A completly new Syrian Combat Mission game?

[Sequoia]

Steve mentioned in another thread it would be nice to reuse all the work they did for the initial Shock Force game. We know we're going to get a Russia vs NATO game with the updated CMX 2 engine but let me pose the question, given recent events in Syria, would a new game with the engines new features of a 2008 campaign against Syria still be marketable?

Someone once mentioned with the Syrian equipment you basically have everything North Korea has. Do you think a modern Korea game be a good seller?

[LongLeftFlank]

Korean War Part II gets brought up perennially; do a Search with Keyword Korea and you'll see. Here's my particular take on the topic:

Putting Chinese (or Korean) forces into a Combat Mission product has huge potential to attract a gigantic new audience for the game.

In this case, as a software company, BFC needs to consider a critical business question (and their CMA experience with the Russian audience may inform this): will they actually generate any revenues, or will the game simply be hacked and pirated on day 3 after release?

Also, please note that the moral circumstances surrounding a Third World War pitting US "main forces" against their Chinese counterparts would likely be vastly murkier than the CMSF Syrian backstory. That one was a total soft-pitch -- Syrian-enabled terrorists kill a bunch of white people, Syrian regime refuses to disavow it and pays the price. Pretty clear morally who the "good guys" are in that one, even though we're invading their country.

Assuming that the venue for such a scenario would be Asia (as opposed to a "Red Dawn" type thing on US soil), the moral circumstances -- big picture here -- would be far murkier.

Even in a Korean War Part II scenario, where the US and Chinese forces come to blows over the prostrate corpse of North Korea, the morality isn't clear. The Americans would see it as simply fulfilling their longtime obligations to the ROK as an ally, and disposing of a dangerous rogue nuclear gangster regime even more odious than Saddam's Iraq. And the Chinese are recklessly interfering in the reunification/rebuilding of the Korean nation. Oh, and a fair number of American troops have lost their lives in this cause over the past month or so (particularly if the KPA popped nukes and chemicals in their initial attack) -- sunk cost.

The Chinese, on the other hand, would see the US presence in Korea as the tail end of an awful* 500 year pattern of exploitative Western meddling (and far worse!) in what was, for most of human history, China's sandbox -- including in China itself. Kind of a Chinese Monroe Doctrine, if you will.

And there is some truth in that view, even though the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese and Filipinos wouldn't necessarily like it any more than the Mexicans or Cubans do. Enough truth that the Chinese would likely see the forcible ejection of the last "white army" (not counting the Russians) from mainland East Asia as a just and reasonable cause. Especially when that army was now advancing to their own borders. Which means the Chinese soldiers would fight hard and cunningly, with all the resources at their disposal.

US mechanized ground forces intervening in some kind of Chinese civil war would end up as another lopsided asymetrical fight with Chinese tanks instead of T90s, and I think BFC has learned its lesson on that one. And would definitely make the US the "bad guys", harking back to the imperialist Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion.

BTW, all of the above also means that Chinese players will see themselves as the "good guys" in any hypothetical CM game they play, not as another set of faceless hordes for the US to butcher.

* Although the US Navy benevolently guarding an endless stream of Chinese exports flowing across the Pacific to WalMart under extremely generous terms of trade since 1980 could be argued to be a significant goodwill gift or reparation to China, enabling their super-rapid modernization. But that wouldn't necessarily occur to the average Chinese soldier, or hardline demagogue.

Remember the Twilight 2000 RPG? Pretty imaginative and well researched work, and IIRC posited on a Soviet-Chinese war that then becomes a European and world (nuclear) war when NATO invades East Germany. Although anyone being able to field an even nominally mechanized army in a post-apocalypse world did strain credulity a bit.

It's pretty difficult to devise a plausible scenario where a US or NATO armoured force would go head to head with PLA mechanized forces CMSF style. Best bet would be the Korean peninsula in the wake of a second Korean War -- even if the Chinese weren't behind a North Korean invasion (unlikely, at least with their current leadership), they would certainly intervene quickly and seize a fair chunk of territory to keep Americans away from the Yalu border. So you could get:

(a) An "accidental" clash in the outskirts of Pyongyang between PLA armoured forces and US/ROK Marines moving in from the coast (the DMZ presumably being devastated).

( Later on, incidents along a "new DMZ" in the Chinese-occupied buffer zone.

© Ongoing guerrilla warfare by die-hard North Korean irregulars, abetted by China, against the "occupying forces".

But very hard to imagine a head-to-head ground clash. Even with major improvements in Chinese airpower and support arms.

[Erwin]

Did anyone say "Political Correctness?"

While LLF's political analysis is probably correct, we are talking about an entertainment product game here, not a tool of foreign poicy sanctioned by the US (or any) Govt - and we all know there have been other games that posited a Sino-US or Russo-NATO/US conflict and the sky did not fall in. Popular first person shooters have the Russkies, Chinese, N. Koreans etc etc as the bad guys.

