Well, thanks for the compliment. :) I agree it is modelling the impact of Political guidance or goals being filtered by MACV as “Operational Guidance”. In this case it is represented in: the Observation rules, the Cache system I’ve developed, how reinforcements are handled, the Automatic Victory Conditions. Another is Rules of Engagement on particular hexes (Villages, towns and Urban/Built). BTW, what you have seen is a bit still in the air on some of those issues… As it stands right now, Bombarding any of those hexes would incur a VP penalty, but I may do other things with them.
Now at one level or two levels telescoping upwards (say at a Corps Tactical Zone Level over a year, or at a Countrywide level with Seasonal turns, like Nick Karp’s VG Vietnam), you should be able to invest in Pacification and see an effect for that investment, potentially at a cost to combat effectiveness. I think that sort of effect becomes much easier to see…and it should be easier to see. It isn’t as limited in terms of time and space as my title is.
Oh, no doubt what Pat’s working on will be solid; that is pretty clear from all the info he’s related, and what we’ve deduced. I think it will work because the level is right. You can have, and need to have, things in place at that level to provide the parameters that frame the tactical or operational situation.
At the operational level, you can model some of the aspects of the broader political situation, abstractly, with victory point penalties and limits on activation, that sort of thing. What is difficult, IMO, is to go beyond that and put the player in the position of dealing with things like the draft in the US, the NVA’s relations with Moscow, or stuff like that.
IMO Victory Games’ Vietnam 1965-1975 really is the only game to effectively do that in an intelligent way. It still boggles my mind given the limited sources Nick Karp had to work with in 1983-1984, how that game is such an effective expression of that conflict at that scale. And the Battles Still Matter too (BSM Factor, another term I am coining right now. :). Trying to take them out of the equation is a trick many have tried. Unfortunately, they are inextricably intertwined with all the other factors you enumerate. Is it flawed? Yeah, it takes too long to play! But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the best expression of the game at that scale. Sometimes a wargame won’t cooperate with your gaming needs, and if it does, and compromises with you, it isn’t a good representation of what it is trying to model. I think that can be said of a lot of wargames.
Europe was pretty good, had a great MP systems with PBEM++ and was very modable (the A3R mod). I expect the same here. My only fear is that they scale the globe to the level of the Pacific and Create a Global Grind-fest with no feeling of fluid warfare.
So how is the new Strategic Command? It’s rare to find a turn-based treatment of all of WW2. (I have my solitaire World in Flames set up next to me as I type this!)
Strategic Command WW II: War In Europe was excellent, I’ve slathered praise on it in-thread. I haven’t started this one yet, and should later tonight. I expect it’ll at least uphold the standard of the previous title.
The problems I saw: under Proton, I couldn’t even launch the game. The start button in the standard Matrix launcher thing launches a browser pointing to the Steam store page.
Under WINE, I can launch the game, but it gets confused about fullscreen vs. fullscreen with taskbar, and crashes when it tries to show the combat odds popup.
It’s a hard life being a Linux wargamer. Every developer has a custom engine, and none of them work quite right outside of real Windows.
