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Nuclear War posted:Are coal barges really that expensive? Ask India how well their buy order for a Russian carrier went. They agreed to pay less than a billion for it, they ended up paying closer to 2.2 billion dollars, not including the maintenance fees they inevitability will have.
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Sep 19, 2018 09:42
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fishmech posted:So your source is a 4th hand account of a suggestion someone had once, which might even have been just something the devs considered doing at one point. And hey, even if I dev did claim that making the gameplay like that was intentional, they could be lying to make themselves look better.
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Sep 19, 2018 10:02
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It seems unlikely to me. It would hurt sales for something 97% of players would never realize was going on. If you're going to do something like that as a dev you'd point it out in-game in some blatant third-wall-breaking fashion to reap the controversy / publicity.
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Sep 19, 2018 11:03
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I quit Spec Ops because the main character steers so poorly. Does that mean I beat the game?
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Sep 19, 2018 11:28
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Zereth posted:I've seen claims that somebody on the dev team made a statement about a part of Spec Ops, and then somebody else on the dev team contradicted that when asked by somebody else at a different time. I've read the book from the writer of the game and while he focused on the storytelling/writing aspects of it, I got the impression that the team who developed it did not have any interest in making the gameplay bland on purpose. It came out about two years too late, though to look like anything other than a retread in terms of gameplay. Jobbo_Fett posted:And even still, the numbers the devs would pull showed that more players chose the germans and many still went with war crimes. The German side of the game is more intricate and interesting than the Soviet side of DC:B, though there's a valiant effort with the Soviets. The Soviet side is probably more appropriate for a novice wargamer, but you don't really have the internecine squabbling of the German side, which is probably DC:B's most interesting aspect. I don't really think it's neonazis loving warcrimes. Valtonen posted:On the absolute opposite If that idea, Yeah, in HOI4, division design doesn't really resemble how divisions were organized and why, or really the 'whys' of any organization during the war, it's just HOI4's version of the ship designer from every space 4x game. Knowledge of how to make good HOI4 divisions generally involves an understanding of mechanics such as combat width, hardness, and some other esoteric mechanics that don't really resemble much.
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Sep 19, 2018 12:20
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Oooooooh lalalalalalalalalalala, c'est une bande dessinee pour M. Barthas! https://twitter.com/Offenstadt/status/1042331957856747522 Ou est la translation anglaise? Ou est Mme. Bell et M. Hockridge?
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Sep 19, 2018 12:21
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Trin Tragula posted:Oooooooh lalalalalalalalalalala, c'est une bande dessinee pour M. Barthas! That looks pretty good.
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Sep 19, 2018 12:23
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Honhonhonhonhon
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Sep 19, 2018 12:24
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That's gonna be a serious comic, right? I tried to read Les Tuniques Bleues but it felt like Garfield but set in the Civil War.
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Sep 19, 2018 12:56
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That's cool! Wonder if they're going to have pigeons decked out in poilu outfits, like in Valiant Hearts? Those were the cutest thing. Hey, weird question, does the modern military still worry about lice (the non-sexual kind) or delousing? I forget if it was Barthas or Orwell talking about how they had lice like a wriggling carpet, and I think Bill Maudlin's WWII memoir had him mention people lining up for delousing, with miraculous DDT! But I don't know anything about military hygiene past that.
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Sep 19, 2018 13:03
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Can anyone reccomend me a book or books slash other resources on the Spanish Civil War. Im approaching this from the prespective of running a simulation game about it so anything with a focus on figures of men and equipment to help me develop mechanics would be great but also standard histories.
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Sep 19, 2018 13:32
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bewbies posted:think of it as an opportunity to finally clearly demonstrate the primacy of the battleship over the Sad and Weak aircraft carrier My navy will be nothing but submarines. Can’t sink my fleet if it’s already under water on purpose
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Sep 19, 2018 13:35
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Rockopolis posted:That's cool! Wonder if they're going to have pigeons decked out in poilu outfits, like in Valiant Hearts? Those were the cutest thing. DDT is fine if you don't ingest it and if exposure isn't on the population level. Small scale application of concentrated DDT is actually how it should be used. Agricultural spraying with diluted DDT is the problem. Fangz fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Sep 19, 2018 |
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Sep 19, 2018 13:54
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Hot drat I am so excited about our favourite grouchy poilu getting a comic adaption. I wonder if the artists will resist the urge to slip in real life Asterix cameo in a side panel?
