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Definitely, I only understand a small percentage of spells but yeah a lot of them seem irritating. I had my one success with casting Armageddon a bunch of times, which basically ruined every province for everyone. My summoned army was just set up to do a little better and require fewer resources so I was comparatively more powerful, opponents slowly succumbing to being unable to afford army upkeep. But it meant everyone quit the game though, I didn't win by invading capitals. The writing was on the wall and my opponents just realized it was hopeless, and yes irritating to continue playing as I slowly nuked the world. And I'm not a good player at all, just lucky that nobody squashed me earlier and that I didn't seem a threat until the end. I lost handily every other time i played with people.
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Sep 23, 2023 21:40
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1stGear posted:If we're remembering the same article, I think my favorite part of it was that Soviet doctrine emphasized really simple plans. So the NATO side would be laying out really intricate clockwork of how they're going to advance, when air support will strike, when artillery barrages will start/end, phase lines, the works. And the Soviet team would just say "We're all gonna go forward at once, whichever axis has success will be reinforced" and be done with their planning in like thirty minutes. It was apparently extremely successful at unnerving the NATO players. Which is funny for how much these same people love the idea of the initiative of the Prussian style NCO to shape a battle
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Sep 23, 2023 21:43
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my dad posted:There were two articles, the original and the response to it, which points out, with good arguments, that the original misrepresents the Soviet doctrine in some ways, including playing up the 'brute force' aspects of it. I know I have them both somewhere on my computer as PDFs, but it's in a hive of ancient folders I don't dare disturb. i totally get what you're saying the psychological and mental elements of competitive strategy games are still really under recognized and interesting imo its v noticeable playing sc2 since it's so fast paced and gives no time to recollect your thoughts so any mental fatigue tends to build up through a match and across matches (players will gg out of tournament matches before they're completely decided if they've got rounds after that and don't think they can win, to conserve their mental energy for the ones they think they can, it becomes a fully fledged third resource next to gas & minerals at the pro level) all players have their kinda basic cycle of actions and decisions they'll run through about every ~10-30 seconds, unit production, scouting, macro stuff. attached to that is the higher order decisionmaking and processing, where they think about what you're doing and what they should do. its attached to it and not the other way around while playing because there's just too many things happening after the first few minutes, that build off decisions you made 30 sec, 1 min ago, 3 min ago etc. and by 4-5 minutes there's a new thing happening purely in your internal economic development.every 1-3 seconds, not including interactions with the other player. by about 7-8 minutes youll always have more than one thing per second happening. cues and timing and working off rote memorization/muscle memory are how someone navigates most of what's happening in the game, while making decisions on how to most efficiently direct those cycles of input and focus in response to the decisions made by the opponent without executing those cycles, you can't execute any strategy, so the priority is always there, all of the more complex gameplay sprouts from it. there's a rhythm to it created from the pace units/buildings build and upgrades complete at and how quickly resources are gathered, it speeds up and builds in complexity as the game goes on & the upper ceiling of potential performance continues rising until the end of the game. it's executed in shorter intervals and becomes more fluid and adjustable the better a player is, that's where the really high APM in bw/sc2 pros comes from, the pros are splitting their focus in sub-second intervals continuously - but fundamentally it's no different from any other competitive player, its just being done more often and more efficiently, it's the only way to engage with the game mechanics competitively you can really notice it between two grossly mismatched players, the better player will just intuit how often the other player is bouncing between things and will time their attacks & pokes ( which all cause the same big flashing red symbols on the map and voice yelling "WERE UNDER ATTACK", every time) to interrupt those processes specifically. less for the effect on the map than in the other player's head - by disrupting the other player's ability to smoothly make more dudes and to react without impacting their own + preventing the other player from taking the initiative, correctly paced intervals of disruption will do more damage than the actual damage done with the majority of attacks past that, if a player can continue to interrupt that process to the point their opponent begins to feel like they're being outplayed, and/or is forced out of their own gameplan, they will inevitably start to make glaring mistakes, over respond to things, get tunnel vision, become overly passive or overly aggressive, and then fall apart - even if their actual position on the map isn't behind the other