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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Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Bayonets win ground. Don't underestimate the bayonet.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2023 03:17

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 19:14

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Frosted Flake posted:

There's Hess on one side (most civil war combat was at a hundred metres or less) and then on the other Paddy Griffith, who thinks there were more changes.

I smell a great opportunity for a dialectical study

# ¿ Feb 10, 2023 11:28

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Frosted Flake posted:

The book on US submarine surface actions includes an entire chapter on why they had to let Donitz go, yeah. It ends by mentioning that while US veterans rarely if ever talked about the surface actions, and so the public was unaware, the military and civilian leadership were. Because Japan had made formal protests about some of these crimes, there was a risk that if they proceeded at Nuremberg against Donitz they would severely undermine the Tokyo and other trials. They thought about putting their own skippers on trial but some of them were famous submarine aces by then, and so they let Donitz off the hook to put the whole thing to bed.

�In 1944 the Japanese government lodged a formal protest against a submarine attack on the 130-ton Taiei Maru. The motor vessel carried a crew of six and seventy-seven civilian construction workers and their families on the morning of 3 July 1944, traveling between the islands of Palau and Yap. The Japanese claimed that After shelling set the ship on fire, a submarine circled the vicinity, firing machine guns at people in the water. Floating victims were allegedly probed with poles and if found to be still alive were shot with pistols. The accusations apparently emanated from the Taiei Maru�s master, who said he escaped by feigning death and that the only other survivors were two women and two of his crew�

�There is no doubt that the submarine referred to in the Japanese allegations was the USS Albacore, although its patrol report described the wooden interisland steamer as nearly 1,000 tons, and not surprisingly made no reference to shooting survivors. The Albacore�s commander, James W. Blanchard, gave a very different version of events when requested to respond to the accusations. According to Blanchard, the Albacore first fired at the vessel with its four-inch gun from some 6,300 yards away. The vessel took evasive action, and as the submarine gained ground it began firing with its two 20 mm guns and two .30-caliber machine guns. Blanchard insisted that guns were directed �at the target only� and that allegations of the crew firing at survivors in the water were �absolutely untrue.�

�Leaving aside whether survivors in the water were shot, the Albacore had indisputably turned its considerable firepower on an unarmed craft carrying civilians. As is the case with many other gun attacks, it is possible to interpret the assault on the Taiei Maru as motivated partly by frustration. Earlier in the patrol, during what later became known as the battle of the Philippine Sea, the Albacore found itself in the midst of a Japanese carrier group south of the Mariana Islands. Blanchard managed to fire off six torpedoes at the 31,000-ton carrier Taiho before being driven deep by enemy depth charges. Believing he had failed to sink the carrier, Blanchard brooded over missing such a rare opportunity. He was subsequently ordered to intercept traffic between Palau and Yap, and it may have been the prospect of a barren patrol that spurred the ferocious attack on the Taiei Maru. Ironically, months later Blanchard received confirmation that he had indeed sunk the Taiho and he was awarded a Navy Cross.�

�There were other instances when individual submariners shot at survivors on their own initiative. In a postwar interview William Hazzard, skipper of the USS Blenny, related an incident in which his executive officer began shooting at a man in the water. After the submarine sank a gunboat in the Java Sea, one of the survivors began shouting and brandishing a knife. The executive officer responded by firing a .45-caliber pistol at the man before Hazzard stopped him and told him they weren�t going to shoot anybody in the water.�

�The impulse to inflict pain and suffering on the enemy at times seemed overwhelming. On the USS Seahorse one of the crewmen, who had lost a brother with the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor, begged the skipper to let him turn a machine gun on some Japanese survivors encountered at sea. In this case the request was refused.Commanding the British submarine HMS Thule in the Malacca Straits, Alistair Mars professed, �At times I felt savage: I wanted to lay into some Japanese ship with the Thule�s gun, to smash her to pieces and massacre her men.�On at least one occasion Mars acted on these impulses; having driven a Japanese vessel onto some rocks, he ordered his gunners to shoot men as they abandoned ship.�

�In an ecology of violence that not only condoned killing but encouraged it, such incidents can hardly be surprising.40 American admiral Bull Halsey professed delight in the slaughter of Japanese troops, routinely ending messages with the admonition to �keep �em dying.�41 As will be documented later, numerous submarine actions might be described as �atrocities� or �war crimes.� Far less defensible than the killing of Japanese military personnel, these sometimes involved the death and maiming of civilians, whether Japanese fishermen or local seamen.�

Which book is this? I�m always looking for more to read on the Pacific Theatre of WW2

# ¿ Feb 10, 2023 20:39

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

I don't think I'll buy another Company of Heroes game after the second one which was straight up Nazi propaganda

# ¿ Feb 24, 2023 08:53

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Lostconfused posted:

Company of Heroes was always sus, I think I remember hearing or reading some poo poo about how they just wanted to show how they were just regular brave/heroic soldiers in the market garden campaign.

