Will you keep playing after this patch?

[Uxbridge]

I will go on playing this game while waiting for something else that can surpass it in scope and enjoyment. It has it's flaws, surely, as has all games, but in my view they are minor or could easily be dealt with using some house rules. We are now in april 1945 in our first game and will soon swap sides for a second run. I wish the game wouldn't end in 1945, as the Ruskies are still to enter German soil.

[kevini1000]

Not a chance.

[carlkay58]

The current VP system is a simple aim. The war is going to be won by one side or the other, either the Axis capture 290 points of cities or the Soviets capture Berlin (and thus end the war or make it a certainty in the near future). The timetable seems to be that the Soviets win a marginal victory if they capture Berlin before the Western Allies do. A simplistic but effective measure of game victory.

A typical war game would have the historical result be a draw and then graduations for the amount of time earlier for a Soviet Victory or the additional amount of time for an Axis Victory. However, you need to finish the game to see if your game strategy is a winning one or not. That is probably the most frustrating thing on an incomplete GC game - there really are no milestones to see how you are doing. And playing 225 turns to see if your play in the first 25 turns was good is a very long delay - heck at my age I probably couldn't remember what I did during the first 25 turns! Which leads to keeping a "war diary" so you can remember your previous decisions and why . . .

And then you get well into the game and suddenly the latest patch comes out . . .

It would be easy to use the editor to make a GC with different VP awards. The casulties are easily done - historically about 2.4 Soviet to 1 German death - this tells me that a decent start is 50% of Soviet losses versus 100% of Axis losses. Then comes the problem - the territorial VPs that make the small campaigns so balanced as to capturing and/or holding onto cities. There are only 10 cities able to be defined for each side. This is not enough granuality for a GC game. If this could be increased to about 50 for each side, then you could make a good attempt to award per turn awards - end of game awards are probably not needed in the GC - since the capture of Berlin or the 290 cities could still be used as a sudden death end (although I don't know if you could do that in the program easily or not).

So I would make a priority to have the number of VP cities increased to 50 for each side - something that should be easily changed in the program. This would allow people to start to come up with alternative victory conditions and solve several of the complaints about reasons to stand and fight or attack during the game.

[LiquidSky]

I would argue that the Russian/German conflict was actually a fight between the western democracies and Russia, with Germany as the proxy.

Imagine, if you will, how long the war would have lasted if Stalin really decided that Berlin was the ultimate objective.

The Fronts that moved into Rumania/Hungary/Yugoslavia would have been used through Poland with the rest of the Russian army. I would argue that Stalin knew that the Germans were finished (or at least controllable) and was in a hurry to gobble up as much of Eastern Europe as he could before the allies could reach Berlin themselves and end it.

In fact, I think the largest problem with figuring out a victory for a game like this, is that the participants didnt have any sort of clear victory in mind. And that the idea of victory that they had in their minds changed from season to season.

Summer 1941. Germany thinks it only has to destroy the army on the border. No more Russians, then free walk to Archangel/Astrakahn.
Summer 1941. Russia thinks it can use its larger army to crush the invaders and push them back into poland with a series of attacks. Victory!

Fall 1941. Germany thinks one more push aught to do it, and plans for Typhoon to take out the 'last' Russian armies in front of Moscow. Moscow then Victory!

Fall 1941. Russia thinks attrit and hold the Germans while new formations are raised (with a small number of fresh divisions from the east, and lots of new officers released from gulags) for a winter offensive.

Winter 1941. Germany just wants to hold onto what they own. Give up no ground until summer. No more talk of Victory.
Winter 1941. Russia counterattacks everywhere to drive the invader back to Germany! Victory in Germany!

Spring 1941 Germany plans to take out the southern breadbasket/mineral fields and drive to the oil fields Victory!
Spring 1941 Russia thinks just one more push aught to do it, and tries for Kharkov in the teeth of German preparations. Victory if they can take Kharkov, and pocket Germans!

Clearly neither side really had a realistic idea of what they needed to do for victory. What hope do we have?


I would think that because the nature of the battle changed so much and so many times over the war, you could break victory conditions into little bite sized chunks. And the sum total of those chunks determines ultimate victory. Much easier to argue/debate/decide a suitable condition then.
It also has the pleasant side effect of giving a benchmark of progress to your score, so you can be rewarded for taking risks during certain campaign seasons.

