PFMM

dickesKind, Most importantly, to have infantry mount or dismount from a carrier by your orders the carrier must have no movement orders on it at all. You can give infantry units riding a carrier orders to dismount but they will only do so when the carrier has finnished all of it's movement orders. The same for mounting, so long as the carrier has movement orders the infantry will not mount. Pause commands on the carrier have no effect on this. Infantry can be forced to dismount (usually enemy fire) and if given a movement order will attempt to reach that position by foot. Best thing to do is to find either the mods author or the name of the mod and use the search function. Troops only benefit from the leader in command, not from multiple leaders. If you want a certain leader to command a unit you must move that leader closer to the unit than any other leader (watch the command ribbons to determine this). Some units, particularly independent units, can be only commanded by their parent leaders. Hope it's of use to you.

This may well be gilding the lily but a few last thoughts from me. I think one of the apsects that this discussion was attempting to highlight is the contrast between the game and the system. The system is merely that, a series of codified inputs followed by a series of codified outputs. Wether it provides entertainment or not is very much in the eye of the beholder, as the choices of the players have little to do with any entertainment provided, or much of anything for that matter. I can see why criticism of The Art of War III and The Highway to the Reich comes from the angle it does, as they are predominentley systems and any sort of inputs provide much the same ouputs, decisions often have little to do with anything and tend to be mandated by the constraints of the system. The game on the other hand emphasise a player's choices within the context of a sytem and highlights the result. Wether the choice and result was either good, bad or mundane entertainment is produced and thought are provoked. Furthermore the choices a player will make are at the least interesting and very much dependent on the situation he has put himself in. If one examines the state of the art of gaming, developers are still very much producing systems and hoping that the punters will see them as games. The art of the game has a long way to go.

Well, I actually did research, design and program a computer game back in the late eighties (18th & 19th century naval warfare), which was a failure mainly do to my game design, it was as boring as hell even to me. If I had the chance again the pivotal issues I would resolve first would be an interesting and relevent scale, minimum routine and maximum interaction. Further, I would engineer as much visual content as possible, as that is what the punters come for, they stay for the game. And if you examine any strategy genre the games that have longetivity, a sizeable population playing them and actual gaming address most of my above catagories. What is more, most of them are real time. Even the next iteration of Combat Mission is realtime, and the makers of it have stated again and again that we-go was a compromise they could do without. To my mind, the only difference between a real time Combat Mission and Highway to the Reich is the scale and the visuals. If one was able to meld the two I'm sure you would be bankrupt, but you'd have a winner.

The main argument, while acceptable to me, hinges on the basis of board game design. And while the elements of innovation are similar they are not the same. To translate Go(and indeed any of the boardgames listed) to computer literally is to rob it of much of their enjoyment, as it reduces the player part to routinely pressing buttons and waiting for his opponent to do likewise. Boardgames are designed to be played face to face over a table top, that is their nature, a computer game is not. I think the role of the computer as a rules lawyer is overstated and it's ability to involve the players is under emphasised. I feel that most of the success of contemporary board game design is limiting down time (ie people sitting around just watching) and increasing player involvement. to me,computer games do this when they introduce some form of tension in the game play. Combat Mission does this by giving both players the same movie with each player aware he is not seeing what the other player is seeing and maybe also what he is seeing. The object of the game play is then to manipulate that movie to his benifit and his opponents detriment. How well is he doing this? Well he never really knows, but experience and ability count. However the turn nature means that the player must again become a routine button presser and the tesion is lost. By introducing a real time continuum the button pressing no longer becomes routine. It is only required when needed and the buttons required depend on what is to be done. Furthermore the player is once again manipulating the movie. It is his decisions and ability that determine what is shown and when. Finally, I think people who critique real time games such Highway to the Reich as number puzzles should go online (with the demo even) against a human opponent. There it becomes more like Go (which I also play). You are constantly trying to minimize your signature while leading your opponent into a trap. When and how you involve yourself is as critical as what you do. And if you look at the most successfull computer games (in terms of audience share)reagrdless of genre, they are almost all real time.

Alien abduction in my case. Nothing quite like a good probing.

No undead reindeer cavalry. Just NO. As a practising statistician your figures are an abomination to me. Here's why: One cannot take 187 from one souce and then take 37 from another souce and assume an average for two and half years. Rubbish in, rubbish out. One needs figures for at least one, more likely two years, for each source. You need to examine both for long and short term trends, and corelation. Does the weather have an effect? Does the target unit's activity have an effect? The relative concentration of opposing air forces? And so on. The figures you have produced are not indicitive of anything. They are a fantasy.

