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sullat posted:That's one heck of a bless for EA Ulm. A dormant Luck bless combined with (10) fire resistance is a solid way to avoid most of the friendly fire, while also being useful in other contexts, and without crippling your economy. With luck buffing moved to glamour magic, which Marverni doesn't have, you can't do the old body ethereal+luck stacking trick to get guys who need to receive a killing blow on average about 16 times to actually die. Except, with the Luck bless, you can now - and without needing mages for both buffs as you had to do before, you can actually have a lower mage to troops ratio now, despite the game overall making troops more numerous relative to mages. Luck also scales quite well into surviving lategame "gently caress you" spells, especially now that you have a round to bless before most of the remote ones hit your army. You can also double down on luck combos with area twist fate spells, since luck procs before twist fate as long as it's what would normally be a killing blow. Fire resist helps with the new meteor fire splash, while also covering a big national weakness of Marverni, which is that most of your national stuff gets turbofucked by fire magic. my dad has issued a correction as of 10:31 on Mar 23, 2024 |
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Mar 23, 2024 10:16
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Playing some Field of Glory 2 and i just wish it had some real command/control friction, it's otherwise basically perfect. Oh also it should probably just have light troops break on contact with normal troops unless in favorable conditions but that's kinda minor
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Mar 23, 2024 15:38
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I really like how it properly simulates that melee combat wasn't made up of neat lines like Total War seems to think. While not a completely intermingled brawl like Hollywood thinks either.
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Mar 23, 2024 15:54
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From the new not-Europa Universalis project in development at Paradoxquote:So there has been a lot of speculation on the start date, where many of you have figured out the correct start date of 1st of April 1337.
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Mar 23, 2024 16:11
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Orange Devil posted:I really like how it properly simulates that melee combat wasn't made up of neat lines like Total War seems to think. While not a completely intermingled brawl like Hollywood thinks either. Yeah like I'm complaining that units are still too responsive, but even as just simulating stuff like "it takes a full turn to rotate 90 degrees" and "you can't charge past someone who could counter charge you" makes positioning so much more interesting
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Mar 23, 2024 16:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:From the new not-Europa Universalis project in development at Paradox April 1st huh 1337 huh
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Mar 23, 2024 22:34
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the weirdest thing is that there are actual advantages in total war to keep marching units in columns or blocks if you want to deploy them quickly. Something that reduces the speed of battle shows just how effective that is because a fully stretched out neat line of units will take a long time to turn 90 degrees while you can quickly put them into battlecubes, redeploy the cubes and then reform the line at right angles. Its just completely useless because the battles themselves are way too fast. Something that deliberately slows down the pace of battle like DeI for rome 2 or one of the realism overhauls for the gunpowder games shows that effect in action. Columns for quick march and lines for maximizing firepower.
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Mar 24, 2024 09:46
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Endman posted:April 1st huh The biggest joke is the claim that Paradox will model a transition in state organization.
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Mar 24, 2024 10:07
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I bought War in the East 2 because it was 50% off.  I still have like 14 miniatures to put together for WW3: Team Yankee so I can play a 100 point game next weekend...
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Mar 26, 2024 01:38
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Tekopo posted:it's focus is more on maneuver warfare than anything else. No real supply tracking. Scuse?
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Mar 26, 2024 07:31
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I love OCS but I’m not gonna lie, the fact that in the earlier games air power is extremely good, it’s all about blitzkrieg and that you mostly don’t want to use large artillery concentrations is really funny They have tried to course correct later tho
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Mar 26, 2024 08:32
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Tankbuster posted:the weirdest thing is that there are actual advantages in total war to keep marching units in columns or blocks if you want to deploy them quickly. Something that reduces the speed of battle shows just how effective that is because a fully stretched out neat line of units will take a long time to turn 90 degrees while you can quickly put them into battlecubes, redeploy the cubes and then reform the line at right angles. Yeah, EiC for napoleon had lines vs columns, poo poo was dope as gently caress
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Mar 26, 2024 08:44
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Been rewatching Band of Brothers again after finishing Masters of the Air. Then noticed Valkyria Chronicles for £4 on Steam and rebought it (had it on PS4 and never finished it). Weeb BoB with magic FTW. As an aside, just watched part five “Crossroads” where a bunch of SS got roundly demolished by Easy Company with the help of artillery. FF would be proud.
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Mar 26, 2024 18:23
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Zeppelin Insanity posted:A while ago I posted about a Kriegsspiel game ran in Flashpoint Campaigns, in which I am in charge of divisional artillery and also just being a staffer, and got a lot of help from this thread (and especially FF) in forming the plan. This is cool, btw. Wild that you're having to figure out what happened from a .PDF and map it yourselves.