I also understand the commercial realities as to why every game tends to have the US as the primary player role. However, I would love to see India vs China - that is the most likely scenario imo since they are competing (or soon will be) for the same resources and geopolitical areas. One of "W"'s only decent foreign policy decisions was helping India with nuke technology so they could better counter the emerging China threat (as an expendable US surrogate "aircraft carrier" as the UK was during the Cold War).

[ZPB II]

A couple of things about political correctness.

A popular first person shooter gets off easy. They are by nature supposed to be rad and edgy. Nobody cares, because who would take a message conveyed by a game like Call of Duty seriously? The plots do at times have some undertones that could dig deep, but it is still a macho gunwank tailored for the lowest common denominator. (I've played nearly every Call of Duty, they're entertainment products of consumption culture, not a hobby like Combat Mission.)

But when we are talking about a realistic and restrained game like CM, things get different. It is much harder to sell the idea of propagating foreign policy objectives via the use of force in a thought-provoking game. This is not an MTV audience.

From what I've gathered in my limited dealings with Koreans and Chinese, they are somewhat sensitive when it comes to this issue.

I'm not saying it's a dealbreaker, but since I want BFC to stay in business I want them to consider all aspects.

[Erwin]

Well, if N. Korea and China are a major customer...

However, I would suggest that the market for the CM game series is so minuscule and specialized compared to the shooters like COD etc. the thought that it could offend a major nation plays into a rather overstated sense of self-importance (that true enuff, some threads on these forums betray).

[ZPB II]

Why are you dragging nations into this? I was talking about people.

The more niche a game is, the more it should avoid needless provocation that might alienate potential customers. I just don't see CM as the type of game that could succesfully ride the controversy wave. Yes, controversy is a cheap and easy marketing trick, but there are plenty of examples when it backfires.

Like I said, I don't see this as a huge issue, but still...It's fun to speculate.

[Erwin]

There are already many cardboard wargames and a few computer wargames on subjects like a war between N and S Korea with Chinese and/or US intervention, NATO vs resurgent Russia, China vs Japan and US, and at least one or two Iraq Invasion games were rushed out just prior to the RL Iraq Invasion. There were no fall-outs at all.

Surely you are not saying that you would have nixed the CMSF concept cos someone in Syria (large CM customer base?) would have been offended. Modern reality is that these days one can't breathe without someone somewhere being offended.

To eliminate "what if" scenarios from wargaming sounds completely silly since most wargaming (or any gaming really) are about depicting "what if's". Sure if there are tons of BF customers in India and China that's an issue... But, I somehow doubt that.

[LongLeftFlank]

Note that I did not intend the above observations to be a reason not to develop a Second Korean War and Aftermath CMSF game. Just saying that if BFC were ever to develop such content, they should take care to provide thoughtful RED force briefings for H2H scenarios, as well as including a campaign from the RED (DPRK or PLA) point of view. Since I believe that once word got around the interwebs, a substantial Asian gamer community would come out of the woodwork.

And they'd bring their nationalism with them; not that BFC needs to cater to that, just acknowledge that they'll want to play their nation's forces with a reasonable chance to win at least on points, think of themselves as the "good guys", and also be VERY irritated by game mechanics (sterotypes) like unsplittable squads that seem to "tilt" the scales in favour of the White Boys (I suspect they do understand and accept that their equipment is generally inferior at long ranges).

This in sharp contrast to the overwhelming BLUE slant of the CMSF series. Community generated content aside, there was precious little to encourage players to "like" playing the RED side. Just my opinion.

EDIT: All these comments also apply to the announced CMSF:Ukraine venue. There will be Russian (and Ukrainian) players, and they will want to play their own side on a "fair fight" basis, etc.

[sburke]

I could see possibly Chinese gamers wanting to be able to fight their countries units but I expect there would be a miniscule N Korean gaming community if one exists at all. Anyone with access to the internet and CM would have to be someone who fled the regime with little likely sympathy with it. I could on the other hand see a possible South Korean community wanting to face off against the North.

One place it might be interesting to see about PLA battle drill is any information that may have come out about the fighting between Vietnam and China. Granted it is dated, but as I recall China didn't exactly fair all that well despite commiting some 200,000 troops to the invasion. The spin was good, but the reality was they never even faced Vietnamese regulars.

[LongLeftFlank]

Oh, absolutely. The PLA is probably even less ready today to fight a determined enemy, especially outside China, than it was in 1979.

Its officer corps, like much of the rest of the Chinese state sector, is vastly more concerned with repurposing military resources (including extensive land holdings and conscript labour) for its personal enrichment than in bothering with the humdrum of readiness and training. The old saying "good iron is not used to make nails, nor good men to make soldiers" remains true; smart, ambitious Chinese do not generally seek a military career, and if they do they want to be influential officers, certainly not the career NCOs that lie at the heart of the effectiveness of a modern army.

That said, the PLA does do a certain amount of training of course -- this isn't the 1930s, and there have been periodic crackdowns by the CMC on excessive absenteeism and other extreme abuses (embezzlement of soldier pay) since the 1980s. And certain elite formations do maintain a higher degree of readiness, especially for control of domestic dissent.

But there's a good reason the Chinese hesitate to invade Taiwan, even though they are well aware the Seventh Fleet would likely not lift a finger.