War Shouldnt be so calculated

[Achtung stef]

Ive playing this game over the past week and have been dissapointed by it, the combat seems to me to be to clynical because of the ability to undo an attack and rethink the odds, surely once youve attacked there should be no turning back or if you do some penalty for doing so, I just think its unrealistic to know the exact odds of a battle and over runs, surely war is about taking chances, okay the dice does give a degree of chance but in my opinion not enough, dont get me wrong there are some things I like about the game like the tank shock value and and the way the weather changes the landscape, what does everybody else think of these points?

[Massattack]

I thought you could only undo a move if you have not revealed the exposure of an enemy unit, at least thats what the manual seems to say. The Combat advisor is optional, and need not be used by players who do not wish to use it. You can set up an email game with it turned off, or just don't use it if playing the AI. I rationalise using it by thinking that I am an ordinary Joe Soap trying to do a generals job, so need all the help I can get! So far I am greatly enjoying this game, but accept that it will not be everyone's cup of tea.

Regards

[Capitaine]

To be quite frank, I don't think you get the idea of what true "wargames" are supposed to be about. Originally, wargames intended to teach about military strategy by applying principles of war in a historical game format. When wargames hit the PC medium, many who had not played non-PC wargames expected to "experience war", which never was the actual goal of a wargame.

There are military games that come out from time to time that try to give the "experientialists" the confused, black box notion of "real war" but they rarely succeed because they do not satisfy what military enthusiasts crave to know: Why did such and such happen? Could it have come out differently with a different strategy?

Personally, I feel that the era when wargames tried to compete with Sci-Fi and Fantasy games for rollicking rock 'em sock 'em action is over, with only the serious players left on the scene.

Also, the more you get down to the tactical level, the more the "reality" component becomes a factor. So you might consider what scale of game suits your taste the best. "Squad Assault" might be more to your taste, for example. (I preordered that one too, BTW.)

[Sonny]

The combat advison does seem a little sterile. Think of it as your subordinate commanders giving you their availability report. Even though you get the odds you still have to make the decisions on where to attack. Once you move more than one stack/unit you can't take it back so you have to plan your positioning carefully. What the combat advisor does is relieve you from trying to calculate all of that information in your head. You get to make the kinds of decisions which you should be making without having to get into too many calculations.

As long as you are going to be shown odds and shifts etc. you migtht as well have the combat advisor. If there were another way of approximating the strength of units and chances of successful attacks then I would say leave the combat advisor out of the game. But since the game is built around CRTs and numeric quantifications of attack and defense strengths then the combat advisor is your friend.

[Rob Gjessing]

Dont be fooled! The combat advisor is not 100% accurate.. it will never under estimate some odds, but sometimes if you spend the time moving units around you can better the odds that the adviser reports.

Another thing to mention is that the combat adviser isnt an automatic pilot, it wont win the battle for you. It may report a 9-1 and a 8-1 combat is available to you, but usually you wont be able to use both of these because they are based upon using the same units.

The real challange is working out which one do u attack the 9-1 or the 8-1. And its not really that simple either.. most people would probably go for the 9-1. But does that change things when you look deeper and realise that the 9-1 is against a unit on Urban terrain and the 8-1 is against forest? Sure does.. most people would now be saying.. go with then 8-1. But again, how many steps are involved here.. the 9-1 has 2 steps for the defender and then 8-1 has a full strenth four stepped unit defending.. what now? 8-1 or 9-1?

Dont think that the combat adviser makes it a no brainer! If anything it makes the game more strategic and tactical.

The combat adviser is just that.. it advises what is available.. I agree its like a member of your staff giving you the intel for you to make the decision. And decisons they are

The other thing is if you dont like it then dont use it. I know of some people who dont like it and they play the game without turning it on. I also know that on Wacht am Rhein, when we start to host some tournaments one of those will be based on turning the combat adviser off! Bet that will prove interesting..

In terms of undoing combat? Well you cant actually do that.. once you commit your troops and press that execute button on the combat panel then the war gods have spoken.. no undo there. Thats about as realistic as you can get in war Casualties inflicted Sir.. maybe we shouldnt have attacked! Too late.

And as pointed out, if you play with hidden units then sometimes when you move a unit you cant undo that because it has exposed an enemy.

I would suggest you play a game with the following settings:

Hidden Units, Unknown Units and Random Weather. Dont use the combat adviser thoughout the game, and then Im sure you will get what you are looking for.

Good luck and I would be pleased to hear what you thought...

[BrubakerII]

Ive playing this game over the past week and have been dissapointed by it, the combat seems to me to be to clynical because of the ability to undo an attack and rethink the odds...

Stef this is just not true. You cannot undo an attack once it is conducted. Do you mean undo the planning of an attack? If so then really that is no different than staff officers in the rear of a battle poring over maps trying to decide their best options. When a battle is designated (in the game the conduct button is pressed), it thens comes down to a measure of luck applied to our choices, just like real life.

I think this is the beauty of the game, the fact it can appear clinical - I love that stuff. I think if you want that aspect removed you need to play a real time game such as Squad Assault or similar where the clinical nature of warfare is hidden behind a more pretty 'emotional' layer.

Believe me I loved Close Combat to death but when it got down and dirty I would still be calculating the [hidden] numbers in my head.

