No worries @cannedwombat.
Pat points to his precious treasure - nice one @Navaronegun - but there’s two kind of obvious analogues to the “dials”:
- Optional Rules
- House Rules
Optional rules can be either for chrome - or just shits and giggles really - or to increase the fidelity of the simulation (ASL is the insane extreme in the physical game world). You don’t have to dial down anything, just outright ignore it.
House rules can be either “hot fixes” to issues with the rules (either editorial issues or more deeper ones), but in my experience, house rules boil down to streamline some aspects of gameplay. Most often, you just work that out on the spot, making them as you go along with your opponent.
If the game turns out to be balls… well, if you’re playing with friends, having a couple beers and doing smacktalk, who cares?
It’s like going to a football match that turns out be shockingly bad. If you go alone, feels like wasted money, if you go with friends, probably you won’t mind so much.
Computer war games kind of try to simulate that process of negotation that makes every single table top war game game session unique in its own way. On a computer, that process is enabled by exposing those toggles, dials and sliders. The language is that of the medium, at best ambiguous and at worst obtuse, and the intelligence behind those levers is at best limited, or at worse, inexistent, enabling the players to setup games which turn out to be unfun. There’s rarely programmed any kind of failsafe built in that produces a pop up window saying “These settings suck donkey’s balls man! Are you sure you want to play like this?”.
Changing tack to something a bit more combative.
FWIW, games like Civilization and on have also issues in this regard, game speed and “AI cheating levels” come to mind. A bunch vocal fans want to have excruciatingly painfully long games, because they want to play tactics with a game that models warfare at a similar level as Risk does. Another bunch of very vocal just want to play the game as quickly as possible online, pretty much skipping over 50% of the actual gameplay which requires too much “thought” (plannning, optimization, or what some call derisively “micro management”).
I don’t think you can make 10 games in one, each a slight modification catering to the preferences to 10% of your audience. Well, you can, but you end up with a Soylent Green game like Civilization 6 (which I tried to like but I can’t).
You will need to piss or turn off someone eventually, and that should be okay. In the TV world, this has lead to 15 years of pretty solid shows which I don’t think would have been “doable” in the 1980s or early 1990s. I for one don’t miss the hegemony of shows like insert generic soap opera or sitcom here whose appeal was basically their blandness: everybody could watch them, nobody hated them too much.
Other types of games seem to play with different rules. For instance, flight simulators, where games have neatly split between “study” sims that require insane amounts of dedication just to perform adequately basic tasks (DCS PFM come to mind), middle of the road sims that offer AI assistance and hardcore modes barely over the level of complexity of PFMs (novy IL-2) or just go arcade (War Thunder) making the whole discussion irrelevant. Many voices claim that walking away from casual friendly customization (which is hard to make well) and other “single player” oriented features killed the mainstream appeal of flight simulators… did they?
Do computer wargames need their War Thunder to kind of wake up out of this perceived slumber?
