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Obstacle2 posted:I deployed with one of the authors of the new COIN manual as the commander of my infantry battalion and we pretty much exclusively performed COIN operations. A lot of public works poo poo, get people on your side. Remain visible, build relationships, etc. It was very successful and the province we were in was the safest it had ever been during the war. Saw totally bloodless provincial elections in 2008-2009. Cool, thanks. This echoes a lot of what I just read in Andrew Bracevich's America's War for the Greater Middle East. He was saying there was a rather scattershot effort in terms of implementation of COIN in Afghanistan as well.
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Dec 6, 2016 22:55
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Phi230 posted:Team Yankee is in 1985 87, and it was a great game 
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Dec 6, 2016 23:35
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dtkozl posted:I would like to read a good defense of COIN because my entire knowledge of it comes from a few college courses and the war nerd podcast. The Malayan Emergency tends to come up a lot in these discussions as a success for anti-guerilla tactics.
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Dec 7, 2016 00:10
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Ultimate General Civil War caught me out. I'm a dumb Brit with little knowledge of the American Civil War, and I didn't know Shiloh was a multi day brutal slog of a battle for the Union. I picked a terrible battle to experiment with a high impact shock cavalry at the expense of buying more supplies. Sucks that you can't repeatedly detach skirmishers though, would make retreats a lot easier.
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Dec 7, 2016 00:37
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PleasingFungus posted:The Malayan Emergency tends to come up a lot in these discussions as a success for anti-guerilla tactics. Yeah, but it (like Sri Lanka/Tamils, another commonly cited "successful" case) had many unique factors that helped make success possible, from geographic and a lack of foreign support for guerrillas, to racial divisions between Chinese guerrillas and Malay allies of the British, to an end goal other than "everyone lives together happily ever after in a free and fair democracy", and others. Malaysia seems to be the exception, not the rule, when you look at 20th/21st century insurgencies and civil wars.
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Dec 7, 2016 01:00
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Well I wouldn't call Malaysia the exception, after all the exact same thing happened in Thailand to the chinese peasants. They were brutally suppressed and Thailand was another domino that didn't fall. I think it just goes to show the problem with the myopic view the US had at that time where it tried to force everything in a neat little box of communism vs capitalism and completely ignored the ethnic/sectarian fissures in the region. If the Malays were mostly communist and the Chinese anticommunist, we probably would have seen a much different result in Malaysia. We could have stopped the Khmer Rouge as well by simply supporting their anti-vietnamese ethnic hatreds early on, but no one in the west wants to pony up to that one. I think it is the same problem we have with getting a good cold war game. We are accepting this world view that was predominate at the time and which most major decisions were based on because there is just a preponderance of literature accepting that world view as fact because it is easier. We now know of course it is false. We now know that the USSR could never have launched a first strike through the Fulda gap, that most of its military was a paper tiger, and even before the berlin wall fell their missiles were rotting in the ground. It was the west's jingoism that was real, its first strike forces were real, and it always held the reins when it came to military aggression. You would have to dismiss contemporary US reports, histories, and foreign policy as based on bad intelligence and pure propaganda, fundamentally shift the built in ideological poles we have as sons of the west, and completely re-write the popular reality of the time when it comes to military and economic capabilities. Plus no one wants to make the us a bad guy that kicks off ww3. dtkozl fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 01:32
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Baloogan your bad game is trying to convince me to not play other, much worse, games. 
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Dec 7, 2016 02:01
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And now for an actually unpopular opinion: Alea Jacta Est is a good game.
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Dec 7, 2016 02:20
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The only thing I don't like about it is the AGEOD. The map is slow and stutters, the turns take forever but it's fun and the scenarios are cool. I've played it more than any other AGEOD game and it's really the only one I come back to.
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Dec 7, 2016 02:28
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I still play russian civil war and the american civil war ones. Honestly almost every game I play (combat mission, total war, ATG) has bad load times so I'm kinda immune to that sort of thing now. A SSD and a fast CPU makes things quick enough for me.
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Dec 7, 2016 02:31
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But can you form armies of naked German men with huge 
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Dec 7, 2016 02:43
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dtkozl posted:Well I wouldn't call Malaysia the exception, after all the exact same thing happened in Thailand to the chinese peasants. They were brutally suppressed and Thailand was another domino that didn't fall. I think it just goes to show the problem with the myopic view the US had at that time where it tried to force everything in a neat little box of communism vs capitalism and completely ignored the ethnic/sectarian fissures in the region. If the Malays were mostly communist and the Chinese anticommunist, we probably would have seen a much different result in Malaysia. We could have stopped the Khmer Rouge as well by simply supporting their anti-vietnamese ethnic hatreds early on, but no one in the west wants to pony up to that one. I'm not sure the true nature of the Cold War really makes for an interesting game compared to Allan Dulles fantasyland.
