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cabron66 -> RE: Thoughts on TOAWIII vs HPS PzC/MC (7/12/2006 9:52:21 PM)
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Hello
1. Panzer Campaigns is, and I think I am saying nothing new here, a cash cow for HPS. Each new battle is, while somewhat well-researched up to a certain point, based on an engine which has received only minor adjustments over the last eleven years. I have seen all of their battles and all of their products and it has become clear to me that they are blatantly using PC to support the development of new engines and, above all, efforts at taking a bite out of the new and lucrative military interest in simulations.
2. PC are well-researched in terms of OoBs, work done by a very good group of people that I like very much, but unfortunately the exacting detail brought about by Micheal Avanzini and others is not carried on by the scenario designers. In other words, yes all of the units are there, but no they are not accurate in any way in terms of their actual TO&Es.
Speed seems to be the goal. HPS places little or no emphasis on using any of the sources readily available to give units any kind of historical accuracy in terms of in what that condition that unit found itself when it entered battle. In one single battle you will find endless units with identical strengths that are arbitrarily applied based on a criteria I can often not determine.
For example when asked why every single infantry division was at 90% (I don't remember if it was Kursk or Kharkov or both) Glenn Saunders replied that he estimated German activity leading up to the battle would have resulted in a 10% loss rate. Instead of applying that loss rate unevenly or taking the time to research a bit more and find out which divisions were fresh and which ones weren't the design team simply reduced every division by 10%. The term "cookie cutter" is not enough to cover this.
This trend has continued right up to Stalingrad. In fact, I was shocked to see units going into battle at full strength!
As a side note, in neither battle, Kursk or Kharkov, was the German Army at anywhere near 90%.
3. Worse, even if the effort was made to accurately reflect a unit's TO&E, the engine is not nearly flexible enough. Units degrade as their strength in men or vehicles (one or the other, but not both as PC does not allow for mixed infantry and vehicle units) is lost. Actual equipment is not taken into account at all. In other words, an infantry company has a strength of 100 men (HPS only includes combat elements in this figure) and an attack value of 7. As men are lost the attack value is decreased. That is the extent of the depth of the system. The engine has no way of taking into account the actual equipment possessed by a unit. An infantry battalion with any number of weapon systems available to it is represented only by the number of combat soldiers in it. Firepower is averaged out over all of those men so that 1 man lost is always a certain percentage loss of firepower.
4. If one were to attempt to break up a battalion into its parts in order to give it some semblance of historical flexibility one would end up with thousands upon thousands of units. This would render an already tedious battle virtually unplayable. The solution that HPS appears to have reached is to abstract everything to the point where a unit moves, fires and does little else.
5. The game is meant to be played PBEM. HPS has more or less stated as much. Units have no intelligence at all, artificial or otherwise, meaning the player does everything. The only use of AI that attempts to take the load off the player is a relatively new feature that was supposed to move divisions from one place to another in road formation. This feature, as far as I know, has never worked properly, and little or no effort has been made to fix it.
6. Air? forget about it. PC makes no attempt to model airpower as it was historically used during WWII.
7. Artillery? Laughable. In its 11 or 12 years of existence PC has never done anything to move artillery beyond select a unit, choose a target and bombard it. IMO, if you are of the opinion that this is sufficient than you are unaware of what artillery does on a battlefield.
8. Graphics? Silly.
9. Sound? Annoying, bland and poorly implemented. Sound files load EACH AND EVERY time you fire or do anything. Buy the game and you will see what I mean. In order to escape the horrible drudgery of watching the "AI" plough through tens of thousands of random shots with the same sound files, you will attempt to use the faster speed option. At which point you will see hundreds of shots blow by in a space of seconds. Needless to say neither of these settings is functional. Understandable really. HPS has only had 11 years to do something about it.
10. Hex-based. Hex-based is such a bad idea that I don't know where to begin. It was the best of a few bad options when it was adopted and any designer will tell you so. Why people actually argue for its continued existence when computers can now do so so so so much more is beyond me. Space invaders was fun, but I am not about to go out and buy a game the size of a walk-in closet and argue that it is somehow superior to a modern pocket-sized gaming platform. Hex-based should be deader than Jimmy Hoffa. It is one of the greatest miracles of the modern age that it did not die the death that it so deserves.
10. Why do people continue to play it? I don't really know, but I suspect that it is because it is the only option for those of us who love the detail and complexity of WWII operational warfare. My only hope is that someone, perhaps Matrix, picks up on how easy it would be to scoop this market away from HPS.
11. Irony. I still try to force myself to like PC because of what it could be and every time I take it off my hard drive in utter frustration.
Cheers
Paul
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