Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: sterckxe

quote:

ORIGINAL: sulla05
Yes you were supposed to give the formations "real" military orders and then watch what unfolded. Much like COTA etc.. I even saw a preview of it in some mag. It would have been an excellent game way ahead of its time.

I wrote a small review of the Road to Moscow beta some 3 years ago - here's a copy & paste

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Hi,

As some of you might know I was recently offered the beta 1.10 version of
this Loch Ness monster of wargaming. I promised a review so here goes :


Game Concept :


Detailed geographical map of Europe where units of Brigade/Div/Army level
move and fight - all in real-time. You, as supreme commander literally
"draw" up the battle plan(s) which get executed by your AI commanders
whom you can shuffle around. A very detailed OOB + TOE and a nice choice
of scenario's complete the package.


Concept execution and detail :


The most interesting concept is the drawing board - you literally select
a portion of the battle field - which gets copied to the drawing screen
where you "draw" up a battle plan. You can set primary and secondary
objectives and tell your units where to move to. You then approve the
"plan" which gets executed by the AI.


This all sounds pretty nifty - though we could do without the separate
drawing board - the problem is : it doesn't work.


The reason it doesn't is because you can draw up a plan that looks good
on paper only to have it botched up by the incompetent own unit AI -
sounds like real life (tm) you'd think - not really - especially playing
as the Germans you'd expect the battlefield commanders to be smarter than
the guy sitting in Berlin but they aren't and that's where frustration
sets in because you lack the means to control the action.


Example : let's suppose you spot a Russian infantry army with their left
flank secured by mountains/rough and a refused - but open - right flank.
Let's say you have a German inf div, a mountain div and a panzer div at
your disposal - what plan do you come up with ? I want the inf div to
move up, make contact, make probing attacks but nothing serious and act
as a screen for the panzer division to swing behind and move behind the
Ruskies right flank while the mountain div infiltrates their supposedly
secure left flank. A minimum amount of coordination should ensure succes
in rounding up the Russians. Let's say you draw up this fail-safe plan in
RtM, you sit back smugly and watch it all go terribly wrong as soon as
you turn things over to the AI. The inf div will slam hard into the
prepared Russian positions and take numerous casualties, the mountain
unit will get lost in the mountains and the panzer division will arive in
the Russians rear and decide to await further orders amidst the Russian
rear echelon units.


So where did it go wrong ?


Well, for one thing this game oozes ambition - the entire Russian front -
in realtime - in 1997-1999 on pentium 2/300 machines with 1 MB graphic
cards .. Technically it couldn't have worked on the machines available
back then - my 2.8 gig / GeForce 4 machine has barely enough horsepower
to run it. No wonder it was reported to run in sub-realtime with every 5
minutes of game time taking 15 minutes of computer time - this would mean
a 12 year continuous runtime for the entire campaign. Madness.


The concept of "drawing" up a masterplan sounds good on paper - but the
own unit AI is so incompetent in carrying out your plan that this game
really needs more player control over the battlefield - there isn't,
resulting in player frustration. You feel like the guy sitting in his
Berlin bunker in 1945 moving around armies and nothing happens the way he
plans it.


The reason it survived so long as a "game in progress" - and a financial
sink-hole - is that if you look at a screenshot and read the manual /
concept docs the shear ambition takes your breath away. On paper it's the
game I want to play. It's a game practically all grognards would want to
play so it got financed way too long because it's so beautiful in concept
people wanted it to work despite the technical and conceptual hurdles.


Could it have worked ?


Well, if they had limited the game to let's say a "Kanev Bridge", added
more own-unit controll and had put a lot more effort in the AI they could
have ended up with an "Airborne Assault". And this is really the point I
wanted to make : the RtM game concept is - apart from the over-ambitious
scope - virtually identical to the Airborne Assault series games. RtM is
dead and buried, but if you really want to see that inf div make a
probing attack to fix the Russians in place, the mountain div sneaking up
on them while the Panzer div swings into their rear you'll have to wait
till the guys at Panther Games turn east.


