I remember in a game about the Market Garden offensive, the bridging units were key. You could bridge a minor river in a turn (8 hours), but a major river took a day IIRC. And the bridging units were vulnerable and started out far from where they needed to be. But for that operation, capturing intact bridges over major rivers was key to victory. Same thing with the US offensive across the Rhine - capturing the Ludendorff Bridge intact was key to 3rd Army's move across the Rhine - the other armies were a week or ten days behind because they had to build bridges. And the Germans ultimately destroyed the Ludendorff Bridge but by that time the US engineers had deployed several pontoon bridges.
At the scale of this game, don't know if it is worth getting to this level of granularity but certainly commanders at the Army Group and Front levels were concerned about holding or destroying bridges. Having to build a bridge versus being able to cross an undestroyed one, and even being able to repair a damaged bridge versus starting anew made a big difference to the speed that motorized forces could move across major rivers.
Market Garden was a terrible operation from the start. They planned a whole corps moving via a single road.
The Remagen bridge was captured fortuitously. SHAEF expected 21st Army Group to cross first up north.
I'd say a bit of coding could create bridge hexsides over major rivers. When a hex with a bridge hexside changes ownership, have a fairly high chance of destroying the bridge. Then, the bridge can be repaired by engineer elements in combat units or assigned SU in the same way fortifications are built. A destroyed bridge is harder to cross than an undestroyed bridge. Maybe let engineer units build bridges where none were before. An unbridged major river hexside should be impassable to motorized units.
Well, I am against needless micro-management in a game that simulates a turn of 7 days. I would much prefer options to do more variable things, like have the Germans double up the RR repair units (at the cost of having other fronts suffer from no rail repair), so that the game introduces more variable play. Right now, every good Russian player can know EXACTLY how far the German rails can be repaired on any given line, and plan accordingly. With no gas, the German tanks are toothless.
Same for victory conditions. Right now, if all factories in say, Moscow are evacuated, the cost for gaining or losing the city is not the much other than the manpower. Something the Soviets never seem short of in most games.
Well, I am against needless micro-management in a game that simulates a turn of 7 days. I would much prefer options to do more variable things, like have the Germans double up the RR repair units (at the cost of having other fronts suffer from no rail repair), so that the game introduces more variable play. Right now, every good Russian player can know EXACTLY how far the German rails can be repaired on any given line, and plan accordingly. With no gas, the German tanks are toothless.
Same for victory conditions. Right now, if all factories in say, Moscow are evacuated, the cost for gaining or losing the city is not the much other than the manpower. Something the Soviets never seem short of in most games.
I agree that putting more big strategic variables into the game would make it more interesting, BUT the problem with that is that they would be difficult to balance, especially the ones that would be suppoused to affect late game, as very few games reach that far.
Losing Moscow is also a big hit to rail capacity. And manpower is not negligible. In our 2 by 3 game, where we have been pushed back to the Volga, we have serious manpower issues.
Historically the Soviets moved all of their rail assets out of Moscow in October 1941 so the fall of Moscow should have no effect on rail capacity. Another thing for them to fix in WitE 2.
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I doubt that the conquering of such an important traffic hub would have had no impact even when the movable assets were removed. What about things like coal & water supply, repair shops, etc., if other parts of the rail system now have to handle the rail assets it would surely be a burden and have a negative impact on the overall rail capacity.
BigDuke66. The book "The Soviet Economy and the Red Army 1930-1945" by Walter Scott Dunn has some detailed information how the rail hubs worked and how they were effected by the Axis advance. With regards to coal Moscow's prewar supply came from the Moscow Coal Basin to the west, which supplied around 63% of coal and was occupied by the Germans in 1941. David Stahel's "Operation Typhoon" indicates that the rail maintenance factories were sent east in October.
Is there anywhere a compact list of the changes that come with WitE2?
at the moment, the best advice I'd give you is to find all Red Lancer's posts in this (admittedly) long thread, may give you some idea where WiTE2 is diverging from WiTW. The differences WiTE1-WiTW are relatively well known (if you have WiTW) so take that as your start point: separate air phase; fixed air bases; non-linear supply, importance of depots and transport capacity etc.
but as is repeated a few times by Joel, the game is still in alpha. That means both that not all the final set of features are coded in yet and, of course, somethings are getting revisited as the game develops.
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quote:
ORIGINAL: GrizzlyKt
so 3 years in the making and still no release date this will be nearly as long as the war took in total why promote something that doesnt exist yet
WitE started develeopment in 2000, was stopped and started several times (got distracted by War in the Pacific and a few other games during that time) and only got back to full time development in 2008. It released in December 2010. WitW started at that time and was released in December 2014. WitE2 started at that time, but we're also working on a remake of Gary's old Steel Panthers series. We're a small dev group and these games take a long time to develop. The testing time alone is enormous (testing for both bugs and game balance). We are still in alpha testing as there are a few major pieces of the game that still need to be completed before we can start beta testing. All we can say is that we are working on WitE2 and until it's in true beta testing we're still quite a ways out from release.
< Message edited by Joel Billings -- 7/16/2018 11:48:12 PM >
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would the devs be likely to release a public beta for testing at some in the future? I think the more complex war games would benefit from this approach but then the game might take longer to be released
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Haven't posted in a while but thought this might interest you all (and I don't remember mentioning it before).
WitE2 has a new pseudo-unit - the City Fort. The City Fort is a container that can hold large numbers of units in certain hex types to make them more defensible without the limitation of the three counter stacking limit.
Screenshot is from the new version of Vistula to Berlin and shows Budapest.
On a collateral matter, just want to say that I vastly prefer the previous light gray roads shown in prior screenshots. These bold brown roads are pretty garish. Hopefully just a mod.
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Joined: 11/16/2005 From: UK Status: offline
I'll be quite straight here to manage expectations. The map does go all the way to the Murmansk area but the WitE2 GC41 uses a Theatre Box to manage all of the Finland / USSR Border.
This is a sensible design decision because teaching the AI how to handle so great a distance with so few units on the map is almost a game in itself. The new event system helps make this more palatable to perfectionists.
That choice doesn't stop the creation of small scenarios or a Human only scenario that puts the whole map in play but as developers we have to be realistic on what we can be achieved without adding significant time to the development programme.
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