What does Squad Leader do better than CM?

[Peterk]

You know, the rules aren't half bad if you have an electronic version and can look up and cross-reference things quickly.

Just started playing ASL again tonight after 6 months away and I found something out...yes, the learning curve is absolutely huge, but once you make it to a decent level, it kind of sticks and you don't have to go all the way back to the beginning.

It's strange, I keep coming back to ASL, but I haven't really touched CMBB for 2 years or so and don't think I'll ever go back to playing it a lot unless CM Campaigns changes my mind.

Anyways, my take on what ASL does "better". Better for me doesn't necessarily mean more realistic, but handled in a manner that's more fun for the player.

1. Big battles/campaigns. I don't find that CM operations come anywhere close in immersion/involvement to something like Red Barricades. A turn of Red Barricades - ASL is a lot more fun than a turn of To The Volga - CM; to me at least.

2. Buildings

ASL has 2, 3 story buildings with interior walls, cellars and rooftops and possible extra fortification. A fight for a building in ASL can often be a long drawn out affair with lots of maneuvering and strategy.

CM buildings are fairly generic in comparison.

Scenarios depicting fights for well-known strongpoints like Pavlov's House or the factories in Stalingrad can probably be better modelled in ASL.

3. Solitaire play. SASL is quite well done. The "artificial intelligence" of the SASL system produces a less stupid game from the system than playing against CMBB's AI (at least when its attacking). I'm doing a solitaire play of Red Barricades using SASL guidelines and it feels almost like I'm playing against another person - the system is doing good defense, well-timed counter-attacks. I never saw anything as satisfactory playing solo against CM in a similar sort of sceanrio.

4. Less Fog Of War....

is sometimes a good thing excitement-wise?!?

I remember playing a ASL scenario a while ago. A russian AT gun had a killer shot lined up on a Panzer and rolled boxcars to break the gun. In CM if the same thing happens - the German player would say "I wonder why that gun stopped shooting; maybe it's broken"; the Russian player would say "Crap I broke my gun"...but you don't get the simultaneous groan and scream of excitement you get in ASL from the same event as both players see what happened at the same time.

Same thing when a berserker is created and starts its charge. Usually very exciting in ASL; but in CM not really.

I think the transparency of being able to tell why something happened can lend a lot of excitement to a game.

[Michael Dorosh]

I think it is possible to interpret every one of the strengths you list as a weakness though. I guess it's just as well to say "to each his own" as it all depends on personal taste.

I know what you mean about transparency. I think Charlie Kibler and I tried to play a CM scenario with no fog of war. Was interesting. I don't think I sucked any less though. It is certainly more "gamey", but with a positive connotation. All comes down to whether you want a game or a sim. I guess the great thing about CM is you can have it both ways, to a degree, through use of the FoW setting.

[John Kettler]

dieseltaylor,

I owned and played both SL and CoI, but any such aspirations toward ASL were brought low by the enormous cumulative cost and seeing some ASL players walk into a gaming venue with a foot high stack of rule binders. That did it for me! I don't miss wading through a sea of legalese written in microtype, an issue which stopped me from getting into the eagerly awaited MechWar II from SPI.

dalem and Michael Dorosh,

While I grant that fighting from the halftrack was certainly not the norm, save, say, against a broken foe, the Germans paid just such a visit to one of the first American units to land in North Africa. Attacking out of the setting sun, they came roaring in, guns blazing and flinging grenades into the American positions, before racing off into the darkness after having "welcomed the new neighbors." I also own a facsimile of the wartime sketchbook of artist Hans List in which exactly this kind of attack is seen

from the recipient's perspective.

Carl Puppchen,

The around practically forever WRG Rules had morale checks prior to close assaults. The German antitank training films I posted the links to gave me my best sense yet how scary a tank could be.

Ace Pilot,

TSR's Tractics, IMO, had a vastly better hit location system than either ASL or CM and did a very good job of depicting the challenges of hitting a small exposed turret or weapon mount.