Greetz,


Eddy Sterckx

quote:

ORIGINAL: sulla05
I remember all the games you mention. I even still have some of them. I liked Talonsoft's BTR but I really want a remake of Europe Ablaze.

quote:

ORIGINAL: SMK-at-work

quote:

ORIGINAL: sulla05
I remember all the games you mention. I even still have some of them. I liked Talonsoft's BTR but I really want a remake of Europe Ablaze.

TOAW has a scenario "Europe Ablaze" modeled on the original I believe - I never played the original tho!!

TOAW doesn't have a proper strategic side tho - which may be good or bad depending on your p.o.v. - replacements & reinforcements are all programmed per "history" for each scenario, with possible variations done by scripting - eg if playing "Fire in the East" (East front 41-45) supply and production values can alter with capture of key cities - eg Axis supply goes up if oil centres are captured, soviet supply goes down if Archangel is captured, or up if you use the optional rule for bringing Turkey into the game and can capture Istanbul, etc.

But you never get to allocate specific resources such as manpower, or particulr weapon production - you might end up desperately short of riflemen, but with a huge surplus of bridging engineers that you can't retask......

"We" (ie the people on the TOAW forum) often mention these little problems to the designers, who are still active and working on the next iteration....

quote:

ORIGINAL: apathetic lurker
Interesting.. I sort of figured that our machines back then were under-powered which was why it failed. Still, it was an interesting concept. It might be feasable these days though.

quote:

ORIGINAL: sterckxe

quote:

ORIGINAL: apathetic lurker
Interesting.. I sort of figured that our machines back then were under-powered which was why it failed. Still, it was an interesting concept. It might be feasable these days though.

It's more than an interesting concept : it's a working and winning concept when done right : Conquest of the Aegean is Wargame of the Year 2006 as voted by the punters at The Wargamer, at GameSquad and on UseNet's War-Historical.

Also note that there are other engines out there too which use the same concepts, most notably the Air Assault Task Force engine of ProsimCo, but also tactical 3D games like Combat Mission and Panzer Command. It's just that nobody has made a strategic level game based on these principles ... yet.

Greetz,

Eddy Sterckx

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ORIGINAL: ravinhood

Welp now you've heard of it and I've listed it and the designer and his team and even the copyright date. I still have the manual and the game on 5-1/4 floppy for C=64. ;)
I even did a google for you http://home.comcast.net/~evanbrooks/20tha4.htm#ROAD%20TO%20MOSCOW%20(Ba'rac)
(...)
I probably have the largest library of computer wargames of anyone from 1982 to present day. ;) And that's not even having all of Matrixgames of today. lol I'll eventually get them when the timing is right. When I die someone can do some documentary on me and all the wargames and computers I still have. ;)

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ORIGINAL: sulla05

There never was a Road to moscow that ever came out that I knew of.

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ORIGINAL: bairdlander

I played it in the 80's.It use to bug me because on the map east was the top of the screen,so kind of weird.

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ORIGINAL: bairdlander
Two other excellent games from the time were "Fields of Fire" and "Panzer Grenadier".They were very similiar to the Close combat series,though they used counters not sprites.

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ORIGINAL: jamesm

There was a game to be called "Road to Moscow", but it became vapourware. Shame, from the screen shots and the information given it looked like it could have been a very good game.

quote:

ORIGINAL: E

quote:

ORIGINAL: bairdlander
Two other excellent games from the time were "Fields of Fire" and "Panzer Grenadier".They were very similiar to the Close combat series,though they used counters not sprites.

Panzer Grenadier (East Front), Fields of Fire (N. Africa & West Front) & Nam all used the same engine. It was also the basis for SSI's Wargame Construction Set I.

quote:

ORIGINAL: bairdlander

Two other excellent games from the time were "Fields of Fire" and "Panzer Grenadier".They were very similiar to the Close combat series,though they used counters not sprites.

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Cant beleive how ancient it looks,at the time i thought this was the best game ever.lol