No undead reindeer cavalry. Just NO. As a practising statistician your figures are an abomination to me. Here's why: One cannot take 187 from one souce and then take 37 from another souce and assume an average for two and half years. Rubbish in, rubbish out. One needs figures for at least one, more likely two years, for each source. You need to examine both for long and short term trends, and corelation. Does the weather have an effect? Does the target unit's activity have an effect? The relative concentration of opposing air forces? And so on. The figures you have produced are not indicitive of anything. They are a fantasy.

Well reserached scenarios that are playable under three hours in one session and are not tedious. The nice thing about Combat Mission is allows you to pick and choose to ones taste.

I feel that we may be muddying the waters a little too much for the purposes of this discussion, and will point out that the veracity of any simulation is meaningless unless it is turned into a game. Furthermore, we want this resulting game to be as various as possible with as wide an audience as possible, to give us as wide a range and as many people to play against. Yes, each to his own, but it's no fun playing with yourself. If you examine the boardgamming market it is just these designs that have enabled it to surpass it's mythical glory days (1970-1980s). Which is why I think Combat Mission, TOAW III (I read up on it), Civilisation, Dominion, et al., are successfull. They combine reasonable levels of PERCIEVED simulation with an easy to learn and mostly enjoyable game. However, as Pascal pointed out, man cannot stay in his room and remain forever happy. We can do better and that is what this discussion is about. Reckall and Phillipe, bare in mind that once the historical outcome is placed in amongst all the other outcomes it is just as unlikely as all the other outcomes. Games that force historical outcomes upset me no end. Stalin's Organist, no, wrong again but keep trying. markshot, leaving simualtion to the self proclaimed experts without judgement is a fools' paradise. JasonC, I don't think it is a gimmick. It presents choices in a continuum not as discrete opportunities. That's not trivial. Oh, and gaming budget is both money and time. I have plenty of allowed gaming time, but need to buy the game and my two allowed purchases for this half of the year have been used.

I'm not talking about producing simulation and neither is JasonC. What we are both saying in our own ways is that the model should be as close to reality as posible while the game design is as interesting as possible. As to taste, perspective, whatever determining our choices, I agree completely. I find Combat Mission's order system tedious but its' view of the battlefield and attention to detail is unrivalled. Contrary to JasonC I think realtime is the way formard and think Highway to the Reich is the paradigm. Most of the designs JasonC describes for board games I think will not work on the computer as computer games and I've yet to be convinced otherwise.

Ralph Trickey, The terms are defined in the post. As to your second post I've never owned TOAW III, have not refered to it ever, and till now known what it was. I would advise you to ask people who own and use it for comments.

I am fine with people having their own tastes and preferences, and they can play what they like without any fear of criticism from me. My point is that in my profession to rig a series of procedures to produce an expected result is unethical. If one has to tweak the fatigue rate to a little quicker than in reality, or increase the supply consumption compared to what it was in order to reproduce some other historical outcome I'd say your design is wrong. And what is worse you are giving people the wrong reasons for the original outcome. At worse you are lying. Just becuase it's hidden does not excuse it, in fact it makes the offence worse. If this was not an issue we would all be playing chess, go, checkers, etc.

No Stalin's Organist. You are wrong. The crux of this argument is the integral design versus differential design. The integral design is a process of averages. One examines a whole process, movement of a unit say, and it's likeley outcomes, ie it goes here or here or here. It's accurate, but the actual process of how and why it occurs is a mystery, with the net result that the movement of one unit is much the same as another unit. The differrential design displays the individual parts that make up that process and tell you why it ended up where it did and how it did it. The problem here is that any error in the modelling of the parts will result in the whole being inaccurate and what the player sees off. If you do research for a differential design you will quickly discover that the historical data is not there or is incomplete. So one compromises. The other issue of a differential design is it requires a lot of processes and is complicated and convaluted. Even on a computer even if you had all the information, you're not going to be able to do them all. So one compromises. The final measure of these compromises is how well does the simulation stack up to the expected outcomes, what insights does it give to why and how things happened, and does it both entertain and challenge. The games we are highlighting here make these compromises in a nice way. They grant us interesting, challenging decisions, show us how they are done and why and are simple enough to able to do in a reasonable length of time. The others become a chore in comparison and are as illuminating as an accountants spreadsheet. That is what we are discussing.

