Curtis Lemay
Posts: 12969
Joined: 9/17/2004
From: Houston, TX
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quote:
ORIGINAL: larryfulkerson
Yeah, what Telumar said. There's rules about the morale and fatigue of each individual unit ( TOAW has readiness and supply ) and there's attrition just from being adjacent to an enemy unit ( simulating low-scale snipping back and forth I guess ) and there the aerial re-supply of units which I think is the cat's meow. So those Panzers that are way way out in front of the supply pipeline can still be re-supplied ( somewhat ) and the Soviets can have night flights of transports to supply their partisans ( and drop NKVD supervisors, small arms, explosives, etc. to the partisans )........I mean there's a whole new level of detail in WITE. But the turns aren't so time consuming that play is inhibited. Most of the things a human being can be involved with ( aircraft upgrades, committment of reserve aircraft, rail-road engineers being expedited to specific repair sites, etc. ) are also automated so effectively all the human is there for is to move the units around and squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the units. The manual for this WITE game is almost 400 pages long packed with pictures and verbage to explain just about everything that can happen in the game so I've read it about four times now and I'm STILL "finding" new things. I'm told that WITE is WITP-AE lite. Which means that there's player involvement but not all that much ( WITP-AE is viewed more as a click-fest or "chore" than a game per se. I've seen some of my turns as the Soviet player take about 30 minutes or less. Zort and I can do perhaps four turns per day to each other. But then again we're both retired. There's a controversy on-going about whether or not the winter of '41-'42 is too severe on the Germans and that that reason alone may be the cause of more abandoned games in early '42. But there's a patch ( version 1.04, scheduled for sometime in April ) coming out to specifically address that. So the AAR's dealing with the winter are going to be under development staff survailence to see how the new patch effects things. Or is that affects things? And like Telumar was hinting there's an OOB that is flexible.......you can detach one or more units from one ARMY and attach it( them ) to a different Army on the fly. We're told that disbanding the Soviet Rifle Corps HQ unit is a good thing as it removes an effectively unused link in the chain from the Front HQ unit to the actual rifle division on the front line. Stavka HQ -> Front HQ ( or Military District ) -> Corps HQ -> Army HQ -> Rifle Division(s) is the chain I'm referring to here. And each of those steps in the chain can have supporting units ( engineers, artillery, mortars, etc. ) that they can commit to any of the battles of any of the divisions under their command ( either offensive battles or defensive battles ). And there's a "die-roll" to determine if the committment is successful or not. The thinking is that it's easier to have the supporting units in the Army HQ unit rather in each of the individual divisions as long as there is a "good" leader in charge of the Army HQ. Oh, and leaders have attributes as well, which can vary somewhat around a "national average" for that nation. Serbian leaders suck naturally and German leaders are world class and Soviet leaders vary depending on who you're talking about. And each leader can be "dismissed" and replaced with a better leader by you ( or by the AI that drives the game depending on the win-loss differences). The turns are weekly so they have abstracted out the blowing / repairing of bridges which is one thing I miss from TOAW and I'm not used to units not having to dig in when you stop moving them but go ahead and think of some detail from real life that deals with warfare and it's probably already been dealt with in some form or fashion. You'd have to peruse the manual to see what I mean. The learning curve is steep ( like in TOAW ) but that's only because of all the details you can have an effect on. Gameplay is rather simple though. Did I happen to mention that I really like the aerial re-supply of units? I'm posting a picture that shows the graphic representation of a re-supply mission. The black line is the airplane(s) coming from their home base to the "staging base" where they take on the cargo ( either "supplies" food for the horses, ammo, etc. or like in this case, fuel) and the red line is the actual flight path from the staging base to the individual unit receiving the supplies.
Thanks, Larry. But, I'm not sure if I'm all that impressed - yet. I think everything you've mentioned above was also present in War In Russia (Grigsby's earlier EF sim). While WiR was good for it's day, that was long ago. I was hoping WitE would take a big step beyond that. Perhaps it does, but I just can't tell from what's been posted.
Volume Supply. A good thing, but only as good as the model for distributing it is. In WiR, it was very abstracted. As a result, using a few C&C tricks, you could keep the Axis forces fully supplied all the way to the Urals. Furthermore, the entire captured rail net was repaired shockingly fast. Just how is the "volume" transported? Physically, or abstractly?
I'm also concerned about the map shot you showed. No roads? No towns? Are there distinctions between large and small rivers? Between light woods and forest? Between marsh and flooded marsh?, etc. Where are the rail heads? WiR had a very simplistic map.
What about equipment? WiR only had generic squads and artillery. There were tank-types, but that was it. How does WitE compare with TOAW's equipment list?
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want a free copy of WITE? - 
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), rather expensive. 
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