[Mehring]

The obvious solution is to release a bug fix version and an all inclusive version so as not to interrupt people's games. Me and my opponent were fortunately at the end of turn two when the latest swathe of data fixes and rule changes arrived, so we restarted. Further on and I for one would not have been so happy. I'm wondering about the 1.6 version announced with the add on. Is that going to have more game changes?

Please, release the bug fixes seperately.

[janh]

ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
Common practice in wargaming is to assign victory levels according to performance better than historical.

Hmmh, perhaps you ought to figure in the potential of improvement of both sides into the VP conditions. Both sides made huge misjudgements and errors, and it is hard to guess whether the Soviets or the Axis would have more potential to learn from hindsight and lack of medelling by Hitler or Stalin, or their staffs and officers with own politics going on. It even depends on the time: certainly the Axis could have done little better in 41 with the exception of the Leningrad hold order, and perhaps or not the delay of Typhoon for Kiev, but the Soviets could do a lot better by running rather than desperately learning many times that fighting mobile forces without proper means leads to huge, wasteful pockets. Later, also Axis has a lot of potential to avoid mistakes.

An extreme example would be applying above rule to the battle of Chancellorsville. Given that this was perhaps a one-time feat, it is hard to image that any Confederate player could even get anywhere near the historical result. Hence, a "performance better than historical" is perhaps not a good argument alone.

ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
As I see WitE right now, things are rigged so that the Axis player - no matter how weak or strong - achieves similar gains to those achieved by Nazi Germany by December 1941. Hence why we'll hardly see any Axis player suffering the nearly 500,000 casualties (permanent and temporary) suffered historically by the combined Axis Armies between 22nd June - 1st September. That's the reason why will never see Southwestern Front more than holding their ground against the massed forces of AGS 6th, 17th and 1st PzGroup. That's why there isn't anything like the Smolensk battles between July and August 1941 in the game.

And the converse is true for the Soviets. The game is rigged from 1943 onwards. The German Army loses quality even if it doesn't suffer anything like the Winter 1942-43 disasters or 1941-42 attrition rates.

That's what it seems like. The transitions, forced by both the optional rules such as the 41 blizzard rules, the new snow rules, and the national moral changes, are quite quick and feel abrupt. Too abrupt? All these detail, extra situational rules are becoming hard to remember, are getting too many. Things should develop naturally from the situation, making it easier to understand and play.
For example, I would wish the strong blizzard offensives would come about due to the Soviets gaining more strength by reinforcements, the Siberian Divisions, and by a naturally tightening German supply situations due to snow and severe weather inhibiting road and railway traffic combined with overextension and exhaustion. The transition of initiative would be more continuous, and offensives would trickle out rather than be immediate -- the latter which allows a gamey exploitation, especially with fixed weather, as player know perfectly when to pull divisions back to Germany, or stop the blizzard counteroffensive and run for the trenches again.
Unfortunately, as it stands now, the Soviet counters in 41 are in little condition to counterattack unless massed against single or isolated German units. All the counterattacks on a smaller scale, or the hard counterattacks against AGS and its tedious advance are not represented due to poor Soviet quality, Lvov, lack of reaction mode combined with very fast mobile/Panzer speeds, etc. You cannot blame a Soviet player not to fight forward more than evacuations necessitate with that.
I will try a game against Soviet AI next in which it gets a 130% morale bonus for summer 1941, and see whether that leads to some counterattacking...

[janh]

ORIGINAL: LiquidSky
I would argue that the Russian/German conflict was actually a fight between the western democracies and Russia, with Germany as the proxy.

Imagine, if you will, how long the war would have lasted if Stalin really decided that Berlin was the ultimate objective.
...

I would think that because the nature of the battle changed so much and so many times over the war, you could break victory conditions into little bite sized chunks. And the sum total of those chunks determines ultimate victory. Much easier to argue/debate/decide a suitable condition then.
It also has the pleasant side effect of giving a benchmark of progress to your score, so you can be rewarded for taking risks during certain campaign seasons.

