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SoW was a lot of fun. Next time should be goons vs. goons, players control divisions, courier chat only, camera lock on your commander. 
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Mar 29, 2014 23:27
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:I'm experimenting with a WiTE 1941 campaign where I play as the Soviets and do literally absolutely nothing every turn and I'm somehow doing better than the Soviets did in real life. Well I suppose you could argue that the soviets were actively incompetent in some ways.
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Mar 29, 2014 23:57
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:I'm experimenting with a WiTE 1941 campaign where I play as the Soviets and do literally absolutely nothing every turn and I'm somehow doing better than the Soviets did in real life. Many a debate has been had on many East Front games over how to convince a Soviet player to be as stupid as Stavka historically was because giving any amount of freedom to the Soviets means it just isn't going to happen.
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Mar 30, 2014 00:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:Many a debate has been had on many East Front games over how to convince a Soviet player to be as stupid as Stavka historically was because giving any amount of freedom to the Soviets means it just isn't going to happen. I don't think it's possible and the best East front game is one in which you have several players cooperatively dancing German armies around an AI Soviet behemoth.
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Mar 30, 2014 00:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:Many a debate has been had on many East Front games over how to convince a Soviet player to be as stupid as Stavka historically was because giving any amount of freedom to the Soviets means it just isn't going to happen. Really the only way I can think of is to have Stalin as a force ingame who will give you orders for counterattack and "Defend at all costs" orders. You can fail these, but you shouldn't fail too many in succession or completely, or else Comrade Chairman might start to think you are secretly colluding with the enemy... Hell, you could activate that in late 1942 for the Germans. In a word, you turn the AI's stupidity into a feature.
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Mar 30, 2014 01:47
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I've seen games where the Germans can play a Stalin card that makes you have to launch attacks or face a really bad penalty. If they really want a simulation, they may need to add some lovely dictator flavor other than "mediocre generals disappear sometimes."
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Mar 30, 2014 01:58
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Yeah, the Sudden Death VP idea is one I've seen a couple of times. WITE (and others) seems to just make the Soviets so weak and slow that the Germans can make a bunch of sweeping encirclements regardless. One idea I'd like to see is a 'hidden strength' mechanic. Your Soviet units display a strength of either ?-? or are wildly inaccurate estimates until you attack with them at least once, effectively tempting the player into making attacks that he thinks will go well or are necessary. The German player could still see accurate strength counts on the Soviet counters, but only on his turn.
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Mar 30, 2014 02:01
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ArchangeI posted:Really the only way I can think of is to have Stalin as a force ingame who will give you orders for counterattack and "Defend at all costs" orders. You can fail these, but you shouldn't fail too many in succession or completely, or else Comrade Chairman might start to think you are secretly colluding with the enemy... That was actually implemented in a much simpler game. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin had a mission where your superior officer was trying to undermine your forces, and would, every third day, force one particular type of unit in your army to not move or attack for the turn. I could definitely see that sort of thing working on a much larger scale for a Russian Front game, or any game where a major component of how the war went was the stupidity of one side's command.
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Mar 30, 2014 02:05
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The Soviet Army was outclassed and did launch a bunch of lovely attacks, but sometimes they surprised the Germans. Alan Clark's Barbarossa has tons of German commanders bitching about local counter attacks and Russian ferocity. I feel like if you tried that at all you would end up with way, way higher than historical casualties and could possibly lose the war. The one time I played Soviets on MP, I had some success launching very local attacks, but I also pulled an anti-Stalin and ran to the Dnepr across the front with every rail point I had. By the time the Germans caught up, I was dug in and could then hold long enough to build real armies and do real attacks. It worked, but it was a sloggy WWI strategy and felt like to went against the spirit of the game.
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Mar 30, 2014 02:06
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Everything I've read that went over Barbarossa (including that book) basically presents the German reaction to the Russian's resistance as a sort of slowly dawning, horrified realization that they've bit off more than they could chew, as the Red Army pretty much counterattacked (sloppily) at every opportunity, and because I think the Red Army went through the equivalent of being completely destroyed and rebuilt twice over or something ridiculous like that.
