I have too many colorful boxes collecting dust
I have owned thunderbolt Apache leader for years and never played it
vyshka
6395
Grognard membership application accepted!
I’m happily assembling a Thirty Year War Swedish miniature army. It’s quite a satisfying exercise really.
That actually sounds quite zen-inducing. Any battle you are focusing the OOB on?
vyshka
6398
I would love to do that, but I imagine what would end up happening is I would have a closet full of paints, and unpainted miniatures waiting for me to spend time painting them.
Thankfully a friend is painting up an Imperialist Army at the same time, so we’ve both got the motivation to do it, and as neither of us is exactly a great painter, there’s not an incentive to fruitless perfection.
I’ll have enough initially for two regiments of cavalry and three/four of pike and shot so I’m planning to paint two as Yellow and Red regiments + one generic and also use various flag carriers to reskin as necessary (i.e. if we want to play ECW as well.)
There’s some good-looking Osprey skirmishing rules for small scale stuff too, but I suspect it’ll be a few hypotheticals to start with.
Yeah I read that article (someone had Tweeted it) and I think it’s exactly backwards. You can’t learn anything from wargames unless you believe the model is somehow a real simulation. Otherwise, you are simply looking for parallels. No one thinks Twilight Struggle is a sim, or even reflects much of reality. Thus, any resemblance to reality is something the design happens to get right, not some revelation from the game design.
" War games are useful intellectual aids because they force players to make decisions under pressure. While people may intellectually understand a problem, gaming forces them to think even harder."
What does this even mean? How is this unique to wargames? Was one player at gunpoint? Are there Deer Hunter repercussions for losing?
Just read it. That article is some thin gruel.
Here is another article from them.
Speaking of hypothetical stuff, I got Northern Fury from Amazon on my Kindle recently, and started reading it. It’s surprisingly good, and it focuses on the early 1990s rather than the usual mid-1980s time frame. The premise, that the collapse of the USSR was narrowly avoided via a hard-line coup, is more or less believable, and while the authors place too much reliance on face-value Russian paranoia in terms of motivation, the overall scenario they create is at least as plausible as most of these things, and better than most.
I mean, yeah, Russians in general have a justified suspicion of the West in general and Germany in particular, but it’s a bit hard to believe that, in 1993, leaders in Moscow would seriously think that Germany had the political, military, or economic ability or desire to invade Russia/the USSR. Still, the book (supposed to be part one of a series, though I think none of the other parts are out yet) ranks pretty highly in my estimation in terms of its set-up. Haven’t gotten to any actual fighting. though.
“Really?” should apply to that whole article. As in its raison d’être.
I read it and basically got: “Tom Clancy wrote a book about a funky plan that didn’t work, and it probably wouldn’t have.”
Meanwhile, here is nothing whatsoever in the article that states that the Soviets had made any such plans, merely one author’s (Peterson’s) 2014 opinion (link dead in the article, had to look it up) that the Soviets could or should have been interested in such an operation. Which he has written about since he wrote “Iceland - is a red storm rising?” (Phillip A. Petersen, International Defense Review, Volume 20, Number 8, 1987, pp. 1007-1011.) a year after Red Storm Rising was published.
I can’t remember exactly, but I think I read a Larry Bond book back in the 90s that had France and Germany (in the 90s) teaming up… against everybody. I could probably look up the title (it wasn’t Cauldron) but I can’t be arsed.
Some of even the better military-pr0n books back then had some “thin gruel” for scenarios.I can’t imagine what it’s like now, with 3rd-generation Tom Clancy ghost writers and no juicy Cold War One to fall back on when all else failed.
Isn’t that the future history of Traveller 2300?
Fulda Gappers gotta Gap. If the hypothetical scenario ceases to exist, then fiction is preferred over actual wars conducted.
I misread that as Twilight 2000 there for a second
It was the future of the Twilight 2000 universe.
BTW, that is a game I’d play anytime/anywhere.
vyshka
6411
The early 90s had a lot of crap. Coyle had books about the USA fighting Mexico, an American unit fighting it’s way out of Germany after (iirc) some closet nazi took power. Bond had his book about Korea, one about South Africa that included a nuke getting popped, and Cauldronm which I haven’t read.
Ralph Petersen had a couple of well-written, thoughtful technothrillers in the 90s. It’s too bad the author himself transformed into a full-on Muslim-hating alt-right paragon (although, based on the afterword of one of those thrillers, in was inside him all along. God bless editors.)
Note to self: actually, it was Cauldron.
