Grognard Wargamer Thread!

TheWombat · 2013-02-09T13:52:53.000Z

Tim James:

Bruce may be talking about the lack of combat odds window in Decisive Campaigns. They talked about it at JoshL’s link. In any case, that might be hard to deal with for a new player.

Just get over yourself and play Unity of Command. Grab the NATO counters mod. You can always play more serious stuff later. It’s not going anywhere. You can blow through Unity of Command in a week or two with one or two scenarios per night.

Oddly, the lack of simple combat odds never bothered me much. It was, as fenrir points out, the laborious select/move/act sequence that was annoying.

Brooski · 2013-02-09T20:54:26.000Z

fenrir:

Decisive Campaigns awful UI goes way beyond not having a combat odds window (if it indeed doesn’t, I don’t know - didn’t get that far). It’s the way it makes you labor to perform the simplest tasks. Being able to move and attack with simple mouse clicks would help immensely.

Agreed. The interface makes you click so many times for the simplest tasks. It’s so tedious.

TheWombat · 2013-02-10T07:37:03.000Z

I can tolerate a lot of things in games, even as I get older, but tedium is not one of them. My tolerance for that evaporated sometime in my thirties I think…

JoshL · 2013-02-10T11:05:24.000Z

Unity of Command is the daily deal on Steam today, so no excuses. Sadly the Red Turn expansion is not on sale.

SlyFrog · 2013-02-10T12:04:42.000Z

JoshL:

Unity of Command is the daily deal on Steam today, so no excuses. Sadly the Red Turn expansion is not on sale.

Unity of Command and European Escalation in the same weekend. Thank you kind gamer gods.

Brooski · 2013-02-10T18:45:22.000Z

SlyFrog:

Any suggestions for a more classic wargame feel that doesn’t look like I’m pushing bobbleheads around?

Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear.

Brooski · 2013-02-10T18:48:33.000Z

Great post on Mad Padre and link to the recent podcast with Don Greenwood on Guns, Dice, Butter.

If you know who Don Greenwood is, then you probably want to listen to this podcast. The comments about ASL are priceless.

Aceris · 2013-02-11T14:30:09.000Z

I cracked and bought WitE. It’s … staggering :)

TheWombat · 2013-02-11T17:46:58.000Z

Aceris:

I cracked and bought WitE. It’s … staggering :)

I bought it when it came out. Even printed the manual out in color. Then…I kind of never played it more than a couple of tries at the Minsk scenario. Something about the game just overwhelmed me.

tgb123 · 2013-02-11T19:18:57.000Z

TheWombat:

I bought it when it came out. Even printed the manual out in color. Then…I kind of never played it more than a couple of tries at the Minsk scenario. Something about the game just overwhelmed me.

This was the game that made me swear, once and for all, to never again buy an $80 game from Matrix, no matter how good it sounded.

thrasymedes · 2013-02-11T20:32:58.000Z

tgb123:

This was the game that made me swear, once and for all, to never again buy an $80 game from Matrix, no matter how good it sounded.

But… Distant Worlds!

fenrir · 2013-02-11T20:47:43.000Z

Given that I’m playing WitE right now (I caved in after reading Bruce’s new series - he should be getting a cut of the sales!) I probably should offer a counter argument.

Yeah it’s big and overwhelming. But if you play the three introductory Road to scenarios (Minsk, Leningrad, Kiev) you start to get a sense of the grouping of things. Once you do that, it’s much easier to compartmentalize the different fronts and objectives, and to work through them one at a time without trying to micromanage the entire Eastern Front at once. You get a general idea of what you want each army to do and then work one army at a time. Although there’s a lot of detail, you don’t actually need to understand a lot of the systems to play the game pretty well.

The feeling of playing WitE is almost more similar to assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle than playing a traditional computer game. But once you get over the fact that it’s a different gaming experience than most other games you can get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

As a side note… I also got the printed manual version. Then discovered that the printed manual is useless as it mostly only contains the UX description part of it and I still have to read the main part of it on the screen. Sigh. Not to mention there have been significant updates to the rules/manual - make sure you read “WITE-Manual-[US_LETTER]”, not EBOOK - that one has patch notes added in appropriate sections.

Aceris · 2013-02-12T01:50:31.000Z

tgb123:

This was the game that made me swear, once and for all, to never again buy an $80 game from Matrix, no matter how good it sounded.

Well, tbf I knew exactly what I was getting into. Some of the stuff is so opaque if you want to get the most out of it though (HQBU, air force, support units). I played through a couple of the introductory scenarios, which seemed very easy (easy difficulty). Then I tried road to moscow(normal difficulty) and stalled out with a huge carpet between me and moscow. The AI’s willingness to take crippling casualties is pushing me towards a full campaign where that sort of thing will matter (ulp).

TheWombat · 2013-02-12T06:30:38.000Z

fenrir:

Given that I’m playing WitE right now (I caved in after reading Bruce’s new series - he should be getting a cut of the sales!) I probably should offer a counter argument.

