R.J.

I'm not crazy about province style combat either- the thing that drew me to Strategic Command was the old fashioned "Avalon Hill" feeling to the game (i.e. hexes). Still, I think anything that draws more attention to the Grand Strategy genre is a positive development. [ November 14, 2006, 02:00 PM: Message edited by: R.J. ]

Just came across some info on a new grand strategy game Strategy First is publishing in the spring called Making History: The Calm & The Storm. It looks more like HOI than Strat Com - risk-style provinces rather than hexes/tiles - and there's not a lot of info on it, but there are a couple of dozen screen-shots. Here are some links: http://www.making-history.com/home.php http://www.3dgamers.com/games/makinghistory/

Here you go.

It's the craftsman vs. mass production conundrum. If you sell a million or more copies of a game you can afford to sell it for less – and/or hire more people to give the game more glitz and glitter and sell it for more. War games, alas, have a much smaller market share, thus have smaller design teams and higher prices. SC2 (in fact all wargames) might look like a budget game, but it's not. You pay for the quality of the game design- if it also looks good that’s just a nice bonus. You can rest assured you're not being gouged. HC isn't blowing your hard earned money on Ferraris and supermodels. :confused: (Actually, if you are, let me know. I might give up my day job and go into game designing.)

I'd really like to see HQ's have two values under supply – one to list their actual supplied value, followed in brackets by their supply source value (or vice versa). Counting tiles in Russia gets so tedious.

Very true, but it also represents 2-8 weeks worth of naval operations in a rather abstract way. It would seem to me that if a nation has the will and ability to launch naval attacks against an invasion, it should be rewarded with more than a 20% decline in a corp's/army's fighting strength. Reducing the transported unit's supply a few points for each attack could be one option.

The French seductively removing their garrisons to get a rise in Italian readiness – it's not just gamey, it's positively immoral. To counter the Italian exploit, when Italy's readiness reaches 100%, it should not automatically enter the war, but rather the player should then be given the option of entering the war when they choose. Or at the very least, Spanish readiness should also go up.

My boys are fighting in rags and stuffing their boots with straw to keep warm... I'm a bad, bad Führer

A German unit being op moved from Northern Russia to Paris, Italy or Greece should have their moral rise by about 90%- cramped trains or not. Overall it makes more sense to drop readiness than moral, but as it affects readiness it pretty much comes out even.

You wouldn't get all 60,000 but you'd certainly get more than 10% of their foxhole strength, or their follow up supply ships. If a BB can kill 30% of an army on land, I'd expect they'd do a lot more damage to them when they're at sea.

LOL, actually I use a push mower- but that’s just to save my ears and lungs, not mother earth. I agree with you there. The concept of real sacrifice for a greater good kind of faded away when eat, drink and be merry for here and now is all there is became the national (indeed Western) ethos for the modern age. With morality (the domain of religion) giving way to ethics (the domain of philosophy) the gold standard for some will be us versus them, and me me me the standard for the rest.

Cary also wrote (p3): Because we generally accept that mixing religion and politics is a disaster. I'm afraid you're setting the moral bar too high for the strictly secular concept of the nation state. If you're going to ask for a sacrifice that grand you'd better be offering something more than the temporal. Politics (modern and Western at any rate) tends to play out in more pragmatic, alas even cynical, terms. 'Bomber' Harris may have to answer to God in eternity, but in the here and now (or there and then as the case may be) the idea of ending a war through terror bombing was believed (falsely as it proved) to have merit. And where does one finally draw the line in us v. them? My family v. the criminals who threaten them? My country v. the country that threatens to enslave us? The family of man v. the livestock that feeds us? All organic matter living in perfect harmony? Will some future generation condemn us for mowing our lawns as some now condemn Harris for trying to spare "his own" at the expense of others? It's an imperfect world. We need both our ideals and a good dose of pragmatism for such difficult questions as war.

I would assume he's sad because it's not working. P.S. I'm not sure if you need Freud or need to avoid Freud?

Sell it to whom? Rich industrialists who would simply raise the price of products and commodities to offset the capital expenditures on luxury goods? Money that would have better served the poor by being put into industrial expansion (i.e. creating jobs). Meanwhile the world is poorer because priceless art treasures are now in private hands and not on public display. Wealth isn't created by a simple exchange of paper money and/or property. Wealth is created by investment, labour and human ingenuity. And I'm afraid that opinion is the typical fuzzy logic of socialism that kills investment and personal motivation that creates real wealth. The other part of your post is spot on though. "If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it." -Benjamin Franklin

Soviet dog mines. Fairly good in theory, explosive pack on the back of a dog detonated by a rod that was pushed back when the dog dived under a German tank. In practice, the dogs (who were trained by placing food under Soviet tanks) tended to make a beeline to the familiar smells and sounds of the Soviet tanks. The program was cancelled very quickly. (I suppose you could simulate that one by having Russian tank units randomly lose a strength point once and a while. )