nonsuch

Getting back on the subject however I just found an old Avalon Hill game called Russian Campaign which similarly gets the balance spot on, a bit like 'The North and the South' american civil war board game. Spot on. This is exactly how I felt with SC. I too picked up Russian Campaign and loved it. Since I could rarely find an opponent I gravitated towards computer gaming. In terms of balance and playability it is still as good as you will find - Fortress Europa is good too which is from the same designer. As far as PC games are concerned I would struggle to point you at something of a similar standard of exellence. Part of the problem lies with the design process. Good game designers and guys who can write good code are not likely to be one and the same (certainly not with wargames). The really great board wargames were largely designed by a small number of people. None that I know of have moved on to produce electronic games. There are some guys who can design great strategic games and write code as well (Sid Meier for instance) but I don't think that they are in the majority. You will find a ofof postings on this site referring to games that tackled WW2 at a srategic level. Please believe me - this is the best. You will struggle with Third Reich. Eastern Front is OK but is over complex like most Gary Grigsby games (don't even attempt War in the Pacific), the ACW games produced by Battleground are simplistic(especially against the AI) For fun and playability I would suggest - Sid Meiers Gettysburg Panzer General and it's successors ACW from Sumter to Appotomax Age of Rifles and maybe some of the SSI stuff (they were the first company to really push computer wargames and made some great stuff in the early days - Grigsby's War in Russia on the Apple/Atari was wonderful at the time. Their Ardennes offensive is worth a look and free to download I believe. Anyway good luck and happy gaming.

Adding Ireland to the Axis makes no sense to me; I can envision the country joining the Axis almost out of necessity if Britain had been conquered. De Valeria had strong leanings in that direction and it might have become an Italian or Spanish type fascist state. No doubt Germany would have tossed Northern Ireland in to sweeten the package while creating a Vichy style British Government as a liason with the former parts of the British Empire. [/QB]

There was in fact another plot to kill Hitler in 1944 besides the one we all know about. It was drawn up by the SOE in Britain and sanctioned by Churchill but shelved because it was decided that it was more advantageous to let him continue with his disastrous course. This has only recently come to light after the 50 year expiry of the official secrets act. In a documentary shown this week a group of historians were asked to examine the plan and assess it's merits. Their conclusion was that it could well have worked - it involved a sniper taking him out at the Berghof. Apparently a flag was always flown in the nearby town when he was in residence and he always took a morning walk down a track unattended by guards. They also concluded that had it been successful Germany would have surrendered within two months and as a result about ten million lives would have been saved! Information on Operation Foxley can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/foxley_report_01.shtml [ April 04, 2003, 03:58 PM: Message edited by: nonsuch ]

This may have been raised before but I can't find it in the back pages. Shouldn't this game show generals who commanded in the field at the appropriate level? And shouldn't they become available at the correct times. Rommel and Manstein did not command armies in 1939 and neither did Montogomery. If Eisenhower is represented why not Brooke? (surely the best British general of the war) Finally, how did Mark Clark get to be rated "7" the same as Rundstedt?

OK. point taken. I'm still a newb so I didn't know (although I confess I didn't feel comfortable posting it) Hope I didn't cause offence. I enjoy your postings - they are invariably incisive, considered and frequently spot on. Like you say, we all have a different perspective on things. Keep the faith!

I really don't know about this John. You have clearly given this a lot of thought and I wouldn't take issue with anything you propose but I do have difficulty with the notion of assembling them in a game of this type. It isn't third reich or drang nach osten and all the better for it. How far would you go? Freeze all rivers north of the Bug for attack and movement purposes during the Russian winter? Whatever else this is still a strategic game and maybe it is beer and ptetzels also - who cares. It's fun and it's playable and it has a good deal of historical accuracy. If it is also unbalanced in human v human play then let's address it. Winter rules make sense but let's keep them simple and make them affect supply (to represent logistical problems) and experience (to factor in attrition)

You could try this. I've played the demo and it's not bad http://www.pocketmatrix.com/reviews/pocketconquest

