SimpleSimon

I would argue as I always have that in the grand scheme of it all what we need is a CM Cold War. It's still more like the number 2 on my wishlist below Combat Mission "Black" - Fall of Europe 1939-40, but it's hard not to see the enormous potential of a release in the 1950s-1980s timeline.

Right and sorry if i'm not distinguishing enough that what i'm looking at here is on the aggregate. I know there's a lot of publicly funded Unis and plenty of privately run Primary schools. The student loan bubble came from somewhere though and plenty of public Universities have the same incentive to drive down their operating costs as private Universities. My point is that the result is the same even if the reasons could be different. Enormous quantities of money have gone into higher education but there's been no commensurate increase in wages to match the investment. Grads are looking at depressed job prospects even in good times. What are they going to do now??? No what i'm saying is that the resources of education systems everywhere are being steered by interests and leadership that does not have honest intentions toward education. The motive could be profits, or it could be nationalism, but the result is the same. A widespread lack adequate skills to navigate socially and technically complex modern society. Like whether or not you realize kevin you and are I talking about the same thing.

They teach almost nothing in the way of applied courses while emphasizing rote memorization of facts. This manifests most clearly through excessive reliance on reference material, (textbooks, rules of thumb, repetition etc) and canned syllabi. This isnt really classroom teacher's fault though. School administrators foist a totally unrealistic workload on their staff while simultaneously culling staff counts in just about every district to slash payrolls. Objectively they don't, and all that students learn is how to pass tests and feign knowledge of subjects rather than actually posses any. I know what good applied mathematics and understanding of physics and philosophy do for me. Most Americans don't, and to be fair don't really need to. It's the lack of basic, i'm talking extremely basic life skills that bothers me. Lots of people don't know how to cook for themselves, or do their own taxes. Schools districts job out Drivers Ed even though not having access to a car and a driver's license is literally crippling in most places of the country. These are skills every bit as critical to people's daily lives as basic literacy. Schools generally go the greatest efforts of following austerity models to cut education they objectively should be giving their students in favor of Prestige Courses that have absolutely no business being in primary education. Why? Schools want to look like they're doing a good job while simultaneously passing the tax payers a lower bill for their services, and that's simply a lie. I agree it's not Primary Education's job to conduct High Education. In fact that's my very point. American Grade Schools are clogged with classes teaching students impractical skills and knowledge that they have no use for afterwards. I have a separate issue with America's Higher Education system, especially its Private and For-Profit Universities conning people into forking over a mortgage's worth of debt over an education that is too simplistic and leaves students without the higher level skills they need to compete in sophisticated fields of study. Everyone at my college used to joke that in the end 4 years of college really just felt like 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th Grade. I didn't go to the most prestigious University in my field mind you, but I know plenty of people who did, and they're still paying the loans off for the same amount of pay i'm making. The irony in all this to me is that Public Schools are teaching courses fit for Universities and Universities are teaching courses fit for Public Schools. What they both have in common is a desire to cut costs, and through that they lop off staff and payroll at every turn and this causes impacting of class-room syllabi into condensed versions of what Educators should be teaching into meaningless summarization and rote fact memorization because...that's all they can teach with the impossible demands placed on them by Administrators who shouldn't be Administering a Deli let alone a school. I think if you have at least a Bachelor's Degree in America you should know who Voltaire is, but I understand why most undergrads won't.

