Strategy & Wargames - middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearn to pull levers

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Strategy & Wargames - middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearn to pull levers

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Slim Jim Pickens: Jan 16, 2012

The capitalist building AI wasn't a systemic issue, or rather, it didn't need to be (it was hardcoded for some reason).

It's more like the collection of little things that add up to total nonsense. Factories and RGOs split wages 50/50 as a hard rule between upper class and workers. If the capitalists or aristocrats don't exist... their share of the money evaporates into the ether. Tariffs are just weird taxes because every the simulation makes every country an autarky. If you sphere a country, your pops are sold "duplicated" versions of its goods, they don't have proper sellers so the money paid is also vanished.

There's so much more, but none of it is really valuable to understand because the economy is rigged up in a way so that the basic economic history of the 19th century can happen. Industrialization is slow at first, until tech starts making everything hyper productive and awesome, up until the 1920s when it will start collapsing. The reasons for collapse are entirely unique to the game's simulation being hosed up, but you get to pretend that it's the Great Depression so it's fine.

Slim Jim Pickens has issued a correction as of 06:55 on Nov 22, 2022

# ? Nov 22, 2022 06:53

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# ? May 27, 2024 07:42

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

HoI 4's greatest quality is that the (unintended) capacity
for its focus trees to act as storytelling devices. The effect is a little sedate when you're talking about the dry mods like Kaiserreich

Hence the misunderstanding of what Kaiserreich is and then blaming the mod for your dissatisfaction. Kaiserreich isn't telling a narrative with the focus trees, the focus trees aren't creating the narrative, they're a reflection of the players action when interacting with the rest of the game mechanics.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 06:53

John Charity Spring: Nov 4, 2009; SCREEEEE

Jazerus posted:

it is eternally funny that a ron paul guy produced the core economic system of a game that makes capitalism look like dumb poo poo for assholes

He gave a game dev conference talk years later about how he designed the economic system around marxist economics because it made the most sense for a game even though he personally didn't believe in it

It's not a good simulation of marxist economics either but you can kind of see what they were going for lol

# ? Nov 22, 2022 06:57

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

I just remembered that I bought Arsenal of Democracy through GamersGate back in 2010 (almost 12 years to the day), and incredibly, the account and the download still works.

then, I dug a little deeper and found that AOD's last patch was 1.12, as recent as July of 2020: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/development-of-aod-1-12.1128336/

I still need to review the manual to get back up to speed with all of the changes, but it looks like I can jump back into this game.

Already I'm reminded of one of the big changes to the combat rules: AOD respects Lanchester's Laws, and applies a stacking penalty that prevents divisions from applying their full firepower in battle, at a time.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 09:23

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Hearts of Iron 3 had a lot of potential to be a better military game than 2, but it�s so unwieldy that I can see why people prefer either 2 or 4 for that. It�s too bad too, playing Command Ops on a scale like that is kind of the dream eh?

# ? Nov 22, 2022 14:13

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Frosted Flake posted:

It�s too bad too, playing Command Ops on a scale like that is kind of the dream eh?

yeah... I have hazy memories of Computer Gaming World running previews for a wargame that was supposed to deliver us the Eastern Front at the battalion level, which is obviously a little too ambitious for late 90s, but, shoot, you could probably do it nowadays

# ? Nov 22, 2022 14:37

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

quote:

Changes to [Arsenal of Democracy] Land Combat

First of all, we gave every existing brigade a useful task. With HoI2, most players just didn�t see any sense in building brigades like Anti-Air, Tank Destroyers (TD) or Rocket Artillery other then for historical flavor. As softness is now calculated in percentage terms and there are no more in direct subtractions, brigades like Antitank (AT) attached to Infantry or Commando Units give now greater possibilities to win a battle against Armored Units. Increased Technology will now effect casualties, as [Ground Defense Efficiency] is now directly influenced by the unit's defense value. Highly valuable and excellently equipped units can now also defeat masses of poor equipped units. You are now more likely to win with a lower unit count if you go for quality rather then quantity. The actual firepower is also dependent on the softness and enemy hard attack. This makes AT or TD extremely useful to prevent being overrun by Infantry combined with armored brigades or armored divisions early on.

