Rather than refund SCWW2WAW, I decided to give it a try on my desktop. I’m glad I did.
It’s a worthwhile addition to the stable of WW2 games. It plays pretty quickly, by dint of going at a rate of one turn per month, so I’m already to late 1941 in my let-the-AI-play-everything-but-Britain game. (If I had to think about the Chinese theater and the Eastern Front, I’d be going a lot more slowly.) I’m countenancing a miniature Operation Torch in early 1942, staging two armored corps (divisions? armored and mechanized units don’t really say how big a unit they represent) and two ordinary corps on Crete to land behind the Afrika Korps, which is currently stalled just over the Egyptian border. It was going pretty badly at first, but I was able to rush a mechanized corps down from the British Isles just in time to stem the tide and allow my battered North African army some time to repair and refit.
The only place I’ve done at all well for myself is at sea, where I eliminated the Regia Marina as a fighting force, and sent Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and a quartet of German heavy cruisers to the bottom of the North Sea. At least one of Bismarck and Tirpitz is still out and about, but Russians sank one in a battle in the Gulf of Finland.
Thanks to some good old British diplomacy, the Americans entered the war in September 1941. We’re coming up on December 7, so we’ll see how Pearl Harbor happens in this universe, if it does at all.
This is the sort of game that twenty years ago I would have killed for. Now, I don’t have the patience or desire to play lengthy turn-based wargames any more. I love the idea, but while I can put in hours on something like a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game, or an ARPG, sitting down and fighting WWII turn by turn is something that I’m afraid has, like Elvis, left the building.
I used to play PBEM games, but it was like walking uphill through molasses for me. Sloooooow.
This one is a little more like a sandbox wargame, and there really aren’t that many units to move. Haven’t had much time since I bought it, and I haven’t seen how the Pac war plays out yet, really, but I’m enjoying it. I’ve liked every iteration of these games, though.
I’m diving into Strategic Command: World at War now. I liked War in Europe and though it had been closest to a modern Avalon Hill Third Reich game I had found in recent years. And, I never even used the mod that brings it more in line with the Third Reich game system.
Ok well, I don’t think I’ve made the best decisions. I’m playing the Axis and its May 1940. I don’t think I’m doing terribly in Europe, France is still behind schedule but pushing on. China, however, wow I think I messed that up something fierce.
Thanks for that entertaining mini-AAR, @Fishbreath. The game sounds fun. I recall that the AI gave me a good fight in the last iteration of the series, and it sounds like it’s giving you a good game too. I’m sure I’ll buy the game soon.
Long lance torpedoes. Dual weapon gun mounts on destroyers, Surprise. The Zero. Effective morale.
And finally fantastic early leadership. Better night fighting training. Superior torpedo aircraft, a huge advantage in destroyer models.
I stand by my original thesis: The IJN could have won the war.
Not the long war. The war they were fighting though.
(I am sorta surprised I have to convince anyone of this ….perhaps a review of Japanese history is in order?)
Oops sry. I feel like a silly WW2 troll in a thread about board games. I cannot imagine what I am thinking.
So what you are implying --in fact asserting – is that alcohol has affected my judgement, that I am completely wrong, that you are the supreme authority on what can be historically right in the Pacific Theater, and finally that the IJN and the Kido Butail would have failed inevitably?
That’s a lotta assumptions.
(btw I used that broken clock metaphor yesterday with a client – I think it rang truer then)
1.) This already happened here, and you posted about it incessantly for days and oodles of folks presented documentary and sourced information to the contrary, (at least 10 books and articles and whatnot) that you waved off repeatedly, treating the historical facts as if you were debating a religious belief system.
2.) I ain’t wasting a millivolt of psychic energy on it again.
It’s impossible to divorce the technological aspect from the political, though. The IJN could have won a war, but they lost any chance at fighting that war as soon as bombs fell on Hawaii and the Philippines.