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Mar 26, 2024 20:12
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:Been rewatching Band of Brothers again after finishing Masters of the Air. Then noticed Valkyria Chronicles for £4 on Steam and rebought it (had it on PS4 and never finished it). Weeb BoB with magic FTW. Valkyria Chronicles 4 is also really good even if its stempunk fantasy invasion of Russia that is also Nazi Germany
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Mar 26, 2024 21:09
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KomradeX posted:Valkyria Chronicles 4 is also really good even if its stempunk fantasy invasion of Russia that is also Nazi Germany Actually got it on Switch when it came out, and again, never finished it (and now I remember also having Fire Emblem: Three Houses to complete now I got the Joy-Cons upgraded to Hall effect sticks). I can’t remember if the squad was as interesting as the original game’s. Think there was also another class added to the gameplay or some other tweak that was divisive.
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Mar 26, 2024 21:22
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A decent writeup on the doctrine of using standard 'thugs' in Dominions (6):    'Army thug' is usually what people use for thugs meant to operate alongside armies. I don't like the use of the phrase 'army thug' in general because, while many of the principles of cost-efficiency above apply, it's a very different kind of beast, doctrine-ways. It's generally your army's equivalent of a specialist support weapon that requires support from the rest of the army, rather than a survivable, mobile flanker and strategic backline harrasser that operates solo or in small groups. 'Counter-thug' is self-explanatory. Specialist whose job is to be a cost-efficient tool to remove more expensive generalists.
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Mar 27, 2024 12:18
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the more I pull at the threads of these grognard games, the more I get disappointed War in the East 2 had a patch released three days ago, and of the big new features was a new optional rule: Reduced Retreat Attrition. When a unit gets defeated in combat, it retreats by one hex, and takes losses just for retreating (i.e. apart from losses taken during combat). This setting reduces the amount of losses taken during retreats, with a note from the developer that this is supposed to more strongly encourage the player (usually the Axis one) to conduct full encirclement battles and destroy units fully, rather than triggering retreats and depleting the other side's manpower and equipment from such losses. I started digging into why this rule needed to be implemented. Apparently, the way WITE2 works when playing with the AI is that the AI can "teleport" its units to anywhere on the map, as long as it's not an occupied hex, and as long as the unit is not already engaged or adjacent to an enemy (i.e. within the enemy's Zone-of-Control). Presumably, the AI is granted this exemption from having to abide by normal movement rules because they couldn't program it to be smart enough to make coordinated movements under regular movement, so they just get to plant their units wherever they want in order to be able to guarantee that the computer can always form a contiguous front line. Now, this does not mean that it's impossible to beat the Soviet AI as the Axis: if you're always moving adjacent to Soviet units (and taking care that such adjacency does not leave you vulnerable to attack yourself), then those units cannot teleport. If you can encircle Soviet units, then units inside encirclements cannot teleport. If you inflict lots and lots of damage to Soviet units, then they will become weak, to the point where even though you might be facing a solid line of counters, the counters themselves will be pushovers in combat. People eventually figured out that, if all you really want to be doing is depleting Soviet manpower and equipment, then inflicting casualties is the bottom line. Encirclements can destroy lots of equipment and kill lots of manpower in one fell swoop, but then it requires you to behave and maneuver in such a way that can be pretty difficult to pull off in practice. So Axis players invented a strategy called "grinding": the Axis player does not explicitly aim for encirclement battles, and instead sets up strong direct attacks on Soviet units, with an emphasis on anyone on open terrain, and anyone that's already previously lost a battle or otherwise looks weak. The idea is to win battles, trigger retreats if not routs, and rely on the losses caused by retreat attrition to win the war in the long term. The goal is to get and keep the Soviet OOB under 3 million men in 1941. this works, which is why the devs had to address it, but the problem is that if you turn it off outright, then the game becomes much much harder against the AI, but if you leave it on, then Axis gameplay becomes a lot less... innovative, even when playing against a human Soviet player that doesn't have teleportation and shouldn't need to be grinded-against. So, they turned it into a toggle - leave Retreat Attrition as it is for games against the AI, but then flip it if you're up against a Soviet human player in PBEM. ___ having said all this, I'm not really opposed to the teleportation in principle: it makes for a more interesting game against the AI (where the alternative might well be not having a passable AI opponent at all), and it's possible to turn it off (keep the AI settings on "Normal" difficulty), but the reaction to "grinding" had some uncomfortable implications for the game: 1. unlike similar games such as The Operational Art of War, you can't determine how hard the unit is going to defend a hex. Every battle is treated as though the defender is resisting with maximal effort, which leads to these results where the Germans can blow up one-third of a Soviet division in the combat itself, and then another third is lost during the retreat, when this might be a battle fought outside Smolensk in September '41 and it would've been more prudent to conduct a withdrawal as soon as a little pressure is applied. 2. more importantly (at least to me), this goes back to the post I wrote some months ago about how devs seem to want to encourage maneuver warfare, even when the bare results of their own simulation yields a more optimal solution. If it turns out that it would've been better in the long-run for the Axis to have conducted attritional warfare in the East Front, who are we to say that that's wrong and should be patched? Because Guderian said so?
