To answer @TheWombat and in the same vein as @Lohengrin: you don’t need to be checking every rifle squad in your army to play the game effectively. If you are so inclined, you can take a dive indeed, and revel on all that detail, with top hat and all like Scrooge McDuck. Sometimes it feels kind of reassuring, but it is not necessary.
I have never really ever checked most of the factors the game uses to track unit capabilities (a couple months back a fellow beta tester showed to me a screen which I had never discovered after all these years), and I consider myself a capable player.
What do you need to track - and in this the WITE UI has always struggled - what is the trend in bayonet, tank or aircraft strength over time. If you’re killing your Army, and you have nothing to show for it, you need to reconsider your strategy. It would help heaps that the game told you that something is not right, or that your army combat power is declining. In other words, getting the “big picture” requires too much work.
You’re right - 2 up / 2 down is what works. With WITE the smallest unit of maneuver is the Regt/Bde (and the Bn in scenarios for WITW), the highest one is the Army Group. In practice, though, when you play the game you need to think at the Corps level mostly, as Corps are the logistical and combat support hubs. But mechanically, the focus is on Divisions (as it is the most common type of unit).
Comparing a playthrough of WITW covering Tunisia (like the short Kasserine engagement) and a playthrough of Tunisia OCS would be very interesting and a practical way to illustrate the discussion we’re having.
My excuses in advance for any further, unintended, cruelty on dead animals :)
I love Tunisia. Probably one of my favorite campaigns all time for Operational-level modelling. Certainly my #1 or #2 in WW2.
I refunded my WiTW and Tunisia DLC:
Hmmm, I have no technical issues on a 1920x1080 monitor or one of the higher resolution Microsoft displays FWIW. If you give more details of the issue, I can pass along that feedback.
I would get it back for you over Steam, but you need to be nicer to me :) Perhaps somebody else that has the game would be willing to play along. Actually the experiment would work best if it wasn’t involving the same players.
Windows 11. If you aren’t at 100% (no bigger) then oh well,. If you want bigger (to read stuff) then you can’t scroll in the gui. It just gets bigger and buttons, etc inaccessible as they can’;t be seen on screen.
Slitherine’s Support resolution is to “manually alter your appearance sizes. That it’s a 2x3 thing, and not their code.”
For $110 bucks (total) I expect more.
As well, Tunisia was a fiddly slog in WiTW. #NotmyTunisianCampaign.
You’re good man, @MiquelRamirez, but don’t worry, I won’t be playing it or WiTE
I will probably give v2 a spin, but have my hand on the refund trigger. Just common sense, if I didn’t dig the first one…
You give a me a hint there with the DPI scaling, thanks.
Fair enough.
Panzeh
4653
Few screenshots from the final turn of our second A3R game.
I still feel in terms of readability and quick play, that scenario is awesome, even compared to other SCWW2 scenarios. It could use a little more work, though.
Interesting final situation, what is the date of this end turn? Also,
- Looks like the Western Allies did a double landing in France, right? When was the invasion launched?
- Interesting to see the Axis totally stalling / preempting the Torch landings. Did Egypt fall?
- Also interesting situation in the Eastern Front. Is that the high water mark for the German army? Or there was some sort of fighting withdrawal to the positions displayed?
Brooski
4655
Thanks for the extensive description of the changes. Do you know of some people I could contact to get a rundown? I am thinking of revisiting that series to talk about how the game has changed.
Btw a side note: I asked Joel Billings by email when the game first came out if I could run some questions about the mechanics by Gary Grigsby’s, and Joel’s response was, “I can try but I’m not sure Gary knows the specific details.”
I would say that trying to get in touch with Joel Billings and Erik Rutins is definitely the way to go.
There’s also Pavel Zagzin involved with the programming, and I presume it is a big code base, hard to keep it all in your head.
Brooski
4657
Joel put me in touch with some peeps. We’ll see what happens!
Panzeh
4658
This is May 1942.
Things did not go as well for @Navaronegun as planned. He actually did take the Middle east into Iraq and stuff the Torch invasion by SRing most of the units he used to conquer the middle east.
Invasion was launched in April '42 in two places. Against a player with good coastal defense, you need to do double invasions to get enough hexes to bring your units to bear, otherwise it’s pretty easy to bog down the invasion. This requires multiple HQs though and Britain does not get them until 1942 unless soft build caps are on. The airpower of the US also helped quite a bit.
