karonagames
Posts: 4712
Joined: 7/10/2006 From: The Duchy of Cornwall, nr England Status: offline
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I write as someone who has only played 50 Turns of DNO, but also an avid follower of the FITE AARs, and I certainly intend to play FITE once my DNO game is finished. I think that trying to integrate DNO's factory system into FITE would be a waste of effort. DNO is specifically designed to recreate the first 8 months of the war compared to the 4 years in FITE. As noted above DNO does force players to defend further forward than seems to be the case in FITE where everyone runs for the hills and a line solidifies in front of Smolensk/Kharkov/Stalino, which the axis can either break in 1941 as Karri has done in the current AAR or that can be broken in 1942 as Freeboy did in his AAR only to find the the Soviets could still savage him in the winter of 42/43. In DNO you HAVE to defend the Dneiper and the cities to the West of Stalino to prevent the automatic Axis Victory. Would FITE benefit from having a similar victory system that undermines the whole point of the game - i.e. that you can play for more than 1 year? I'm not sure FITE needs much fixing, as it clearly reflects players skill and abilty, as the Axis can either break the Soviet line in 1941 or they can't, based on their ability to maximise combat rounds. In my current DNO game, my opponent did a great job and got 3-4 rounds per turn, and consequently he has done better than history in some sectors- although I still hold Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov by the skin of my teeth. In his previous games, he didn't achive 3-4 rounds, and ran into the Smolensk brick wall that he could not break. Most of the modding to date seems to aimed at weakening the line that the Soviets can construct in 1941, and this is where DNO's structure differs to FITE due to having an OOB designed specifically for 8 months compared to 4 Years. FITE has to allow nearly everything to reconstitute to enable the Soviets to have anything that closely resembles their 1944/45 OOB. DNO reconstitutes far less. I do not pretend to understand the details of the reconstitution system in TOAWIII and whether designers can adjust it, but my guess is that the Soviet gets 30-50 more divisions to form his line in 1941 with FITE than he does with DNO. DNO does have more NKVD and brigade/regiment sized units to fill out the OOB but these are much weaker than the full sized units that get reconstituted in FITE. The Soviets will always be able to salvage more troops than historically, as no one can every replicate STAVKA/Stalin's disregard for the wellbeing of their armed forces by ordering hopeless counterattacks that sacrficed units needlessly - no amount of house rules and modding can recreate this. Remember, FITE's stated victory conditions are for Berlin to be in German Hands at the end of the game. I have only read one AAR that has played this far, and this is preceisely what the Germans achieved, but it was exteremly close, so clearly the "stock version of FITE is capable of achieving its objective without any modding. But of course we as players want to use the game to explore the gazillion "what-ifs" that have been debated by historians for the past 50 years using a game engine that has been stretched to its absolute limit, thus requiring us as players to be stretched to our limits to stand any chance of seeing if our own personal "what ifs" stand a cat in Hell's chance of being achieved. Personally I can't wait to see if FITE will allow me to follow my own personal strategy of Leningrad in 1941, Stalingrad in 1942 and Moscow in 1943. In the AARs published to date, Freeboy has achieved 2 out of the 3, and I await with interest to see how 1943 pans out. I also hope he and his opponent have the stamina to finish the game so we can analyse what impact losing Leningrad and Stalingrad might have had on the Soviet war effort. So maybe the current modding needs find a way to handicap the Soviets by a certain amount in 1941 without handicapping its strength in 42/43/44, which is precisely what Buzz et al are trying to achieve. The first efforts clearly weakened the Soviets to much. Maybe a simple solution is to delay some of the scheduled reinforcements in 1941 so that they are not added to the reconstituted divisions, which according to the rules re-appear 1-4 weeks after they are destroyed (page 28 para 9.1.8). Is this a true reflection of what really happened? If it actually took 3-4 months to reconstruct these divisions then the only adjustment the game engine gives us is the ability to slow down the arrival of the equivalent number of divisions that have arrived "too soon" via the reconstitution system. The reverse could apply to the losses that the Germans incur in Stalingrad and the destruction of Army Group Centre. Obviously delaying scheduled reinforcements will not impact the overall growth in strength of the Soviet armed forces, and the long term playability of the game is not impacted. Also if the ratio of reconstituted to "scheduled" divisions is increased, the availability of replacements will have a bigger impact on the strength of the reconstituted divisions, so this may encourage players to hold on to replacement cities for longer than they do at the moment. Just a suggestion.
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It's only a Game
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