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My only ever tabletop wargaming experience (not counting playing Risk as a kid) was Trin Tragula's WW1 game, in all its goony glory. I don't remember what system it was based on.
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Feb 9, 2023 07:26
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I was in that game! I'm sorry that your first wargaming experience was field marshaling a bunch of barely competent goons. (check your PMs, I think I sent you relevant one a while ago) For those interested, here's a link to the observer thread for the game, you can follow other links from there if you want to. It was a fun game! No need to feel sorry, heh. Herding 20-ish goons around against 20-ish other goons was an interesting experience. Ironically, I think my lack of experience with wargames genuinely helped me there, lol, since I approached it less as a "I'm the brilliant mind in charge of the grand battleplan" thing and more of a "I'm a glorified middle manager pretending to know what he's doing, trying to keep the guys under me who do know what they're doing pointed in the general direction of the orders from above (AKA mission objectives)". More of my effort was dedicated to keeping people on the same track, keeping their plans from having too many moving parts, and maintaining morale, rather than looking at the map, and for the most part with better results than had I done differently. The best orders in the world don't matter if they're not actually executed. Relations with my division commanders were tense at first, and I was genuinely worried I'd get coup-d out of leadership lol, but we built up a solid grudging respect by the end of the game. I remember you doing pretty well at your task in the game? iirc I found you annoying at the time due to your (at the time) tendency towards seing imminent DOOM everywhere, but having you assigned as someone whose job is to tell me how our plans can go wrong worked out pretty well. You also did a very solid job as a deputy commander after glorious elan of the French led General Mon Pere (me) into machine guns at the end.  My big regret about that game is that I came in with the expectations that Trin will be sharing things we talked about during the game, my perspective, predictions, reasoning, difficulties, etc in the observer thread. Figured it'd be a nice counterpart to the after-the-fact nature of the irl memoirs of generals who were writing about what happened just as much as they were making GBS threads on their rivals and making themselves look more competent by coming up with retroactive justifications. And he shared none of it in order to maintain audience suspence. :/ Was a very rude surprise when I showed up in the observer thread after the game was over. The game was in part inspired by Trin and I discussing prejudices about WW1 and the annoying "they were all blundering idiots" narrative. Now, admittedly, goons aren't the best group to use to disprove this, but I think the game did a solid job at demonstrating the main point, especially the significance of the delay between being things happening, finding out about it, and being able to actually react to it, while relying on fairly unreliable communications, especially when on the offense. My favorite part is that it had cavalry that was both wildly more successful than irl on the western front (because the German team metagamed 'ww1 cavalry sucks', they took none of the actual precautions that caused cavalry to suck during ww1), with Germans losing half their artillery to a poor choice of time and place for redeploying and a French cavalry unit that could take initiative from behind a reverse slope that launch a surprise charge, and also had a cavalry charge catastrophically fail at the end because the German team did eventually, after a lot of flaing around and panicking, actually take the precautions that obsoleted cavalry. In retrospect, it's kind of hilarious how much both teams represented two stereotypes of WW1 commanders. The German team was having constant stress problems and breakdowns over setbacks they had, with players cycling out of the game, while the French/British team was fairly sanguine for the most part, almost to the point of being callous about losses in a way that'd be... almost as demoralizing to know as a soldier being commanded by as as the German HQ's breakdowns would be. I will note that the game left me... disappointed in NATO military guys' competence. Like, regardless of my opinion of NATO's role in the world, I assumed that guys who did planning related things would be, you know, actually good at that. They ended up being the most difficult people to work with, and prone