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Sep 19, 2018 14:11
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SeanBeansShako posted:Hot drat I am so excited about our favourite grouchy poilu getting a comic adaption. That reminds me of another possible avenue for a video game, one taken by Valiant Hearts:  No, I have never played it. But from what I have seen, it is a game - more of a story - set in WWI, which emphasizes the tragedy of war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP8q5F6dFqQ
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Sep 19, 2018 14:41
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Valiant hearts is great; and it avoids the “how do we make an anti-war game while still making the war game fun” problem by being a puzzle game, not a shooter.
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Sep 19, 2018 14:47
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Cessna posted:But from what I have seen, it is a game - more of a story - set in WWI, which emphasizes the tragedy of war Yes indeed, nothing says "the tragedy of war" like a sausage-eating comic book villain and a driving level to the tune of the Can-Can Like, it's pretty drat good and its heart is in the right place, but a hammy narrator and an emotional ending does not "an emphasis on the tragedy of war" make Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Sep 19, 2018 |
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Sep 19, 2018 14:48
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Trin Tragula posted:Yes indeed, nothing says "the tragedy of war" like a sausage-eating comic book villain and a driving level to the tune of the Can-Can I’ll defer to you on the rest of it but if I may defend the can-can scene specifically; that’s an early level, isn’t it? In the opening “we’re all pumped about how great this war is probably going to be” act? It’s not totally thematically inappropriate, if I remember it right. The villain is essentially a nazi though, I’ll give you that
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Sep 19, 2018 14:58
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Raenir Salazar posted:Speaking of games, this came up in an argument on my Hoi4 gaming groups discord, but can strategy games benefit from having some sort of working historical knowledge of strategy/tactics? If you had someone go through Westpoint, gave them 300 This is a really interesting post and I'm going to ramble a bit as I spent a good portion of the last decade buried in this stuff. Militaries have been interested in games since forever, but the problem of course, as has been noted, is that games are...games. They have mechanics and whatnot that replicate reality and those mechanics are always far from perfect for any number of reasons. So, a lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time and Taxpayer Dollars to figure out how best to leverage the advantages of games (relatively inexpensive, very flexible) and minimize the disadvantages (they're games). There are three main ways the US uses games and sims: 1) to develop individual tactical competency, strategic thinking, and creativity, 2) to train commanders and staffs on the "operational art", and 3) to test conceptual systems, doctrinal approaches, organizations, and operational plans. Each of these has a very specific set of requirements, and each has to be very carefully managed in order to get at the specific requirements the DoD is seeking. #1, for instance, requires virtual systems and organizations that behave realistically, realistic scenarios that have multiple solutions, but narrow enough sidewalls that it isn't possible to creatively-think your way into an unrealistic situation. #2 needs a more rigid structure with very in-depth scenarios and close oversight, and #3 needs in-depth scenarios but a lot of flexibility in application. Basically, the quality of the output of a sim hinges on the quality of the game manager, and how effectively they are able to screen the limitations of the platform from the end users. There are ALWAYS ways to get around the limitations of a sim, and while doing so might make you appear clever, if that isn't the objective of the exercise, you're not really helping anybody. A famous example people around here all like talking about was "Millennium Challenge" some years ago, but my personal favorite example is Captain James Tiberius Kirk and some training scenario in which he literally reprogrammed the computer in order to "win". This was apparently lauded by his superiors at the time, but if I'd been in command there I would have been absolutely livid - scenarios are designed to develop specific things, and breaking into the backend of the scenario in order to "win" is neither particularly clever nor does it demonstrate a particular commitment to professional development. I guess it fit the narrative of the character though. ANYWAY The point of a sim in all three categories above is to provide useful feedback to the users. IE, if you do the right or smart thing, you get positive feedback, and if you do something bad or dumb, you get negative feedback. The game manager's job is to ensure that this occurs. Doing some end-around thing that breaks the game or otherwise avoids addressing the objective of the event provides positive feedback (in that you win), but doesn't necessarily reinforce the skillset or training objective the exercise is trying to get at. This is bad and irritating. For something like Hearts of Iron, there