Question about issue of quality

[mwalker]

I was a big Harpoon player a long time ago, and have flirted with buying H3, but had one beef with Harpoon that always put me off. My issue was that the units in the game, aircraft in particular had generic ratings so that any potential user of them always used them with the same effectiveness. I remember designing my own scenarios in which Iranian F-4s or F-14s were flying against Americans and they were treated as equally effective. For that matter, when you look at the rank incompetence of the Libyan pilots in the incident involving the USN crossing the "Line of Death" in which they fired rear aspect IR missiles head in my opinion it takes away from the accuracy of the game.

Does this game in way address the issue of the quality of the forces in involved?

Thanks,

Mike

[Dimitris]

Contrary to the original Harpoon, both H3 and HCE have player-editable DBs that enable addressing this issue.

Most of the databases available differentiate between same-type platforms of different user countries by altering some/all of the parameters that affect their combat ability. In your example, you may find Iranian US-built aircraft to be less manouverable, have less capable ECM & avionics, fewer weapon options etc. than their US-operated counterparts. There is no "pilot quality" variable per se but the differences in the other parameters can have a dramatic effect in the overall combat effectiveness.

[mwalker]

Hmm, that's interesting -- it gets me at least part of the way there. I really wish the designers of this game would consider incorporating this factor into it. Its pretty clear that pilot quality is frankly *more* important than hardware. The Bekaa Valley in '82 is the best example of that.

My wish would be to have something like the old board wargame by SPI Airwar 78, in which every nation had a ranking and that based on that pilots were assigned different levels of quality. I suppose playing a US vs. Soviet type of game would make this seem less important, but in taking into consideration third world nations, or Israel vs. the Arabs, it is a major problem. I can remember doing real damage to the US Navy in Harpoon as the Libyan's which is totally absurd.

Mike

[JRyan]

Hmm. As was said that can be addressed in the DB. I would not think it would be a good thing to actaully rate the pilots becuase who actually decides who is best? It would be interesting to have a DB check for it but, if the DB can make the plane 'dumber' less 'able' then that would be the same thing in some sense. Every once in a while the little guy still has a shot. The Dice roll....

[mwalker]

Obviously the easiest was to do this would be to have a scale say 1 through 5, that would modify all performance parameters Consistently. What the old board game did I mentioned was create a far more complex matrix and rated every pilot. This way you could look at a generally sub par air force, like North Vietnam, but every once in a while get a Colonel Tomb who would fly *better* than a lot of Americans. IIRC the ratings were called from worst to best, Turkey, Poor, Average, Honcho, Super Honcho. I'm guessing about the ones in the middle, but it was very interesting, and allowed aircraft of equal performance to have very unequal encounters. Turkey's were just that, and Super Honchos could run rings around superior aircraft.