So for calculating battle results, a lot more factors are now taken into account to encourage the player towards a broader unit diversification. In the new system, combat delays movement and forces the aggressor to slow down depending on the battle progress.

Combat Events have more impact on the actual outcome and can be decisive. Unit speed has a more direct correlation to the combat outcomes, for example, the breakthrough or encirclement event. So it is more likely you will see such events happen with mobile units like motorized, mechanized and armored units.

The combat modifiers themselves have been completely remodeled for historical accuracy. Of course all of them are now editable in the misc.txt for maximum flexibility.

In contrast to earlier versions of HoI, battle outcome was and loss calculations were based on the well known mathematical laws of military theorists'. Lanchester, for example, said that the combat power of a force was proportional to the square of its size; that was always the case with HoI (["Battle Winning Ability"] was effectively attack value times ORG). What [we] have done is take into account Dupuy and other Operational Researchers' results that show that, for a sizable force, the firepower actually does not increase in proportion to force size, it increases roughly in proportion to the square root of the force size.

Conceptually, you can get a picture of this if you realize that a force takes up depth as well as width, so that as a force gets bigger, it operates over more depth and keeps a larger proportion of its strength in reserve or otherwise disengaged at all times. Because this is (roughly) an area effect, and the firepower comes from one �side� of the area, it works out as a square root (actually, some sources (notably Dupuy) say it is harsher than that, as it tails away to be almost flat � added firepower for added troops - eventually).

This has several game effects; it means that brigades and powerful units are more valuable, because just buying lots of cheap units gives diminishing returns. If division A is twice as powerful as division B in attack, two of division B are not as powerful in attack as one division A - they are about 0.7 times as powerful, where before they would have been as powerful. This effect is a small mechanical tweak, but it has big effects!

It also means that, if you go above a commander's command span, adding extra units actually reduces the force attack value! 10 divisions under a General with no HQ are less effective in attack than 9 divisions. This makes commanders and HQ's even more critical than before.

The "diminishing returns" factor is based on number of divisions, so brigades represent an addition to combat power that is not affected by the diminishing returns factor. This may not be entirely "realistic", but it is much simpler this way and partly offsets the lack of a separate ORG and STR for the brigade.

Basically, the diminishing returns makes all the higher-value units more useful because they represent not just more combat power but more concentrated combat power - that makes them worthwhile even if they are more expensive.

The fact that GDE is now a function of Defensiveness or Toughness (for defenders and attackers, respectively) means that brigades that increase those values are now more valuable and add some "virtual strength and organization" by slowing down losses.

The "square root rule" means, too, that battles between larger forces take longer; if a battle with one division on each side takes 2 days, a battle with 9 divisions on each side will take 6 days. No longer can Kursk be done with in a single morning...

Another key point to get across is how the new system interacts with attrition. Attrition is now an important part of the picture because:

� All units in provinces adjacent to provinces with enemy troops take attrition (simulating low-level fighting).

� Divisions with zero Organization are no longer targets in combat, so they do not �suck up� attacks, but they still do take heavy attrition losses.

� Retreating units take enhanced attrition losses if combat is over; this should make �rearguard� actions possible (the fact that combat holds up movement makes delaying actions possible, too).

� The greatest factors influencing attrition are position, pursuit, technology, movement, and supply.

Finally, I think it's important to explain that the duration of battles has increased dramatically. This means that defensive reserves, instead of arriving after the battle is over and the original defenders are in retreat, can arrive to actually reinforce the line. It means that the battle situation develops more gradually so that the player can react to how it is going if they have reserves of fresh troops.