isn't a whole lot of training value there. The game has a lot of engine limitations, and it is designed to be accessible to a mass audience, not to be brutally realistic. In other words, they eliminate a lot of the severe irritants that commanders and staffs have to deal with real world in order to make the game tolerable for your average guy with a computer. The engine seems to have some mechanical flaws as well....one think I remember is you could dominate the world's oceans by building a giant fleet of cruisers. Building divisions is also really...weird, and very divorced from how things are in the real world. Not that they're bad games -- I've enjoyed playing all of the versions -- but they're not really built to develop the kind of thinking the military wants. bewbies fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Sep 19, 2018 |
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Sep 19, 2018 15:05
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Trin Tragula posted:Yes indeed, nothing says "the tragedy of war" like a sausage-eating comic book villain and a driving level to the tune of the Can-Can I've already stated that I have not played the game. From what I've seen in promos and trailers it looks like it is trying to take a different approach to how war is used as a setting for a game - for that alone I'm willing to forgive some missteps. I've been a wargamer - tabletop, hex-and-counter - for a long time. I'm also a combat veteran. These two things are very, very different, but both are part of my life. There are any number of activities that involve war that are quite popular, from playing games that use war as a setting to academic study; I'm always interested on how these different interpretations inform each other. I don't think there will ever be a game that really depicts combat well, if that makes sense, but new approaches, flaws and all, are a lot more interesting to me than yet another re-cycled shoot-em-up.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:08
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Panzeh posted:The German side of the game is more intricate and interesting than the Soviet side of DC:B, though there's a valiant effort with the Soviets. The Soviet side is probably more appropriate for a novice wargamer, but you don't really have the internecine squabbling of the German side, which is probably DC:B's most interesting aspect. I don't really think it's neonazis loving warcrimes. Sure, and this isn't directed at you, but it always seems like a race to the bottom of the barrel with "germans are bad and playing as them is a mortal sin". Maybe a German campaign could show off just how lovely the Germans were and make you feel lovely for playing as them, or not being able to do anything to prevent atrocities. FPS' don't usually get too deep in their narrative if its trying to appeal to the mass market, but, as pointed out recently, Battlefield has at least made attempts to tell a deeper story about the characters, units, and locations it chooses to represent. Who knows, without any access to their current work (apart from a now-expired Open Beta), maybe they have something that offers a smarter discussion about atrocities committed during WW2 and how such stories are not present in more "mainstream" games? 
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Sep 19, 2018 15:08
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bewbies posted:The point of a sim in all three categories above is to provide useful feedback to the users. IE, if you do the right or smart thing, you get positive feedback, and if you do something bad or dumb, you get negative feedback. The game manager's job is to ensure that this occurs. Doing some end-around thing that breaks the game or otherwise avoids addressing the objective of the event provides positive feedback (in that you win), but doesn't necessarily reinforce the skillset or training objective the exercise is trying to get at. This is bad and irritating. Agreed! Yet sometimes that end-around thing is an innovative new approach that might pay off in actual combat. A really good referee/staff/game manager should recognize this and adapt accordingly, or else his training becomes an initiative-crushing exercise in by-the-book sameness.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:11
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I've got high hopes for 11.11, which is out soon from many of the same team who did Valiant Hearts and who have been talking it up as more story and less game, which is so far up my alley we're next-door neighbours.Ainsley McTree posted:if I may defend the can-can scene specifically; that’s an early level, isn’t it? In the opening “we’re all pumped about how great this war is probably going to be” act? Yeah, I remembered it that way too, and then the last time I replayed it I was waiting with great glee for it to show up and it takes a lot longer to get there than we remember it does. There's a whole hour-odd of gameplay which goes well into 1915, until they get rescued by Anna at Second Ypres; and then there's a driving level; and then they go to Neuville for another regular level; and then the boss battle with Von Dorf in the Zeppelin; and it's not until after that when they flash back to Anna in Paris in 1914; and then there's another regular level while you get her to the taxi. (It was still funny enough the second time that I failed it several times through laughing too hard to actually control the drat taxi, mind you.)
