help buying

[pepita17]

Hi,

i am intereted in buying this game with the 30% discount but it
looks like the buzz is going down around that game (compare to wite).
is it because just one campaign option ? any comment ?

thank you.

[zakblood]

some forums are just more active than others, best not to read too much into it, regarding what is good, better or for any other reasons to be honest

[RandomAttack]

It has only one campaign, but there are soooo many options (decisions, logistics model, "what if" items, difficulty, etc.) that it never plays exactly the same. If you leave "historical deployment" off, the setup is jussst enough different to impact your tactics. I don't have WITE-- frankly, it intimidates me and seems like maybe too much micro. This is the best, most bug free, most unique (decision & logistics systems) Eastern Front game I've played. Sure, I have a few minor quibbles but the bottom line is it is FUN to play. Also, the developers give EXTENSIVE explanations for their design decisions and it's hard to fault their logic in this area.

It helps if you can accept that after the time period of this game there was no realistic chance of Germany prevailing. It was win quickly or go home.

IMO it's a "must buy".

[Philippeatbay]

Depends largely on personal taste.

WITE gives you a huge map, tons of counters to push around, and god-like control over your units. It's a monster game, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how much time you have to invest in playing it.

DC Barbarossa has a different focus than WITE, does something that no other wargame has done before, and does it in a unique way.

WITE presents the Eastern Front from the perspective of someone playing a monster wargame.

DC Barbarossa presents the Eastern Front from the perspective of a theater commander, with all the limitations of someone working inside a large organization with an ambiguous chain of command. It's not immediately obvious, but the game is about logistics, a theater commander's main concern. DC Barbarossa tries to deliver the theater commander's experience and frustrations.

I don't know how long it takes to play the equivalent of Barbarossa in WITE but I'm guessing it's probably a six month investment. You can play a DC Barbarossa scenario through in about two or three weeks.

DC Barbarossa is a role playing game built on top of a very deep and mature wargame engine. The wargame part of it is streamlined so that it doesn't overwhelm the player or the role playing aspect of the game. The challenge that it presents is that to play it successfully you have to think with two different parts of your brain at the same time (the wargaming part and the organizational politician part). And what happens in one part can have a direct impact on the other.

[pepita17]

gentlemen you have convinced me and i am downloading DC:B right now.[:)]

[majandro]

I had doubts about buying this one, but your explications help me to take the right decision (I am also a easy guy) [;)]

[Recognition]

Im curious as to how you are finding the game Gentlemen? Im on the fence with this one as I have the version before.

Cheers,

[Philippeatbay]

DC:Barbarossa is closely related to the other two games, but it does different things. It gives you one of the few unique wargaming experiences that pushes the boundaries of what a wargame is supposed to be. If you don't get it because you've played a couple of the other ones, you'll really be missing out. Here is the review I wrote for Steam:

quote

Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa covers the initial German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and paints a unique picture of what goes into conducting a successful military operation. It can be played solitaire or against a human opponent, and sports some of the strongest AI in the industry.

The game combines an easy-to-play but very deep turn-based divisional scale wargame with an extended role-play of command management. This combination creates a brilliant and unique game system that is as important and revolutionary as the invention of card driven games for board wargames. After playing Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa you will never look at another wargame in quite the same way, because without the role-playing command layer something very important will be missing.

The German player has to slalom around cranky colleagues, unruly subordinates, and irrational superiors while conducting a demanding military campaign that threatens to come unravelled if you run out of fuel or if too many of your trucks or panzers break down. The Soviet player gets to be Stalin, wrestling with ineffective subordinates and growing paranoia while trying to keep the military situation from falling apart.

The game is not an orgy of micromanagement. Many things appear to be handled abstractly, but appearences can be deceiving. The game focuses on the important decisions an overall theater commander must make and their influence on short-term combat operations.

Anyone who has ever worked in a large organization has at some point taken a proposal to senior management for approval. You may already know the executive who has to sign off on the proposal, and you scan his face while he reads it hoping for advance warning on what is going through his mind. You listen carefully to his questions, trying to understand his thought process. You answer even more carefully, trying to steer him into your way of thinking. And to your delight, the questions that he come back at you with tell you that he is thinking about the proposal the way you want him to. When he summarizes the issues and the decision he has to make, you know that he fully understands why he needs to sign off. And then the unfathomable happens: he turns you down.

Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa played from the German side puts you into the role of that senior manager. You are constantly being asked to make decisions or delegate the choices to a subordinate, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. It is often painfully clear what the intellectually correct choice should be, and you repeatedly find yourself compelled to make a poor choice, or even the worst choice, with full understanding of what the unpleasant consequences are likely to be.

Any action you take is likely to upset someone. Antagonize a subordinate and he'll be slow to carry out your orders, which won't do wonders for your next performance review. Annoy your peers and your fuel allocation will get diverted to Western Europe, or your supply trucks won't get repaired when they break down. Anger your superiors and count yourself lucky if all that happens is early retirement. Anything you do or don't do comes at a political cost, and you rarely have enough political capital stored up to do what absolutely needs to get done, let alone what you really want to do. So you perform a heart-breaking triage on the decisions you have to make, repeatedly making bad choices so as not to upset the apple cart because you need to keep your political powder dry for the big fight over that one thing you think you absolutely need.

Make no mistake, this is a wargame. There's a big detailed map, with lots of units to move around and lots of places for them to go. But you're playing as theater commander. You sit there looking longingly at the map, thinking of all the brilliant maneuvers you could make and all the clever things you could do, if only you could get your subordinates to follow orders. And then you remember your inbox. It's a big inbox.

So why do you have to read through all those reports instead of focusing on moving your troops around ? You could delegate to your staff, and you can even ignore your inbox entirely. Many commanders throughout history have done precisely that. But it's part of your job, and sooner or later not understanding fuel consumption, railroad track gauges, and broken down trucks will bite you in the ankle, especially when the weather is starting to freeze over and your troops haven't been supplied with winter coats.

Played from the Soviet side the game presents you with a different but equally challenging set of problems. You have to figure out how to get a brain-dead, incompetent, and terrified officer corps to do something (anything) while navigating around Stalin's episodes of paranoia. Less than ten years before the game begins the functional part of the Soviet officer corps had been purged, and the consequences of that purge are still very much in evidence in 1941. You survive in the Red Army by towing the party line and not being too prominent or conspicuous: showing too much competence or initiative was a one-way ticket to Lubyanka prison or the Gulag. In that environment, the natural inclination of a Red Army general with any hope of life expectancy is to do nothing. When he isn't descending into paranoia, Stalin can nudge the Red Army into action by dispatching Zhukov or Khrushchev to keep things under control or restore order. When playing the game from the Soviet side a player will find himself in a constant war with inertia.

Playing from either side you have the option to remove the management exercise layer from the game before it begins, and what you'll be left with is an engaging division-level wargame in the style of its predecessors in the series, Decisive Campaigns: Blitzkrieg Warsaw to Paris and Decisive Campaigns: Case Blue. But playing with the management layer turned on elevates Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa to a unique experience that demonstrates at a visceral level that there's a lot more to being a good general than just making the right moves.

unquote

[Eambar]

I've just used my Anniversary code to purchase this and Case Blue. Long time WiTE player as well as multiple other East Front wargames (including all of the old SSG titles).

The positive reviews on Steam and in this forum helped tip my purchase decision, so thanks for posting.

Cheers,