player's, and on paper they still stand to win, they're unable to find a way to reach the win condition. the parts of their routine that aren't flexible aren't able to be changed while they're still playing, and the flexible parts aren't able to develop a new plan of action that compensates for the situation without mechanically degrading their own play so much they lose on unit/base count regardless of their strategic planning, since the plans come from the execution of what are essentially drilled exercises the interplay of trying to break into and disrupt each other's mental process is where the real depth and interesting gameplay in those kinds of games is imo. ppl talk about the micro bc its fast & intricate and flashy, but it only even matters bc the game requires that strategic distribution of attention-span and working memory across more things than can be flawlessly micromanaged and focused on at once the neat part of it to me is that entire aspect of the game all lies outside of the actual ingame strategy & is independent of which race, map, playstyle, etc. it's almost entirely the exploitation of physiological and psychological responses to stimuli to keep a person off-balance, or breaking their will to fight by making them feel like it's a waste of energy to go on
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Sep 23, 2023 21:43
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palindrome posted:I love reading dominions posts, I've only played 2-3 games of dom4 I think but it's fun tooling around in single player against incompetent AI. And I understand what you are saying. The human player is definitely a resource. Your time and energy can be consumed, or you may not have 2 hours that day to pay perfect attention to every detail. Accounting for that reality is sound strategy. The instinct of computer gamers is usually to go for perfect play it seems. exsqueeze me, I only keep reloading my xcom 2 saves because I want my precious pawns protected because I spent hours on creating them.
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Sep 23, 2023 21:53
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/antony1959/status/1705220310696419648?t=ZKHswz-osp_R1Cjkgfb79w&s=19 These boys are living the life goddamn.
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Sep 24, 2023 00:14
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KomradeX posted:Which is funny for how much these same people love the idea of the initiative of the Prussian style NCO to shape a battle Everybody loves to imagine themselves as the low level NCO taking control to achieve great success and glory. None of the generals like giving up control though, and you can’t have the former without the latter.
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Sep 24, 2023 00:23
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Orange Devil posted:Everybody loves to imagine themselves as the low level NCO taking control to achieve great success and glory. None of the generals like giving up control though, and you can’t have the former without the latter. Its really funny that I never heard about then officers in Vietnam micromanaging troops like an rts from their helicopters tillnI read it in Kill Everything that Moves, or was in Technowar? I can't remember I read those books back to back
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Sep 24, 2023 00:41
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Additionally I feel like lots of games focus on the scale where tactical flexibility is prized but the operational context is mostly abstracted
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Sep 24, 2023 03:57
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because the former is really fun and visceral.
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Sep 24, 2023 03:59
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The operational context might be "congratulations your victory was completely pointless and did nothing to alter the course of the campaign." Who wants that?
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Sep 24, 2023 04:15
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I remember the old (surprisingly good) Axis & Allies Battle of the Bulge game had a historical note that Axis victory is just doing better than history, their planned objectives literally aren't on the map
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Sep 24, 2023 04:21
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Lostconfused posted:The operational context might be "congratulations your victory was completely pointless and did nothing to alter the course of the campaign." Hillsbrad was a vital strategic hamlet.
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Sep 24, 2023 17:21
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yes it was. Literally a pit stop to alterac city.
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Sep 24, 2023 18:01
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StashAugustine posted:I remember the old (surprisingly good) Axis & Allies Battle of the Bulge game had a historical note that Axis victory is just doing better than history, their planned objectives literally aren't on the map was this the game where you drove tanks around?
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Sep 24, 2023 19:25
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That reminds me of the Peiper's Charge scenario that's been in the Battle of the Bulge books for Flames of War for the past couple of editions. Literally just drive the SS Panzer Kampfgrupper in a straight line down a road for as long as you can to see if you can get further than they did in reality.
