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janh -> RE: What is the point of HVY? (10/25/2011 4:20:44 PM)
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Nice posts, Jimbo123. The closer you keep the rules such that a player is forced to repeat history, the easier and more meaningful is a comparison to the historical outcome (as far as number and facts have been determined accurately by historians, which already appears to be a big problem even for Axis and Soviet casualties if you look at the discussions of the many research resources on Wiki), and the more meaningful is a statement such as "feels historical" by players. However, if you get too close, you end up watching a history movie. As with most games, it is often best to play AI if you are in search of a historically accurate experience, since AI is often designed to mimic that. One simple example comes to mind in AE is the use of CV -- players in PBEM rarely split KB or allied CV, given the risk attached, but AI does in line with historical use of them, and as a player against AI you can and should do so too. Hindsight and experience usually leads to PBEM players to avoid dividing these critical assets, which represents a totally fine alternative doctrine in my opinion.
Perhaps one could script a whole war scenario to repeat historical moves and engagements, and run it as a simulations to obtain results to can be tuned to meet the outcomes. But even then you'd just have one set of data, which might not necessarily suffice to determine if other pathways/decisions would be equally well described by the underlying game mechanics. As the discussions show, it is hard to get even simple numbers for fundamental things like militarily used rail capacity, factory discrimination by types (and what actually is purely military production, or partly civilian, and what were the number reported historically or in sources) etc., let alone to figure what exactly they mean and how they ought to be implemented. There is a lot to learn from all these discussions about the potential problems in game design that one may face.
Regarding your idea to use AP for allowing moves that would likely have been opposed by Hitler, or Stalin, or not been possible for other political reasons, you could set up a set of house rules. As far as I understand your idea, you basically suggest coupling the permissions for those to the limited AP pool, i.e. you want to limit the number of times a player can deviate from historic moves/mistakes using hindsight or attempting something new?
But what do you then consider the standard moves that to watch deviation from, and what freedom for a player would you consider outside that? I think it will be hard to establish a red line there for both sides, and might indeed be something to negotiate with each new opponent. You could set up an additional "AP/decision" pool (as obviously the present AP would anyways have to be increased to accommodate a rule change), and keep track of that in excel or so together with your opponent?
Perhaps a basic set of rules, like "no Soviet large scale retreat in 41 below 3M casualties, or 10k tanks", "no German withdrawal from front line in winter 41 without at least 1 attack on a position", "at least 1 major Soviet counteroffensive in spring and autumn 42", and "at least 1 major offensive attempt by Axis in summer 42 and 43" could be negotiated, but I can see a lot of discussion about that, and I probably would not go even as far as the above to compromise. But still then you are a long way from any of the "bonehead" moves/mistakes that both sides made in the war and that gives that struggle so much of a face, be it the shift to Kiev, Stalingrad, Kursk, Demyansk or the Iszum salient and the overly late "withdrawal" (rout) at Bagration.
Yet I am not sure whether you should actually aim for taking away that amount of freedom other than by personal house rules. My impression is that the devs have decided on a very sound concept to allow you to change things within plausible freedom, and obviously in quite a few cases deviating from history too drastically was already shown to fail (such as a too early Soviet Sir Robin). Aside from that, the freedom you have left just allows to explore more options and gives both sides more long-term potential/interest: you may need to invent a good story for justifying some moves, just like you'd have for many PBEM or AI games in AE where a Jap player invades OZ, or New Zealand, or India, or lands on Hawaii -- not easily realistic, but also can't be totally ruled out to have happened under some surprising and unplanned circumstances. I guess no AE players would want to give up that kind of freedom. Thus I would hesitate with any kind of system that forces historical orders, or rules or doctrine that is man-made on a player; optional rules or house-rules might be the way to go?
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