The joke to me is that the more the view counts of Planet of the Humans increase the louder the cries of it being a Koch Brothers conspiracy get. In fact the criticisms of the film are a fascinating example of the ways in which American media fails its people and the ease with which pundits and those talking heads on TV obscure reality. Like it's almost comical to see the media's by-the-numbers approach of attacks on the film. Focusing on trivialities (Gibbs is a poor narrator!), ad hominem attacks (Michael Moore is a sensationalist!) and red herrings (the movie simplifies complicated issues!). Really all the usual obfuscation is there, and you can tell what nonsense it is because crucially zero outlets will attempt to address or consider the film's main point... That the alternative energy and recycling industries have been completely captured by corporate interests and money. Failure to tackle the central theme of the film, or even recognize it, is the weakest link in criticisms against the film. It's easy to take up too, since it'd be foolish and unrealistic to expect progress or answers in alternative energies without the sort of industrial cooperation and technical expertise capitalist markets can bring to the table. By bringing in Capitalism's problem solving capabilities you pretty much have to open up to monetization and politics for all the good and bad both of those things bring. Like I say, the price we pay for free speech is the dilemma that anyone can use it to circulate contemptible nonsense and lies. Truth and honesty too, but lots of nonsense. This is the dilemma of liberalism honestly illustrated by America's media. There's just an enormous amount of free flowing data and tbh what good is it if people aren't literate enough to comprehend it? I'm not talking in terms of lexical literacy either, but in terms of understanding. This is why I like to point out the inadequacy of America's education system, top to bottom. It emphasizes data memorization, not understanding. This has the effect of making people unable to form their own ideas and so therefore become reliant on guidance from "strong-leader figure XYZ" and their rhetorical garbage. They're too easily turned into acolytes instead of individuals. The total disregard Americans have for art and philosophy is a symptom of this, you can't even mention someone like Voltaire or Hegel (the precepts from both of whom underpin most of our daily lives in the west) to many of American Graduate Students without getting a "who's that?" How about why Americans hear the word liberal and automatically associate it with Affirmative Action or Gay Rights? You can't tell people that Alan Greenspan is a neoliberal without being corrected by oh no no he's a Republican you see.

Much of the American shop-retail industry has been on shaky grounds for decades, and i'm not inclined to feel very bad for the big chain retailers when they go. Long before Wal-Mart and Amazon won the consumer markets-game Sears, Macys, JCPenny etc and the other Strip-Mall conglomerates had already dealt a fatal blow to small business owners and local retailers. They had no compunctions about dabbling in the same sort of wage-suppression practices as Wal-Mart and Amazon. They sought the same cheap labour overseas to undercut American manufacturing workers and their pesky Unions by sending their jobs to countries with no worker protections. I would say "serves em right" but I know that they will inflict the most painful consequences of their bankruptcy on their employees while management will golden-parachute to safety again.

There tends a corresponding increase in the amount of vitriol and rhetoric that emerges from America as its slice of world GDP declines and another power's rises. We saw this most recently in the 2000s when China's growth began to takeoff, we saw it in the 1970s as Japan's market power grew rapidly prompting American pundits to launch into vicious and dishonest tirades about a resurgent Empire of the Rising Sun taking over the Pacific through bank accounts and not warships, as if the Americans weren't abandoning the Gold Standard to do precisely that. In the end Japan's growth fizzled out as its population growth capped, and China's was slowing before COVID, but no one was sure it would continue to lose steam and in fact it may be ideally positioning for another growth cycle while our consumer markets are crippled. What I have no doubt about is how the growth of China's GDP slice will prompt many, not all, but many American leaders and media pundits to double time their circulation of vicious and contemptible filth anchored on many tired (but clearly effective) entertainment-media industry cliché's. Rise of the Asian menace, oh no the Soviet Union is back, they're just jealous of our freedom, etc and other Great Hits on this Album! Some Americans have a bizarre perception that the world is some sort of zero-sum game where there's only one winner and everyone else is a loser and while many obviously don't think that way the question in American popular-electorates will be as always how many believe that. Even the more seemingly benign mythology, like the false-equivalency stuff comparing American "liberties" to Chinese "oppression" is loaded but i'm sure we will be seeing more and more of that in the coming decade. American leaders of all backgrounds know that the path to power is never a question of the entire electorate, just the electorate you need to cross the barrier. Issue to me now, and here is a big mistake American Social Liberals (and many right wingers) have made. The logic of zero-sum games, of one winner in a world of losers, that only the strong deserve to survive, etc will be an assumption taken for granted by all of that rhetoric. The foundation of all it will be, basically, that either America has to be first, or it's last. This is in fact utterly Hitlerian reasoning and will almost certainly be the grounding for American fascist movements if it isn't already. Unfortunately the last 30 years of Nazi Wolf cries has left everyone a bit tired of the cliche but that's where America's media has genuinely failed it. Not because our media circulates lies, but because it circulates nothing except advertising. By exhausting the meaning behind the term to push ratings up (and ergo profits) Americans are clearly less informed and totally ignorant of what Nazism actually is, which leaves them really defenseless to it. Because they think it's about the superficial items, the flags, the tanks, the rallies, the salute and not the ideology which is totally anchored on (discredited) notions of Social Darwinism, and behind that, Eugenics. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but the lessons of history have not reached a sufficient number of people in my view.

