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Tombstone -> (12/3/2000 8:05:00 AM)
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Wow. Thick thread. I'm sure people have seen me post about this sort of thing before, but here goes.
It's a simple fact that the personal scale of SPWAW/SP1 is a significant factor in its popularity. The fact that it is also an excellent game makes it crazy good. That wont change, and for a game like sp3 there will never really be the kind of audience necessary to keep it afloat. However, I sympathize with Zhukov's desire for big. I'm just starting with the whole scenario design thing (it's addictive) and my bent is clearly toward the excessively large. I was a GIGANTIC sp3 fan, and I personally find it to be way more fun than East/West/Pacific Front. What really gets me going about larger engagements is the fact that your planning becomes more significant. I like a scale where a player can't respond to threats immediately. Once you reach a certain size of force and area of operations, a lot of what's really exciting about modern warfare comes into play. Real outmaneuvering can't happen unless there's enough space to do it. The classic 100x80 hex 50m board is a little shy of the necessary space to have really dynamic battles. Even the new larger maps are a little thing (not that anything can be done about it). Dont get me wrong, the new 100x240 is way cool, but given that space you really need to have a unit limit that can support the historical unit frontages along 12km. That could easily get to corps scale (clearly unreasonable), but in order to get anything reasonable as far as the numerical ratio of infantry squad to tank the unit limit would need to go up some (this is not a request). This is more significant now that the game has taken on infantry in a much better light. You can play strictly infantry battles and have a damn good game of infantry combat now. (Sheesh this game is pleasant.) The tension between slow and fast troops (especially in WW2 era) is something critical to a game that models modern war. Certainly, that tension is mostly operational, but the effects dip into the tactical and can/does play a huge role in SPWAW already. In my scenario "North of Psel" that deals with Kursk, I made every effort to challenge the player to answer the following questions: Dispersion vs concentration, speed vs caution, annihilation of units vs bypassing them, how much flank security do I need, how much force do I need to take a given objective, which objectives should I commit to capturing. After toiling for ages, I felt that the only way for me to achieve any of that was to have enough space relative to the speed and attack range of units so as to maximize the effect of "what I do now will affect things later." That then forced me to adequately fill the space. If there was more space to take and more units to fill it with I feel that my objectives would be better fufilled. Blah blah, thats my take on size. Scale is simply another tool to achieve it. It's nice cause it reduces the number of units to something more manageable.
But then theres the other problem with all this stuff that is... I argue for what war is to me, and what about it I find challenging and exciting. For me, It's not about what it's like to pit a company against another company, or see a Tiger tank stand triumphant among a dozen wrecks. I want to know why one company had to fight of ten and won(or lost), or what made this commander think that a certain sector was safe from serious attack, or why this battalion was able to take some position with a minimum of loss while another couldn't get past square one. I want to go through the motions of having a situation develop, and have to react and adjust to it. My most satisfying wargame experiences are in sp3 against excellent PBEM opponents... Bigger maps and unit counts and it becomes a bigger game, but I dont mean that in the obvious way. On one level I am using my units tactically and trying to maximize their effectiveness, but on a higher level I'm making judgement calls on how densely and where to allocate forces(I know that this is starting to enter in the realm of operational warfare). At that level against other humans the game takes on a level of excitement I have great difficulty expressing as anything other than 'really good'. I know I'm kinda just ranting and raving, and my point here is really that I'm not crazy. I'm a believer because I've been able to play games that have made me see the potentially huge amount of fun and satisfaction one can derive from those taking a detailed interest in really big battles...
Man, I gotta stop typing.
Tomo
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