It also means that air power can be used to either prop up or increase the pressure on critical parts of the line. Air units are likely to get several missions over the duration of one battle. While air attacks do not dominate combat, they do have enough effect that air superiority can make a key difference in �cracking� the enemy line quickly enough to allow exploitation.

Artillery Bombardment. Every Land Unit has a value for this, artillery brigades increase it dramatically. To not overpower this new feat, you can define in the misc by which factor supply consumptions rises when bombarding and also the efficiency itself on various targets (Soft/Hard/Infrastructure/IC). Also, when bombarding an adjacent province and getting attacked gives the bombardier a severe defense penalty - because his troops were arranged for long range strikes rather then for actual defense.

About Reserves, if you want to have reserves be effective, you have to hold them in reserve until "space" develops in the front line. As divisions drop to zero Organization (and thus drop out of the battle) or retreat you can add reserves in without penalty. Combined together, these changes mean that the experience of land combat for the player is radically different from that with previous versions of HoI.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 15:03

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

gradenko_2000 posted:

yeah... I have hazy memories of Computer Gaming World running previews for a wargame that was supposed to deliver us the Eastern Front at the battalion level, which is obviously a little too ambitious for late 90s, but, shoot, you could probably do it nowadays

Hmm it would either be the best or worst wargame.

Trying to figure out where individual artillery batteries were day to day with something as well documented as the Scheldt is a nightmare even with access to the Canadian records. There are much better researchers than me though, and certainly the advantage of plotting artillery units is that they had to carefully record their positions to register the guns. Log books go missing though, some were clearly written after the fact and have entries like �October 20, fired at Germans around the canal� (this being the Netherlands, not very helpful), but I digress. I suppose for the Eastern Front you�d just place the Divisions and guess from there, but I can see people losing sleep over that.

If you could segment it, that would be my ideal wargame, I think. The layer above Combat Mission I�ve always wanted where the terrain and forces are part of a larger whole, but you only need to manage a reasonable workload. So, having that large map, drawing a box and generating a Command Ops scenario, that would be fantastic. For anything else you run into the problem of all complex wargames used for commercial entertainment and not military training - the lack of staffs and subordinates to manage the tremendous amount of planning, staff work and execution of orders.

For a bunch of reasons, videogame AI can�t do that. Command Ops 2 probably does the best job so far of understanding �Commander�s Intent� and having orders relayed, planned and executed. Most casual gamers hate it, it�s one of the biggest complaints about it. The problem is anything else is more work than any officer has ever been asked to do, more information than anyone could be expected to track, more planning etc.

So, sort of like Scourge of War and Command Ops, I�d like game designers to start designing AI staffs and staff systems. It can be hidden from players if you like, but have some way to turn clicks into coherent plans and orders without the player having to be army commander, corps commander, division commander all the way down the the battalion, at once, across the whole operation.

I want to see a game on that scale but like Campaign for North Africa, it needs like 10 people to manage a side, and ideally that would be AI. For a Professional Edition, easy peasy, we have stuff like that at work for tabletop exercises, but to be a fun game at home, there needs to be a way to balance the workload.

You�ve given me a lot to think about there.

Descent into anarchy : the German High Command, 1933 to 1943

# ? Nov 22, 2022 15:21

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

Frosted Flake posted:

I want to see a game on that scale but like Campaign for North Africa, it needs like 10 people to manage a side, and ideally that would be AI. For a Professional Edition, easy peasy, we have stuff like that at work for tabletop exercises, but to be a fun game at home, there needs to be a way to balance the workload.

