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PMCN -> RE: 1.08.01 criticism from a Russian wargamer (2/10/2015 12:49:17 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: heliodorus04
(snip)
If you want historical realism READ A HISTORY BOOK. You deviate from history on Turn 1...
Otherwise, accept that games require abstractions, and the sum of all of them is aimed at playability more than historical rigidity.
(snip)
This is an old and tired argument. If the game is supposed to simulate reality then it can not allow utter and total wacky results independent of what one does. If the game allows units to do things which are absurd in real life then the game engine is flawed.
A historical game means not that it reproduces history, that is impossible since battle results are not pre-ordained and many battles in history could have gone one way or another depending on how a complex series of events played out during the time of the battle.
To me, a historical game should present the player with the challenges that the people of the time were faced with. If you can do outright impossible things...then the game has a problem that should be address and fixed where possible.
As far as house rules go, I recall my proposed house rules were widely adopted by WIR players and even made it into WITE with the inclusion of limits on where the Finns will go. These sorts of gentleman's rules are necessary when the game itself has problems.
But the reality is if you need house rules to prevent exploitive behaviour then the game engine should be worked on to not allow it. Though probably at the end there is a limit what you can do and eventually it is prohibitively difficult to solve the problem, and min-maxer munchkins are exceptionally good at finding every possible loophole to exploit. That is infact why they are munchkins in the first place...they like that sort of thing.
But I, for one, don't want to play grey on brown. I want to play the eastern front in WW2. I want to deal with the issues that the people at the time dealt with and see how the fact that the logistics were a nightmare actually influenced the campaign NOT deal with some moron who thinks pulling all the german tanks out of the panzer divisions in the med and replacing them with cheap italian crud is OK (to quote a WIR multiplayer result that made me stop playing multiplayer).
For me, it is the difference between playing Panzer Leader (by Avalon Hill) and Tactics 2 (by Avalon Hill) both are good games but one is a generic blue on red game on a random map and the other is various battles from WW2. It is about seeing how going for moscow early rather than turning south would have changed things not about seeing how exploiting HQ build ups to do wild and crazy stuff in cojunction with the entire LW being used as an arial refueling service.
I can't speak for anyone else but I would be dubious anyone who wants to play a historical war game as a simulation doesn't want to change history, they just don't want to do it by exploiting game engines or being a min-max munchkin. They want to do it by trying one of the dozens of "what ifs" that exist when looking at WW2 and seeing what the result of it is or at least so I would think.
It is like when someone takes over the world strating from botswanaland in HoIx, using only militia or something equally absurd. That works only by mind wrenching exploitation of the game system and is about as interesting as watching paint dry.
I play these sorts of games to learn about the conflict in question. Seeing the effect of a decision in a game is more than just reading about it in a book. Watching the panzers wheel to turn south taught me instantly that it wasn't completely moronic to have done that...as it utterly unhinged what up to then had been a sucessful defence near Kiev but there was no way to hold that if the front holding the northern flank collapsed, which it certainly did when that many Panzer divisions hit it. The only thing that saved the day was mud (and the overeall ineptness of the AO as it should have pocketed more of my divisions).
That for me is the value and the point of playing a historical wargame. Otherwise I could just play civilization on a random map or starcraft or whatever.
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