Slitherine

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the game encourages very gamey tactics

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ORIGINAL: pzgndr

IMHO, it's the whole Panzer General style of game engine that encourages gamey tactics. It's not wargaming like we grew up with playing boardgames; ie, with unit stacking, combined unit attacks, odds-based CRTs for combat resolution, etc.

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ORIGINAL: IDontThinkSo

If I were forced to defend the objectives during the Soviet turn that would follow, I would have lost at least one (if not both) of the objectives.

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As I see it, stacking and combined attacks do not add all that much to the game being more simulation-like (a "real" wargame). As long as the game is IGOUGO you're going to end up with some gamey tactics. If you have stacking, then there's the pitfall of "super stacks". Combined attacks IMO emphasises "min-max" type decision making which is gamey in its own right.

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ORIGINAL: pzgndr

What worked pretty darn well has been tossed out the window for computer programming simplicity.

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PG-style single unit move-shoot is ok to a point but requires players to orchestrate their maneuvers in a very unrealistic way. And min-max is not gamey; Economy of Force and Mass are well-established principles of war, principles that are difficult to simulate in the PG-style game and can leave players wondering just how those historical battles and campaigns really happened.

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ORIGINAL: jeffreys

A few comments occur to me.

1) I do not think the outcome described at by IDontThinkSo is that ahistorical. In reality the Germans kept pouring troops into Stalingrad in an attempt to subdue the entire city. They came very close, but were left sitting in a salient and had depleted both shoulders to the point that the Soviets were able to counter attack and isolate the German Sixth army, which was forced to surrender a few weeks later. Hitler was so focused on achieving the geographic objective (Stalingrad) that he left his army depleted and vulnerable to destruction, which sounds rather like the situation in the game described by IDontThinkSo.

2) In the old playability vs. simulation debate Unity of Command has gone more toward playability than simulation. It's a relatively low complexity game though it seems to me to have more simulation value than most other games in this category (e.g. Strategic Command 2, Commander: Europe at War, Panzer General). For instance it does a very elegant job of modeling supply. The ability to combine movement and combat in any order, along with the overrun feature, the ability to return to a unit after moving a second unit, and the ability of friendly units to negate zones of control, act together to give a pretty good simulation of combined arms and the "rhythms" of World War II combat (sometimes fast and fluid, other times a bloody slog).

Overall then I think this game is outstanding as it is, a very enjoyable, playable game of relatively short, challenging scenarios with reasonable simulation value. I think Unity of Command is best left pretty much as it is, perhaps with some tweaks. If you start adding complexity, or creating much longer / larger scenarios, in an attempt to remake it into something different you run the risk of losing what you have. When you want more complexity and realism and larger "campaign" scenarios (as I often do) there are other outstanding games such as "War in the East", SSG's Decisive Battles series, and Decisive Campaigns (who will soon be releasing a game "Case Blue" covering the Stalingrad campaign) which are available to fill that niche.

3) That said, I agree with gdrover that the criteria for determining the level of victory appear to be too simplistic. My suggestion would be to take the score that the game currently calculates, apply scenario specific modifiers for casualties inflicted and for casualties sustained, and use that modified score to determine the level of victory.