One of the few sound recordings of Hitler speaking at an HQ conference has him confiding to Mannerheim about how amazed he was at Soviet Russia's ability to manufacture weapons, especially tanks, and it's capacity to replace losses. He goes so far as to say if he had he'd have done things differently. Actually John I think the German High Command had a good idea of what the Russians could do in terms of manufacturing arms. Hitler just didn't listen. Guderian took a delegation around an armaments factory in the late 30's and they expressed disbelief that the Panzer mk 2 was the Germans best tank - they already had the T34 prototype and had used it in Manchuria. The analysis of Soviet production capacity that was made by the general staff was ridiculed by Hitler. It still fell far short of what was actually achieved but OKW didn't take account (understandably) of the Soviets ability to dismantle and reconstruct factories. Personally, I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the way the Russian campaign plays in this game. I don't think it is necessarily the German Blitzkrieg or even the abscence of weather but the fact that the only response the Soviets seem to have is to produce masses of corps units which makes the game resemble WW1. This is not so much a question of historicy but one of approach. This is a strategic game - the bulk of the Soviet force should be armies surely and they should be outproducing the Germans for most of the duration. They should lack the strength, mobility, experience and cohesion of the German units BUT should be churning out armour, artillery and large infantry units at a much higher capacity. Hubert may well contend that the end result is the same - survive with the Soviets for a couple of years and they should prevail but it just doesn't feel right. I want somethig with more movement and risk. In fairness to him I don't think that this arena has been cracked by anyone else, even companies with a heap of designers and guys writing the code or even for that matter by the board wargamers (for me Hitler's War was the closest). It's a tough one to do. Nevertheless, everyone seems to agree that this is the crucial battle and I would rather that any future development concentrates on getting this bit right than (for instance) sorting out the Western Desert.

Is there any particular reason why this forum is set out the way that it is and are there any plans to change it. There are now over 21,000 posts covering more than 80 screens. It is becoming very time consuming to locate anything and a nightmare for new players to negotiate. Is there a problem with creating group headings for some of these topics. I realise that some of the longer threads cover a multitude of issues but I would like to think that a clear structure might impose a degree of order on this. Any suggestions?

This would elevate operations such as Battle of Britain type campaigns and Allied bombing missions from isolated England/Malta etc., into a new realm where they wouldn't be undertaken frivolously. [/QB]

[No matter what I think about his decisions I'll always feel some strange reverence for the man. Probably, along with Teddy Roosevelt, he was the last of a vanished breed of adventurer statesman, with the added attribute of being a scholar. [/QB] You make some excellent points paricularly with regard to Churchill. He was undoubtably an adventurer as you say and much more besides. Having just fininished the latest bigraphy I am still left perplexed. We recently had a poll on TV over here for the greatest Britain who ever lived and Churchill won by a huge margin (I voted for Thomas Paine). Unlike Lincoln I think Churcill's motives may have been suspect. The reason he had been in the cold for so long was his refusal to accept the Britai should relinquish control of India and whilst his distaste for Nazisim was there from the beginning his primary motivation in the war was the preservation of the empire rather than the defeat of fascim. This may seem a bit harsh and I may be a less than impartial judge having never voted for his political party in my life but I will saty one thing. His stubborn pig headedness meant that we had someone to oppose Hitler and all he stood for when most politicians of whatever persuasion would have capitulated. For that I salute him. By the way - Charles Darwin came runner up in the poll. Votes were eligible from the UK only which is probably just as well or the residents of Tenessee might have had something to say about that. I wonder who the top five in the US would have been? My guess is that Lincoln would win.

This is one of those situations where there is always a clash between historical feel and play balance. There is clearly a problem with the fixed deployment in the game but that probably goes for all the scenarios. It has been tackled in numerous ways in board wargaming. Whilst I favour a free deployment of units prior to invasion (as in AH russian campaign), this still allows the (Soviet) to work out an optimum placement of troops. As far as the winter situation is concerned a tweak on the supply rules can fix this but that isn't really the answer. The Soviets suffered from the cold just as much as the germans - they were not all siberian guard divisions decked out in helly hansen's finest! Their big advantage was that in their supply lines (and their numbers) Many games have adressed this in a simple fashion - for instance if an Axis Unit is not adjacent to a city, movement and combat strength are halved. This seems fine to me. After all it wasn't the shortages that screwed them up it was the inability to get them to the front. As for the suggestion that the Axis shouls lose strength simply because of the winter - I can;t go along with it. We are in charge not Hitler. Whether they should lose experience to reflect morale loss from retreating - well that is another issue!

