I think everyone needs to go back to the basics. For that I must turn you to one of the founding fathers of war games James F. Dunigan:
http://www.hyw.com/Books/WargamesHandbook/1-what_i.htm
A wargame is an attempt to get a jump on the future by obtaining a better understanding of the past. A wargame is a combination of "game," history and science. It is a paper time-machine. Basically, it's glorified chess. If you've never encountered a wargame before, it's easiest to just think of it as chess with a more complicated playing board and a more complex way of moving your pieces and taking your opponents.
A wargame usually combines a map, playing pieces representing historical personages or military units and a set of rules telling you what you can or cannot do with them. Many are now available on personal computers. The object of any wargame (historical or otherwise) is to enable the player to recreate a specific event and, more importantly, to be able to explore what might have been if the player decides to do things differently.
To be a wargame, in our sense of the word, the game must be realistic. And in some cases, they are extremely realistic, realistic to the point where some of the wargames are actually used for professional purposes (primarily the military, but also business and teaching).
Since the 1980 edition of this book, computer wargames have largely (but not entirely) displaced paper (or "manual") wargames. The personal computer brought a lot of new capabilities to wargames and it took about as long as was needed for wargamers to get PCs for the majority of them to shift most of their gaming from paper to keyboard and CRT. PC ownership by wargamers went from less than one in ten in 1980 to over two thirds in the early 1990s. The generally well educated and affluent wargamers joined many other PC users in using computerized wargames. The widespread use of PC based wargames has created a much larger audience for wargamers. A lot of this has to do with the fact that it's much easier to get into a computerized rather than a manual wargame. Moreover, computers made possible some types of wargames, namely simulators, that were simply not practical (or possible) as manual games.
Computer wargames are more difficult to learn than other computer games because wargames are, at heart, simulations of real life events. A simulation is, by its nature, a potentially very complex device. This is especially true of historical simulations, which must be capable of recreating the historical event they cover. Recreating history imposes a heavy burden on the designer, and the player who must cope with the additional detail incorporated to achieve the needed realism. Most computer wargames are also designed to allow the user to play against the computer. This means that the program must have a pretty good artificial intelligence (AI) system. The more recent computer wargames have AI for both sides, and often have the option of letting the computer play both sides, turning the game into a rather unique form of video entertainment.
In all war games, paper or otherwise, the designer/developer has to make some choices and determine the scope they wish to achieve. In this case the designers/developers decided not to include or force Hitler/Stalin stand or die/attack at all cost orders and felt the player will be/is or most likely have the ammunition to do this them selves/shoot them self in the foot/trip/forget or make their own mistakes, without any help or assistance from the system. Likewise they decided or choose not to have an
event editor system other then some major historical East Front only things.
What some of you are not realizing is that this game is operational in depth and the political die has been cast, in a sense you are more or less the Halder/Jodel or Zhukov's running the war and not the
supreme leader. I would say that you are actually the Chief of Staff to the
leader. Some things are out of your hands and not in your theater of operations (OKW for example) and that is really just the way it is.
All this name calling or insulting is really not fitting and is really just a turn off for those that seek information or want to have a conversation and ultimately I think a lot of you are not really realizing just how complex a PC war game is to code, test and debug and then to request a significant change when nearing beta would if acted upon may lead to the delay of the game for another year or more, if you think about it that way.
I don't know what else to say about this subject
[:D]