Yeah but this the amusing bit to me. The false dichotomy between American liberties and Communist oppression neither of which exist anywhere near the sort of strictly true stereotypes they're often pushed around on. Respectfully the problem with addressing just about any point you make Ripper is that you obviously expect people to take this premise for granted in your discussions with them. Yet it collapses quickly under basic scrutiny. How can Americans claim liberty and rights are so sacred while sitting on top of 25% of the world's entire inmate population? Where's the NRA? Where was the promised insurrection when law enforcement was given the right to search people's homes, emails and telephone conversations without consent 19 years ago under the Patriot Act? Like where's the line in the sand here? If American gun ownership is supposed to be some kind of guarantee of the rights of Americans it's track record for this has proven rather unimpressive to me. Even access to heavy weaponry is taken for granted at the average American gun club so it clearly isn't an issue of firepower or anything. My own thoughts here are based on accepting the notion that gun owners are universally invested in the rights of all Americans and not merely white gun owners by the way. It's hard to read roadie's post and not at least walk away with the impression that simplification and stereotyping are not the answer to dealing with China.

The political theater here amuses me quite a bit and conjures up some parallels with the great Stalinist Play Act Trials of the 1930s, though it seems more in tune with the Denunciations among Soviet Leadership that came after his death. Factionalism within Communist Party Leadership seems to lead this sort of event, but it's not as if America and Europe don't have their own ideas of-and uses for-political theater. Right, so Xi's push is the most logical path for what is actually a campaign by Beijing to strongly assert Federalism in China. Xi's act isn't new either, "strongman cleans up local corruption" tends to be the pretty common line and indication of a recent trend toward authoritarianism, and was the same the basis upon which Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orban have claimed power not to mention Vladimir Putin. Is Xi the same sort of authoritarian as these guys? I'm unsure, but the cult of personality stuff going on with him is probably more a legacy of Maoist tradition, which he is trying to connect with. It does not seem to me that he's explicitly going for totalitarianism though. If you ask me American leaders legit just don't know how to be authoritarian since they're almost universally unqualified for their positions lol. When oppression and spying are perpetuated in America it is almost entirely by the negligence and ignorance rather than any kind of concerted effort by its leaders to control people's lives. What there is plenty of in America nonetheless is oppression and spying, it's just crucial to understand that the mechanism that emerges these things doesn't always emerge from Washington, but frequently from America's unfree free market system.

I find it sort of strange that anyone would be taken by surprise at the idea that racism happens in China or that Chinese leaders are capable of lies. I guess since Americans are so frequently blindsided by these realizations they think everyone else would be too. Indeed.

I think the best part about roadie's post is how it highlights how widespread nonsense and disinformation about China is in the west. To me it's incredible because all of it is shameless repetition of canned arguments and propaganda literally recycled from the decades of the Cold War and now combined with a crude sort of euphemistic racism against Asians. The idealist notion of the 80s that a free internet would become some kind of antidote for lies and disinformation rather than a highway for those things has been rather clearly sunk. The most important bit people should consider is the one that in fact there's popular support for the Communists and whether or not its a clear majority or not is irrelevant. The Communist Party has tied itself successfully to improvements in the quality of life in China because these are improvements that they have legitimately brought to the country. There were consequences to this and the improvement has not been universal but the idea that student protests are about to explode into a mass overthrow of the Communist Party is unrealistic. Not to mention the idea that Chinese Leadership is hatching some long term plan to take over the world. Classic demagoguery and nothing more. roadie perhaps you can add. My impression of Chinese leadership is that it is highly decentralized and for the most part Beijing does not normally concern itself in rural or regional affairs. Federalism is present but its resources are rather limited and this goes further to explain failures (of any kind) in the Chinese response to the virus than HURR COMMUNIST REPRESSION does.