I think that goes against game design in general. The workload is the most important part of the game, doing that work is what playing means. If you automate all the parts of it, then what is your game about? The parts that are either not automated, or automated very poorly and a human has to intervene. Like if things are automated well then why would the player want to do it manually, especially if there are parts that are not automated and demand more attention.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 20:20

atelier morgan: Mar 11, 2003; super-scientific, ultra-gay; Lipstick Apathy

with a lot of grog games the way you handle that particular issue is that things are turn based and you can simply plan a turn representing one hour or day over the course of a week or month

# ? Nov 22, 2022 20:40

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Lostconfused posted:

I think that goes against game design in general. The workload is the most important part of the game, doing that work is what playing means. If you automate all the parts of it, then what is your game about? The parts that are either not automated, or automated very poorly and a human has to intervene. Like if things are automated well then why would the player want to do it manually, especially if there are parts that are not automated and demand more attention.

Well, I�m thinking of it like this: if the point of DCS is to give you the experience of being a pilot, realistically managing the work and turning intent into results through your actions, you read the dials and flip switches.

If the point of a wargame is to be an officer, you manage the work and turn intent into results through your actions. Your staff acts as the dials and switches, managing and presenting information and carrying out instructions.

At a certain level of leadership, it becomes exceedingly poor command to try to micromanage the implementation of your intent. Even moreso for general officers, often disastrous. You identify the town, river, direction of the advance, in accordance with the scale, but no one person could handle directing that top to bottom.

Wargames often handle that with abstraction and scale, so moving a counter to a hex stands in for all that entails. Clicking bombard represents meeting with the artillery staff, describing your intention, their taking the desired effect and then calculating required fires, drafting of fire plans, passing them to the Regimental chiefs, their planning, the orders to the batteries and so on.

That lacks granularity, which I would love to see. I�d like to zoom in to see how each phase of the attack is progressing, how the intent was transformed into orders, how they�re carried out, one village at a time.

A few years back there was a tech demo of this, whose name escapes me. It looked promising, the demo was France in 1940 and it was covered in RPS the Flare Path but it must have went nowhere.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 21:01

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Has anyone played the board game Empire of the Sun? It's a relatively groggy hex and counter about the War in the Pacific but it's a card driven game with each card play being an operation including enemy reaction (unless you get a surprise attack) so it maintains a back and forth tempo

# ? Nov 22, 2022 21:10

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

atelier morgan posted:

with a lot of grog games the way you handle that particular issue is that things are turn based and you can simply plan a turn representing one hour or day over the course of a week or month

For sure, and like you said it gets around that by distributing man-hours across time rather than systems or people. While it�s immensely satisfying to see a good turn play out in a JTS title, and at any given time I�m idly plugging away at one as mental exercise or to take a break from reading, it�s also easy to lose track of the battle or operation, not see the bigger picture, wander off the main focus, or even turn to turn forget what you were trying to do. Now that�s fine, because I accept it as a limitation of the state of the art, but I would hope the art advances eventually.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 21:25

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

Frosted Flake posted:

it�s also easy to lose track of the battle or operation, not see the bigger picture, wander off the main focus, or even turn to turn forget what you were trying to do.

This is pretty much exactly what I am talking about. People are just going to fall into some niche they find comfortable or the one that grabs their attention the most. If you're not treating it as some kind of a learning tool or a group exercise, there has to be a reason or some kind of motivation to push the player into doing more work than they want to at any given time.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 21:29

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Lostconfused posted:

This is pretty much exactly what I am talking about. People are just going to fall into some niche they find comfortable or the one that grabs their attention the most. If you're not treating it as some kind of a learning tool or a group exercise, there has to be a reason or some kind of motivation to push the player into doing more work than they want to at any given time.

That might be the problem lol. Though, in terms of fidelity and presenting authentic problems to the player, you can�t replicate the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, the most famous cavalry action in history, without something between the player�s intent and initial orders and their execution. If you could manage down to the troop or squadron, even the brigade, the charge never happens. No player would intend to go straight at the Russian batteries, they would simply direct the advance towards to correct objective, which couldn�t be seen from Bde HQ. Moreover, CO�s intent was either simply a demonstration or threatened manoeuvre, maybe a slow advance. It turns into an unsupported charge on the wrong objective through those intervening layers.

Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 22:18 on Nov 22, 2022

# ? Nov 22, 2022 21:48

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

I know that's not what you want, but you can definitely do that with a video game.

You just replace the idea of "orders" with "player input", heck make the interface annoying enough and you can have people fat fingering their way into all sorts of mistakes. Or just make them use a really bad mouse instead of a good one.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 22:11

bedpan: Apr 23, 2008

Lostconfused posted:

I know that's not what you want, but you can definitely do that with a video game.

You just replace the idea of "orders" with "player input", heck make the interface annoying enough and you can have people fat fingering their way into all sorts of mistakes. Or just make them use a really bad mouse instead of a good one.

There was a video game like this for the c64. You were playing as the high command of an insurgency but the only control system allowed was pong paddles. This was done intentionally by the designer.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 22:14

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Frosted Flake posted:

No player would intend to go straight at the Russian batteries, they would simply direct the advance towards to correct objective, which couldn�t be seen from Bde HQ.

You are vastly overestimating the acumen of the average gamer.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 22:33

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
if you want it to be

you would have to get it just right though or it just becomes frustrating
i have tried to do a no micro playthrough of hoi4 a few times but i always end up mircoing like 5 minutes into the first war

# ? Nov 23, 2022 00:18

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

Megamissen posted:

you would have to get it just right though or it just becomes frustrating
i have tried to do a no micro playthrough of hoi4 a few times but i always end up mircoing like 5 minutes into the first war

It's a very special game in the sense of making you incredibly frustrated by making everything extremely stupid.

# ? Nov 23, 2022 01:59

Atrocious Joe: Sep 2, 2011

I never played Old World, but the concept of only having a certain number of actions in a turn seemed like a cool mechanic. Combined with automation, it seems like an interesting way to make micromanagement possible but risks other areas being neglected or running suboptimal.

# ? Nov 23, 2022 03:30

Flipswitch: Mar 30, 2010

Looking forward to WARNO's army general, online isn't too bad but I'm keen for some campaign modes.

I'm also really enjoying Dune: Spice Wars. Anyone else here played much of it? It's just had a fairly big update and seems there's still quite a bit to go before it lauches.

# ? Nov 23, 2022 14:11

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

quote:

https://twitter.com/Levelupdice/status/1595508333066465280

The bespoke dice industry has finally found a way to go too far:

# ? Nov 24, 2022 03:06

KirbyKhan: Mar 20, 2009; Soiled Meat

I LOVE GROGNARDS THOSE LIL DOOFUSES

# ? Nov 24, 2022 03:12

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

so wait they made dice into panthers and KTs? how did they roll

# ? Nov 24, 2022 03:13

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

Raskolnikov38 posted:

so wait they made dice into panthers and KTs? how did they roll

no, no. the opposite.

https://www.facebook.com/8966702337...96398157117583/

# ? Nov 24, 2022 03:15

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

oh thats bad

# ? Nov 24, 2022 03:16

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Raskolnikov38 posted:

so wait they made dice into panthers and KTs? how did they roll

it's dice made of steel, but the steel comes from Nazi tanks

# ? Nov 24, 2022 03:17

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

Raskolnikov38 posted:

oh thats bad

it is next level!

# ? Nov 24, 2022 03:17

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

Dudes just want to roll some iron dice.

# ? Nov 24, 2022 04:17

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

But why specify the SS Pz Divs? Also, if it was an Australian capture it was Heer. Finally, their �elite� status came from being issued Panthers while some Heer units went without, using Pz IVs undermines that.

I�m just baffled by the action and apology.

# ? Nov 24, 2022 04:36

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Frosted Flake posted:

But why specify the SS Pz Divs? Also, if it was an Australian capture it was Heer. Finally, their �elite� status came from being issued Panthers while some Heer units went without, using Pz IVs undermines that.