Yeah it’s big and overwhelming. But if you play the three introductory Road to scenarios (Minsk, Leningrad, Kiev) you start to get a sense of the grouping of things. Once you do that, it’s much easier to compartmentalize the different fronts and objectives, and to work through them one at a time without trying to micromanage the entire Eastern Front at once. You get a general idea of what you want each army to do and then work one army at a time. Although there’s a lot of detail, you don’t actually need to understand a lot of the systems to play the game pretty well.

The feeling of playing WitE is almost more similar to assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle than playing a traditional computer game. But once you get over the fact that it’s a different gaming experience than most other games you can get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

As a side note… I also got the printed manual version. Then discovered that the printed manual is useless as it mostly only contains the UX description part of it and I still have to read the main part of it on the screen. Sigh. Not to mention there have been significant updates to the rules/manual - make sure you read “WITE-Manual-[US_LETTER]”, not EBOOK - that one has patch notes added in appropriate sections.

Oh, it’s certainly doable, it’s just that I don’t have the inclination to do it. Though I’ve been playing wargames since around 1972, I never really was interested in mastering mechanics or rules (you can see how horrible I am in our Bulge games!). If I had a lot of free time and no other games, I’d probably sit down and work on WitE, and maybe I will one day, but I simply don’t have the patience anymore. A half-hour with Planetside 2 or a session with Skyrim are more to my tired brain’s liking these days.

JoshL · 2013-02-12T14:28:46.000Z

Apropos of nothing, I was listening to a Three Moves Ahead podcast from a few weeks ago about WitE (which I’ve never played). They talked about the price for a while, and somebody (I think Rob) said that, although Matrix is probably pricing the game appropriately (in the sense that, it’s a niche game and they’re not going to sell a huge number of copies, so they have to give it a high price in order to make the game financially viable), it’s a bit of a shame that Matrix doesn’t provide more games to get people into the hobby at lower price-points, to hopefully expand the user base.

And yeah, maybe that’s a pipe dream, but they still want $30 for Korsun Pocket. Korsun Pocket is ten years old. Why aren’t they giving this away??

fenrir · 2013-02-12T20:40:07.000Z

That’s just the Matrix way, and I have seen (and taken part in) this discussion many times over the years. I agree, but I guess their numbers tell them otherwise - that’s the most charitable interpretation I can come up with. It certainly feels like they don’t do much to expand their audience, in fact it could be argued they do the opposite in a lot of cases.

Having said that, in the interest of fairness I have to point out that I did buy my WitE for $60 instead of $80 during the holiday sale, so maybe there’s hope. The lower price was definitely a factor in convincing me to take the risk and I probably wouldn’t have done that at the normal price point. Now, having played it I would have been fine spending $80 in retrospect but it’s a tough price for an unknown quantity.

Fishbreath · 2013-02-13T07:26:59.000Z

I can’t help but think that if Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge were on Steam for $30 or $40 (50%-60% of the current price), they’d sell orders of magnitude more copies than they do now. It’s a twin issue of exposure and pricing, I think—very few people have even heard of Matrix relative to the number of people who buy games from the Internet, and of the people who come across Matrix’s store and say, “Hey, managing the entire war in the Pacific sounds cool,” or “I’ve always wanted to manage two or three divisions in real time with competent subordinates and realistic delays in orders and information,” I’m sure a lot of them see the price tags and walk away.

Like fenrir said, this isn’t a discussion that’s very likely to yield anything new, but it’s still a topic that bugs me. Matrix’s position is that everyone who would buy a serious PC wargame knows that Matrix’s reputation is “serious PC wargames” and is willing to pay the premium price. My position is that Matrix is only reaching a tiny corner of the potential wargamer community, and that its reputation is more “that company with the absurd pricing practices”.

strategy · 2013-02-17T14:39:19.000Z

Question to the classical warfare grognards out there (if you play Field of Glory, that’s you).

I’m working with a simple grid-based warfare system, and I’m trying to chose between between two ways of doing the map - either sideways (HOMM/Imperialism style), or a more “classic” bottom-to-top orientation.

Example of sideways, HOMM style:

Example of bottom-to-top:

Graphics are simply mockups with placeholder art.

I like the former for various reasons - and it’s been used to good effect in games such as Imperialism. On the other hand, I feel like the bottom-to-top (i.e., your forces enter from the bottom of the screen and attack up) is intuitively easier to grasp.

Doing both would technically be easy, but not going to happen (art is money).

Interested in a little outside feedback, as I’m still wavering between the two approaches.

TheWombat · 2013-02-17T16:32:57.000Z

strategy:

Question to the classical warfare grognards out there (if you play Field of Glory, that’s you).

I’m working with a simple grid-based warfare system, and I’m trying to chose between between two ways of doing the map - either sideways (HOMM/Imperialism style), or a more “classic” bottom-to-top orientation.

Personally, for ancients, I prefer top/bottom orientation, as that seems easier for me to grasp when thinking in linear terms. But it’s not a deal breaker either way.

Gulf_Of_Araby · 2013-02-17T17:51:51.000Z

Aceris:

I cracked and bought WitE. It’s … staggering :)

When you’re ready, Aceris, I could use an opponent for the Grand Campaign…I’ve played it twice vs the AI. The game is worth the learning curve.