I have started reading some original literature on that, the "Tagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht". Even within the German ranks there politics and conflicting interests, and even between all ranking Wehrmacht officers or staff there often wasn't even a clear cut goal or line. Add Hitler on top, who usually had again different opinions, and you can see how the chaos and dilution of "Schwerpunkte" came about. They were arguing, pushing, fighting and manipulating each other all the time it feels.

They were at one point planning Seelöwe for spring 41 while sending military missions to Rumania and Bulgary, organizing operations Felix (Gribraltar) and Marita (bailing out the the stuck Italians from the Greece debacle), arguing about sending a Panzer Brigade versus several mobile division to Lybia (Italians stuck again...) and setting up new Army Groups in Poland... That was just 7 months before Barbarossa, and no staff was preparing for that yet -- if they even had an idea that this thought could have crossed Hitlers mind by then.

Things are obviously never as simple as in a game with a single player at the top, and no further personal intentions, gains, or dangers from failure... To mimic that, perhaps a little randomization of goals and VP sites, or values, could help? Some FOW on that...?

[demyansk]

I am liking this game and glad patches keep coming out. Not like some of the other games I have read about like the one game that has no retreat for the unit and for some reason the publisher is not updating the game, I think its on this forum somewhere, can't remember the game. I am a super noob to this game even though I have had it since the first day. I loved the old war in russia and still have the game.

[demyansk]

remember? I still have the game along with the three V for Victory boxes etc from 360

[PMCN]

Just restarting my game which is in july of 42...I was hoping that major changes in the patching process (why I stopped playing) were over with. But most of my armies are under 18 CP anyway so I can adjust. What I don't know about any more is the armnements point question...I have a large pool of the things. Is it possible to reduce it...or for that matter what value should it be reduced to?

As for Germany winning the war in the east. It was possible if they had originally planed for a 2 year campaign and didn't have a political apparratus in place that made stupid decisions regularily. Read "Why the Allies Won WW2" and the point is that the victory was not forgon or flip that around and it says that the Axis powers had a chance to win. A large number of factors went into Russia surviving the first 2 years of the war, had enough of them gone the other way it is possible that Stalin would have had to settle for some sort of peace from a dacha in siberia.

Is it likely? I don't think so, but with a plan based around winning in 42 it had a chance. With the plan they entered into the war with they had a snowballs chance in a blast furnance. They didn't even have a defined "stop line", they had poorly defined objectives, and what few they had changed, and they didn't have the logistics and production to back up their troops. Plus the soviets were far more determined then they had anticipated. Their morale stiffened the further the further back they were pushed. Stalin was smart enough that after a few disasterous months of interfering with the Army concentrated on politics and left the professionals to their job. Soviet industry was in the Urals...one thing that seems unrealistic in this game is how quickly the industry recovers from the displacement but it is a lot better than in HOI3 where it is more or less instantanously.

But even in the game it should be rare the German's achieve a decisive victory, but on the other hand stalemates should be rather common. Winning as other people have said should be defined in comparison to history.

[johnnyvagas]

ORIGINAL: Farfarer
" Oh boy, June 21 1941! The first step in my master plan to achieve a minor victory in May 1945 begins!"

[RP on] "Gentlemen launching Operation Barbarossa is critical to halting the the Red Army at the Oder four years hence so the Reich can surrender to western powers. Plan accordingly. " [RP off]

[:D] LoL

[Farfarer61]

I am quite happy with any even dramatic changes caused in an ongoing beta game, regardless of consequences. That is really 'the deal. You get the latest stuff hot and fresh - deal with it. I guess I am in the camp that does not want a historical forced outcome, but wants a Game with superb technical, industrial and combat modelling, and ,given the inevitable benefit of hindsight, I can "win" and win big. So I amongst others do offer comment.

[gradenko2k]

I think a good compromise would be the creation of a Hakko Ichiu/Scenario2-type of 1941 Grand Campaign for the Germans, even if the only ahistorical change are the victory conditions, as opposed to Japan getting better LCUs, industry and air squadrons.

[RCHarmon]

h

[wodin]

I find it astounding that people seem to have a gripe that a developer is adding to supporting their game. Personally if I was going to buy it (and one day I may) I'd wait until the final patch is released.It's such a massive complicated game that it is going to take along time to get right. I knew this when it was released.

