|
romanovich -> RE: Admirals Edition Naval Thread II (11/18/2008 4:52:15 PM)
|
We'll all be banned soon for mis-using the Naval thread...
I want to clarify why I asked my question earlier: it comes down to the question "at what point do you start a historical simulation". So much effort has gone into making the master scenario in AE a historically accurate one (down to tiny fragments of some rifle companies and private contractors doing work on some remote commercial airbases for the U.S. ...). If you have that level of detail, you want to start at some major point in history and "take over" with an OOB as a historical given.
If that starting point is 12/7/41, Yamamoto's design of the Pearl attack is already historical fact. So the outcome of the Pearl attack should be modeled as such and the results included in the starting OOB. The challenge is what to do with the hand that everyone was dealt after successful execution of the Pearl attack. That would be a neat scenario. (This is all in my humble opinion, of course).
As it is w/o such a scenario (12/8, if you want to call it that way), all the planning for the Pearl attack is a given parameter, but the outcome somehow is not, and the game engine tends to skew the result towards unfavorable outcomes for the Japs (at least it did in WITP, but also appears to do in AE, based on that Yamato Hugger wrote). The historical results weren't a huge smash for the Japs, I think everyone agrees. They failed to harm the carriers, and failed to put away Pearl as a functioning base. In retrospect, even the feat of sinking 5 BBs (to the bottom of the harbor) turned out to be a rather inconsequential feat. But it did hamper the U.S. battle fleet, and that should be a GIVEN in a historical scenario that accepts the Pearl attack as having occured. In most outcomes I get when I play out that turn, the Japs sink a BB and maybe a second if they are really, really lucky and pay with a ton of planes for the privilege. That distorts the historical realities to a degree that it cancels out all the fun I stand to get from the fact that even fragments of some obscure rifle company are now modeled correctly in AE's "starting" OOB.
If the outcomes of an attack on Pearl are variable (as they now are in the master scenario), such a scenario should have its starting point months earlier when the Japs still have the liberty of deciding AGAINST a Pearl attack and pursue some alternate battle plan. Then, if you chose to go through with a Pearl attack as Jap, you get what you gambled for with the roll of the (computerized) dice...
And now back to Naval topics.
|
|
|
|
