No full campain!

[FAdmiral]

ORIGINAL: bradfordkay

For the full war campaign, buy War In The Pacific. For an in-depth look at particular carrier battles, buy Carriers At War.

The day is coming when games like these will be all-in-one. Start at the strategic level
and then go into the tactical level when conditions are right. The 2 above examples
are good choices for this with a little Silent Hunter 4 thrown in for the sub lovers....

JIM

[Texican]

I'm not saying designers need to bake in the entire Pacific War, but simply string the existing scenarios into a campaign so that ships suriving prior scenarios can either end up in repairs or participate in a future scenario. If the Lexington survives the Coral Sea, for example, then maybe she's available at Midway or some later scenario.

If you lose too many carriers, too early, then perhaps your order of battle for the next scenario will require you to adopt some non-traditional strategy. Maybe you end up with the Langley (or a crappy lend lease British carrier you buy at the sacrifice of hefty victory points) and a couple of Pearl Harbor battleships and have to figure out how to keep Guadacanal from falling. You may even have to "throw" a scenario in order to build up your ship capacity for subsequent battles.

You could create the campaign like this:

Pearl Harbor --> Coral Sea or Wake Island --> Midway or Aleutian Islands (hypothetical scenario) --> Eastern Solomons --> Santa Cruz --> Marianas or Raid on Truk --> Phillipine Sea --> etc....

See, somewhat linear, but with a couple of "either or" options to give the campaign a semi-dynamic feel and to keep the game fresh.

Games, in my opinion, are more fun and involving when you get to keep your units (ships), upgrade them, and continue with them onto the next scenario. I have little doubt the famous Panzer General game got much of its popularity from its branching campaign format than had it only been released with a bunch of individual scenarios.

Again, I'm not saying the new CAW is a bad game, but I am saying that the addition of a campaign could only make it better. Much, much better.

Could have been the old Carrier Strike game, not CAW, that had the campaign format I'm thinking of.

[bourbaki]

ORIGINAL: FAdmiral

The day is coming when games like these will be all-in-one. Start at the strategic level
and then go into the tactical level when conditions are right. The 2 above examples
are good choices for this with a little Silent Hunter 4 thrown in for the sub lovers....

JIM

i think that day may have already arrived. total rome, total medieval etc are good examples of games that can toggle between strategic and tactical levels.

[Toby42]

Campaign at this level doesn't interest me at all!!

[82nd Airborne]

ORIGINAL: Texican



Panzer General.

[X(]

ORIGINAL: Texican
Now CAW, as just released, may be a fine game, but had Matrix built a semi-linear/semi-dynamic campaign, where your surviving carriers could be upgraded, outfitted with new aircraft, and live onto the subsequent scenarios, they would have designed a hit game like no other. Imagine if after the Coral Sea battle, you are given a choice of fighting at Midway or countering enemy activity in the Aleutian Islands?

you could actually do this yourself using the editor. Once someone posts how to actually use the thing [:)], it is something that I'd like to try and do. Will take a little book keeping but should be fairly easy to accomplish.

[FAdmiral]

ORIGINAL: bourbaki

ORIGINAL: FAdmiral

The day is coming when games like these will be all-in-one. Start at the strategic level
and then go into the tactical level when conditions are right. The 2 above examples
are good choices for this with a little Silent Hunter 4 thrown in for the sub lovers....

JIM

i think that day may have already arrived. total rome, total medieval etc are good examples of games that can toggle between strategic and tactical levels.

Yes, it has been done in those games set in olden times but for the WW2 era,
only Pacific Storm has made an attempt. But somebody had to start it off and
the first edition was not to successful. I hope to see a WW2 (world-wide) one
where we have it all. I would not mind (loved this feature) seeing the monthly
resource meeting between leaders that they had in PTO2 where policy was made
for the next month. Now that was a GREAT feature....