Wisbech_lad,

Kingmaker? That takes me way back. Used to play it every Friday night with my gaming group for months on end. Since you shared your gaming gaffe, I'll share one of my own. Some of my friends and I played AH's Up Front religiously for two years straight before I happened to discover that the entire time we'd been running ordnance attacks wrong. Yes, long red faces! Speaking of ordnance, I think main gun and other jams made the game pretty exciting. Sucks when your one big weapon has the target acquired then suffers a failure of some sort!

pamak1970,

Am really hoping for proper treatment of grazing fire in CMx2, since it's vital to proper defensive fire layout, as well as proper modeling of the cover penetration properties of the .50 cal. MG and other weapons, rather than just treating them as firepower factors. The Germans hated the .50 because it could blow through otherwise good cover.

Michael Emrys,

Ah, arguments! Got so bad that several friendships were very nearly destroyed by epic clashes of the rule lawyers. I still remember the public dressing down one friend got for petulant

behavior in Up Front tournament play. What doubly stung was that it came from his wife, a national Up Front champion!

As for variable fog density, burnoff and the like,

I want them!

General Bolt,

Priceless! Had to fight down punitive urges years ago when, after being beaten six weeks straight in AH's Russian Campaign, I finally began to turn the German tide, only to be undone by my friend's marauding little brother. Even worse are stories I've heard involving DNO and cats!

GLK,

That passage is actually more opaque than some of the worst DoD jargon passages I've seen.

Ted,

Laughed so hard my eyes teared up and almost fell out of my chair to boot!

Steve,

My friend Don Hawthorne used to be editor of the GENERAL, and I got to visit the, er, lair shortly before Dott the Visionless and Wargame Clueless took a fat payout and threw his people to the wolves.

Brent Pollock,

Concur! Not only were they a major factor for the Americans, but the I Remember stories are full of mentions of German "frames," which I think are FW-189 Uhus.

Regards,

John Kettler

[GJK]

Peter,

Dorosh and me just started up a pbem of an ASLSK scenario. I haven't played in a few months either but had been itching to. FWIW, I also hadn't played CM for several months until the other night, I did a quick battle just to get it out of my system. Both of these games will be ones that I'll always go back to as none does it better (each in their own way).

I have also transitioned from playing computer wargames to primarily playing board wargames (via VASSAL albeit). My brother, whom I was playing "Fire in the Sky" with tonight summed it up when he said that with boardgames, "You do everything. You know every piece and their status in the game. You're much more involved.". Some say that the benefit of computer wargames is that the computer handles the mundane tasks for you, supply checks, rules enforcement, etc. I'm finding that to be a liability though. I much prefer having that complete control; call it micro-management if you will (and yes, I know that in *some* computer wargames you can micro-manage, but they all still do *some* things for you that sometimes you'd rather it not of done).

My thoughts on this old but classic thread.

[Peterk]

Hey Gary,

Are you guys still doing the starter kits?!?! Time for the big plunge. Barricades!

Your brother hit it on the head with where the immersion comes from in boardgames.

I think the charm of CM however is more than just getting the computer to do the tedious chores and rules. It's seeing your move in 3-D. I have a feeling if it were 2-D; it wouldn't work.

If you wrote an ASL proram to do all the rules and calculations and dice rolling - even though that's what some people think they want - I have a feeling that the fun of the game would be gone. ASLers would start complaining that there wasn't enough to do.

[GJK]

Originally posted by Peterk:

Hey Gary,

Are you guys still doing the starter kits?!?! Time for the big plunge. Barricades!

I've got the 1st ed RB, the new 2nd ed RB and several modules. I was getting pretty deep into regular ASL with a buddy until he was shipped off to Iraq and then my interest waned. So, going back through the SK's (aren't those things great? Like little refresher courses) and then I'll work up to full ASL again. Actually looking forward to SK#3 (tankz!). I've never used any type of vehicle in ASL before, so that will be fun.

Originally posted by Peterk:

Your brother hit it on the head with where the immersion comes from in boardgames.

I think the charm of CM however is more than just getting the computer to do the tedious chores and rules. It's seeing your move in 3-D. I have a feeling if it were 2-D; it wouldn't work.

