices. These results all have to be dealt with, and rather than correct the initial error, the designer tries to paper over the results using special rules, events or house rules. These actions cause results and it just goes on and on. A perfectly designed wargame shouldnt need such fixes, the rules should allow what was historically possible, and then the strategic choices of the players or the AI will produce results that everyone recognizes as accurate. But we all recognize that this isn't a perfect world.
The naval game is an excellent example of this truism. Before the introduction of air/sea interaction with ToW, many of the most important strategic decisions of WWII were, quite simply, a joke. But that simple fix made a huge change in how the entire game plays. There are now posts from players up to their necks in the depths of the Russian Steppes worried about how their navies are doing. Imagine the depth of play we could achieve if just one or two minor corrections are made to the naval game!
In order of importance, we MUST fix the following areas.
Aircraft are quite simply not doing enough damage to naval shipping. Look at the evacuation at Dunkirk -- the British committed 603 vessels to the campaign and the luftwaffe sank 243 of them. Of 39 destroyers engaged, 10 were destroyed and 15 seriously damaged, This was in the course of one game turn (one week.) Can any one imagine being able to replicate this rate of loss as the game is currently configured? During the naval actions around Crete during May of 1941 a single Luftflotte sank 9 major British warships and severely damaged another 18 over a period lasting essentially one game turn. Can any one imagine being able to replicate this rate of loss as the game is currently configured? I could mention many other examples -- the Battle off Norway in 1940, the Arctic convoys, etc, etc.
Aircraft should be able to do sufficient damage, in a single attack, to sink or seriously damage 1 or more warships in a single turn (week.)
As a corolary of this, we should allow aircraft to attack pp transfers such as lend-lease. The strategic importance of Norway increased exponentially when we allowed planes to attack ships. Imagine how important Norway becomes to Germany if the only way to reduce the shipment of PP to the Soviet Union is to base aircraft (and warships) in Norway. It would be infinitely easy to require that lend-lease shipments (by sea) to any country be sent by convoy, and that all convoys be subject to air attack when passing through a sea zone where the enemy launches a maritime attack with an air unit.
All of the other ideas suggested for the naval patch -- improving and quantifying ports, fixing the currently silly tech level rules for ships so that they agree with the rest of the game, differentiating between engineering damage and weapons systems damage, adding the newly suggested coastal sea zones to limit aircraft range and solve the problem of ships moving through interdicted areas without suffering attacks, escorts and convoys, and repair times for damaged vessels -- all of these wouldbe less difficult to program and implement then just the changes made in the air game instituted in 1.60. They are much more necessary
Deciding not to fix the naval part of this wonderfull game "because we're going tomake another game that will have a better naval simulation," is a betrayl of what this game is supposed to be. Guys, just a little more effort on this one flawed system is going to pay AMAZING dividends! ToW can be a game for the Ages if we just fix these problems, because they will add amazing strategic depth, just as the fixes in ToW and the 1.60 patch did.
And you dont have to do it alone -- this community will fall all overitself to help.
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Another despairing plea for a fix for the naval game - 
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