Toaw Gaps

[trotsky1917]

Anyone think that there are many Historical gaps in TOAW Community scenarios?

Just to start the debate: The Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979?

I'll be back with more later....

[josant]

Yes I think like you, a very high percentage of the scenarios are of World War 2, and there are missing conflicts as you say or others like soviet invasión of Afghanistan in the 80`s,...

[ColinWright]

In a lot of such scenarios, either the main dynamic is political rather than military, and/or what conflict there is couldn't be modeled very well in TOAW.

Afghanistan you might be able to do. However, good luck with the Algerian War of Independence, for example.

Even in most conventional wars, politics and other non-military issues impinge on the decision-making in a way that TOAW can't model unless you just use events to force the player to repeat historical choices.

...in less conventional and/or very unbalanced conflicts, the military aspect of the conflict isn't even the most important. When that's the case, TOAW is simply irrelevant.

[ColinWright]

Then too, sometimes there are more than two players...or 'allies' with such disparate goals that they can't both be reasonably managed by the same player.

The WW2 Partisan War in Yugoslavia would be an extreme example of that. You've got at least...stops to count...seven distinct parties...all of whom have goals that conflict with the goals of most of the rest. For example, Germans chased Chetniks and Italians gave them shelter, so that they could fight the Croats, whom the Italians were seeking to undermine...

Or take our still-theoretically possible entry into Syria's civil war. Which side would we be on? At the moment, we're ranting about Assad, but if we did start paddling about, it would swiftly emerge that we didn't want his opponents to win either...nor would we be willing to run the country ourselves...

...but I digress. The point is TOAW can't handle such multilateral situations very well.

Just sayin' the potential harvest is not as great as it might appear to be. You'll need to sort through the candidates.