If you wrote an ASL proram to do all the rules and calculations and dice rolling - even though that's what some people think they want - I have a feeling that the fun of the game would be gone. ASLers would start complaining that there wasn't enough to do.

That's funny, I said the exact same thing in a thread on the GDF here just last week. I thought that I wanted a "computer ASL" game, I can see now that it would quickly become yet another computer wargame that I would rarely play. The fun factor with ASL is the social interaction and the actual squad management.

[Peterk]

I'm probably going to try to play all of the scenarios in Beyond Valor in the next little while. I'm doing Paratrooper now and am about 3/4 of the way through. Let me know if you ever want a game.

[DavidFields]

I see a different lineage to CM than ASL.

My friends played Panzer Leader when I was young. (Like PanzerBlitz, but with that important opportunity fire). We would set up two identical sets of boards, have a partition in between, and a moderator/mediator would tell each person (or team) what they were able to see of the other side's units.

This allowed FOW for starting set-up and units, unknown, and variable, reinforcements. Special events, like para drops. And, with a good moderator, one has a final judge on rules disputes. (Sounds D and D-ish, but we thought, "Why desire a flaming sword, when you could instead command a Panther tank?"

In CM, the computer replaces the moderator.

Can ASL be played like that?

Different people have different preferences, of course: the visuals are not a big thing for me, but my son zooms in and notices every detail (and defect) of a unit. For me the interest is the projection of will in the face of uncertainty--indeed, intelligently reducing the uncertainty is part of the fun. It is the difference between Bridge and Poker on the one hand, and Chess on the other (with history thrown in).

With new engines, CM will get better eye-candy, but I would say even the unmodded CMBO has the CM strengths of FOW, simultaneous movement, and more accurate ballistics.

What was better about ASL? For some, I think, there is the fact that you can see the rules, whereas in CM many of the "rules" have to be derived or intuited--hence the threads where people run tests on bogging rates.

[DerBlitzer]

Fun to see this topic resurrected---I hadn't known of its existence until now.

I, too, latched onto the Avalon Hill games as a teenager, advancing from Afrika Korps to Tobruk to PanzerBlitz/PanzerLeader to Russia Campaign (which we'd always start but never finish) to Arab-Israeli Wars (never really sparked my interest much) and finally to Squad Leader and its sequels. It was so thrilling to be able to play on the tactical level, with such detail; I can remember the excitement of playing those first scenarios against my brothers---of delighting in sewer movement and berserkers, and then the introduction of tanks!

What does SL (and board games in general) have over CM and other computer games? Imagination and conversation. For all the 3-D effects in CM, which I love, you get a much richer visual experience when you play a board game because of what you imagine, and what you say, face to face, to your opponent, mimicking the fear, the sounds, and voices on your own, rather than relying on the game to do it for you. Plus there are always those side discussions about history that always come up as you advance your tanks across the hexes.

Some of you younger folks probably don't know that before PBEM there was PBM---games played by regular mail. Yes, before email existed. I think Avalon Hill (or its magazine The General) published PBM forms that you'd use; you'd laboriously fill out the coordinates of hex positions of your units, where they were moving, firing, etc. There was a whole ladder system maintained (maybe it still is) for such games. I actually played Squad Leader this way against a guy on the opposite coast; talk about a slow rate of turn exchange! It would take almost two weeks to make a tiny advance in the battle. But the anticipation of getting that letter with the opponent's moves was extreme. For dice rolls, we'd use digits in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on a specific set of days. It seemed to work fairly well, and it's the only reason that I remember the DJA being around 800 (!) in 1978. Of course, you had to leave your board set up for weeks or months at a time, not an easy thing to do with one's mother prowling around, cleaning, and vacuuming up occasional pieces that had fallen on the floor. A powerful Engineer squad helplessly sucked into a black hole!

I was in the middle of a large SL game the summer before college, and before I left home, I painstakingly recorded all the positions of my units and my opponent's, packed up the game, and took it to my new dorm room, where I actually set up the scenario again and tried to play. But physics and chemistry proved to be far more complicated than SL's rules, and so it was the last game of SL I ever played. But I think I have been inspired to pick up a copy of ASL's starter kit and have a go. Anyone for a game by regular mail? [just kidding]

[GJK]

Good post DerBlitzer. Try the SK's, you wont be dissapointed. The rules are very easy to digest and each of the scenarios have a high replay value. Install VASL and Skype (voice) and then meet up with others and play online or arrange for a pbem game. Very enjoyable.