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Sep 19, 2018 15:14
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We need a game in which you are Wojtek, an Iranian bear that joins the Polish army in the war against Nazis but instead of being allowed a hero's retirement to his home mountains, ends up locked away in a zoo. War. War never changes.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:14
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Cessna posted:Agreed! Yet sometimes that end-around thing is an innovative new approach that might pay off in actual combat. A really good referee/staff/game manager should recognize this and adapt accordingly, or else his training becomes an initiative-crushing exercise in by-the-book sameness. True - in rereading that wall of text I probably didn't emphasize this enough. A lot of the point of games-as-training is to encourage creativity and outside-the-box thinking, and lord knows I've run into enough variants 2 Star General (ret.) MacDildo as facilitator who want to crush creative thinking because that wasn't how they did poo poo when he was a brigade three in Germany back in the 80s. A good facilitator can tell the difference between unrealistic gaming of the game and legitimate thoughtful creativity, and can reward the latter while squashing the former.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:16
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If I am ever going to replay Honest Hearts I am not going to finish it again and just make up a slightly less heart wrenching ending in my head.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:16
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Sure, and this isn't directed at you, but it always seems like a race to the bottom of the barrel with "germans are bad and playing as them is a mortal sin". Maybe a German campaign could show off just how lovely the Germans were and make you feel lovely for playing as them, or not being able to do anything to prevent atrocities. FPS' don't usually get too deep in their narrative if its trying to appeal to the mass market, but, as pointed out recently, Battlefield has at least made attempts to tell a deeper story about the characters, units, and locations it chooses to represent. Who knows, without any access to their current work (apart from a now-expired Open Beta), maybe they have something that offers a smarter discussion about atrocities committed during WW2 and how such stories are not present in more "mainstream" games? I'm not so sure the average Battlefield player is really going to be the kind of audience that responds positively to an in-depth warcrime simulator or a grueling discussion of Einsatzgruppen. If people are learning their history from video games exclusively, it's more an indictment of them than the games. Cessna posted:Agreed! Yet sometimes that end-around thing is an innovative new approach that might pay off in actual combat. A really good referee/staff/game manager should recognize this and adapt accordingly, or else his training becomes an initiative-crushing exercise in by-the-book sameness. Sometimes! I play wargames with a guy who used to handle procurement of said commercial games for the DoD, talking about how he had to suffer through one of them because they ended up buying the Tiller stuff a while ago.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:18
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Yeah, I'm sure there are things out there that gaming could potentially uncover, but making a scenario flexible enough to allow creativity but not be outright abusable is going to be really really hard. Dubiously relevant sports analogy- the average Madden player makes the right decision to go for it on fourth and short. The average NFL coach does not.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:20
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P-Mack posted:Yeah, I'm sure there are things out there that gaming could potentially uncover, but making a scenario flexible enough to allow creativity but not be outright abusable is going to be really really hard. Also in NBA 2k, players used to take way more 3-pointers than the real NBA did- the NBA actually ended up adjusting to that and 3PAs are up across the league in a huge way.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:22
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Panzeh posted:I'm not so sure the average Battlefield player is really going to be the kind of audience that responds positively to an in-depth warcrime simulator or a grueling discussion of Einsatzgruppen. If people are learning their history from video games exclusively, it's more an indictment of them than the games. Why would you assume that people are learning their history exclusively from video games, and why, if that is false, would games be excluded from learning history? And why is this an issue, when CoD broached this back in Modern Warfare with the "No Russian" level?