JIM

[Adam Parker]

ORIGINAL: Texican

For me, operational games are best in campaign format, so that your surviving units get repaired, gain experience, get equipped with new planes, then head off to the next battle. This pulls you into the game more. Nothing more disappointing to me than to buy a game and find it consists of a bunch of individual disconnected scenarios.

Here's an interesting position as to whether this is feasible, from Mark Herman discussing the focus of his Pacific board game "Empire of the Sun" in 2003:

One of the interesting phenomenon of the Pacific War is that although the Aircraft carrier was the dominant capital ship, the effectiveness of this system resulted in the opposing navies losing almost their entire initial inventory of this key weapon system. This resulted in the surface actions of late '42 and early 43 until the respective industrial bases began to produce new ones. The (EOTS) game focuses on this military cycle that most games do not represent, because they either look at a much shorter timeline, so it isn't relevant or they take so long to play that you never sense the bigger picture.

-- Source: Consimworld, Empire of the Sun forum, post #23 (my highlighting).

SSI's Pacific General gave it a go but the scale never really fitted and IIRC land fighting filled the many gaps on the seas. Your ideas have merit. Yes I'd like some continuity too but as Mark explains, the Pacific war just wasn't fought that way.

Hope you do change your mind regarding this title. It took me a short while but SSG is off to a solid start with this 1.0 release.

Adam.

[Warfare1]

Here is my humble 2 cents worth on the matter:

If it is not possible to implement a campaign system within this type of game system, then that is one thing.

However, this is a game, and personally, I have always enjoyed games more, where one could continue to play with the same units from scenario to scenario.

There could be a campaign system for Nimitz and one for MacArthur and one for the Japanese. Any landings would be generic in nature and be pre-set. The only units that would move from scenario to scenario (if they survived) would be carriers, planes, pilots and a few surface ships (perhaps belonging to the carrier TFs). Everything else would be preset within each of the scenarios that comprise the campaign.

In a campaign that comprises say 5 scenarios, the player could start off with 2 core carrier TFs. The rest of his forces would be auxillary. It would be the players task to achieve victory while maintaining his core forces intact.

At the end of each scenario, the player would be awarded victory points for how well he did. These points would allow for ship repair; obtaining new pilots (inexperienced); new planes; and new ships to replace those lost within the player's core carrier TFs.

Any new pilots/planes; any new sailors on board the ships (to replace casualties); and any new ships would diminish the overall TF experience rating going into the next scenario.

All other forces that are in each successive scenario within the campaign would be placed by the campaign designer, and would be auxillary forces.

This doesn't seem to be overly complicated to me, and would certainly add a whole new dimension to the game. PG (DOS) was doing this 12-15 years ago.

This campaign system could be implemented either as an expansion OR it could be developed for CAW II, along with a random scenario creator.

[Texican]

Some good ideas.

Just so I can mention, Carrier Strike, I believe, had a campaign system, and was the same basic scale and set of scenarios as are available in CAW. It worked, it was appropriate, and was darn fun. For example, if Yorktown and Lexington BOTH survived Coral Sea, that didn't necessarily mean you had 4 U.S. carriers at Midway. Just maybe one of the 3 carriers you would have might be Lexington (instead of Yorktown, for example).

Having an optional campaign is not as big a problem as folks are trying to make out on this message thread. It'd take some coding effort, of course, but it's certainly not a task that's out of scope. It'd be mostly a linear design, with maybe a couple of "either or" options (in an earlier post "Fight at Midway or Aleutian Islands") just to keep things interesting.

I think you just have a pool of ships and if the scenario calls for picking 3 CV's, for example, out of that pool, then its some random (or not so random) selection. If the pool dries up, then maybe you sacrifice victory points to get a lease on a British CV, or maybe you're just out of luck and have to figure out how to win with surface ships until the new carriers are built.

Perhaps, if you choose to upgrade a carrier to better AA armament or a squadron of those new Hellcat fighters, then that carrier sits out a scenario and is "not available in the pool" temporarily. There could be some very cool ideas implemented.