WEGO vs RT-Is it age related?

[sburke]

My age and wargaming experience is similar to your own, I believe. I switched to RT because I could pause the game any time I want (often after less than a minute has passed, but sometimes only after several minutes when there is no reason to stop the action). The only disadvantage is lack of replay, but I regard that as being more realistic. Running the replay over and over so you can glean every detail of what happened to every unit would be something a RL commander could only dream about.

OTOH, it would be nice to have a saved movie to look at after you've completed a mission.

+1 with Umlaut on this. At least with Wego you are forced to watch the results of a bad decision for 60 seconds. In RT you can immediately stop a unit based on info from another unit giving an even more unrealistic sense of the god eye effect. I also agree the pursuit of "realism" is overblown. The only way you will get this is to either have no visual of the battlefield or play a first person shooter (okay yeah I know they are even more unrealistic, but I was just thinking in the sense of not knowing what another unit is doing). If you want to try for some realism, then incur your own penalties, rigidly follow spotting problems and occasionally throw in a mis understood order so a unit pursues the wrong objective. Have a commander freeze and withdrawal mistakenly. You can even cause some friendly fire if you want with your own artillery and tank guns. Now there is some ugly realism for ya.

What I do love about wego is being able to watch the details of a battle, there is so much going on in a company size engagement that unless I can pause and review how individal units behave I am missing half of what BFC spent all this effort to produce. It isn't about knowing what happened and then issuing orders based on it so much as seeing how the AI behaves and what my pixeltruppen are actually doing.

I am 105 so I forget what the heck I am playing most times whether it is RT or WEGO. Wait a minute. what were we talking about?

[noxnoctum]

Naw don't think so I'm 23 and I only play wego.

RT you miss out on all the little action moments and your situational awareness suffers. Watching the replay vid was half the fun in CMBB for me. Plus I don't like feeling time pressure at all in a wargame. In RT I usually don't have time to check all the little terrain variations and have to stay zoomed out if I don't want to miss something important (like an enemy mortar spotting round or a side shot from a hidden AT gun) The only downside with WEGO is MOUT but I get around this by splitting squads a lot and using delay timers.

I play Starcraft 2 also but that's an entirely different kind of game.

[jbmtintin]

27 years old.

RT.

Because in RT you can pause the game whenever you want. This is useful to me because I do not like the limitation of AI: in RL people on the ground will - I think - act better than in the game. So I must micro-manage them thanks to "Pause".

[Magpie_Oz]

45 RT for sure, I like the pressure, the need to have excellent situational awarness and the better flow of the battle, much more engaging for me.

[GreenAsJade]

I can see that RT would be the way to go for Single player.

I don't understand it for 2 Player, umlaut nailed it for me on that one.

So maybe it's not an age thing, it's to do with whether the people want to play single or 2 player, this WEGO vs RT..

GaJ

[phil stanbridge]

I'm 37 and I play primarily WEGO. It's the style of gameplay I prefer and always have done since the very first days. It's much less chaotic and I love being able to use the replay to see exactly where that shot came from. Plus I can make a brew inbetween turns. Maybe it's partly something to do with the fact CMBx1 started out life as WEGO, that we have got used to it.

I also agree with what a lot of the others have said. But I do play RT occasionally; it tends to be for the tiny scenarios or small QB's. You do have more finite control over your forces using the realtime engine there's no denying that aspect. But it just doesn't do it for me. I can't stand the thought of a large, important campaign battle in RT - what a nightmare!

[rune]

Older then anyone who has posted here yet, and I play both, smaller I play RT, bigger rt and occasional wego.

Rune

[John1966]

Realism would be something like this: You as the commander being able to see only the inside of a bunker, while you get updates on the progress of the battle via out-of-breath dispatchers running into the bunker to tell you that a "Tiger is spotted in the western corner of the woods" or recieving half dechifrable messages on the radio. You would then move your virtual commander to the virtual map on the virtual bunker table and mark presumed location of enemy and friendly forces.

Until another dispatcher tells you that the enemy is retreating

or

the enemy enters the bunker

or

an artillery shell hits the bunker

...and the game ends.

That's the joys of playing "Highway to the Reich", that is.

Except for the bit about the shell landing on your bunker. Thankfully.

[z1812]

It's great to have the choice. I usually play wego, although I sometimes use RT for very small battles.

[Thomm]

RT H2H: Not satisfying, in my limited experience.

RT vs. AI: Not a question of age, but a question of scenario size and how many different focal points one has to control. If there is time pressure and units are spread all over the map, it tends to become stressful.