I should be working... The problem of computer game design is one I know painfully well. First a bit of history. Back in the sixties and seventies WARgame design was mainly concerned with presenting the matter over a table top in a manner unaquainted people could comprehend. They were simple. With the eighties and more familiarity in the market another force became more evident, and for about a decade games became increasingly complicated and convaluted (ASL is one of those survivors). Eventually it was relised that this was doing more harm than good, which brings us to the current level of innovation we see. The eighties also saw the beginnings of the personnal computer, and many board game designers fantasised (me too!) about how their games would have a wider audience as the computer would track every detail and enforce the rules. All it needed was an interface. They were wrong. The issue is both one of resolution and meaningfull procedure. And it's a mistake I also made. For example if you were to make a game of, say, 18th century naval warfare with say fifteen minute turns you would be able to provide meaningfull results (based on historicall outcomes) to your players, and they would be able to respond in kind on the results. However, if you model every single cannonball in realtime (for which there is no meaningfull historical outcome), you will produce rubbish with gibberesh as a response. It's a trap that many are prone too, ,as we have games of whole wars (Ancient, Napoleonic, WW2,etc.) stretching decades modelled on individuals. One systematic error anywhere results in nonsense. If it were a religion, Gary Grisby would be it's Pope. When computer wargame designers learn from the previous errors of their boardgaming cousins and pick appropriate scales for their subject matter, maybe we will see better gaming. JasonC, I'd take you up on the offer, but my gaming budget is controlled by my better half these days. I am currently playing Fire in the Sky by the same designer of A Victory Lost. I'd recommend it.

While we are at it I will put my plug in for SSG's ancient War in Russia. Army level units with division resolution with regimental replacements,and weekly turn based. It has two levels of command (High and District) with slots for up to eight human or computer players. At the High level (OKH,STAVKA) you set activity levels and the send reinforcments to each district, with the West front a concern. At the District level (North,Center and South) you have to manage each army and their manuever elements (composed of divisions), allocating air and support as required. Partisans, supply, fatigue, administration, rail lines, forifications, lend lease, weather, and even Hitler and Stalin (who you do not control) are covered. The entire campaign is playable in an afternoon, with smaller scenarios available. If you don't like anything it comes woth an editor.Best of all it's free as SSG released it to the public domain. Caveat, it's old and will require an emeulator.

The space chimp's been playing with his crayons again. Very nice. Thanks.

Old school would be Warsaw Pact versus NATO. Not these exotic new fangled conflagarations the young are so infatuated with. Grumble, grumble.

Learn. Be inventive. Most of all, do it to him before he does it to you.

And there is the rub. We want to be lied too. We imagine ourselves gloriously and heriocally overcoming the impossible odds. It's what the side of the box the game came in promised us. Why do you think you see all the complaints here? It's not that Combat Mission fails to match any proposal of reality. It fails to live up to the lie. Either that or the Germans had more style. I mean, olive drab is just so, drab.

And there is the rub. We want to be lied too. We imagine ourselves gloriously and heriocally overcoming the impossible odds. It's what the side of the box the game came in promised us. Why do you think you see all the complaints here? It's not that Combat Mission fails to match any proposal of reality. It fails to live up to the lie. Either that or the Germans had more style. I mean, olive drab is just so, drab.

Sigh. When people quote the internet or some precoceived view there is not much ground for a discussion in any form. If any of the daydreamers actually do any research of primary sources they will find that almost any large organisation cross references it's own reports. It matters little to the higher ups that Captain Blog reports a loss of two tanks. What matters is that the army report tallies up with all the other reports being logged. Double bookkeeping is as old as the hills and unless everyone is lying it never fails to detect discrepencies. And even if they are all lying it will still show something odd as people rarely tell the same lie the same way.

Sigh. When people quote the internet or some precoceived view there is not much ground for a discussion in any form. If any of the daydreamers actually do any research of primary sources they will find that almost any large organisation cross references it's own reports. It matters little to the higher ups that Captain Blog reports a loss of two tanks. What matters is that the army report tallies up with all the other reports being logged. Double bookkeeping is as old as the hills and unless everyone is lying it never fails to detect discrepencies. And even if they are all lying it will still show something odd as people rarely tell the same lie the same way.

Scout. If your opponents even half competent he will screen his advance and mount soakers. If you have excess firepower use it to conduct spoiling fire into terrain you think he will occupy.

Just adding to the praise and thanks.Very Nice.

Well, we've finally finished this one with 79-21 loss to me as the Soviets. I opted for a steady and sustained push up the valley by collecting my troops near the shore and then pushing on as one up the road to the objectives. I timed one set of artillery to blast what I thought was the front lines and another set further back in an attempt to interfere with any enemy reinforcements (the first achieved little, and the other nailed a truck and about twenty men). Much too my suprise my opponent mounted an aggressive defence by moving to the sides of my advance and heckling at range. I allowed myself to be distracted by this and became involved in far too many shooting matches. My progress didn't suffer much buy my supplies did. As his reinforcements arrived, rather than meet me head on he again seeped them round me and engaged at range. As my supply situation became desperate he moved in, and despite my armour, routed my entire force at close range. Only the end of the scenario prevented me from swimming. We both enjoyed this from start to finish. Lots of choices in both stratagy and tactics for both sides, interesting forces and interesting terrain. Might go for a rematch if time permits, but know it's time for bed. Many thanks.