John Pancoast
Posts: 76
Joined: 7/26/2003 Status: offline
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Szilard [B]This is off on a ery slopy tangent, but ... what about the old SSG Battlefront/Panzer Battles system? I get the impression most people didn't like it too well, mainly because you didn't have control over individual units. You would give orders to a corps (say), and the computer corps commander would control the divisions. It was too simplistic, and the computer commanders were often frustratingly dumb. But despite that, it remains my favorite computer wargame system. I liked it partly because it's the only board or PC system I know of which gives me a POV which I can understand. I'm an Army commander; I give orders to my Corps commanders; they execute them, badly or well, but it's not my job to be moving divisions around. And also because it's an approach which makes the computer do most of the boring work, instead of me. I think it was a move in the right direction in the transition from cardboard to PC. It was a qualitative change, doing something you couldn't really do with a board game, and something which added (IMO) realism while cutting out labor. I think I'm pretty isolated in that belief, though. It seems that most prefer a completely different direction: finally the PC allows you to do CNA or some other monstrous board game without making you take over the living room for a year. So you get Grigsby/Koger/Tiller designs which attempt to model things down to the last rifle (and are of course seriously incomplete and rather inconsistent in this modelling), allow/require you to directly control each sub-unit, work like a tax assessor on details over & over again ... To my mind this is crazy. CNA etc were not bad designs because they lacked the technology to make them workable; they were just bad designs. (Obviously, a totally subjective judgement, I realize.) I think the DB system is much better, largely because it doesn't aim for an inappropriate, unnecessary and self-defeating level of detail in the modelling. But I'd like it much better if they could graft onto it an updated & improved version of Panzer Battles' control mechanism. Here's my ideal system: You, the player, have a POV which puts you somewhere in a standard military hierarchy. It can be at the top, or in the middle somewhere. You can jump around and wear more than one "hat" if you want to. You can issue/be issued various operational orders. Where the computer is in charge of a formation, he/she is represented by an AI agent which has routines to execute these orders. The system includes tools for player-designers to create their own routines for executing standardized operational orders, and to transfer these between game settings - in effect, to create their own "persistent" digital commanders. You can play them off against others; you can do things like create a digital Rommel or Marlborough, or at least your conception of them. (There was a message on Chris Merchant's board from Keating talking about planned AI upgrades for the Normandy game which seem to be vaguely in this direction.) The response will be that this is all pie-in-the-sky, too difficult to do the AI etc (even if people wanted it, which maybe they don't.) But I think you could go much further along the way to something like this than happens at the moment. Most wargame AI seems not to have progresed very much since Jim Dunnigan etc sketched out basics 20-30 years ago - objective based, little or no global knowledge base, little or no memory between "turns" ... Very primitive. SSG obviously does far better than most, and I'll be really interested to see what they come up with for the Normandy game. [/B][/QUOTE] Good stuff, couldn't agree more. That's the problem I have with the PzC series, and the like. I.e., take Smolensk campaign. In the campaign, you're not Guderian, nor Hoth, if on the German side. You're von Kluge, since both Panzergroups of Army Group Center are represented. Yet, you're controlling battalions, or smalleer. I don't think he worried about that scale in reality :)
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