WeGo: Do it only when I want to test something specific. PBEM should be great fun, but I do not have time for it. As for WeGo in general, way too time-consuming.

Best regards,

Thomm

[ZPB II]

I'm 25 and I play RT exclusively. In part this is due to my attention deficit, it's faster to finish battles this way (although theoretically WEGO is faster since you can skip the replay) and I can start the action without having to plot for every unit on turn 1. Then there are some issues in WEGO, such as the lack of armor arc. Then again, RT suffers a lot from the generic "?" icon.

I do miss the replays and find myself hovering far above the battlefield most of the time to keep track of casualties. It's much easier to do well in RT.

All of my CMBN multiplayer has been RT too, which is a bit lacking. It's been fun, yes, but not nearly satisfying enough. Without pause, you rarely ever have time to watch the action unfold and you have to paint with a really broad brush. I simply select entire platoons and rush them into battle. There's been some occasional micromanagement moments that almost rival Starcraft 2. I remember dancing around a Tiger and a Stug with crews, an XO team, an ammo bearer team and a jeep...Flinging grenades and laughing as those slow turrets turn in vain. Did I mention I hate the nahverteidigungswaffe?

Oh WEGO TCP/IP, how I and the Finnish CM community miss thee...

[sluggo337]

WEGO almost all the time. I have tried RT for smaller battles and it's fun but I hate it when I miss something and can't go back to watch. I do like the ability to Pause when I want. I would play a lot more RT if there was a rolling 30 sec of history I could Pause and replay. Not change orders but just see what happened or rewatch/save some cool event.

[Erwin]

The thing that I don't understand about RT fans is that they can't possibly have time to enjoy the graphics. BFC may just as well do a 2D CLOSE COMBAT top down sort of game for them, or COMPANY OF HEROES etc.

I have always thought that the best thing about all the CM games from the original 12 years ago was the ability to enjoy the scenes from many different angles like watching a movie replay from different camera positions.

[ss11955]

The thing that I don't understand about RT fans is that they can't possibly have time to enjoy the graphics. BFC may just as well do a 2D CLOSE COMBAT top down sort of game for them, or COMPANY OF HEROES etc.

I have always thought that the best thing about all the CM games from the original 12 years ago was the ability to enjoy the scenes from many different angles like watching a movie replay from different camera positions.

Right on !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WEGO all the time !

[John1966]

WEGO almost all the time. I have tried RT for smaller battles and it's fun but I hate it when I miss something and can't go back to watch. I do like the ability to Pause when I want. I would play a lot more RT if there was a rolling 30 sec of history I could Pause and replay. Not change orders but just see what happened or rewatch/save some cool event.

Totally agree. If you're doing RT then you want something that is actually user-friendly for RT like Close Combat. In fact didn't they bring out a 3D version of Close Combat that bombed? Seem to remember playing a demo and it was awful.

[herr_oberst]

WeGo vs RT might be related to "what you grew up with" to a certain degree.

I waited years for a PC to realize what I had wanted after sorting, playing, and generally moving hordes of cardboard counters on boards on a table with Avalon Hill games, and CMBO was just that. So WeGo it is, and still is as it suits what I want the best. RT/FPS just doesn't do it for me (have 2 teenagers who are clickfest happy).

Sure, for a while CloseCombat was fun (how many kills could you get with that MG42-equipped Kubelwagen before it got snuffed?), but didn't match my desire.

[slysniper]

Both have their place.

I prefer Wego for many of the same reasons others have mentioned, I really enjoy catching all the events that are taking place on the Battlefield. This is the only game that does that well while you are playing.

Rt is fine also. I find it enjoyable if I am playing the AI, it equals the playing field a little since I cannot command or watch everything that is going on. It gives a different feel to the game that is fun also. It is nice to be able to micromanage a unit and prevent it from doing stupid things, but that is a big advantage over the AI though – kind of cheating to say the least.

I have two problems, One RT in H to H play, I just do not see CM being a good game for that, I just do not think it’s the right design for good RT play where both sides will play with equal skills. Just think of an attacking player vs. a defensive player. For once I would want to be on the defense, just for the shear fact I need to manage much less in forces. Close combat is a much better design for that. Just for the simple reason they keep the forces to a reasonable managing size of 15 units to start with. If CM battles were designed small for that reason, then it would be fine. But in general, it isn’t.