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Mar 28, 2024 08:17
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Maneuver warfare is sexy and dashing, logistics and spreadsheet grinding is not
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Mar 28, 2024 08:30
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i always felt that the big grognard computer games always tried too many simulationist aspects in their design: trying to drill down to how many specific men are in a regiment, exactly what they are armed with etc etc just makes it impossible to actually balance a game in any useful way, because the adjustments you have to make are either too small and ineffective, or so large that they have unexpected knock-on effects that end up invalidating what you are trying to simulate in the first place its the same issue I have with ASL: in ASL you aren't simulating war, you are simulating playing a game of ASL
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Mar 28, 2024 09:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:So Axis players invented a strategy called "grinding": the Axis player does not explicitly aim for encirclement battles, and instead sets up strong direct attacks on Soviet units, with an emphasis on anyone on open terrain, and anyone that's already previously lost a battle or otherwise looks weak. The idea is to win battles, trigger retreats if not routs, and rely on the losses caused by retreat attrition to win the war in the long term. The goal is to get and keep the Soviet OOB under 3 million men in 1941. So they unwittingly reinvented Monty’s “crumbling” strategy. That’s hilarious
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Mar 28, 2024 10:03
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KomradeX posted:Valkyria Chronicles 4 is also really good even if its stempunk fantasy invasion of Russia that is also Nazi Germany I wish that the score for the missions wasn't 80% the turn count. It turned every map into a puzzle instead of a scrap, imho. And having a shared action pool sucked.
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Mar 28, 2024 15:01
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:Actually got it on Switch when it came out, and again, never finished it (and now I remember also having Fire Emblem: Three Houses to complete now I got the Joy-Cons upgraded to Hall effect sticks). I can’t remember if the squad was as interesting as the original game’s. Think there was also another class added to the gameplay or some other tweak that was divisive. I really liked the squad members in it and the addition of mortars was nice
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Mar 28, 2024 15:21
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Tekopo posted:i always felt that the big grognard computer games always tried too many simulationist aspects in their design: trying to drill down to how many specific men are in a regiment, exactly what they are armed with etc etc just makes it impossible to actually balance a game in any useful way, because the adjustments you have to make are either too small and ineffective, or so large that they have unexpected knock-on effects that end up invalidating what you are trying to simulate in the first place I agree. The game (and the ethos of the games in this vein) all swing wildly between things that don't matter, things that sidestep the simulationist aspects completely in order to matter, and things that are so deeply buried in the interface and yet matter and are not obvious to the player: - Soviet artillery units will only stock themselves up to 60% of their maximum ammo allocation prior to 1944. This has a knock-on effect of making them shoot less often during combat, thus dealing less damage. It's trying to create this historical flavor of the Soviet high command not allocating as much ammo as they could have to artillery units until the heyday of the Soviet offensives, but if you're going to apply such a strong blanket ruling on the mechanics, what was everything else for? - many Soviet HQ units will start the game at below their full TOE of Support Squads, and can and will lose more if they're attacked/disrupted by German units. The missing Support Squads will cause units under these HQs to fail their various leader checks more often, simulating inefficient/incompetent/understaffed Soviet command structures during the first portion of the war. Since HQ units do not have a "Refit" button the way combat units do, the only way to restore their Support Squad allotment is to put them into the Stavka reserve box... but the logistics phase will stop creating new Support Squads when the manpower pool dips below 120k available men, so on top of putting them in the reserves, you also have to watch both everything else in the reserves, as well as the regular units on Refit, to leave enough manpower on the table some of it goes to the HQs. How is a player supposed to know this??? Alternatively, if the devs were willing to implement a hard rule that makes artillery units shoot less often prior to 1944, why couldn't they also implement a hard rule that makes Soviet HQs less capable of passing leader checks prior to 1942 or 1943? Why make the player jump through all of these unintuitive hoops? ___ The old SSG Decisive Battles series is still the example I like to bring up when it comes to a game that tries utilize the computer-ness of the video game medium well, without simply throwing lots of detail and numbers at it: - a unit's health is measured in pips, which can be as few as one and as many as six; this gives units a level of varying strength that would be hard to pull off on a boardgame, but without also having to correspond each pip to x number of infantrymen or tanks - if you flip a switch in the scenario settings, the combat strength of a unit is randomized within a range, and you won't even know what it is until you commit that unit to combat. This creates variability and replayability within scenarios, again, without needing to elucidate exactly how that strength number was arrived at - ammo is measured in discrete amounts of bullets, between two to six - you can a unit out of ammo with repeated combats, but you don't need to distinguish between 2% ammo and 76% ammo and exactly what that means - and underneath it all, the combat system is still boardgamey: combat strengths form odds ratios of the attacker against the defender, defensible terrain causes column shifts in the defender's favor, artillery and air support causes column shifts in the attacker's favor, and it comes down to a 1d6 roll to determine defender step loss, defender retreat, exchange, attacker step loss, etc.; and this is good, because making the combat engine completely beholden to the player helps them make actually meaningful decisions, rather than just guessing.