It's more than a little amusing to me that people would accuse the Chinese of trying to destabilize the world economy when the history has been for crisis to develop, routinely, out of American-European market economies. The American system is so crisis prone that the Federal Reserve is now entirely taken for granted as the economy's fire department and emergency first responder. Europe's system brags about being more resistant to crisis but it turns what they meant by that was forcing austerity measures and privatization on the Mediterranean economies. This has has yielded nothing to the people of those countries and brought with it a decline in the standard of living for most of them. This creates an extremely caustic distaste for any notion of European Federalism and creates lots of opportunities for reactionary and right-wing leaders in Europe to seize upon. Even the idea that the virus emerged from the wild-animal trade in China being a uniquely Chinese thing is a big pot-kettle-black. The biggest movie on Netflix last month, possibly in America, was literally about the illegal wild-animal trading that goes on in the US, not to mention how humiliatingly transparent it is.

Bingo. The memory of Tiananmen Square is still a fresh one, and Hong Kong just last year was proof that it was not merely a fluke. Communist Party leaders took the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union to heart more than many think, and have historically made decisions based on a realistic assessment of the measures necessary to retain control of the Chinese state and stabilize it when a crisis appears. In 2008 China's growth served as a factor to stabilize shocked markets a lot, and Chinese leaders did not take such a golden opportunity to role out a blitz of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric or launch a currency war. They had no intention of rescuing anyone, but they were not casting stones either. Reality is globalized markets present China with far too many great business opportunities for them to honestly want to sabotage any of that.

So it is written, so it shall be done lmao

By leaving out more than half of it lol. Tbh I don't care all that much. Battleship fetishization is so tiresome and dominates the narrative, unfairly. Most sailors never served on a battleship, most in a navy surprisingly never even served on a proper "warship". Yeah this is why I shouldn't bring up any of Wargaming's awful products. Your reasoning here is based (so far?) only on the advantage that your ship has twice the throw weight. Crucially worth pointing out on your behalf that both ships have practically the same armor arrangement, actually Dreadnought is minus the belt on a Lord Nelson class by one inch, and its belt doesn't extend all the way up like Agamemnon. Fundamentally both ships used the same scheme that was used on the King Edward VII class. Since Dreadnought was proofed against her own guns this in theory makes the throw weight matter a lot less since, at least in theory none of those 12in shells should be able to penetrate such a scheme. You and I both know though that there's more going on here behind a tiresome belt armor battle though. One crucial difference also was that Dreadnought had a somewhat thicker armor deck, but I doubt either ship would've been able to stop a 12in shell crashing in through the roof and blah blah god I hate battleship theory battles for precisely this reason. Tell me you actually read of that and I won't believe you lol. Also the Royal Navy didn't prefer its Captains to fight at stand off ranges. The pressure on both of you would be to charge right up to each other and go to broadsides where what would matter most is belt armor, and actually a Lord Nelson type might have an advantage over Dreadnought in some slight ways on that. The thing that annoys me about this though is the assumption, proven wrong often enough times, that anything would happen according to highly formal European models of fighting. Why don't we ask the crews of ships like USS South Dakota or HMS Prince of Wales how screwed up your day (night?) can get sometimes. Bismarck was doomed by a friggen biplane because it's AAA mounts were, I kid you not, unable to track such a slow target. Then for a ship that was supposed to be the literal terror of the Atlantic, and who had major firepower and tonnage advantages over both her opponents Bismarck proved rather disappointing a foe the next time around. Bismarck actually lost the capability to reply with more than half of its guns only about 20 minutes into the battle but...teh bigger throw weight??? Course neither Tovey or Hamilton were, crucially, about to underestimate the threat posed by an opposing Capital ship, crippled or not. tl:dr of it is that I agree with you that Dreadnought was revolutionary and held many crucial advantages over the competitors of pretty much any peer ship in class or tonnage. But a "wipe out" is way oversimplifying things as shown in a side by side comparison of mere stats. (I want to emphasize the near insignificance of such a struggle between two closely matched ships.) Such was Dreadnought's reputation that the marketing and hype remain powerful to this very day. Just important to remember that it was, in many ways, hype. Rule the Waves doesn't span 100 years of history because the developer was lazy, unimaginative, or both. Padfield spanned 100 years of history in his book because his intent was to summarize. It's a good summary too.

