Central Blue
Posts: 695
Joined: 8/20/2004 Status: offline
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lots to think about here... best solitaire games I've played were Age of Rifles, TOAW, Steel Panthers, and Talonsoft Campaign Series. In the long run, if you play the scenario often enough, you'll generally figure out how to beat what the computer sets out to do. You can even win at the Little Big Horn if you play like Reno and Benteen rather than like Custer. THis game, and PacWar before it, aren't really like the games I mentioned above. I can't think of another game that is so much about long term planning and supply. THis is true even if you play the AI, I think. To that extent, it mimics the war in the Pacific. And besides the peculiar considerations of operations in the Pacific Theater, I can't think of another game that tries to do equal justice to air, land, and sea operations. It is certainly easy to "game" the AI in the few canned scenarios we've been given. But it is also possible to think of exertions against the AI as tests of operational plans and assumptions that governed conventional thinking at the time. That's a game too. Seems to me that's why the people that wrote the game gave us the opportunity to create scenarios of our own. Any one of us can write our alternate history of Pearl Harbor, or Clark Field, to begin with. It seems a tad persnicketty to lash the designers for poor scenario design when they gave us so many tools to create our own more perfect scenarios. BTW, I do look forward to PBEM, because it is a different kind of game. I'll play the AI and the various user mods till the system stabilizes.
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USS St. Louis firing on Guam, July 1944. The Cardinals and Browns faced each other in the World Series that year
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