Larry Smith
Posts: 203
Joined: 4/14/2001 From: Williams Lake, BC, Canada Status: offline
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In my defense, I've been doing repairs on what amounts to our local "projects", only they aren't publicly owned. A lot of patching, and that dust is like a poor man's cocaine. Personally, I think the mustiness from the flooding in one place, now a de facto maintenance room, is more potent. As for my tactics, too many times I have managed to cut off my own spearheads [during solitaire games] by forces I thought I had bottled, until I realized an error I had committed, and the only way to fairly correct it [in my mind, at least] was to send the offending unit back to it's last known start position, and disorganize it [I was keeping in mind that I might have an offended human opponent to placate at some point, and then I was making a lot of mistakes]. I wasted a lot of time back then - time I should have been in classes. I was bad, but I had the bug. But I learned to play more cautiously, since if I could wreck my own plans so thoroughly, a real opponent would do so even faster. On a completely different note, I tried out the "Making History" games I found on steam, and while the nation-building parts were fun and engrossing, there was just something about the combat that bothered me. They manage combat by territory, not by battle lines, so you can end up with two opposing armies marching right past one another, but where a frontal system would generate a meeting engagement, at the very least, as units block each other with ZOC's and whatnot, the armies in this game just pass each other by. I could just imagine the Austrian troops invading Serbia as they tip their hats to the Serbian troops marching in the other direction to invade Bosnia, perhaps even calling out tips to each other on where to find the best cafes and such. Therein and it wasn't much different for the WWII version, so it just took a nosedive in my opinion. Imagine arguing that one out! [Actually, please don't - I'm just joking here]. Made me run all the way back to the WiF vassal module, only to be reminded that the reason I stopped messing with that is it was short a bunch of charts for the DoD part. I am a fussy completist, and I like having options, but without some more official thought put into it [I know many have worked out their own fixes], that in my opinion [and it's just my opinion] Option 47 doesn't really do much more than reward a few lucky die rolls, gamey strategies to keep certain units out of action for a while, or to overly punish players for making bad moves [while out of supply] or trying to make a mad dash for it. You might find, Bo, that by using the computer game, we as players are avoiding a lot of the errors that would leave us with those dire straits. We know when a unit is out of supply before we move it, and are reminded when we do, if it goes "face down" [gets the orange dot]. Then we can undo the move, and try something else. All the frustrations we had while Steve was still sorting out the supply subroutines has certainly taught me to think twice before moving an HQ before moving anything else, and I'm a lot more careful about committing one to combat during turns where the weather could sour [just in case the HQ goes "orange dot" and can't be moved to shorten supply lines later on]. Lately I've been trying to do more just by manoeuvre - have the Japanese side prompt the Chinese side to pull back to preserve itself, rather than force the Japanese to pile up on it. The terrain now impedes the Chinese as much as the Japanese, since their units have less movement points, even if they might have more supply sources open to them. Anyway, I'm starting to jones for the must and dust [meaning i need to go take another pass at my patching].
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