RFalvo69
Posts: 1380
Joined: 7/11/2013 From: Lamezia Terme (Italy) Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Dili quote:
ORIGINAL: RFalvo69 I still think that the One Week/Turns of Pacific War are better at simulating the tempo of operations in the PTO than the One Day/Turn of War in the Pacific: AE. In the real world after you put together a plan you have to search for the needed resources, send appropriate orders to from Fleet Admirals down to platoon leaders, maybe have a disagreement or two with your staff... In WitP: AE all of this happens in a sort of "outside time", or "limbo between days". Factually, in AE you put together your plan and right the day after the ships sail. I find a bit surreal, when I read the WitP: AE forums, to see debates about "openings" (like in chess ). Check a very interesting book called "Pacific Crucible", by Ian W. Toll. It is about the US Navy in the first six months of war, very well researched, and it shows how the Navy started to have a real clue about the situation, about what was happening in the Pacific, and how to use this new "Aircraft Carriers branch" around the Marshall Islands raids - not on day one like it happens in AE. I think that is a misfire. You can't unlearn what history has taught us. Everyone one of us go to play War in Pacific with our culture with lessons of last 80 years. But this is true for both sides, something which turns the historical events into academia. Useful academia but still academia. You don't plan against historical events, but against the specific situation(s) evolving in a given game. It doesn't matter if you are the Allied or the Japanese: the decision cycle (analysing the objective situation ---> developing a plan ---> send the orders to the involved people ---> analysing the new state of things after the plan is complete ---> go back to step one) should still require a realistic time - not one day. Planning invasions, as RangerJoe pointed out, is a step towards realism. However it covers only a slice of the whole game. The rest is still planned in a sort of "outside timezone". A player decides what, for example, his ships will do, the commanders get the orders at once and the ships sail at once. This would be impossible today, imagine in the 1940s, even with the best communication gear the time could offer. And of course no time is spent in the game to come up with a plan in the first place. One day looks cool on a pamphlet about the game, but I'm still convinced that PW's one week turns are still more realistic. The whole of the Allied forces in the Pacific didn't react in a coordinated way with a plan already in mind on day one of the war - like it now happens with the aforementioned "chess openings".
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"Yes darling, I served in the Navy for eight years. I was a cook..." "Oh dad... so you were a God-damned cook?" (My 10 years old daughter after watching "The Hunt for Red October")
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