to drawing an infinite amount of hypothetical map lines that didn't amount to anything in practice. Wargamers ended up being a lot more down-to-earth in that regard. Since I'm already posting about this - remember the guy who was accused of cheating, but it remained kind of ambiguous since he backed out of the game afterwards? He was absolutely, 100% cheating. To people not in the know - the guy was reading not only the other thread but also the offsite 'hq' we used to work with the map and discuss things in a more chat-like manner than the more official and rigid "Here's your orders, follow them" kept in the thread for ease of coordinating. The German commander noticed that one of his guys was acting really suspicious with sudden 'flashes of insight' that he confirmed (after the game when he was allowed to read the other side's stuff) were conveniently timed with our own conversations, brought his worries up with Trin, Tin talked to me, and I set up a trap to get the guy to tell on himself during round 2 (the vote for the new commander, with a few little tricks included) - he bought it hook, line, and sinker, and I will remain smug about catching him in the act like that for the rest of my days. my dad has issued a correction as of 18:39 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 18:32
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Serbia had a similar experience with more modern rifles about two decades after the US civil war. They were hella impressive, but amounted to much less than everyone expected them to. (Learned via the stupidest war in Serbian history wherein we invaded an allied Bulgaria whose army we partially geared and trained because Austrians egged our king on about survivors of the Timok Rebellion hiding there after a failed uprising in Serbia. A lot of Serbian soldiers genuinely believed they were going to help Bulgaria vs the Ottomans. God, King Milan was a fuckup.) After the war, there was a lot more emphasis on "artillery very important" and "infantry will be engaging at fairly close ranges", which continued into WW1. (In WW1, this contributed to Austrian propaganda about Serbs backfiring during the fighting because people tend to poo poo themselves and run if their trenches are being stormed by someone they genuinely believe to be mindless bloodthirsty animals with grenades) Trivia: Serbia ended up with a lot of Prussian influence on its military. The way this happened was unusual. Prussia (and Germany) was incredibly lovely to its minorities, and Sorbs in particular suffered pretty bad, and were often told to gently caress off to Serbia. (despite the similarity of names, we were about as distant as Slavic languages and cultures can possibly get, but this didn't end up mattering at all) Catch: Sorbs had a very high degree of participation in the Prussian military, and over time Germany effectively donated a shitload of Franko-Prussian war veterans, professionals with ties to European arms industries, and officiers trained in the Prussian way of war to Serbia. When Sorbs started arriving to Serbia, and the Serbian government stopped pinching itself to check if this is real, Serbia rolled out the red carpet and went full 'Welcome Slavic brothers! Our homes are your homes, our lands our your lands!' - One of the commanders of the Serbian military in WW1 was general Paulus Sturm (Pavle Jurišić), who was a Sorbian dude who was an old war buddy of German general Mackensen.
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Feb 10, 2023 12:12
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I was gifted Company of Heroes 2 by a goon who today works in a DC think tank dedicated to making a more hawkish US foreign policy. Never played the game, but it crosses my mind sometimes.
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Feb 24, 2023 12:11
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I don't know many specifics about the unit, but of what I remember, the long story short was that it started with Italy dragging a bunch of Slovenians to Africa to die for them, which the Slovenians weren't exactly eager to do, and they defected to the allies ASAP with the help of some Yugoslav diplomats working in Egypt since before the war. Their numbers grew since Yugo defectors from the Italian army all over the meditteranean rallied to the unit, and then grew some more because the unit didn't ask too many questions if non-Yugos decided to ditch Italian citizenship and take up Yugoslav one to join the unit. Thanks for being racist, Brits, I guess. Eventually, to the surprise of the British, when the opportunity arrived, most of the unit joined the communist Partizans instead of siding with the Četniks or staying with the British.