My second issue is I think RT play and designers who use it have added time in scenarios for that style of play. I find many new scenarios just have way too much time and that a defender is at too great of a disadvantage for how long they are to hold their goals in a game. The only way in many scenarios for the defender to achieve their goal is to eliminate so many attacker that the game becomes more of a stalemate situation where neither side can progress much anymore, that is very realistic. But too many battles are too one sided in forces to create them type of losses. So given time the defender will always be eliminated. Thus the time limit in the game is the only method for the defender to achieve a goal, can he play well enough to slow the attack down to take longer than the requested time by the designer. I really think this only requires one simple thing to fix this issue. Scenarios should have two versions, one for RT play and one for Wego. We really need scenarios designed with it stated and clear as to which method they should be played in.

[Frankster65]

+2 to umlaut's post.

[Amizaur]

35.

A 15s WEGO mode .

I prefer the WEGO even though 1 minute is often a bit too long "without control" for me.

If I had an option to chose a 15, 30, 45 or 60s turns... I would be completly happy and never play RT again . Is is hard to code ?

[Praetori]

I prefer RT as it provides a better feeling for the flow of the battle.

I always played WeGo in the past but switched with CMSF BF.

The backside is that I rarely play large scenarios anymore. Company sized is about as big as they can get while still being manageable.

I would like to see multiplayer co-op in RT though as that could bring the large scale scenarios into RT.

Back in the days when I was young-ish and actually had time to put time into gaming I only played Turn-based or WeGo style strategy games (with the exception of Close Combat).

RTS traditionally leaves little time for thought and therefore the results are rarely as optimal or perfect as one would wish. Having all the little pixeltruppen work together like clockwork while compensating for losses and unexpected events is the goal. Seeing it unfold in RT is more fun than WeGo but the gameplay is harder.

[hoolaman]

I'm 31 and I mainly play WEGO, but will pick realtime if the situation is right.

Pausable RT is a lot of fun in solo play and for very small scenarios, like a reinforced platoon at the very biggest. It keeps the pace moving and puts realistic constraints on what you can see and control at any one moment.

The biggest problem with RT for me is the fact that you need to remain at high levels or miss blatantly obvious contacts with the enemy. CMx2 LODs are ugly as sin at the higher levels and the TacAI generally on responds with units that are directly fired upon, so cannot respond with realistic actions to a tank getting hit somewhere on the map.

RT multiplayer OTOH is absolutely ridiculous. No pause makes it the epitome of clickfests.

WEGO with 30 seconds or less timed orders phase like you used to be able to do in CMx1 would be perfect. I'd even like to see a timed orders phase in single player actually.

[sburke]

Older then anyone who has posted here yet, and I play both, smaller I play RT, bigger rt and occasional wego.

Rune

Dang and I thought that 105 note would have blown anything else away - geez you must be ancient.

[LJFHutch]

22, play almost exclusively RT (without pausing), I don't mind wego (absolutely cannot stand PBEM) but it just takes much too long and the fluidity of RT is much more enjoyable. I never play scenarios where I can't control my forces properly either, as to RT being a "click-fest", what size battles are you playing

[Ithikial_AU]

I'm 27 and been playing CMgames since CMBO.

CMx2 engine I switched to RT and found it hard to go back to WEGO. How fast things can happen in CMSF with modern weaponary I like (and need) the ability to pause the game. Really trying hard in CMBN to switch back to WEGO but find myself going RT more than others.

PBEM for multiplayer is just convenient for me due to work commitments.

[Bradley Dick]

I think WEGO vs Real Time comes down to the experience. The experiences are wildly different and require you to think differently.

With WEGO, you get to meticulously obsess over every turn. You get to watch replays and click through status panels. You lose that ability to interrupt your units between turns. I always liked the explanation of WEGO where you are playing as a commander who issues orders over radio and then hears reports before you can give new commands. If you gave good orders, then you're hopefully doing well when you hear the reports. If not, then you're panicking to come up with better orders. It's all about the plan and the strategy.

Real time is a different beast. All the complexity of the system is there. You can still obsess over planning and details. Unfortunately, you're left little time to micromanage. You have to trust in your men (however horribly trained or programmed) to do their jobs. You put them in the right place with a good plan, hopefully they do well in contact, and then you react. The reaction part is what separates WEGO from RT. You have to think on your feet without the ability to pause, at least against a human, and you just can't do everything at once. I always found it to be much more challenging and realistic. It does, however, lack the nuanced depth of the slow paced chess game that WEGO can be.

Chess is a game of strategy that can be played at a thoughtful pace.

Tennis is a game of chess that happens as fast as you can react.

I love the thoughtful games of WEGO and also the quick thinking required of real time. Good commanders don't get to sit indefinitely and real soldiers aren't usually as stupid as they can be in RT.

Hopefully, most of you can have fun with BOTH instead of trying to promote a split in the community.