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Mar 30, 2014 02:39
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From reading a few Glantz books on the eastern front it seems like those counterattacks were really quite beneficial. It was the counterattacks at Smolensk that slowed down the AGC enough that they couldn't take Moscow, the counterattack in the Crimea that slowed down the taking of Smolensk, the counterattack at Lake Ilmen that slowed down AGN so they couldn't surround Leningrad in enough time, and of course all these counter attacks caused a lot of strain on manpower and made it so they lost a million men in the first year. This is my problem with the way wite in particular plays, it rewards the red army for doing something that in all rights should have lead to disaster, namely running away. And then it does stuff like give the soviets a random bonus to attack in the winter, when it really should be that they get no bonus and it is the fact they bled the germans dry and the introduction of fresh soviet troops that throw the Wehrmacht back. It is infuriating that they model every tank and stupid pioneer squad and make you dance them around for your army to win, but then they abstract the very basic things that lead to the eventual victory of either side.
dtkozl fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Mar 30, 2014 |
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Mar 30, 2014 03:23
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ArchangeI posted:Really the only way I can think of is to have Stalin as a force ingame who will give you orders for counterattack and "Defend at all costs" orders. You can fail these, but you shouldn't fail too many in succession or completely, or else Comrade Chairman might start to think you are secretly colluding with the enemy... This is exactly how DC:CB works.
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Mar 30, 2014 03:26
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Also both Stalin's Not One Step Back order and Hitler's in the winter of 41-42 was argued by Glantz that it helped both armies. The real problem for the soviets early on is a major lack of good staff officers, any sort of orderly fighting withdrawl on a major scale should be utterly beyond them.
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Mar 30, 2014 03:30
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Glantz's Barbarossa book even talks about how Northern Front managed the WITE equivalent of cutting off a Panzer Division from its supply lines and causing 1 turn of Isolated status.dtkozl posted:This is my problem with the way wite in particular plays, it rewards the red army for doing something that in all rights should have lead to disaster, namely running away. And then it does stuff like give the soviets a random bonus to attack in the winter, when it really should be that they get no bonus and it is the fact they bled the germans dry and the introduction of fresh soviet troops that throw the Wehrmacht back. It is infuriating that they model every tank and stupid pioneer squad and make you dance them around for your army to win, but then they abstract the very basic things that lead to the eventual victory of either side. Yup, this is a problem I have with WITE as well. It models everything down to the individual squads, but then cannot correctly simulate thematic aspects of the war such as early-war counter-attacks. They already have boardgame-esque rules abstractions such as the 1:1 -> 2:1 rule and the First Winter, but you could implement those even without WITE's device-specific scale. When it then comes to the device-specific scale itself, stuff that could do with it is glossed over by the sheer programmed weakness of early-war Soviet divisions and the lack of realistic casualties. It's almost like Grigsby wanted to make a game down to the individual nuts and bolts just because he could, but didn't quite know how to use it to enhance the experience beyond tracking casualties really well (which still doesn't work because the war's progress never tracks as close as it did to the war anyway!). War in Russia was a much tighter and cleaner design because he was working with 1993 horsepower and storage limits.
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Mar 30, 2014 05:04
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Maybe WiTE 2 will solve these issues when it comes out in 2020. And I'm now into November of the first year and the AI has surrounded Moscow and advanced about 10 hexes to its east. However it seems to not be at all interested in actually clearing the pocket and taking the city since all of its combat units are on the front 10 hexes East. <_< I also have several isolated pockets at the prewar border with units doing absolutely nothing since the AI either forget about them or doesn't give a poo poo.
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Mar 30, 2014 05:21
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:And I'm now into November of the first year and the AI has surrounded Moscow and advanced about 10 hexes to its east. However it seems to not be at all interested in actually clearing the pocket and taking the city since all of its combat units are on the front 10 hexes East. <_< I also have several isolated pockets at the prewar border with units doing absolutely nothing since the AI either forget about them or doesn't give a poo poo. When do you plan on doing anything? Your experiment is actually making me consider a similar one where you're never allowed to move anything eastwards, every unit has to move to the west, and as many units as possible need to always be adjacent to an Axis unit.
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Mar 30, 2014 05:41
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I'm not planning on doing anything. I just want to see how long it takes the AI to get 290 victory points. But your idea sounds even cooler.