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Mar 13, 2023 18:59
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I remember playing some ancient SEGA strategy games as a kid, with similar user interfaces, one was Operation Europe: Something something, which was a couple of scenarios of the big WW2 battles of the European theater, other's name I forgot but it was the WW2 Pacific Theater. It took me loving forever to figure out how logistics worked, lol. The most memorable part of it was probably the very first scenario of Operation Europe. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to hold off the Germans as the French until I went gently caress it and combined every CharB from various units I had into a single unit and started playing panzer whack-a-mole while my infantry and artillery holed up in the cities(towns?) and behind bridges I couldn't blow up fast enough and just tried not to die before before my tanks do their thing. The pacific theater one was a intimidating due to the much larger scope, I remember figuring it out eventually while playing USA, but not before being clowned on by the Japanese for a while. Since my father is a history nerd and a veteran AAA operator, he had some relevant books I randomly flipped through that had helped me wrap my head around all that stuff. Still kind of proud of kid me for figuring out that concentrating the tanks was the answer, tho. my dad has issued a correction as of 00:42 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 00:32
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I'm suddenly reminded of KOEI's Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, too. I first played the second one, ended up choosing Cao Cao at random, liked it, started learning about the period. I think the one I played the most was the third, though. I also played one of the later ones, but I forgot which one, that was many, many, many years afterwards, tho.
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Mar 16, 2023 01:43
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Mokotow posted:I’m in a retro binge now and have RoTK II on the SNES lodes up. it’s really obtuse, though, and I keep putting it away, because it seems you need to read through the manual like in the olden days to be able to make it through turn 1. I can assure you, from experience, that you do not need a manual. You just need to be extremely stubborn about figuring things out and try to guess what things might do. It is obtuse. Try RoTK III if you have it, it's a hell of a lot more intuitive while still being retro jank.
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Mar 17, 2023 00:11
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I am suddenly reminded of some British internal communications with consulates in Africa at some point during the Cold War. Alas, my memory fails me on the specifics, but it was something along the lines of: "Stop telling Africans that Yugoslavia is just like the Soviet Union, you're not making them like the Yugoslavs less, you're making them like the Soviets more"
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May 16, 2023 11:52
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Manually aimed FotS artillery could hit significantly beyond its normal max range. My favorite strat was with the Saga clan where I'd use a mix of a traditionalist army behind a reverse slope and the starting unit of modern artillery manually aimed and just deleting any unit that looked like it's capable of putting up an actual fight. As the enemy gets close, I'd retreat the artillery, and then stab stab stab stabbity stab stab stab anything that goes over the crest of the hill.
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May 24, 2023 21:28
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The point of Total War AI is to do stupid things that let you feel smart, and it does the job well enough. If I wanted to actually plan strategy against someone capable of counterplay, I'd play Dominions5. (And I did play 11 games of it, won 3 or 4, and retired because I just didn't have the time for it anymore)
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May 28, 2023 01:41
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The secret to Shogun 2's map AI seeming competent: They heavily constrained places that can be pathed to by using the mountains to restrict movement. Once you take out the dumbest options, the remaining ones are passably ok.
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May 28, 2023 09:44
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Well, yes, that wasn't a complaint. 
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May 28, 2023 10:30
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We probably have different criteria for competent when it comes to total war game AI, but the corner strat would work regardless of AI because limiting how many places you have to defend is just a good practice in that situation. Hell, I did that with the Saga clan, take the west side of Japan with artillery-backed traditionalist armies and multiple fleets of cheap lovely ships to guard my flanks, stop conquests a few provinces short of triggering realm divide, industrialize the poo poo out of my lands, and then switch gear to full modern warfare and roll over the rest of Japan. Regular Shogun 2 I mostly played ashigaru focused Oda. It gives me a fun positional challenge throughout the game, gives me a bump early on when high difficulty can be a bit too punishing, and gives me interesting enemies to overcome later on. The other expansion... I really want to like it, but it's just... I dunno, empty? I get the idea, and it should have been something fun, but it's just not.
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May 28, 2023 11:41
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Oh. I didn't count that one since I saw it as a flaw of the realm divide mechanic itself, but yeah, it's absolutely bullshit. I've never played 3K! My computer can't handle the modern total wars, so I can't comment on these much. Sounds pretty cool, tho.
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May 28, 2023 12:58
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May 30, 2023 16:53
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Or Liu Bei solo a baby.