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Dec 7, 2016 02:43
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Speaking of COIN, how is that Roman Britain COIN game? Looks interesting maybe? Lum_ posted:Twilight Struggle is a fantastic abstract game about resource management and bidding. If you try to play it as a Cold War wargame you'll be *very* disappointed. I'm pretty sure I remember an interview where they said something like "Oh we were just trying to create a thematically rich and evocative board game" which I think you can kinda tell from playing it.
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Dec 7, 2016 03:07
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Yeah the designers notes for TS explicitly spell out that they know its bullshit and they were trying to create a fun game that made you feel like you're watching a hyperbolic 50s newsreel rather than a simulation of the actual cold war. Falling Sky (Caesar's COIN) is pretty good, it has cool asymmetry between the factions and manages to make it feel like a new take on COIN operations while also keeping it grounded in the core systems of the series. Wasn't Korsun Pocket designed by a guy who worked for an outfit called People's Wargaming? I feel you could tap into a niche with leftist wargaming
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Dec 7, 2016 05:50
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Also on the subject of opium in Afganistan, one of the factions in A Distant Plain (the Warlords) has opium fields for bases. Technically the US is opposed to them but in practice they're actually more natural allies than the Afghan Government. The Government can eradicate those fields at the cost of support and potential Taliban guerilla activity in order to hurt the Warlords, accrue patronage (their victory condition, representing the strength of the government to aid its allies) and gain foreign aid from the US. So they eradicate the opium to hurt the US's natural ally, advance their own victory, hurt the US's victory, and increase Taliban forces- and the US pays them to do it
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Dec 7, 2016 05:57
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Oh fuckin put me into leftist wargaming
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Dec 7, 2016 05:57
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I'm one of those people that will get irl mad if the 92nd Inf. Div isn't in the final Fortress Italy upgrade.
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Dec 7, 2016 06:18
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algebra testes posted:Speaking of COIN, how is that Roman Britain COIN game? Looks interesting maybe? Pendragon is interesting because instead of focusing on insurgency it uses the basic mechanisms for a different kind of system. It's got a lot more going on than Falling Sky, for example. Should be very interesting to play.
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Dec 7, 2016 11:33
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Quick googling and file searching from my copy suggests that the WorldRTW.LYR file is the one you'll have to modify. You can open the file in notepad, and you can spot some actual words (City Names, Countries, etc) but its mostly "random" characters. Thanks for that - actually upgrading to the latest patch also worked which I should have thought of 
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Dec 7, 2016 11:40
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dtkozl posted:I still play russian civil war and the american civil war ones. Honestly almost every game I play (combat mission, total war, ATG) has bad load times so I'm kinda immune to that sort of thing now. A SSD and a fast CPU makes things quick enough for me. I'm probably going to regret this and so will you if you accept but would you like to PBEM Revolution Under Siege? I have never done it but have looked at it and the system is a mess but might be doable. I'm a terrible player btw. even better (worse), how about a three player PBEM! 
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Dec 7, 2016 11:41
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Panzeh posted:Pendragon is interesting because instead of focusing on insurgency it uses the basic mechanisms for a different kind of system. It's got a lot more going on than Falling Sky, for example. Should be very interesting to play. I was burnt out on the system by the time Liberty or Death came out, and was very cold to Falling Sky, but Pendragon looks really good and excites me about the system again.
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Dec 7, 2016 14:51
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Nenonen posted:I'm probably going to regret this and so will you if you accept but would you like to PBEM Revolution Under Siege? I have never done it but have looked at it and the system is a mess but might be doable. I'm a terrible player btw. Sure, do you have the gold version?
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Dec 7, 2016 21:00
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That's a pretty fun game to PBEM, you can do co-op against the Reds too (one player for the Southern Whites, another player for the Siberians)
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Dec 7, 2016 21:38
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I just thought I'd check out of curiosity if WitW has a new patch since I last played 
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Dec 8, 2016 07:47
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I think that was the fastest patch they ever implemented too. Insider sources claim its because they were afraid their userbase would be forced to modernize their gaming rigs and, as a result, start
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Dec 8, 2016 08:01
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dtkozl posted:Sure, do you have the gold version? Yep. Do you want to host the game? I'm open for grand campaign, Russo-Polish war or Drang Nacht Ost, all the same. Grand campaign wise playing as Southern & Siberian Whites might be fun, too.
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Dec 8, 2016 09:45
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I finally spent some time with WitW and I'm feeling pretty mixed. On one hand I can see a lot going on with the air war, but on the other I have no idea on impact, effectiveness, or even if I'm setting it up right. Are my losses too high? Low? Just right? The amphibious invasion mechanism is weird and gives very little info to let you know how long until it's ready. Same with the airborne mechanism. Then naval movement is something else entirely, and god forbid if you try and figure out if a port can move those units inland. It's missing that sweeping sense of grandeur I get from War in the East, not to mention in that game I can have no idea what I'm doing interface wise and still take Minsk, or even Leningrad. I really want to like War in the West, but it needs another layer of polish. Hopefully they can get the issues worked out in time for WitEV2. The air mechanic really does need work in WitE, but I'm not sure the current implementation is the right one to do it.