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Mar 30, 2014 05:44
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Here are the videos of the battles from yesterday. The first one is a perfect example of what not to do, the next one is what happens when people have got the feel of the game and don't spend all their time sitting on an empty port hoping that the game spawned in some AI.... Battle 1 - Union Generals 1861 Style Battle 2 - The Battle of the Gully.
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Mar 30, 2014 10:50
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The problem with 'stalin cards' is that you are necessarily taking freedom away from the Soviet player, often to the extent at which they might as well not be there if you are going to force significant parts of their turn.
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Mar 30, 2014 11:20
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You give both players cards and objectives. Stalin cards will loosen restrictions up over time, while Germans will receive more.
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Mar 30, 2014 11:26
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Alchenar posted:The problem with 'stalin cards' is that you are necessarily taking freedom away from the Soviet player, often to the extent at which they might as well not be there if you are going to force significant parts of their turn. Depends on how it is implemented. If it is just "Comrade Stalin orders you to hold Kiev until at least September 1 (but internally the game considers the mission fulfilled if you still hold Kiev on August 15)", it is up to the player how he accomplishes that. Suddenly, an otherwise ill-advised counterattack has a chance of delaying a german attack for another turn and make sense in context. One of the design flaws of most wargames is that they all play in a political vacuum. In WitP, evacuating Singapore is widely considered a perfectly viable tactic. Churchill would have sacked any British officer who would have suggested that in reality. WitE has Hitler and Stalin sometimes sacking bad generals, but that might as well be replaced with "General Deutschmann was struck by lightning while pissing in the woods!" The core of Clausewitzian thought, that war is an attempt to reach a political objective by force of arms, is absent in almost all wargames, and that more often than not leads to unrealistic, deeply ahistorical outcomes.
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Mar 30, 2014 12:58
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It would certainly be interesting if you could impliment a system whereby the AI Leader (Stalin, Hitler, whoever) could give strategic objective orders that may or may not actually need to be completely met. Making it so the player can't immediately tell if a mission needs to be completed or not and making it so that the leaders are consistant (X likes cities so orders to defend cities must be met, but X might be willing to settle in the case of orders to take territory) would be the hard part.
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Mar 30, 2014 13:40
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I've decided to change up my experiment a bit. I've continued to do nothing at the front through the winter and spring of 41/42 but I've moved all new units and reserves from the Urals to Stalingrad. I'm curious to see what the AI does with this.  I'm hoping the AI-German Generals will jizz their pants and create the largest encirclement in E-history but I doubt it.
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Mar 30, 2014 21:15
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Didn't form them up as Dickbutt - Stalin would be furious!
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Mar 30, 2014 22:07
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Total Blue Balls, the AI didn't even attempt an encirclement. In fact it barely even attempted to fight at all. It just kept advancing East on the Northern and Central Fronts collecting tiny insignificant owns until the VP tipped over to 290. Bummer. I guess that's smart AI though?
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Mar 31, 2014 00:29
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Maybe it was just trying to make an even bigger encirclement than you thought?
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Mar 31, 2014 00:32
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Here's a video I haven't seen yet of Ultimate General: Gettysburg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_b2xJ_t-VU I recognize some of that terrain from yesterday, albeit in a more abstracted manner. Looking at this seems alright for grog-lite, but after playing SoW I don't know if I could do not-SoW. 
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Mar 31, 2014 02:40
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Grey Hunter posted:Here are the videos of the battles from yesterday. The first one is a perfect example of what not to do, the next one is what happens when people have got the feel of the game and don't spend all their time sitting on an empty port hoping that the game spawned in some AI.... That first one really was a cluster. I was so focused on the wheatfield on our right that I didn't know we had Confederates moving up the road from Gettysburg until I saw it this video. The second fight was really fun. I wish I'd gotten pics of my 44th NY capturing or routing 3 of Fry's regiments in succession during the fight in the woods. Or of the 20th ME surrendering after I sent them into melee. Honestly, I thought they'd be able to take it.  ^ Yeah, that looks a lot faster paced and doesn't seem to have units at the regimental level like SoW. On the other hand, I now know that the 'building with the copper top' is the Lutheran Seminary. dublish fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Mar 31, 2014 |
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Mar 31, 2014 03:05
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:Here's a video I haven't seen yet of Ultimate General: Gettysburg. SoW was slow and plodding and crazy... in a good way. This looks so... fast. Maybe I'm off in my timeline or the scale of the game, but it seems like Buford ceded his first position in less than ten minutes. Game jumps to two hours later, but something about the pace seems off in the first part of the video, but gets better later.