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Jun 1, 2023 17:18
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Orange Devil posted:Finally won a game as the Western Roman Empire on hard mode in Attila TW. Was probably the most difficult TW experience I can remember. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UIteDF4eII
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Jun 13, 2023 23:12
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John Charity Spring posted:it's decent. better than Age of Wonders 3 and significantly better than Planetfall Haven't played 4 (it'd melt my computer, but otherwise I've heard good things about it) but I can't stand this diss to Planetfall. It's a really fun game that has its share of flaws, but a lot of people don't give it a fair shake because they just assume that unit archetypes are similar to previous games, and they're very much not. (Also, city management was dire on release, but that was quickly reworked)
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Jun 19, 2023 05:55
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The first mission giving you a showdown between factions that are boring standard humans with some sort of basic rifle infatry was one of the more baffling decisions in the game. But there's quite a bit of cool, weird stuff in the game overall. e: Admittedly, I keep rolling my eyes at topical political humor of the Shakarn (space infiltrator lizardmen who steal your cows for science) flavor texts, despite enjoying their playstyle the most.
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Jun 19, 2023 13:08
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Different wars. The difference in treatment was that Russia was a European imperial power and Japan wasn't interested in poking that whole nest of bees more than was necessary to achieve its aims. The Chinese didn't receive any such considerations.
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Jun 21, 2023 16:59
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If there's anything I learned from being reasonably good at strategy games, it's that I'm not a good strategist.
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Jul 7, 2023 08:04
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I think I might (at some point) post an AAR for a certain 30 player Dominions 5 game that lasted for over a year IRL (almost two years IIRC), of which I participated in about half the turns before having to sub out of despite being the strongest player due to IRL stuff. It's amazing how far you can get by just on bluffing about your strength after you somehow blundered into winning an unwinnable fight and build up actual strength off of it.
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Jul 7, 2023 09:06
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AnimeIsTrash posted:from playing starsector and rimworld i have learned that i am terrible at managing more than 1 unit at a time Quick tip for Starsector: Set a "Defend" (not escort) order on your flagship, it keeps your fleet vaguely centered around you (and able to support and protect you and each other), and you can still issue "take that control point", "try to kill that guy", "kill that guy or die trying" or "stay the gently caress away from that battleship you loving idiots it can one-shot you before you even get in range" orders without having to think too much about the specifics. Your fleet will detach an adequate number of ships for the job and return them back to the blob as needed. e: It also tends to sort of naturally overwhelm an enemy flank as you move around looking for exposed enemy ships to pick off and dragging your fleet with you while your stragglers try to avoid fighting the enemy unsupported. my dad has issued a correction as of 22:14 on Jul 7, 2023 |
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Jul 7, 2023 22:11
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My average command point expenditure: 1 point: Giving my fleet the intial order to defend me and capture the nearest control points 1-3 points: Retreating exposed ships, pressing the advantage against enemy ships that are out of formation, preventing the fleet from engaging capital ships before their escorts are thinned out, etc Literally everything else: Selecting the fleet's safety overrides Dominator, right clicking on the nearest big enemy ship, and then piloting my own ship for a bit while I wait for the Dominator to fly out the other side of the resulting debris cloud before repeating the process  (ignore the ziggurath's loadout, it's temporary) my dad has issued a correction as of 22:49 on Jul 7, 2023 |
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Jul 7, 2023 22:46
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I tried out Ultimate Admirals: Dreadnoughts at some point. I played the earliest start as Austria-Hungary, made hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of the fastest torpedo boats I could build, and paired them up with cruisers with maxed out operational range and highest caliber guns they could carry. The results were hilarious and unexpected - I won.
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Jul 8, 2023 09:43
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Trin Tragula later ran the same kind of game.