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Mar 28, 2024 15:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:Apparently, the way WITE2 works when playing with the AI is that the AI can "teleport" its units to anywhere on the map, as long as it's not an occupied hex, and as long as the unit is not already engaged or adjacent to an enemy (i.e. within the enemy's Zone-of-Control). Presumably, the AI is granted this exemption from having to abide by normal movement rules because they couldn't program it to be smart enough to make coordinated movements under regular movement, so they just get to plant their units wherever they want in order to be able to guarantee that the computer can always form a contiguous front line. I really loving hate when they do stuff like this, and it seems like every sufficiently complex game just lets the AI cheat in increasingly ridiculous ways to give the illusion of difficulty, rather than actually simulating anything, which is where the difficulty is supposed to come from. gradenko_2000 posted:more importantly (at least to me), this goes back to the post I wrote some months ago about how devs seem to want to encourage maneuver warfare, even when the bare results of their own simulation yields a more optimal solution. If it turns out that it would've been better in the long-run for the Axis to have conducted attritional warfare in the East Front, who are we to say that that's wrong and should be patched? Because Guderian said so? As I think you pointed out last time round, this is the problem with pretty much every western board or computer game on the Eastern Front (or Battle of France) because they take it for granted that German operational principles were sound, that their operational plans and campaign objectives were coherent, and achievable, and that their successes were all proof of this system working, where the failures are just tantalizing "what if's", rather than reflecting any problem or shortcoming. It drives me up the loving wall. When it comes to how the Allies fought the Battle of France, it's Gort this and Gort that, interwar doctrine, problems with the French Army, but when the Germans fail...? Citino expertly shows that the Germans' successes and failures were part of the same thing, a lot of which was improvised, rather than something called "Blitzkrieg", and yet every war gamer is obsessed with 1941-42, and forgets that clearly something did not quite work out with this approach to warfare. The failures between 1943-45 don't mean anything, manoeuvre warfare can never fail, only be failed. We haven't placed the Regia Marina or IJA on this same sort of pedestal. I don't think "What if the Italians won the Battle of Cape Matapan?" is an enduring obsession that sucks up all of the air of painted miniatures, pop history, board games and video games. "What if the IJA won at Imphal and Kohima?" hasn't been used to argue that every western military today should be patterned after the IJA, and the future of warfare is more pack mules. Endman posted:So they unwittingly reinvented Monty’s “crumbling” strategy. That’s hilarious Yes, because Monty was loving right, and Rommel & co. were wrong. These people need to check the scoreboard. DJJIB-DJDCT has issued a correction as of 15:50 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 15:37
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BrotherJayne posted:I wish that the score for the missions wasn't 80% the turn count. Even the first one is much more a puzzle than fighting it out because you can finish some missions very quickly by putting yourself in very precarious tactical situations but the mission ends as soon as you complete the objective so it doesn't matter, and my major problem in wargames is I can be overly cautious
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Mar 28, 2024 15:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:I agree. The game (and the ethos of the games in this vein) all swing wildly between things that don't matter, things that sidestep the simulationist aspects completely in order to matter, and things that are so deeply buried in the interface and yet matter and are not obvious to the player: The problem with so many wargames seems to be they really want to game out how could the Nazis lose against this and that surely doesn't explain any problems within the hobby itself or society much more broadly
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Mar 28, 2024 15:54
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KomradeX posted:The problem with so many wargames seems to be they really want to game out how could the Nazis lose against this and that surely doesn't explain any problems within the hobby itself or society much more broadly Yep. It's really something.