Not that I really took note of it at the time, but the signs were there.

I think it's fairly transparent that their motivation, which isn't uncommon in both videogames and in tabletop wargames, is that they just wanted the opportunity to play with Nazi toys, without having to grapple with their attachment to Nazi ideology.

The German force you play as in that campaign is even called "Kampfgruppe Lehr" to tie it to the actual Lehr Division, which was the training Panzer division that was mobilised hastily into an actual fighting division (and then destroyed and re-made several times over lmao). This feels like an attempt to further portray them as "unwilling" participants, e.g. "these are the guys that trained the bad guys, not the bad guys themselves, you guys!!"

# ¿ Feb 24, 2023 22:41

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Empire Earth was hilarious, I love that game

# ¿ Feb 24, 2023 23:11

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

The SS brothers are also big landowners. They cry about the family estate at some point in the campaign. Just blood and soil boys.

lmao I forgot about that bit

pour one out for the Junker Boys and their palatial lands that are now almost definitely part of Poland

# ¿ Feb 24, 2023 23:49

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

They cribbed everything from Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan. That's why it was good.

For CoH2 they cribbed poo poo movies like Enemy at the Gates.

begging game devs to read a single history book

no!! not Antony Beevor!!!!

# ¿ Feb 24, 2023 23:50

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

HallelujahLee posted:

is empire earth the one where theres a soviet campaign and you conquer the world if its that one then yeah that was great

EE is the one where in the Russian campaign you play as an Orthodox dictator with a giant robot he named after himself, the robot then becomes evil and invades China after the death of the original dictator guy and you then play as a cyborg guy who defects to the US. The US then sends the cyborg guy back in time to defeat the giant robot before he's too powerful but the giant robot already travelled back in time to defeat you before you defeat him.

It's insane and I love it.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2023 00:09

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Mantis42 posted:

I only play strategy games for the campaign...

# ¿ Feb 25, 2023 00:09

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Tankbuster posted:

yeah regarding the last point.

ahahahahahahahahaha

# ¿ Feb 26, 2023 21:46

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

German big cats are worse in War Thunder than they should be due to sharing their tiers with much more advanced, Cold War era vehicles.

Not to say they weren�t a terrible idea in real life, but War Thunder isn�t a good gauge of real-life.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2023 09:31

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Cuttlefush posted:

like, tigers, tiger 2s, and panthers? last i played (ages ago) uptiering in stuff like that happened but in historical/realistic battles, not much. but no I didnt mean that gameplay. more the struggle of moving it around. they're pigs

Tiger 2s routinely end up in matches with BMP-1s firing HEAT missiles. Tiger 2 is BR 6.7, BMP is 7.3.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2023 11:07

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

The reason War Thunder is the way it is is because it prints enormous amounts of money. If they sold a sim-lite where you just got to play with the top tier planes against AI without the horrible grind, they wouldn�t make nearly as much cash as they do locking that content away and incentivising you to pay to speed up the process to get there.

It loving sucks.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2023 21:20

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

I can't imagine an actually historical 2nd El Alamein videogame mission being any fun at all from the German/Italian perspective. The British dumped literally all the artillery they had on the Axis lines all at once and then kept hammering them with bombers and strike aircraft. Command and control completely disintegrated and the Allied infantry proceeded to pick apart defensive positions like pulling the legs off of a drowning spider.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2023 03:09

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Cuttlefush posted:

it was called battlefield 1942

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg0Tmydj29M

# ¿ Mar 13, 2023 03:37

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

The Chad Jihad posted:

The 20 seconds from :40 on are forever burned into my brain

When the plane explodes will always be a laugh out loud moment for me

# ¿ Mar 13, 2023 04:57

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Close Combat 3: The Russian Front will always be the best WW2 RTS in my opinion

# ¿ Mar 13, 2023 22:44

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Bunch of anglophiles ITT

# ¿ Mar 14, 2023 02:48

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Maximo Roboto posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tHS7-8t9g8

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 01:25

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Slavvy posted:

They are very much still out there, they have varying levels of Politicality though

https://youtu.be/RDOdvA71i_4

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 23:42

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

StashAugustine posted:

should i get steel division 2 on sale

I like it. I've had fun with the campaigns, although they can be brutally difficult.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2023 23:41

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Maximo Roboto posted:

https://twitter.com/supremacy1914/status/1645758609043886081

# ¿ Apr 13, 2023 02:57

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

skooma512 posted:

20 years ago, I got a game called Republic: The Revolution for my birthday. I was a nerd, sue me.