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Mar 31, 2014 03:36
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Beautiful map, though. 
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Mar 31, 2014 03:38
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Chump Farts posted:SoW was slow and plodding and crazy... in a good way. This looks so... fast. Maybe I'm off in my timeline or the scale of the game, but it seems like Buford ceded his first position in less than ten minutes. Game jumps to two hours later, but something about the pace seems off in the first part of the video, but gets better later. I'm hoping they sped up the video for the sake of condensing everything. I'd probably play at half that speed (or more) but gently caress watching someone else play it at that pace.
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Mar 31, 2014 03:41
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Fintilgin posted:Beautiful map, though. I thought it was too hard to make out the topography properly.
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Mar 31, 2014 03:45
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Chump Farts posted:SoW was slow and plodding and crazy... in a good way. This looks so... fast. Maybe I'm off in my timeline or the scale of the game, but it seems like Buford ceded his first position in less than ten minutes. Game jumps to two hours later, but something about the pace seems off in the first part of the video, but gets better later. Later, the troops are all exhausted. I think Ultimate General has definitely shrunk the map for gameplay reasons, and the graceful swooping maneuvers in that game look a lot easier than the slow ponderous traffic jams we had in SoW. The two games are clearly going for very different experiences. UG:G looks like pushing toy soldiers around on a diorama, and it looks awfully pretty doing it, but it's not nearly as grognardy as SoW.
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Mar 31, 2014 04:12
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:Here's a video I haven't seen yet of Ultimate General: Gettysburg. That looks absolutely amazing. I've only ever read one book about Gettysburg, Allen Guelzo's The Last Invasion, but I was able to recognize every place and maneuver within context. The graphics look clear and crisp* and the UI didn't seem very groggy at all. It really does like a second coming of Sid Meier's opus. * Hopefully they'll have a "show grid overlay" option so you can figure out topography more specifically
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Mar 31, 2014 04:12
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All this civil war game talk really makes me wish I could get Sid mieres Gettysburg working on my pc. Does anyone know if it works on windows 8.1?
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Mar 31, 2014 04:15
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dublish posted:Later, the troops are all exhausted. If they change the timescale too, I'm okay with it. If the first phase of the video was two hours of game time, I'll take it. If they have Buford leaving after 10 minutes but then volleys still take 43 seconds then it will really feel off somehow.
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Mar 31, 2014 04:20
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jaegerx posted:All this civil war game talk really makes me wish I could get Sid mieres Gettysburg working on my pc. Does anyone know if it works on windows 8.1? Follow the PBEM spreadsheet in the OP for a link/guide to getting Sid Meier's Gettysburg to run in modern systems. I for one have no problems playing it on my Win7 PC
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Mar 31, 2014 04:34
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jaegerx posted:All this civil war game talk really makes me wish I could get Sid mieres Gettysburg working on my pc. Does anyone know if it works on windows 8.1? Just get cheap SoW! JOIN UUUUUSSSS!!!
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Mar 31, 2014 04:55
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jaegerx posted:All this civil war game talk really makes me wish I could get Sid mieres Gettysburg working on my pc. Does anyone know if it works on windows 8.1? I got it working on 7 http://antietam-gettysburg.com/SMGBattlePacks/BattlePack.html just mess around with those patches and see if anything works Ultimate General looks p nice, like a modern version of sid meier's game
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Mar 31, 2014 10:13
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dublish posted:That first one really was a cluster. I was so focused on the wheatfield on our right that I didn't know we had Confederates moving up the road from Gettysburg until I saw it this video. Yeah, I kept saying "they are marching to the east" but no one answered me, then they were coming up behind us in force. Thankfully we got so many points from the objective we won, otherwise we would have been in serious trouble! The second battle was far better, contact from the start, proper flanking. Next time (oh god let there be a next time) we should either try commander view + written orders or split in to opposite sidessides (or both!)
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Mar 31, 2014 10:54
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