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Dec 8, 2016 14:01
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My only problem with naval interface is sometimes Ike gets stuck in England because all the support units go to him for assignment and as such his "unit" is too big to ship because he has all the superfluous AA and artillery attachments.
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Dec 8, 2016 14:40
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Yooper posted:I finally spent some time with WitW and I'm feeling pretty mixed. On one hand I can see a lot going on with the air war, but on the other I have no idea on impact, effectiveness, or even if I'm setting it up right. Are my losses too high? Low? Just right? This was really the problem I had with Eagle Day to Bombing the Reich and it's still not really fixed with WITW. They give you all the tools for planning air missions, but don't give you any sort of context as to how well you're doing. Recon missions to perform BDA on struck sites has to be a completely separate mission, but even if you always did it and you always got 100% post-bombing intel, that still doesn't tell you how badly you're hurting the German war machine and/or how well your losses are keeping up with historical numbers. At least with HPS Sims's Defending The Reich, there's a plot of how much acreage was historically torched by Bomber Command week-on-week, so you can play the game as a sort of "time trial" against Bomber Harris's record.
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Dec 8, 2016 14:57
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I hate that I always try to find the perfect massive-scale Western Front game, and it always ends up being a scenario in TOAoW3 rather than a standalone game. Maybe one day...
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Dec 8, 2016 15:38
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I think that was the fastest patch they ever implemented too. Insider sources claim its because they were afraid their userbase would be forced to modernize their gaming rigs and, as a result, start The greatest lie ever sold to grog gamers is that hardware and OSes stopped developing after 2001.
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Dec 8, 2016 15:38
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nessin posted:Has anyone tried Sovereignty Crown of Kings? I've mostly ignored it as a early access title on Steam but since it's on sale if it's looking to be a decent game I might pick it up. bad. they decided to redo the engine rather than fix any of the underlying problems or add fun stuff to do, and then gave up. so it's still a lovely broken alpha but in c++
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Dec 8, 2016 17:53
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corn in the bible posted:bad. they decided to redo the engine rather than fix any of the underlying problems or add fun stuff to do, and then gave up. so it's still a lovely broken alpha but in c++ They just patched it yesterday.
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Dec 8, 2016 18:01
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Sovereignty has been worse than it currently is, but I'm not sure it'll get much better than it is (which is mediocre).
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Dec 8, 2016 18:14
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dtkozl posted:I would like to read a good defense of COIN because my entire knowledge of it comes from a few college courses and the war nerd podcast. Then the British tried the same tactics in Northern Ireland and it didn't really work for a number of reasons, such as: - If you kill basically anyone, let alone a whole village in Northern Ireland, people are going to find out and care. - Americans + Libyans sending the IRA + pals guns just to gently caress with the British (did not happen in Malaya, happened a bit in Aden but the UAR and both flavours of Yemeni were all backing different sides) - Splitting up the country was the exact aim of the people who kicked off the Troubles, so there was no "fortified hamlet" type thing that was a good idea (although Catholics and Protestents sort of self-organised them). - Flooding a country with soldiers and police looks even more absurd and reactionary when there isn't a rainforest or any mountains for guerrillas to hide in. - The police were the main source of grievance, and because everyone spoke English, there was no reason the BA couldn't have worked that out almost instantly, which made them look bad when the RUC wasn't 100% entirely replaced on day one (which is what they were sort of originally there to do!). North Yemen was an arguably successful COIN operation at great cost for the UAR/YAR and with nasty tactics like the very prevalent use of chemical weapons by Egyptian forces on Yemeni civilians and Royalist insurgents alike (and even then, the government that came out of the war was a mix of Royalists and Republicans).
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Dec 8, 2016 18:35
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Regarding Norm Koger, he posts every once in a while about what he is working on. It sounds like another game with a 3d engine. Unless it goes up on Steam I doubt I will buy anything he does again after the cock up that happened with Jutland and Distant Guns.
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Dec 8, 2016 18:40
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vyshka posted:Regarding Norm Koger, he posts every once in a while about what he is working on. It sounds like another game with a 3d engine. Unless it goes up on Steam I doubt I will buy anything he does again after the cock up that happened with Jutland and Distant Guns. What happened? All I can piece together is he sold the distro rights to some Russians and they shafted him. You think he could get it back and Steam release it himself?
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Dec 8, 2016 19:19
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Is steam and iron worth a purchase after playing the hell out of rule the waves?
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Dec 8, 2016 19:45
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I downloaded the demo for S&I and decided no, that RtW fit the bill for me.
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Dec 8, 2016 19:46
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Happy Hedonist posted:Is steam and iron worth a purchase after playing the hell out of rule the waves? No
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Dec 8, 2016 19:47
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