quote:

ORIGINAL: Octavian

Dear Vic,
the DC series gave me my most exciting and immersive wargaming experiences and I will always be very grateful to you for having done that „for me“. With high expectations I waited for DC Ardennes Offensive in the last couple of months. I also tried Shadow Empire in the meantime, but couldnīt get really in touch with it.
It turns out, sadly, that, what prevented me from falling in love wit SE is the exact same thing, that I experience with my so long awaited new DC experience.
I know, there are heaps of people who enjoy, but nonetheless I would like to express and explain what is the core of my dissapointment. All this statement wants to achieve is improvement, not insult or accusation in any way. Since I am no native englishspeaker - I am german – please excuse any strange expressions..;), since it is not that easy to express.
I try anyway: What I feel as a main problem of both games is, that I loose oversight and control, because there are – and I claim this is no personal problem of me – just so many parameters of whatsoever, that a human being is unable to do more than guessing instead of doing informed decisions. I want to make that clearer with the help of two examples:
1. Uncertainty rule: In another post of mine, I tried to figure out, what uncertainty option really does. Some people answered and in the end, you, Vic, ruled all this guessing out and came up with a very complex table, full of maths, to give us enlightenment. The problem is: these formulas you gave us, are not only hard to grasp, they also never can be used as a basis to have an idea of the effect uncertainty really has to my use of a unit.
2. An even better example is: recon points. I tried hard to understand this concept. And from what I understand my units throw recon points to their surrounding hexes and then landscape, distance, height and shadow, weather and stuff come into play to make a certain figure in the end for a certain hex. On the other hand there is hide points, based on the size of the enemy unit in regard to many other factors. These both are then calculated against each other with another formula. All this – please donīt get me wrong – makes perfect sense in simulating warfare mathematically. BUT: in the end, I, as player, who makes dozens of movement and battle decisions in one turn, cannot make use of all these figures properly, since the feedback – i.e. what I see on my monitor – isnīt presented to me in a way that I can EASILY make an informed decision. It needed f.e ten minutes of hard thinking for only one of my dozen decisions, to find out, which size a unit could maximally have in a certain hex for me to NOT see it, f.e.
So – and that might be sort of conclusion: what is the sense of having underlying concepts, that are so complicated, that there is NO HUMAN WAY to figure out what they are telling me in my attempt to make a certain decision?
I am in no way against randomness and stuff, donīt get me wrong please. If i wanted chess, I would play chess. But I want to have at least a certain feeling of control and transparency, when I make a decision in a wargame and I want to know – after my decision – why there was a certain outcome.
So I dare to say, dear Vic, - out of respect for your work and effort – that I feel, that you – in an earnest attempt to get it perfectly done – are overdoing some things and make them so convoluted, that I needed to be a processor and no human being, in order to play your game properly and with a sense of control and transparency. I still achieve even major victories in DC Ardennes, but too often I have no idea, what I am really doing there. For me, this kills much of the joy I had in earlier games from your hands. Other players are invited and welome to make their comments to this. I couldnīt make it any clearer, what I mean, sorry.