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Sep 19, 2018 15:27
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Panzeh posted:I'm not so sure the average Battlefield player is really going to be the kind of audience that responds positively to an in-depth warcrime simulator or a grueling discussion of Einsatzgruppen. If people are learning their history from video games exclusively, it's more an indictment of them than the games. It could be both. I mean it could be that the wider cultural context of teaching history is pretty bad, it could be that unfortunately folks are not terribly motivated to get educated, and it could be that producers of mass media have some degree of social responsibility and should do their bit to not propagate myths. Fangz fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Sep 19, 2018 |
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Sep 19, 2018 15:28
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P-Mack posted:Yeah, I'm sure there are things out there that gaming could potentially uncover, but making a scenario flexible enough to allow creativity but not be outright abusable is going to be really really hard. That's actually a really good analogy, and it gets right to the crux of one of the main issues at the heart of modern military leader development. A good chunk of the military's organizational inertia is designed to minimize risk taking, which inadvertently leads to punishing those willing to take risks. In combat, however, assessing risk and taking prudent risk is a pretty central competency. So, sims have tried hard to develop risk assessment skills in leaders. The problem they run into is that taking a risk in a game or sim is a fundamentally different mental exercise than doing it in combat. In a game there are no real consequences (I'm sure we've all saved/reloaded games after catastrophes caused by our bad decisions) and so that puts the user in a completely different mental space than they are in combat, when they're dealing with things like personal danger, or danger facing their soldiers, who they know personally, and might even like, and who have families and friends who love them. The end result is most commanders do not go for it on the combat equivalent of 4th and short. This then creates a paradox - how does one encourage prudent risk taking, when eventually, the risk taker will have things break bad, and people will suffer badly for it? I'm reminded of some NFL coach who actually did go for it on 4th and short some years ago, they didn't make it, they lost the game as a result, and he was pilloried. Lee is a great historical example...he took crazy risks, but risk that was prudent and well thought out, and he kicked the poo poo out of more conservative opposing commanders as a result. Then of course...Pickett's Charge, which was not a prudent risk, and we all know how that went. Eventually, things are going to go bad, so how do we 1) determine what risks are good and what are bad, and 2) if we don't know for sure what #1 is, how the heck do we train people to take good risk? The Evil Corporation did a pretty good piece on this recently. It is more joint command specific but a lot of the basic principles can go right down to a squad.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:45
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bewbies posted:For something like Hearts of Iron, there isn't a whole lot of training value there. The game has a lot of engine limitations, and it is designed to be accessible to a mass audience, not to be brutally realistic. In other words, they eliminate a lot of the severe irritants that commanders and staffs have to deal with real world in order to make the game tolerable for your average guy with a computer. The engine seems to have some mechanical flaws as well....one think I remember is you could dominate the world's oceans by building a giant fleet of cruisers. Building divisions is also really...weird, and very divorced from how things are in the real world. Not that they're bad games -- I've enjoyed playing all of the versions -- but they're not really built to develop the kind of thinking the military wants. I remember seeing a presentation where some staff group had students use HoI2 to simulate problems with coalition strategy. The students each controlled one of the major Allied/Comintern countries in the game, and had their orders filtered through people who knew the game mechanics (so the students didn't have to worry about the minutiae of building divisions or fleet composition or whatever). The Axis countries were played by more experienced players who attempted to break up the Allied/Soviet coalition. It seemed like a pretty good model of real-life issues and a good way to deemphasize the more gamey aspects of HoI.
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Sep 19, 2018 15:47
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i don't see how HoI is specifically a good game engine for that type of exercise
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Sep 19, 2018 15:49
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reenactment simulates the tedium, the chilly damp, the fact that pikes and armor are heavy, and the alcohol
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Sep 19, 2018 15:52
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Download my mod where you order enlisteds to mop parking lots during rain storms.
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Sep 19, 2018 16:02
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HEY GUNS posted:reenactment simulates the tedium, the chilly damp, the fact that pikes and armor are heavy, and the alcohol Yeah, but most of the time you don't die of dysentery or an infected wound.
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Sep 19, 2018 16:05
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zoux posted:Download my mod where you order enlisteds to mop parking lots during rain storms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePv7ZdWVjY4
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Sep 19, 2018 16:06
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the rain simulates rain.
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Sep 19, 2018 16:12
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locals hating you and not being paid
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Sep 19, 2018 16:14
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