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Sep 24, 2023 22:15
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Typo posted:was this the game where you drove tanks around? Nah it was a massively scaled down version of a&a on a hex map, had some neat ideas like how supply was a physical unit on the map that could be moved, captured, and accidentally destroyed
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Sep 25, 2023 03:04
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Endman posted:That reminds me of the Peiper's Charge scenario that's been in the Battle of the Bulge books for Flames of War for the past couple of editions. Literally just drive the SS Panzer Kampfgrupper in a straight line down a road for as long as you can to see if you can get further than they did in reality. There's a great graviteam scenario based on one of peiper's last engagements in the east, you get to ambush a bunch of SS in the middle of a snowstorm at night and it rules
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Sep 25, 2023 03:43
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Peiper is one of a lot of guys who should have been hanged at Nuremberg and got off ridiculously light for the scale and horror of the crimes they committed, but he did at least later die at the hands of an honest-to-god torches-and-pitchforks angry mob after his neighbors in France found out who he was, so justice was served eventually
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Sep 25, 2023 04:18
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Mister Bates posted:Peiper is one of a lot of guys who should have been hanged at Nuremberg and got off ridiculously light for the scale and horror of the crimes they committed, but he did at least later die at the hands of an honest-to-god torches-and-pitchforks angry mob after his neighbors in France found out who he was, so justice was served eventually Hell yeah 
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Sep 25, 2023 04:39
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It's kind of funny how he got off so easily considering he oversaw the massacre of American troops and didn't get paperclipped. Ah well, they got him in the end.
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Sep 25, 2023 05:13
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Endman posted:It's kind of funny how he got off so easily considering he oversaw the massacre of American troops and didn't get paperclipped. Lol https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/us/joachim-peiper-nazi-photo-apology.html 
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Sep 25, 2023 05:26
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ModernMajorGeneral posted:Lol 
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Sep 25, 2023 05:52
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KomradeX posted:Hell yeah Have to like a story with a happy ending
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Sep 25, 2023 10:16
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Endman posted:That reminds me of the Peiper's Charge scenario that's been in the Battle of the Bulge books for Flames of War for the past couple of editions. Literally just drive the SS Panzer Kampfgrupper in a straight line down a road for as long as you can to see if you can get further than they did in reality. did the game model how Peiper had to stop when he encountered rivers because he couldn't find any bridges that can support the weight of his king tigers and then start driving around in a circle looking for a bridge which could while the US army kept blowing up said bridges around him? Peiper was a war criminal who should have being shot at Nuremburg but he was correct that tiger tanks sucked lol
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Sep 25, 2023 15:17
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ModernMajorGeneral posted:Lol Lol I remember when that happened.
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Sep 25, 2023 18:59
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Typo posted:did the game model how Peiper had to stop when he encountered rivers because he couldn't find any bridges that can support the weight of his king tigers and then start driving around in a circle looking for a bridge which could while the US army kept blowing up said bridges around him? I did some reading about this guy due to this thread and lmao we just let the Nazis go. They also had a mutual aid organization for the Waffen SS and they just let them do it, not even as a honey pot to go send them to Israel or anything. Guderian even sent a letter to Truman on Peiper's behalf, to which I was shocked because 1. Why wasn't he in jail/a mass grave 2. He was comfortable enough to send a letter to the American president which he likely read wow They of course, didn't turn over Guderian to the Soviets.
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Sep 25, 2023 19:34
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Typo posted:did the game model how Peiper had to stop when he encountered rivers because he couldn't find any bridges that can support the weight of his king tigers and then start driving around in a circle looking for a bridge which could while the US army kept blowing up said bridges around him? Unfortunately the guys who write the rules for Flames of War are pretty enamoured of their "Panzer Aces" so you never get anything cool/hilarious like that. Sometimes I really feel compelled to write my own tabletop miniatures rules for WW2 that include all of the parts of Nazi tanks that make them awful, like having to roll on a table of mechanical faults for the Panther to see if the final drive falls apart or the transmission craps out when you attempt to move the thing.