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Mar 28, 2024 16:11
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the IJA winning at imphal would still require them to reach the plains of bengal before something resembling an actual civil war happened like everyone in Indian leadership assumed.
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Mar 28, 2024 16:54
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Tankbuster posted:the IJA winning at imphal would still require them to reach the plains of bengal before something resembling an actual civil war happened like everyone in Indian leadership assumed. I realize that, but the Germans winning at Kursk would still require XYZ, Stalingrad would still require XYZ, the CSA winning at Gettysburg would still require XYZ, and yet people are feverishly replaying those defeats and basing their entire view of war on the losing sides because... well that I'm less sure of. Why Germany and not Japan? Why the CSA and not the French in 1871 or the Austrians in 1866?
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Mar 28, 2024 17:27
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no one cares about the war in the pacific unless you are from those countries lol. There were so many "britain has fallen" responses to the national army museum running an online poll and the Battle of Imphal winning.
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Mar 28, 2024 17:29
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:I realize that, but the Germans winning at Kursk would still require XYZ, Stalingrad would still require XYZ, the CSA winning at Gettysburg would still require XYZ, and yet people are feverishly replaying those defeats and basing their entire view of war on the losing sides because... well that I'm less sure of. Also why not colonial wargaming which uniformly depicts Europeans as space marines and the natives as disorganized chaff
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Mar 28, 2024 17:58
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StashAugustine posted:Also why not colonial wargaming which uniformly depicts Europeans as space marines and the natives as disorganized chaff because ...  
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Mar 28, 2024 18:00
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oh my god, the guys sitting on the limber are so cute!
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Mar 28, 2024 18:10
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:I realize that, but the Germans winning at Kursk would still require XYZ, Stalingrad would still require XYZ, the CSA winning at Gettysburg would still require XYZ, and yet people are feverishly replaying those defeats and basing their entire view of war on the losing sides because... well that I'm less sure of. Because Americans have no idea what happened in 1871 or 1866, and you are reading english language publications and boards mostly made up of Americans if you go off the English speaking internet alt.history almost guarantee look a lot different
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Mar 28, 2024 18:17
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My biggest question is "why Byzantium?" Just always loving Byzantium.
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Mar 28, 2024 21:35
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Orange Devil posted:My biggest question is "why Byzantium?" Because it's the intersection of Islamophobia, Romeaboo, and medieval knights
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Mar 28, 2024 22:22
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It's sort of funny, because without Islam, all of the same animus would be directed at Coptic, Nestorian and Syriac Christians "for some reason".
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Mar 28, 2024 22:33
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all copts are bastards
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Mar 28, 2024 22:34
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my dad posted:'Army thug' is usually what people use for thugs meant to operate alongside armies. I don't like the use of the phrase 'army thug' in general because, while many of the principles of cost-efficiency above apply, it's a very different kind of beast, doctrine-ways. It's generally your army's equivalent of a specialist support weapon that requires support from the rest of the army, rather than a survivable, mobile flanker and strategic backline harrasser that operates solo or in small groups. I use the following terminology. Cruiser Thug -- This is your classic thug. Designed to get into an enemies strategic depth and cause chaos there. Can be either snuck into the enemies backlines or used to exploit a breach. (Infantry/Army) Support Thug -- A thug designed to fight alongside an army. They don't usually need the strategic speed or ability to slip past enemy lines that cruiser thug benefits from, however you need to consider what fighting beside an army entails. Assault Thug -- This is a thug designed specifically for storming fortifications. It's nice if they can have some siege abilities as well. Thug Destroyer -- This is a unit designed to fight thugs. Often cheaper than actually kitting out a thug but isn't always capable of fighting enemy armies by itself. Main Battle Thug -- These are the old supercombatants. Expensive endgame summons with fancy expensive equipment. While it turns out they're not as invincible as people once thought they were, they can still be very useful on the endgame battlefield. Then there are the following concepts that don't apply exclusively to thugs. Ecumenical Warfare - These are units that can fight the enemy's dominion directly. Stealthy heretics are good for this. HPC - Heat, Poison, and Cold auras can take out a lot of your units and is commonly used by enemy thugs. It's important to figure out a way to protect your troops if your enemy is engaging in HPC warfare.
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Mar 28, 2024 23:20
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