IGUG system issues

[numdydar]

The major issue with all "I do my turn and then you do yours" (I go, You go) is there is no way to react to events between turns. Paxadox has gotton away from this by using a 'continous time' system in their HoI 3 series. However even there, a 'turn' is an hour as that is the smallest unit of time in the game.

Other games, like War in the Pacific, use a system where moves are plotted for all units, naval, air, land, by both sides, then the turn 'runs'. The players cannot do anything while the turn runs, but naval and air units can 'react' to events as the game processes the plotted moves. Land combat takes place at the end of all land movement but units have to be in the same location to fight.

The issue with all these systems is that for naval forces, the IGYG system fails pretty badly. Since if I send an invasion force somewhere, it cannot be stopped if the distance is short, like in the Med or the English channel. So in the game I can sail around with Assult ships and not worry about any opposing fleets. To me this is a huge flaw in these systems, lack of naval reaction.

There is a possible solution with a game called Aurora http://aurora2.pentarch.org/ . The player can actually set the time inerval for each turn, from 5 minutes to 30 days. In addition, the player can also chose the 'step' for each turn. So if you had a 5 minute turn, you could have the game evaluate, moves, combats, etc. every 5 sec to every minute if you wanted. So how would this help SC?

Assume that you plotted all your attacks and moves in a turn. Your units would show where they would end up just like now. Plus your attacks would show the most likely result of the attacks, including air atacks. Say the game was hard coded to use an hour as the 'step' of time and you chose 1 day as the turn lenght for that turn. So the game engine would step through 24 'mini-turns' behind the scenes and show the results of these 'mini-moves' as they occured. Or generate a turn report that highlights the major events.

With this type of system, an invasion could set sail, for England, the UK could have ships on a patrol type mission that sweep the channel (or even better, in port with a mission to react to fleets withing X squares). Then as the invasion fleet is sailing, the fleet has a chance to intercept and defeat it before anything lands.

Planes coulds also be set to patrol and/or react on both sides that could damage both fleets as they move towards each other. This would result with a much more inteactive system than the current naval system.

To me the gold standard of a WWII game that covers the ETO, is how easy is it for the Germans to invade England. Not so much to capture the island, but just to get ashore with a decent chance to capture a port. With a1939 start. Any game that starts earlier than that can better adjust things towards that goal than a '39 start. So far the best game model that reflects this is the HoI 3 series.

I realize this is more for SC3 than an expamsion of SC2 or patch. But I am hopefully these comments will get the developers to think about a better naval model than the current one. It would be really nice to have one in the ETO that works as well as War in the Pacific, without that level of detail of course. As no one to date has accomplished this yet, I really understand how hard it is to model naval actions that can be over in half a day at the same time you are modeling land battles that can take weeks.

I wish you all the best to accomplish this

[SeaMonkey]

The "Command Ops" series by Panther Games has a great system. Sure would be nice to see a strategic game adopt such a simultaneous/reactive type system.

[numdydar]

I have played almost every ETO game out there and none of them do a decent job with the Atlantic naval operations when individual ship classes are used. Like I said HoI 3 does the best but it is not a true turn based system.

The computer version of Decision Games War in Europe (no AI though) abstracts the UBoat and naval warfare and the model works really well. But just generic ship and UBoat 'points' are used versus ship classes. To be honest though, I would much rather have the naval warfare abstracted and work accurately versus have all the different ship classes and have it be so bad.

In AoD I had two Allied CAs around an island in the Pacific. I had absolutely NO ships anywhere near them, yet I could blithy sail around them like they were nowhere near (even going into the square right next to them) with a transport and safely land. Like that really would have happened lol.

I still like the game and it is fun, but I am REALLY hoping that someday some developer will get naval warfare right without have to go to lenghts that War in the Pacific goes to. But maybe that is the only way to use individual ship classes and have them work properly.