Yeah but like, why does Rule the Waves start in 1900 is the point. If it's a game about the history of the battleship, seems a bit disappointing to me that they'd go and leave more than half of it out. Really? I mean, devil's in the details but the details don't reveal a staggering mismatch or trivial encounter. I can't imagine i'd be as cool with the idea of facing off against another Capital ship regardless of how "revolutionary" mine is. Bad luck happens you know but even if it doesn't, her guns are just as big as mine. That it doesn't have as many is hardly encouraging, she has enough to make me worry. Someone is going to die and I can't guarantee it won't be any of my crew... I found the scope of the book too wide to adequately cover the topic. Like it's a fine book but...prefer Friedman. Most nations had very distinct influences behind their warship designs and the tendency for British authors is to just assume everyone was trying to beat the Royal Navy. Germany maybe but most countries had to consider more than the Royal Navy as a competitor, and many didn't at all.

But Ironclads didn't disappear the next day crucially. Or even over the next year. They remained a factor in naval warfare for years to come. Obsolescence doesn't, if ever really make things just stop existing or go away the next day. It relegates them yes. It demotes them...but they stick around. Frequently so called "obsolescent" equipment ends up seeing more use and action than the newer hardware does too. This is why the "Fleet in Being" narrative of the Great War annoys me a bit. The British and French played fast and hard with lots of Dreadnoughts during the war. Not the Dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet no, but they were practically throwing them away in the Mediterranean to thwart Ottoman minefields. Not to mention Jackie Fisher's Battlecruisers and their escapades... English histories always do that "Only one Battleship lost during World War 1" Wikipedia quote you know? Ps the British lost way more than one *Capital* ship during World War 1 but we all know that. That's the British narrative of naval history lol. Using their own rationale we might as well start Rule the Waves in 1914 when HMS Queen Elizabeth the first super dreadnought was launched because...everything before her is obsolete now right? Thankfully we don't because all of us can agree that'd just be a super arbitrary point to cut a tech tree off at, or the scope of a game, or the narrative of a book on battleships. Really we'd be leaving out heaps of other ships and other context then, and our game would suffer for such a lack of meta. My point is that the history and mythology that Rule the Waves and many naval games anchor (lol) themselves upon is way more subjective than they believe. Yes it is nominally true HMS Dreadnought was the first "true Dreadnought" but if you sent it to battle against, say, HMS Agamemnon...a side by side comparison of each ship does not reveal a staggering mismatch even though our poor HMS Agamemnon is now a "pre dreadnought", literally just because it was a predecessor class of ship to Dreadnought. Is it inferior to Dreadnought? Yup, but by how much? My own litmus test is if you sent these ships to battle against eachother in a World of Warships style team-deathmatch, would the Captain of HMS Dreadnought be totally sure of his victory? Would he even feel it necessary to take precautions? If I was him about the only ship i'd feel that way against would be...USS Monitor. I may have the "better ship" but I will certainly not be underestimating an opponent with similar protection and literally the exact same guns as my ship because he's a few knots slower, definitely not because he's a "Pre Dreadnought".

Pretty much. Many of CM's maps are often scaled down a size more appropriate for a level battle *below* what the scenario designer was considering. (ie: Pairs of Companies fighting on maps appropriate for a Platoon.) It's been brought it up many times but it's fairly common for the scenario designers to excessively pack maps with units, thus causing nearly every battle to become a set-piece offensive. Putting an infantry gun on a map with most lines of sight measurable to 250m or so is a symptom of this. If fighting was expected at those ranges most (but not all) Commanders would be inclined to just ditch the gun somewhere and find spare rifles and grenades for the crew.