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Jul 8, 2023 11:49
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these devs are the same people who made tropico 4 and 5 and also surviving mars make of it what you will
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Jul 20, 2023 13:07
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historical trivia: you could tell the difference between yugoslav partizan and german units firing the exact same machine guns by ear. Completely different doctrines of use due to a huge difference in the availability of ammo.
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Jul 21, 2023 20:19
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Sounds like an interesting game I'd like to try out at some point. I finished my playthrough of Pathfinder:Wrath of the Righteous (extremely slow burn, the game is extremely long and it can't run full FPS on my computer), and the crusade portion of it took the worst elements of HoMM style battles which made every battle past early chapter 3 kind of a bore. "Through a series of RPG quests and battles, major political decisions involving multiple factions, and battle victories, you have attained the services of several powerful dragons" - yeah, yeah, whatever, my archer stacks are significantly more impactful.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:28
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I have, rather unexpectedly, become a Dominions 6 playtester. Illwinter have politely asked us not to gossip too much, so I won't, but it's pretty interesting to see the actual changes play out.
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Sep 5, 2023 07:02
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Slavvy posted:I have never seen a game with a counterfactual about trying to win as Japan for example There's a bunch of old strategy games by KOEI that cover a lot of stuff, including the War in the Pacific. I'm sure there's more modern stuff too.
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Sep 7, 2023 18:59
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There already exists a Star Trek 4X from... 1999? or so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Birth_of_the_Federation It's fairly fun, if ancient. You can befriend minor faction planets to join you, and it's generally beneficial to you to do so. You can, of course, conquer them, too, but it's not cheap and requires you to commit to planetary assault, as well as maintaining a military occupation. Federation's fleet can be summed up: Good but overcosted ships that can do OK in smaller numbers, until the Defiant class comes along at the highest tech tier and now you laugh because nobody can stop your fleet of mass produced OP. Espionage was an actual industry you had to commit serious resources to. Your population reacted to your foreign policy, Federation citizens supported diplomacy, Romulan citizens supported espionage and backstabbing, Klingon citizens supported beating people up but weren't fond of betraying allies, etc. It's kind of hilarious how a lot of subtlety tended to vanish once planets with Dylithium deposits are at stake. The game had turn based (but shown as real time) fleet battles, and you could give orders to your ships groups. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggxsbf-KBrk Kinda funny if you win by conquest as the Federation. We brought peace to this galaxy and now we're going to look for more galaxies to bring peace to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK9m4XSxX2k
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Sep 8, 2023 08:08
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They do playtest things, but at the end of day Illwinter is Two Dudes In Sweden whose first game was made for the Atari in 1990, and they have their own ideas about how things are done. On one hand it can be annoying, but on the other I kind of have to respect that. Haven't interacted with Johan much, but Kristoff seems like an OK dude.
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Sep 11, 2023 21:25
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Yeah, I imagine it gets easier once he wastes all the fuel.
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Sep 12, 2023 20:52
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I have discoverd that a cool goon who set his steam library on family share with me a while ago has Workers and Resources in it. I probably won't be able to play it much now, between my job, other obligations, and Dom6 beta testing, but at least I can see if it runs on my computer or not. e: Holy poo poo, it actually has a Serbian option in the language settings. Hoping against hope it's actually good. e2: boooooo  It doesn't support a bunch of our letters. e3: It's a sloppy, partial translation, and may even be a machine one.   e4: Game works my dad has issued a correction as of 12:34 on Sep 14, 2023 |
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Sep 14, 2023 12:08
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Historical trivia: Yugoslavia stopped the effort to keep saying "No, we're not capitalists, we're still communists" directed at the Soviet Bloc once it was figured out that every time the SU went on a "capitalist Yugoslavia" rant, Yugoslavia's consumer good and vehicle exports to the Warsaw Pact skyrocketed, in both volume and price.
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Sep 15, 2023 16:49
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I've played through the tutorials, and one of them shows two ways to do it. Since it provides an actual example you can look at, I'd advise checking it out. (this isn't intended to be a "play the tutorial, dumbass", I just genuinely think that having an actually working example in front of you helps figure things out.)