I�m just baffled by the action and apology.

this was apparently their second apology

the first apology was when someone broke news that they were making dice out of a Tiger tank - they "apologized" by saying that, no, it wasn't going to be dice made from a Tiger, because they don't get to choose - the museum does

so my guess is that the museum decided to give them the Panzer IV, and that ad copy still has them highlighting how the SS totally still used Panzer IVs so they could retain some of the elite status and exclusivity

# ? Nov 24, 2022 04:43

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; gotta have my purp

Frosted Flake posted:

But why specify the SS Pz Divs? Also, if it was an Australian capture it was Heer. Finally, their �elite� status came from being issued Panthers while some Heer units went without, using Pz IVs undermines that.

I�m just baffled by the action and apology.

they want to have sex with the ss panzer divisions. they kiss the dice and stick them in their asses

# ? Nov 24, 2022 06:21

PoontifexMacksimus: Feb 14, 2012

Frosted Flake posted:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RHBPnmXBm0g

Frosted Flake posted:

Crusader Kings is strange in that it depicts Feudalism as understood by someone who didn�t so much as bother to read Bloch�s Feudal Society, which is kind of the bare minimum you�d expect.

It�s heartbreaking because they could do something really interesting there, have Feudal Law, the Church and social bonds as driving forces - all three are in the game as discreet systems - but instead it�s all kind of wasted in a simplified understanding of it all.

How religion is depicted, I mean, what can you even say? As with a lot of these things, and that one historian wrote a series of long articles about A Game of Thrones in this respect, is that liberals with middlebrow or worse historical understanding as you said, can�t conceive of people truly believing in their religion.The power of the Church, fundamentally, was belief. The institutional power came later, much later if you consider how weak the papacy was relative the HRE for the first centuries of the period. Consider that the Pallium was an incredibly powerful symbol that cannot be modelled in any way shape or form in CK II or 3, other than what? Bishops of Arles and players that hold the Bishopric get +20 piety and an event chain about visiting Rome to lay the Pallium on the grave of Saint Paul?

This applies to all sorts of secular relationships also, but the fact that something as important as the Pallium can�t even be represented within their conception of religion indicates the problem to me.

I still think feudalism is eminently gameable, but it should essentially be an inheritance law simulator, where you are trying to marshal both legal (and religious) arguments and material political support to show why you should be given a contented fief; once that simulator is good enough you could honestly also cover most international wars all the way up to the 30 Years War depending on how robust your legal model is

gradenko_2000 posted:

I will preface this by saying that I do not actually recommend anyone buy AOD in TYOOL 2022 - modern Windows support is worse than DH, and the last time I'd ever looked there were a number of major issues with the game that were left unpatched as development halted. I peeked into the Paradox forums as I was writing this post to try and see if there was any activity, and apparently there's been an alternate team plugging away at patching the game with an update as recent as 2016, but I don't know how well it works so I can't comment on how much it improves the game. I might jump into it if I see it on sale, and if you already have it and are curious, I'd be interested to know your experience. But for now, DH is still the best iteration of HOI 2, and personally my preferred way of experiencing HOI in general, just ahead of HOI 3, because I'm too stupid to understand number 4.

Having said all that, when AOD came out, it significantly improved the fidelity of the combat simulation, moving away from the "total divisional destruction" and way-too-fast blitzkriegs and infantry spam of vanilla HOI 2 into something that really demanded combined arms and well-designed armies. This is not to say that Darkest Hour did not have a similar take, and DH's great new map was an astounding achievement for how much effort it involved, but I was never really one of the people that felt like needing to split the map into smaller chunks or to make it more accurate was a critical feature, and I valued AOD's improved simulationism over that.

Ah, well. Honestly, maybe looking for a quality HoI2 style experience today is just a lost cause...