The plot thickens. I first read of this some time ago but Jersey John's observations made me go back and check the source (Field Marshall Allanbroke's war diaries) I quote (Weygand to Brooke at le mans) "the french army has ceased to be able to offer organised support.Paris has been given up and there were no reserves left. The Iner-Allied council had decided to hold a position covering Brittany in front of Rennes" What we make of this is anybodies guess. Close to 100,000 British troops were in place with the Canadians due for embarkatio when Weygand and Brooke decided that the position was untenable. Brooke spoke to Churchill for the first time in the war to advise him of the decision to withdraw and it took half an hour for Churchill to be persuaded. Brooke was appointed Chief of the imperial general staff later that year and spent much of his time arguing with Churchill. He was offered command of the 8th army after Auckinleck and declined (because he was worried whether anyone else would stand up to Churchill i his place) It strikes me that Churchill was essentially another politician who mistakenly believed that he was a grand strategist (gallipoli, norway, greece) but unlike hitler and stalin he could be persuaded that some of his enterprises amounted to folly. Brooke may be one of the unsung heroes of this war

I sometimes wonder exactly what the "true fear of invasion" was in the UK in the summer of 1940. Churchill, fpr all his qualities did some very strange things during the war but none more so than in July 1940. Having extricated the troops from Dunkirk it seems inconceivable that they would be sent back to France but that is precisely what happened. The 2nd corps of the BEF was landed in Cherbourg and deployed at Le Mans before beating a hasty retreat and escaping for a second time! I have no idea what Churchil was thinking. The commander, General Brooke thought it was madness. Presumably this was some attempt to bolster the French morale but France was to all intends and purposes lost by then. I wonder whether Sea Lion might have been given more serious thought (by both sides)if this gambit had resulted in the disaster that it so nearly did!

Yes. I just caught up with the rest of it. Great stuff! I don't think it's luck - it is a tough ride with the soviets and I would agree with all the postings to your thread - there is probably no ideal way to fight this but the basic principles work well. I was interested in the clustering approach that was mentioned way back in the forum. I tried it in the last game I played and it worked OK even if though it felt wrong. I guess that in the end we have to salute Mr Hubert for throwing us such a problem. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way. Hang in there!

Funnily enough this was the one thread I read before I posted. If you are talking about playing another then I cannot dispute this - it looks tough for the red army. Even against the AI it isn't easy but for me the key is supply. The Axis run out of it eventually. Building massed corps three or four deep will slow them down (even if the game statrs to resemble the Somme) and the same units can infiltrate later in the game to cut supply in the same way that the partisans do. I can't say how this will work against a good human opponent but the Axis can only build so many crack air and armoured units - eventually the number of small soviet units can be made to count.

[ February 06, 2003, 09:43 PM: Message edited by: nonsuch ]

Player nonsuch signs up for the ladder

There appears to be a considerable amount of space in this forum devoted to the topic of play balance. I guess that ideally we would all like a simulation that reflects history, gives us a multitude of options and has scenarios that give both sides a reasonably even chance of victory. Well, I am new to this game but I have played a good few others (both electronic and paper based) and if such a beast exists out there I haven't found it. This one is as good as any I have seen. It is historical (for a strategic game), it plays well and the AI puts up a decent fight. For the record I have played it twice as Allies, twice as Axis on the zero and +1 settings and won reasonably comfortably - largely from reading this forum. It is challenging and fun but I guess the question is where do I go from here? Logically, it would be to play online against some of the venerable contributors to this forum from whom I have learned so much (and no doubt get to learn what a "comfortable victory" is like from the receiving end) Whilst I have no particular problem with this, it strikes me that as time goes on and strategies develop, it becomes almost like chess (i.e. if you don't know the key opening moves and how to counter them the rest is history) This is less of a problem if forces are evenly matched, as they are in chess, but makes a big a big difference when it comes to wargames. The proposed solutions seem to be centred around various tweaks to the game engine. Whilst I would totally endorse the alterations made in the last upgrade, in a sense it does not really fix the problem from a gamers point of view. Let me suggest a solution.... If we ignore historicy for a second, the key difficulty is initial deployment at the start of a scenario. Even with fog of war you know roughly where opposition units are - but what if you didn't? Suppose the scenarios had a random element that allowed the same basic mp per side but with randomised unit mix and locations. Therefore when launching a scenario you would not be sure what you were facing or where it was deployed - anyone who played Sid Meier's Gettysburg online will be familiar with how this works. Yes, you do get unbalanced scenarios at times but that is part of the fun. Experienced players lose to novices. The uncertainty is part of the excitement! Sure, this approach works better with tactical and operational games but even at strategic level it would add a new dimensio to the game. Because of the length of the scenarios, the better player would usually prevail but at least it would not be determined by who knew the "optimum" opening move. Without yet looking at it, I can guess that the scenario editor cannot provide this but on the evidence of what I have seen, our esteemed designer most definately can. Any thoughts?