The issue is that US food production is in danger of price explosions and localized shortages which will, literally and immediately, place lower income families in mortal danger. That the US is apparently unable to make use of the rationing and control mechanisms of 1941-45 to me anymore is parts amusing and other parts humiliating. We're literally just unable to deal with anything in this country because the last 30 years of stealth austerity has totally disarmed any capability of widespread crisis response. It's a free-for-all of state governments saddled with enormous demobilized work forces cueing up on food bank lines while other states literally have farmers dumping milk down the drain and slaughtering animals because they can't reach markets for their produce. Someone hook FDR up to a generator because I bet he's turning in his grave so fast right now you'd need a tachometer, he could power a city.

To comment a bit more on all this, the chief tactical limitation Italian forces had by 1943...reflected accurately by the game, is a lack of access to tanks and aircraft. This means that Italian forces in game are by themselves, capable only of infantry and artillery slugging matches with opposing forces. That still leaves a wide variety of potential scenarios and campaigns available to them, but it rules out an independent Blitz-style campaign of which the games are so frequently built around. There is such a campaign in the game mind you...but you get lots of loans from the German tool kit to make it work so that sort of rules out the notion of independent force projection by Italian forces in the game. Really because they weren't capable of totally independent operations by this stage of the war. Their best Divisions, and all of their Armored Divisions, were expended in North Africa. What was left in Italy was a hodgepodge of some semi-motorized Divisions probably not at all full strength and the useless Metropolitan Forces. Regia Aeronautica and the Regia Marina were both defeated by the depletion of Italian oil reserves. Whatever was being produced in Europe was being completely siphoned off by the Germans. Famine had broken out in Italy over the last year due to the failure of the transport infrastructure and mass requisitions by German troops. This badly undermined morale in what was left of the Italian Army, in some places creating at atmosphere of outright mutiny. The Invasion of Sicily was just the last straw in the long process by Mussolini's own government to remove him. His own Fascist Council, a rather unique organization of Democratic-Fascism, voted him out and he was placed under arrest by the King. Because of the presence of so many large foreign Armies in Italy the subsequent Italian Civil War that broke out after Mussolini's ouster tends to be obscured a bit by history. Really the country had been on the verge of total breakdown for at least a year before the invasion of Sicily though. Hitler and the Wehrmacht had discussed potential options for a breakdown of the Fascist State and Mussolini's ouster the previous year and the original plan for this had been to simply withdraw German forces to a line around Rome (with much arguing back and forth about whether or not to hang onto Rome). In the end German Officers in Italy were able to convince Hitler and OKW that they'd be able to throw Allied invasions back into the sea and full withdrawal wouldn't be necessary. They proved more than a little over-optimistic about that assessment.

The Italians had lots of excellent designs for many weapon systems. The issue was they proved utterly unable to produce enough of them to matter frequently. The Italians may have had the best AAA gun of the war for instance, the Cannone da 90/53...but built less than 600 of them. Just about all of the fighters built by Macchi were not only competitive with Allied designs, but lethal to them in the hands of a good pilot. How many were built though? Between all the types of fighter Macchi built they just couldn't build enough of anything. One of the issues facing Italian war production was that the more the Italians tried to ramp up production, the more they came into competition over resources with Germany. At first the Germans tried to just pass engines and resources to the Italians but as the war's prospects turned against the Axis Germany began to turn partnership into exploitation. The lack of output meant that Italian forces were frequently unable to execute the mostly sound combined-arms theories their forces were constructed around. This imbalance led to lack of flexibility, the lack of flexibility led to lack of realistic force projection, lack of realistic force projection led to defeat on the battlefield which further constrained Italy's options to better balance its forces. Strategic failures caused tactical failures, then tactical failures backfired into the strategy causing its failure.