# ? Nov 25, 2022 00:32

PoontifexMacksimus: Feb 14, 2012

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

All the Vicky games are designed around some weird economic simulation, and fall apart based on that system's merits or failures. The chief limitation of them all is that transportation of goods has to be heavily abstracted for the games to run, you cannot possibly have hundreds of goods attempting to pathfind from province-province, let alone the million+ that's normal in those games.

I have a strong hunch that Victoria 2 was designed around a simulation that they realized mid-way was a failure. There's so much hacked off that game and so many undocumented "fixes" for the systems that I can't see it any other way. The most easily observed aspect of it are the various holes in the game's closed economy, where money disappeared into a void.

It's hard to call it a good game, but it's fun in a way that most eurojank is. Vicky 2 is like if the long 19th century was reflected in a funhouse mirror, what joy to be had has to be found in oohing and ahhing over the warped results it creates. If you actually get sweaty about it, all it is a simple wargame with kooky economics, so it's better to just have fun.

Stupid guys mistaking entertainment for education is an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of there being stupid guys. HoI 4's greatest quality is that the (unintended) capacity
for its focus trees to act as storytelling devices. The effect is a little sedate when you're talking about the dry mods like Kaiserreich, but I think you're underestimating the full-throated insanity of stuff like Red Flood. Gaming is otherwise stuck in the blandest region of middle-class tastes and deviancies, the capacity that HoI has to seize the imagination is worthy of respect.

fermun posted:

There's some Paradox employee comments in a Paradox megathread here on SA from around when it was released, but Vicky 2's economic system was designed by a Scottish Tory that believed in Ron Paul Austrian Economics as the best system and then he left Paradox just shortly before the game was released to design his own space 4x game, which was never released and after a couple of years he was given a job with Paradox again but never got put in charge of designing anything again. The game required a lot of hodge-podge fixes to make its economic system spit out anything that made any kind of sense and that's why it's so weird, a totally broken ultra-libertarian economics system that didn't actually function well patched over with all kinds of fixes.

Man, the unspoken history behind these games is something else - and what follows is the impact on people who think going beyond Civilization makes them free thinkers...

# ? Nov 25, 2022 00:53

Hazamuth: May 9, 2007; the original bugsy

Flipswitch posted:

Looking forward to WARNO's army general, online isn't too bad but I'm keen for some campaign modes.

Yeah, very excited to play the campaigns cooperatively when they come out.

# ? Nov 25, 2022 09:56

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Somebody post the article again on how tabletop wargaming made the SS "cool" and "elite" by giving them black counters and better stats, contrary to historical fact.

# ? Nov 25, 2022 11:36

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

https://twitter.com/Matrix_Wargames/status/1596068107432386560?t=LKwrSicUv7OBFsh2r40TqA&s=19

# ? Nov 25, 2022 13:12

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Dishonor Before Death:
Those Black SS Pieces

I hate Nazis.

I�ve written that phrase a number of times in Daily Content and in the introductions to our books, and now more than ever I still enjoy throwing those three words on the screen. Growing up around survivors of their evil, I learned very early just what their symbols meant. Many years later, as a newspaper reporter I earned a spot on �hit list� of one of the more despicable American neo-Nazi groups. One group threatened me with legal action for calling them �neo� � this offended them, they asserted, because they were the real thing.

Back in an earlier time, wargaming as a hobby included a fairly disturbing element of what can only be described as Nazi worship. It was never as common as later tales would have it, but it definitely did exist and was every bit as repulsive as one might imagine. Our trade group, the Game Manufacturers Association, has strict rules about the display of Nazi paraphernalia that date to that period � and they probably need to show a little more vigilance in enforcing them at their conventions and tradeshows. Lou Zocchi, the industry�s grand old man and a decorated World War II fighter pilot, fought and won a draining libel lawsuit over his stand against Nazi symbols.