Axis was a bit further along in the south before, but they largely got stopped along the lines in the north. Barbarossa was a bit of a wet fart because I think @Navaronegun was trying to surprise me, but TBQH I had already almost built up to the unit limits with USSR. If he was going to surprise me he would’ve needed to invade in 1940, not early 1941. Weather didn’t help him much, though.
Almost every minor power joined the axis except Spain, Turkey, and Iran, so he had a lot of minor power units to stop my first go at invading France, and without a UK HQ for the invasion, the supply situation was bad.
I had done a lot of attrition to @Navaronegun before, including several lucky panzer corps kills in France, and then another set in Northern Russia, probably as a result of the hasty Barbarossa.
I think the biggest flaw in the scenario is the way SRing basically ends up being super free since all you have to do is pay some BRPs for it. In the original, you have a limited amount per turn- in the first invasion of France, @Navaronegun was able to SR the entire Vichy, Bulgarian, and Yugoslav armies into France to get in my way after having zero coastal defense initially. I did the same to escape pockets that weren’t 100% airtight in Russia, preserving a lot of corps.
Thanks for the write up. The game reminded me of ancient games in Clash of Steel, with similar outcomes.
I do agree that SRing is off the rails, it is also quite whacky to have the Yugoslav Army deployed in France.
Was the game fun? What did end it?
Panzeh
4660
I enjoyed it a lot. The benefit of the A3R scenario is how fast it plays turn-wise. Once the action picked up, I had a blast.
Game end was basically @Navaronegun not having anything left to throw into France or Ukraine to stem the tide so he conceded. Conquest of Paris would’ve ended Vichy, and if we’d played it out it probably would’ve meant the end of Germany in 1943.
Thanks again for sharing.
JeffL
4662
Many years ago, before I got into writing, David Landrey (the developer/author of Battles of Napoleon for SSI and some other very nice games) contacted me (we’d chatted back in his SSI days) and asked if I’d be interested in being a game tester for his new testing company. Because of his background he got a lot of the testing assignments for SSI.
We talked a lot, and he said a lot of people back then (early to mid 90s) thought it sounded cool to be a tester, but once they started doing it they realized how hard and grinding it was to actually do the job well, and they would quit after a short period of time. I really got into it, but there was a lot of seeing how the sausage is made, and often after getting a copy of the final game, after testing, I had no desire to play it.
I tested a LOT of Grigsby’s games back then. What became very clear (at least IMO) was that Gary was much more interested in using old code from past games to crank out new games than he was in any kind of innovation. When I would find an issue in a Grigsby game, something in a battle outcome that made no sense, Gary would reply in a very irritable fashion, often with a “Well, no one is going to see that except an anal retentive tester.” Often the results would be Gary throwing something in to hide the problem (and I’d see the effect of that in later games I’d test.) The AI cheated in ways that would make the game unplayable for me after testing; I understood from testing that the AI HAD to have some cheats built in, particularly back then with much less computing power than today, but there was no attempt to minimize it.
I was a HUGE Grigsby fan going in, I spent many, many nights with my old Apple ][ sweating over plane searches in Guadalcanal Campaign, but testing his games for a few years put me off playing his stuff afterwards. I never got the same feeling on, say, Billings games.
Perhaps I was just a touch too naive back then. And perhaps Gary has decided to take a different tact on his development process these days. Just a FWIW.
I did a bunch of testing as well, a lot for Atomic Games, and at one point for 360 Pacific. The latter company had a Pacific War game, IIRC it was called Victory at Sea, for the Mac. I did a ton of testing on this beast, a real-time-ish simulation of the entire Pacific war (yeah, I hear you). It was…ambitious. We sent in bug reports, tested all sorts of things under the direction of someone whose name escapes me (this was like 1993 or 94 or something). One day, out of the blue, we get a notice saying thanks for your hard work, the game is shipping. Um, say what? I think all the testers were shocked, as the game was nowhere near in any shape to ship. At that point I sort of realized that testing games sucked.
That was a great story which happened decades before I got involved. It made me chuckle :)
Development has changed a fair bit over the past years, several people is involved in the coding and also the design of the games. Reusing and refactoring code is as common as in most software projects out there.
Also, now there are public forums populated by hundreds of ana… ehm, dedicated, passionate individuals who are quick to set stuff on fire when bugs are discovered.
That is very true.
Same goes for Tiller (same experience here, and I did module design in the TS days…same deal…“Change the code to make the thing work! Ratzenfratzen!”).
It also explains why a 90 buck peice of software released on Steam has DPI scaling issues with Windows 11 and 1080i.
Creaky old programs.