I attempted to pbm a game of ViTP once. I was 15 I think, and the guy that I was gaming against was much older (I gathered) when after turn two his letter rattled off a list of boo-boo's that I had made in my previous turn and then concluded with a simple "you haven't read the rules, have you?". Ugh.

[Nine_Reds_Instead]

While I am a big fan of the CM series, Squad Leader will remain one of my favorite war games. The lush artwork on the boards and the running figures on the counters made for a very visual gaming experience. Also, the individual leader counters allowed for a bit of semi-roleplaying (ok, I was a D&D nerd as well) which added to the experience. I remember a Cross of Iron game where I as the Germans placed my most useless leader (a 6+1 Colonel) and a couple of unfortunate squads to the front of my position to delay the Russian armored onslaught. The good colonel actually lasted quite a few turns and managed to destroy a couple of T-34s thanks to some extremely lucky dice rolls, much to the frustration of my opponent.

At the end of the day, I rate Squad Leader (with the COI module) close to CM for enjoyability as a simulation game. ASL, on the other hand, was too complicated and those games never flowed the way the original SL did. When it got to the stage of rolling 4 or 5 dice of different colors everytime you did something, and not being able to see any actual unit counters becuase they were all buried under multiple information counters, the enjoyment of the game faded.

Just my view.

[GJK]

I think that a perfect comparison of SL to ASL is CMBO to CMAK. SL/CMBO are fun games for being the first in the genre, ASL/CMAK refine a lot of what wasn't done right in the initial offering.

I think Peter hit on a good point with ASL - once you learn the basics; Chapter A and B stuff, then it becomes like riding a bike. If you play a scenario that offers a terrain piece or a SW that you haven't used before, then you quickly read how those are handled and you play. No way that you learn all of the rules and you don't need to. It's really a brilliant game system.

[Brent Pollock]

Sheesh - I'd forgotten this old thread. Coincidentally, Tom Weniger & I have recently started up a RB CGIII - no better ASL experience than that one. Haven't had a crack at that for over a decade.

And what's all this talk about Starter Kits! Skip those pipsqueaks and pre-order the Valour of the Guards HASL, gawddammit!

[GJK]

Got it pre-ordered. Catching up on the rules so that I can play the thing. Beauty of a map, can't wait to have a look at it.

[LongLeftFlank]

Ah, memories of geeky megalomania flood home.

In winter 1977, suburban Buffalo NY, my friends and I pooled 6(x5) sets of CoI counters and boards to reenact "Elefant/Tiger Panzerkeil at Kursk" on my bedroom floor.... the Ballantine paperback being our primary source. I remember being totally pissed at AH for the crappy print quality of the second set of CoI counters (unreadably dark navy and bright orange) and boards (far too much brown) I had ordered for the occasion. For me, age 13 and making my first mail order purchase ever with my paper route money, this was my version of the Rust Belt "crushed beer can and marble in the dashboard" betrayal of the American dream.

But unbroken, we soldiered on, listening to Styx and Rush on cassette as our stoner older brothers and parents shoveled snow and lined up for gas back in Canada (Back then, compared to Buffalo, Cleveland and NYC, my hometown of Toronto seemed like an oasis of enlightened civilization: CN Tower. Ontario Place. The bank towers. Game over, eh?)

With about 1000 AFV and ordnance counters per side (infantry was largely beside the point), in about 30 hours of snowday play we got through the turn 2 Defense Fire Phase before my mum's cats got into the room and executed Operation Kutuzov on our pathetic Tamiya Sturmpanzer fanboy asses.

The Advanced D&D Monster Manual came out around that time, so that was pretty much the swansong for wargaming, as it was for our cardboard SS Panzerkorps. Having drunk the Koolaid though, I kept buying the ASL games all through college, even though there was nobody to play against. They still sit today in my brother's basement, counters neatly arranged in plastic hardware store containers, collecting dust, lost legions of my misspent youth (oh rubbish, I'm a spreadsheet jock today, and where do you think I got so good at large pattern recognition?)