By the mid-1970s, someone had established a graphic standard of showing Waffen SS units as black with white lettering. I�m not sure exactly where it first appeared � I�ve heard different tales � but the reason why is pretty clear. In those days, the four-color printing process gave you two �colors� for free: black and white. Each color you used cost more, from one to four. Some graphic designers became extremely adept at producing seemingly colorful counter sheets using only one or two colors beyond the two free ones or what was then called �color of the day.� If some other huge job was running using a lot of one color, you might also get that one for free and so pink and reflex blue became standard in many games.

So black-and-white counters added nothing to your color costs, and that explains why the scheme was used at all. But how it became associated with the Waffen SS, Germany's criminal gang of Nazi enforcers, is much less clear. It probably has some psychological underpinning of black = evil, but by the time I was playing wargames in high school, the association was definitely very strong that the black units were the SS. And in most of those games, there was no particular reason for the SS to have its own color scheme. But they did anyway.

When we founded the original Avalanche Press in 1994, I made the conscious decision that we would never use Nazi symbols in our games. And we�ve held to that, even sending the warehouse boys through the stacks with India-Ink pens to wipe out a swastika snuck in by a box designer. By the time our Panzer Grenadier series launched at the end of the last century, we could print in any color combination we could devise. And I decided that we would not use the standard black for the SS; actually, I decided not to put them in the games at all.

Eventually we did, with a camouflage scheme to set them apart from German Army units. Because the SS are often under special rules (usually involving some form of battlefield cowardice) and have different morale levels than the regular Army (general lower), they do need to have a distinguishing look. I did not want to give them the �Nazi� black-and-white scheme.

But many gamers have asked for them in that pattern, and my views have altered. For one thing, these are just little squares of colored, laminated cardboard. The black scheme has little to do with Nazi Germany; it�s a game publishing idea. German situation maps made during the war do often use black ink for SS units (with blue for regular Army, red for enemies, green for allies). Otherwise, it�s a tradition out of the dawn of wargaming.

And so we have the playing pieces in Dishonor Before Death; along with 30 new scenarios, there are 165 die-cut and mounted pieces in a new color scheme originally printed for our old Black SS book. It reproduces every SS unit and leader from three games: Elsenborn Ridge, Liberation 1944 and Fire & Sword. If you don�t like the black scheme, you don�t need them. If you like it and want to see the SS get crushed in the most visible form possible, it just plugs right in. Here�s what it includes:

Panzer Grenadier players like tanks. All three of the games covered by this set feature SS panzer divisions, and these units had top priority for new weapons. And so the Panther tank (Pz V in some games) is a fairly common game piece, and with its good balance of speed, firepower and protection it�s a very valuable one. In this set they�re all called �Panther� - use these also for the Pz V of Fire & Sword.

The Tiger tank rarely appeared as part of a panzer division�s organic tank component, instead equipping independent heavy tank battalions. The set includes seven examples of the Tiger I (Pz VIe in its first appearance in the series, but all the SS pieces have been called �Tiger�). There are also eight Tiger II pieces, enough to equip your own heavy tank battalion. That�s a few more of each than the games themselves require, but there were a handful of extra spaces on the sheet after all three games had received their allotment of counters so we used them for extra tanks.

Despite the fame of the Panther and Tiger, it was the PzKw IV (known to American tankers as the �Mark Four�) that formed the bulk of German tank strength in 1944 and 1945. Two models appear in the set, the Pz IVF2 that introduced the long-barreled 75mm gun, and the well-balanced Pz IVH.

�

The bumbling bloodthirsty bozos portrayed in Slovakia�s War went to war with a variety of cast-off and foreign-made weapons, as the units were never intended to serve in front-line combat. For police duties and mass murder, their Czech or French arms sufficed quite well.

Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 13:19 on Nov 25, 2022

# ? Nov 25, 2022 13:14

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# ? May 27, 2024 07:42

Tankbuster: Oct 1, 2021

Anyone else remember Eric Young's Squad Assault? It was a jankier 3d Close Combat inspired game.

# ? Nov 25, 2022 13:17

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