The Germans were credibly capable of launching Division-level offensives through the entire timeframe of all the currently offered games. Corp-level offensives were conducted to the very last days of 1945 even. There should be no problem in any of the released games depicting the full capabilities of German forces within the scale of fighting depicted by Combat Mission. The Germans had full combined-arms kits to the very last days of the war. The issue was that they were increasingly unable to apply these kits as the war dragged on. Army and Army Group level offensives were mostly off the table after Kursk and capabilities only decreased from there. Fortress Italy has the unique distinction of being the only game released thus far depicting one of Germany's partners, the Italians. An examination of the Italian kits in 1943 will show why they are an example of a nation clearly unable to bear the burden of the war by this stage, making them mostly dependent on German inputs of arms (especially tanks and aircraft). One advantage this gives the Germans in FI is access to a somewhat wider tool kit than usual by allowing them to make use of Italian Forces, who can be very good auxiliary troops in the right circumstances. The Italians were still able to provide wide assortments of infantry and artillery for instance. tl:dr All of the released games have the assets necessary to depict the single most important formation available to German forces during the war...the Panzer Division.

Crucially Rule the Waves has an enormous meta-game sitting over its tactical battles too that enables you to seek alternatives to impasses created by the tactical mode. I know it adds heaps of development logistics to a game and quickly widens the scope for potential game-mechanics problems, but I have just never found any kind of command-strategy game interesting for very long without some kind of tactical-strategic duality in its scope. Ah ha but were the Ironclad and Dreadnought race not one in the same? It's difficult to define exactly where one class ended and the other began. That's why I find the decision to cut the game off at Pre-Dreadnoughts more than a little arbitrary. I know they had to stop widening the game's scope at some point, but you're far from weird in preferring the game had started in 1875. I would've preferred Rule the Waves started in 1861 actually, when the first hint was dropped that naval warfare was in for some big changes. Sure you would've had to feature sails, gunpowder, boarding, etc but at least from my own perspective I can't see how the game couldn't have made those things work. In the end I just figure they didn't think about it, picking an arbitrary start date of 1900 to sort of "begin" the game around Tsushima's time...but the Russo-Japanese War was far, far from the beginning of the Dreadnought age....more like dead in the middle of it all. Nitpicking overall Rule the Waves is a fine game and i'm sure i'll grab the new game soon enough.

One thing to keep in mind was that even as late as the Second World War, the Japanese could be ridiculously successful attacking with literally just rifles and bayonets in the jungles of Malaya and in the Philippines. While certainly not conducted exactly like a Napoleonic bayonet rush it really wasn't until Guadalcanal that these started to become guaranteed high-casualty events. Sure quite a bit could be explained by incompetent Allied leadership but like the inverse of the Japanese using dash and aggression to capitalize on that is equally skillful use of resources is it not? Crucially the thing that actually brought a conclusive end to that event was the increasingly widespread availability of automatics, be those machine guns, sub machine guns and whatnot. Repeating rifles by themselves could make a charge very risky...but didn't seem to extinguish it either. The Gatling gun's issue was that it was such a demanding weapon. It needed a huge crew of ammunition porters, teams of men to push it around, and was hand cranked. It took Maxim's machine gun to make a truly automatic weapon that met the many demands of being portable enough, numerous enough, powerful enough, and efficient enough to make it widespread.

I think the Assault Command is fine honestly, I just wish that an "assault" command placed with its endpoint within about 50m or so would make the attacking infantry prefer to start off with grenades first, and entry second.

In 1866, Prussian troops armed with needle guns easily defeated an Austrian army equipped with muzzle-loading Lorenz rifles, weapons also used in the Civil War. Instead of using a long thin line of men to blast away at an opposing long thin line of men at close range, the Prussians used small company columns that sent men forward into skirmish lines to gain fire superiority. The skirmish line would take advantage of the terrain, and the men, who had had extensive target practice, would take careful note of the range to the enemy and adjust their sights accordingly. The skirmish line was now the main effort, and the column existed primarily to lend support and to send troops forward to the skirmish line. A really interesting observation and one i've been looking for. Crucially i've wanted to know where the "junction" was between the end of Line Infantry and the beginning of the modern day Infantry Rifleman. I would still be cautious about believing that this was a "hard" or distinct change so-to-speak. Like what most Officers probably saw was just a skirmishing fad that wouldn't last because you still needed extensively trained, professional soldiers with lots of experience in order to take advantage of their skills in marksmanship. Conscript Armies are not good shots, and with this in mind probably lots of Officers continued to believe obstinately that the Line and Bayonet may yet have their day. I wonder if they'd've been right too had the machine gun not shown up...