What was the Paul Carell caption again: "One game of many; one dork of many"

[GJK]

I'd grab that collection and bring it to your home before he notices how much some of those modules go for on ebay.

[thewood]

Here is a great thread on SZO that pretty much explains why computers should be used for wargameing. This thread will bring tears to the eyes to all but the strongest ASL rules lawyers.

http://www.strategyzoneonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44620

[GJK]

To me, that explains why computer wargames are deficient. I'll explain.

MMP decided to tweak two rules in the recently released Journal 7 (those are rules that have been the way that they were for 25+ years). The good thing is that if mutually agreed upon by both players, you can either adopt the errata or ignore it. If this were a computer wargame, you'd be stuck with whatever the coding team decided to do.

[Peterk]

Pah.

That's a MINOR, MINOR, MINOR rules change and insignificant for the vast majority of players. Most ASL rules quibbles tend to be just that...arguing over something that has 0.01% impact on the result of the game just for the sake/fun of arguing.

In any computer game you wouldn't even have the option to tell your AFV to take a shot while it's moving...so there.

[thewood]

Originally posted by Peterk:

Pah.

That's a MINOR, MINOR, MINOR rules change and insignificant for the vast majority of players. Most ASL rules quibbles tend to be just that...arguing over something that has 0.01% impact on the result of the game just for the sake/fun of arguing.

In any computer game you wouldn't even have the option to tell your AFV to take a shot while it's moving...so there.

That is exactly my point. Instead of arguing over the merits of the best placement of a MG in a village, they are arguing over which phase that MG should fire in. The entire purpose of the game has been lost on a lot of the hardcore ASLer's. If arguing over those rules is your hobby, than so be it. But those same people will turn around and declare ASL as the most realistic game around.

While I agree that games like CM have to be taken on faith, I believe most ASLer's take what comes down from on high (MMP or AH) as gospel and with the same faith as CMer's have in battlefront.

[Peterk]

The arguing is pretty optional. I've found that most ASLers (granted I don't play much face to face or ever do tournaments) don't argue too much. The problem is the ones that do argue can be kinda LOUD and hard to ignore and fill threads 10 pages long (kind of like the Pengers here...but they're really easy to ignore) !!!

I don't take rules/mistakes too seriously. Most of the time when I go back to fix a mistake (I have detailed VASL logs for all my games), I find that there is no difference in the result anyways. I learned that early and don't let the rules get in the way of having a good time with the system.

As an aside. Just played a PBEM turn of Red Barricades this morning and a turn of Pegasus Bridge after lunch. Even with monster rulebooks and headaches from checking stuff up, those campaign games still rock! Good fun.

[slysniper]

The best thing about ASL was selling it on line and getting all my money back and some. Having the expearence of playing it for many years with much enjoyment. But I have moved on to better things and continue to beleive that the computer games will continue to push the level of wargaming to new levels. I am thankful for those at CM that have kept that vision.

[GJK]

It sounds like you played a lot of ASL. I had only moderate play time with it before moving on to CM. Now that I'm burned out on CM, I'm glad that there's ASL. Hopefully you wont get to the point that you're searching for ASL material on ebay and other locations because you're burned out on CM and back into ASL.

[slysniper]

It sounds like you played a lot of ASL

I loved it, but it had its day. First to steal me away from it was the close combat series, then cm. I can tell Tow will be likely the next, then maybe CMII. But why would I go back when maps are never wrecked, players are not hard to find and fighting over rules are for fools. ASL, sell it while the money is good, for soon it will die with the Generation that grew up on it. I am part of that Generation, let me tell you between the eye sight and memory, ASL would not be enjoyable much longer.

[GJK]

I disagree. It's 25 years strong and growing. With the release of the ASL Starter Kits, there's a new generation that is learning the system. It may never have it's heyday of 1985 but it isn't going to die - not anytime soon if ever. It still has the largest and most gaming conventions held around the world and the largest following of any board wargame.