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Sep 15, 2023 20:48
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So, I've been trying to figure out fuel efficiency in W&R, and then decided to look it up, and it appears that I was mostly on the right track. There's a bunch of math that boils down to really simple results for road vehicles. Horsepower is the main measure of how much fuel you're guzzling and the main number you want to make go down. If you just look at every vehicle and divide its capacity with its horsepower, you'll get surprisingly accurate fuel efficiency estimate. Empty weight (capacity has no effect on this) is a modifier to the above. As a general rule of thumb, 2-14 tons is roughly in the same ballpark, double efficiency for 1 ton vehicles, half efficiency for 15+ ton vehicles. Somewhat inaccurate, the actual numbers are a bit more complex, but I don't think it's worthwhile to waste more time on it. The cutoff points are <2, 2+, 5+, 10+, 15+ and most vehicles with similar traits but different weights are still in the same category. Speed for the most part does not influence your fuel efficiency - you will spend the same amount of fuel to cross a kilometer no matter how long it takes. The one exception is that you're being inefficient if you're currently moving at less speed than your car is capable of achieving on the road it's on (for example when turning) because consumption is counted based on your max speed for the road you're currently driving on. High horsepower vehicles accelerate slightly faster, so are slightly less inefficient than other vehicles when they have to turn a lot. You can probably save some fuel by downgrading roads where your vehicles never get to accelerate above 60kph anyway, but it's a waste of time imo. You consume extra fuel based on the percentage of maximum load you're carrying, but it's like 25% or so, but this is universal and so mostly irrelevant. e: The basic horsepower math is similar for trains, but the rise in fuel consumption for extra wagons is so tiny that you pretty much always want to run maximum choo choo snek unless you know for certain that you won't need more wagons. Go big or go home. my dad has issued a correction as of 20:44 on Sep 18, 2023 |
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Sep 18, 2023 20:36
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:29 |
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Basic example would be that Zis155/Zil158 are the best early buses if you're going at full capacity. But if you're running half capacity or lower, suddenly the RF-977 microbus takes over. Assuming parking space and road capacity isn't a factor (not a trivial thing later on, but I'm assuming you're using the limited free parking options at first, and that vehicles are fairly sparse), 3 microbus are cheaper and can be more granular about delivering workers. Solid for importing workforce for construction projects. Hell, the personal car Trabi is unironically pretty decent at low intensity transportation. You could absolutely just hand these out to people in villages to let them make better use of spread out infrastructure - parking lots are cheap, and space isn't at a premium there. I've also been experimenting with farm vehicle and farm loadouts, but that involves me leaving the game running while I go do other things, so it's not going quickly. The big takeaway so far has been that you always want Western combine harvesters, not the Eastern ones, and that it's generally always most cost effective (and plain easier to organize and automate) to make a bigger farm for extra parking space rather than trying to utilize other parking options. 1 tractor : 1 harvester : 1.5 bigest trucks you can get : 2 big fields seems to be the right ratio get the most out of your harvest, at roughly 500 tons per field. It's not a nice ratio for the multiple of 6 capacities of farms, but doing a 3 : 3 : 5 and leaving 1 parking spot empty isn't the end of the world. A minimalist setup of 1:2:3 and 8 medium fields works decently for a budget farm somewhere you're tight on space.I'm really curious if my hunch about cableways being the ideal way of transporting grain to a small centralized rail adjacent storage is correct. You'd need enough grain capacity per farm to store a harvest, but your central grain hub wouldn't need all that much since it would be receiving a constant trickle throughout the year, it would still be effectively utilizing the storage capacity of the farms, and the trains would constantly be carrying it off to where it's needed. my dad has issued a correction as of 22:26 on Sep 18, 2023 |
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Sep 18, 2023 21:23
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