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Charles2222 -> Realism? (12/6/2002 9:08:44 PM)
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I just got the game yesterday, with just a perusal so far. It doesn't look that terribly complicated to me, as everything seems to stem for anywhere between 4-7 command paths.
One thing I hate to see though, is that on their BB a number of people complain that GE, or whatever nation, shouldn't be able to build so much of this or that by 1939 for example. What they fail to realize, and it's a tragic blindness to say the least, is that the game attempts to answer the question that if certain nations did things differently than they did, what would have happened. Now maybe you could follow the precise path a nation did and come up with very poor results, but I can't see it possible that someone could come up with totally understanding that game on the one hand, and have thorough access to that nations's historic records and translate that into games terms, other than if you're the programmers perhaps. In any event if GE for example were building the naval program and economics in the pre-war years, far greater than you did, while you went all out for the army, then who's fault is it that GE has too great an army? And until you know precisely what GE did and where they put everything, you cannot begin to criticise the game designers for something you don't know yourself.
On a lesser note, I see people also criticise how a certain tank or plane wasn't available by a certain date, but, then again, if you've no idea what amount of manpower and research went into a weapon coming available when it did, you have no way to reasonably claim that the weapon's availability couldn't have come out by that time. I thought about the basic argument about Panthers coming out when they did wouldn't have occured if the GE's hadn't invaded the USSR and thereby discovered the T34 was a pretty goos argument, but on second thought I don't like that line of reasoning either. All we know for sure, is that historically that was the case, but what we don't know is virtual-history so to speak. Sure, in game terms, maybe the Panther becomes available a lot earlier because you put a massive amount of research into tanks that GE did not, be that the game design fault or not, but then again if GE hadn't encountered the T34, maybe, just maybe, they would've designed a much better airplane for example. The game attempts to do this. The eternal question of what could've happened is attempted to be answered in that game. It's probably not the fault of the game if something became available a lot earlier then it did, but that you have no idea just what every specific nation put into the research in given areas, and then are far out-pacing your historic counterparts. Maybe one of the men that died during bombing on some HQ in France is the same one who would've came up with a radical new design for tanks that the Panther would've paled in comparison. Another angle comes to me at the moment, specifically about this Panther availability thing. Suppose for example that your GE had conquered one more nation, let alone twice as much, as the RL GE. What if in the RL GE, not conquering Sweden, there was a spy there who would've got you the T34 information fresh off the designers's desk, but because the RL GE didn't annex them they never knew of the T34 till later? When you start arguing history with a largely hypothetical game, you better have all your bases covered, and if you so much as conquered one nation more than the historic counterpart did, or one less, or at different times (and one needn't even get into research differences as I did earlier), then you have very little grounds for saying that the Panther couldn't have been available earlier.
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