Mr Grigsby and crew should be applauded in my opinion. My only gripe (and for me it's a massive, huge,mega,issue that instills crashing mind eroding waves of bitterness and resentment) is they never made a Tactical game that would have been the spiritual successor to Steel Panthers.[:@][:@][:@][;)]

So be thankfull you have such an amazing game and don't install the new patch until you've finished said game. Isn't it possible to have two installs on your PC one patched and kept upto date the others at the stage of your current game?

[randallw]

They'll never stop patching it. [:D]

[BletchleyGeek]

ORIGINAL: janh

ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
Common practice in wargaming is to assign victory levels according to performance better than historical.

Hmmh, perhaps you ought to figure in the potential of improvement of both sides into the VP conditions. Both sides made huge misjudgements and errors, and it is hard to guess whether the Soviets or the Axis would have more potential to learn from hindsight and lack of medelling by Hitler or Stalin, or their staffs and officers with own politics going on. It even depends on the time: certainly the Axis could have done little better in 41 with the exception of the Leningrad hold order, and perhaps or not the delay of Typhoon for Kiev, but the Soviets could do a lot better by running rather than desperately learning many times that fighting mobile forces without proper means leads to huge, wasteful pockets. Later, also Axis has a lot of potential to avoid mistakes.

An extreme example would be applying above rule to the battle of Chancellorsville. Given that this was perhaps a one-time feat, it is hard to image that any Confederate player could even get anywhere near the historical result. Hence, a "performance better than historical" is perhaps not a good argument alone.

I meant "more efficient" as in less losses and advancing on the historical timetable. For the first criterion, the pieces are already there to be assembled. For the second one, it would involve having a historical timeline for each city and awarding VP's each turn on a 10% ratio (as done by scenarios) plus a bonus when the side is holding the location out of the historical timeframe.

In that way I think the game would be offering incentives to those that actually try to accomplish more, faster and cheaper. It would totally change the name of the game, in my opinion.

Those are pretty objective things one can measure, imho [:)]

[elmo3]

ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek

In that way I think the game would be offering incentives to those that actually try to accomplish more, faster and cheaper. It would totally change the name of the game, in my opinion...

It would indeed. The problem would be with the AI code not understanding this change and probably requiring a major rewrite. That won't happen in WitE but maybe for future games, although that is not my call obviously.

[HCDawson]

ORIGINAL: wodin

I find it astounding that people seem to have a gripe that a developer is adding to supporting their game. Personally if I was going to buy it (and one day I may) I'd wait until the final patch is released.It's such a massive complicated game that it is going to take along time to get right. I knew this when it was released.

Mr Grigsby and crew should be applauded in my opinion. My only gripe (and for me it's a massive, huge,mega,issue that instills crashing mind eroding waves of bitterness and resentment) is they never made a Tactical game that would have been the spiritual successor to Steel Panthers.[:@][:@][:@][;)]

So be thankfull you have such an amazing game and don't install the new patch until you've finished said game. Isn't it possible to have two installs on your PC one patched and kept upto date the others at the stage of your current game?

Steel Panthers...now you just had to up and get me teary-eyed sir. I'd had the honor of working with Gary and Dave Landrey on the old Novastar disks. Did much of the dev work and manual for the Barbarossa and Stalingrad campaigns, as well as disks like the awesome work Chuck Meconis did with Otto Carius' one tiger against an entire Russian regiment battles.

I do think a lot of folks problems with this current game would be solved if one had as much access to the guts that SP had. Perhaps the new toolkit in 1.6 will allow for more player tweaks.

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: wodin

I find it astounding that people seem to have a gripe that a developer is adding to supporting their game. Personally if I was going to buy it (and one day I may) I'd wait until the final patch is released.It's such a massive complicated game that it is going to take along time to get right. I knew this when it was released.

I find it astounding that someone who has not even bought the game can have such a strong opinion about it. The fact is that at least until now, the devs are not so much "supporting" the game as "developing" it. I call support fixing bugs, tweaking data, maybe adding scenarios or an editor. This game had obviously not been adequately play-tested past 1942 (and really probably past 1941) when it had been released and some major things have been changed based on continued beta-testing by paying players.