The previews made it seem like a politics simulation where you lead a party to power in this post-Soviet republic. It has a nice looking 3D engine that still looks pretty good even today. The 3D engine was however, mostly just for vibes and barely had any gameplay attached. The gameplay was mostly allocating actions in a board game-esque interface and a card game that was easy to cheese when you needed to persuade someone. The populace speak a Simlish version of Russian. I heard the voice clips so many times I can probably imitate them from memory to this day. The vestigial 3D engine would later go on to power Evil Genius, and you can see they reused the Mi-8 model in that game which still has the symbol of Novistrana on it.

You manage points that are "ideology": Force, Wealth, and Influence, which you spend doing actions to take territory, depicted as pie charts of public opinion. No political ideology is depicted, beyond some factions having hammer and sickle imagery as their icon. Your party does not have and does not make any demands other than the removal of the current President () and the installation of you instead. When you beat the game, you become the President and that's it. Power is the end, not the means to an end, and it is never asked what you would like to do with it. The current guy mostly uses his power to eliminate rivals, the usual.

This game was quite instructive in how much bullshit previews are, and I learned my lesson lol. The box even has E3 awards, from its previews.

Verdict: Not socialist, at least not in any way other than as an aesthetic.

While looking for screenshots, I see someone here already did a Let's Play.

https://lparchive.org/Republic-The-Revolution/

I remember having this game and not understanding it in the slightest

# ¿ Sep 22, 2023 01:17

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

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.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2023 22:15

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

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.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2023 05:13

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

Lol

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/us/joachim-peiper-nazi-photo-apology.html

# ¿ Sep 25, 2023 05:52

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

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?

Peiper was a war criminal who should have being shot at Nuremburg but he was correct that tiger tanks sucked lol

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.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2023 22:09

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

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.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2023 12:22

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Mantis42 posted:

Anyways how about an alt history wargame where the Nazis destroyed the British army at Dunkirk and Japan attacked the USSR instead of Pearl Harbor, so that Stalin essentially has to battle the combined Axis powers alone.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 03:53

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

The focus trees were a terrible idea imo

As mentioned, they make the diplomacy system mostly useless, and make the game into a choose-your-own-adventure book rather than any kind of dynamic simulation.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 22:38

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

I think I'd honestly prefer if you just ran the war effort in Hearts of Iron, and they dispensed completely with the political and diplomatic systems beyond how they affect actually fighting WW2.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 02:22

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

The Early Modern period really is the natural home for grand strategy games imo

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 22:07

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Kaiserreich is hilarious because the developers obviously understand left wing politics in the Western world really well, which is why all of the post-communist-revolution countries in the West have eleventy different flavours of socialist party representing the entirety of the red portion of the spectrum of natural light.

Also Oswald Mosley is a �maximalist� socialist in their reality :allears:

# ¿ Oct 2, 2023 10:07

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

gradenko_2000 posted:

I tend to broadly agree, and there's an element of STDH in the story, but something that stood out to me was that even in a situation where the exercise is being done under somewhat controlled circumstances, and even when it's just Westerners bringing in their own assumptions against other Westerners, they still can't help but escalate all the way to nuclear armageddon

the actionable takeaway here would be for a Chinese or Russian strategist to look at this and conclude that the Anglo-Americans and their lapdogs are going to end the world if you let them

Remembering that Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay existed, that last part sounds completely plausible to me

# ¿ Oct 2, 2023 12:10

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Fuligin posted:

So i punted on Grand Tactician after the mid goon-vibes and picked up Flashpoint Operations: Southern Storm. Its a blast, exactly what i was hoping Armored Brigade would be more-like. Definitely the best counter-shuffler ive played since DC: Ardennes

I was excited to check that out but then I saw that Matrix is asking $110 of His Majesty's Australian Dollareedoos

Bit steep honestly

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 03:50

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

gradenko_2000 posted:

WISHLIST ALERT

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2591010/Silent_Depth_2_Pacific/

# ¿ Oct 21, 2023 00:18

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

gradenko_2000 posted:

third scenario of Kursk done; Izium-Mius - with all but one bonus objective achieved

I'm particularly proud of destroying the SS Totenkopf (literally a bonus objective to do this), SS Wiking and SS Das Reich divisions in this scenario

yessss turn II SS Panzer Corps into paste!!

# ¿ Oct 25, 2023 12:19

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

That�s very funny given that just a couple of years earlier in Africa the British were paranoid that relying too heavily on Ultra would give the game away

# ¿ Oct 29, 2023 00:07

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 19:14

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Mister Bates posted:

you can�t arm entire infantry brigades with Dreyse needleguns

The virgin ACW versus the chad Franco-Prussian War

# ¿ Nov 4, 2023 02:29

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

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