SeaQueen
Posts: 1451
Joined: 4/14/2007
From: Washington D.C.
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DMAN
SeaQueen alluded to a theatre-wide or hemispherical conflict. That would be nice. 
Most American wars are theatre-wide or hemispherical. We're a global power. One of the challenges for the US is that we have to schlep all our stuff all over the world, most other nations are fighting in their neighborhood. In parts of the world where there's lots of bases that's not so much of an issue because you can preposition stuff. In other parts of the world the options are much more constrained either due to politics or geography.
In Command, though, you'd need to do a lot of very sophisticated LUA coding to move beyond the 12 to 24 hour timeframe, because you run into a problem with the AI and aircraft in particular (on the naval end things unfold more slowly, so it's less of an issue). After they've flown their missions, what do you do next? Do you reapportion them and rearm to strike new things and patrol different areas? Which areas do you patrol? How do you pick which weapons to strike which targets with? What supporting assets do they need? There's a lot of questions that need to be answered. Multiplayer would also potentially make it easier to do things beyond the 12-24 hour timeframe.
I think it's all feasible, but it'd be a fairly big investment of effort. Even then, though, I don't see doing entire conflicts in Command. I just see maybe longer duration missions over a wider geographic scope. Once you get beyond a certain level of warfare (and it's a continuous scale, so there's not a hard-and-fast cutoff) it isn't really about striking aimpoints at all (the subject of Command). It's about things like managing alliances, strategic messaging, logistics, and all the underlying stuff.
If you wanted to make a model of the entire Balkans Wars in Command, for example. To really do the WHOLE conflict, you'd be faced with a political/policy goal. In that case, "Stop the genocide in the Balkans." NATO does not have a "genocide stopping bomb." So how to stop it by military means isn't obvious. All that NATO can do is attack some of the obvious tools of genocide, in that case, they went after artillery sites as well as the military leadership. They'd also strike bridges with the idea that they could keep the parties separated and block lines of advance. Politically, they were being asked by the press about how many tanks they were killing even though tanks weren't really contributing to the problem, but they had to do it because they needed the electorate to feel like they were making progress. The thing is Command doesn't handle any of those decisions. Command is more down in the weeds. It's at the level of "Destroy the FRY XXXth MRB HQ located at Sarajevo." Then you weaponeer your aimpoints, develop your plans for all the supporting aircraft, ships and submarines" then go fly it over a day or so. Then you make a hole in the air defenses, fly your bomb trucks and cruise missiles in, do as much damage as you can and go home. It's a mistake to try to do the entire conflict in Command, because Command is about striking targets and that's only a portion (sometimes not even the most important portion) of warfare. Unless you script in what the political impact is (which is really just an expression of the scenario author's opinion, not a game because reasonable people might disagree) the game is completely agnostic what it is.
< Message edited by SeaQueen -- 3/27/2019 1:35:48 PM >
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