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Sep 25, 2023 22:09
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Endman posted:Unfortunately the guys who write the rules for Flames of War are pretty enamoured of their "Panzer Aces" so you never get anything cool/hilarious like that. this is also why graviteam reigns supreme. Nothing like half your tank platoon immobilizing in the first ten mins of battle cause of the secret soviet weapon, ordinary road conditions
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Sep 25, 2023 22:48
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skooma512 posted:I did some reading about this guy due to this thread and lmao we just let the Nazis go. They also had a mutual aid organization for the Waffen SS and they just let them do it, not even as a honey pot to go send them to Israel or anything. He joined the US Army Historical Division in 1945 and the US refused requests from the Soviet Union to have him extradited.[84] Even after the war, Guderian retained an affinity with Hitler and National Socialism. While interned by the Americans, his conversations were secretly taped. In one such recording, while conversing with former Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb and former General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, Guderian opined: "The fundamental principles [of Nazism] were fine". After the Second World War, the CIA was highly interested in using Guderian to rally the German right to the Atlanticist cause.[88]
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Sep 26, 2023 05:09
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FirstnameLastname posted:the Atlanticist cause.[88] lmao perfect
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Sep 26, 2023 05:13
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1stGear posted:If we're remembering the same article, I think my favorite part of it was that Soviet doctrine emphasized really simple plans. So the NATO side would be laying out really intricate clockwork of how they're going to advance, when air support will strike, when artillery barrages will start/end, phase lines, the works. And the Soviet team would just say "We're all gonna go forward at once, whichever axis has success will be reinforced" and be done with their planning in like thirty minutes. It was apparently extremely successful at unnerving the NATO players. Why Cold War Warsaw Pact Tactics Work In Wargaming
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Sep 26, 2023 07:36
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Topical scenario alert: https://twitter.com/unityofcommand/status/1706601276522250417
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Sep 26, 2023 10:38
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The bit in Citino’s book on the German campaigns of 1943 where he dunks on Prokhorovka actually being a big battle at all is very funny. It wasn’t some swirling maelstrom of thousands of tanks at all, but a mostly abortive attack where disparate elements of 5th Guards Tank Army blundered into 2 SS Panzer Corps, and Rotmistrov later claimed more German tanks killed than possibly could have existed at the battle, whereas in reality both formations were left mostly intact.
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Sep 26, 2023 12:22
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2 separate German alt-history tracks! Oh boy!!
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Sep 26, 2023 17:23
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"What if the tanks were able to drive more than a mile before mechanical failure."
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Sep 26, 2023 17:25
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"What it the SS didn't try to clear minefields with their face" "What if the Germans decided to do something else instead"
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Sep 26, 2023 17:36
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From a gameplay perspective from 1943 onward you need alt history scenarios because otherwise it's just variations of getting your face kicked in over and over again. Ofcourse, game designers never have a problem releasing games about say, Fall Weiss or Fall Gelb in which only Germany is playable, so this seems like a problem with a much simpler solution.
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Sep 26, 2023 17:39
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I'd argue from 1943 onwards, getting your face kicked in is the only remotely plausible outcome that doesn't involve mecha Hitler or zombie SS An actually convincing German alt-history campaign would have to start at Barbarossa or even earlier, just post-France
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Sep 26, 2023 18:00
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There need to be more explicitly alt history style wargames. Like give me something based off the anglo-american nazi war where you gotta do normandy but with 50s tech.
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Sep 26, 2023 18:54
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Slavvy posted:I'd argue from 1943 onwards, getting your face kicked in is the only remotely plausible outcome that doesn't involve mecha Hitler or zombie SS yeah, I would argue the Germans probably lost sometime between late summer-winter of 1941 The goal of Operation Barbarossa was to achieve the operational destruction of the red army, while the Axis did score a lot of kills once the Soviets managed to extract enough of their formations that goal wasn't achievable anymore. The Germans used up their secret weapon (breaking treaties to achieve strategic surprise) to get as far as they did and they can't exactly do it again. Yes, the Germans took a lot of territory and that was important, but it also wasn't clear how they were supposed to win a war of attrition after that point. Typo has issued a correction as of 19:06 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 19:02
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