[StrategyCat]

Ive playing this game over the past week and have been dissapointed by it, the combat seems to me to be to clynical because of the ability to undo an attack and rethink the odds, surely once youve attacked there should be no turning back or if you do some penalty for doing so, I just think its unrealistic to know the exact odds of a battle and over runs, surely war is about taking chances, okay the dice does give a degree of chance but in my opinion not enough, dont get me wrong there are some things I like about the game like the tank shock value and and the way the weather changes the landscape, what does everybody else think of these points?

There's a game made just for you, called 'The Operational Art of War'. In it, you just move nondescript units around a map and hope for the best - LOL!

[gus]

There's a game made just for you, called 'The Operational Art of War'. In it, you just move nondescript units around a map and hope for the best - LOL!

While I certainly do not agree with AchtungStef's assessment of the KP Combat Advisor I must politely disagree with your assessment of TOAW as well. I guess it has been a while since you played TOAW because the units are anything but non-descript and game play is quite calculated especially in PBEM.

While KP has much in common with TOAW it is actually a more highly abstracted game than TOAW, i.e. it hides many of the low level details that are present in most other war games on the market today, TOAW, Panzer Campaigns. In KP most of the combat details that exist in these other games are hidden from the user, i.e. manual use of artillery and airpower, combining and breaking down units. In TOAW and PzC losses are recorded in terms of individual vehicles and squads/men, in KP these are recorded as steps. Command and Control (C&C) is also highly abstracted in KP. In these other games HQ units are also present and provide explicit C&C functionality for their subordinate units.

So you may want to pull that old copy of TOAW out of the closet and give it another look. While a bit old it has stood up well to the test of time and Norm Koger is still releasing patches to extend its life even further and there are plenty of fan sites where you can find all sorts of scenarios to suit your tastes.

-g

[Capitaine]

In TOAW and PzC losses are recorded in terms of individual vehicles and squads/men, in KP these are recorded as steps. -g

Given the complete inability of a computer to ever track accurately the loss of individual men/vehicles (espec. jeeps, etc.) on an operational scale, one might well argue that step losses come out more accurate in the long run. That being the case, I would argue that the game system that was more accurate overall was the better simulation.

Hyperdetail is sometimes nothing more than that: hyper- and unnecessary (and possibly even misleading) detail. The trick to designing a great game is knowing precisely the level of detail needed to portray combat and its effects at any given scale. Saying the the same level of detail is appropriate for both squad and divisional level games would be incorrect IMO.

[gus]

Given the complete inability of a computer to ever track accurately the loss of individual men/vehicles (espec. jeeps, etc.) on an operational scale, one might well argue that step losses come out more accurate in the long run. That being the case, I would argue that the game system that was more accurate overall was the better simulation.

Hyperdetail is sometimes nothing more than that: hyper- and unnecessary (and possibly even misleading) detail. The trick to designing a great game is knowing precisely the level of detail needed to portray combat and its effects at any given scale. Saying the the same level of detail is appropriate for both squad and divisional level games would be incorrect IMO.

Hey Capitaine,

I believe you are taking my post out of context, if you re-read it you will see that I am not weighing the relative merits of either or any system over the other but instead was countering one posters opinion regarding TOAW.

BTW Computers (and before them mere humans) have been able to track loses in war and war gaming quite accurately for years (at least from late WW I on). These programs are not very good at tracking a specific vehicle or squad nor would you want them to be, but they are quite capable of calculating the number of vehicles men/squads etc. lost in a given battle with a very high degree of statistical accuracy and that is what TOAW and PzC attempts to do. Whether or not you think it is successful doing so is probably a matter of personal taste and opinion. Personally I like them all, they are just different ways of solving the same problem.

-g

[Capitaine]

I stand corrected Gus. I never quibble with another player's preference. Just offering some perspective for the overall accuracy of a step loss system over trying to figure individual losses. To me, in the latter, it still has to start with a human-based equation. Yes, the computer has no trouble "tracking" them (the losses), but whether they are accurate is another question and is only as good as the stats on which the CRT is based.

N.B. The major reason/benefit I see for individual losses comes in "grand battle" games, usually the horse & musket era, where such losses actually can reflect the gradual erosion of a unit's manpower over the course of a battle. In a modern era operational level game with regiments and higher echelon units, the modern unit's power is not necessarily a direct function of the number of men. But this is a discussion that is still being held by military theorists today (how to quantify numbers in war).

[Adam Parker]

I'd be disappointed if you couldn't calculate odds at a regimental or higher level.

As Gus said, Decisive Battles as opposed to some other designs is an odds driven system. So the ability to calculate odds by clicking units and playing around with the combat planner is valid.

In this game once units have closed to within a variable number of hexes, fog of war is nullified. So there's no issue. The AI obviously maximizes its mathematcial abilities in using odds to exploit its moves, so there is no problem in letting the human explore similarly. There's no need for it to track bullets and helmets.

And two points have already been noted - Achtung Stef is wrong in that a battle can be undone after execution, it can't (unless you save/reload). And secondly the combat advisor is by no means fool proof and I personally find it more of a hindrance. Many 10:1 forecasts mean shifting much of the line away from its current position - obviously something we'd rarely do. So I experiment by clicking individual units and using the "max" button to get results I'm happy with before going into battle.

Hmmm... seeing at how easily the AI sometimes kicks my butt, maybe I should be using that combat advisor more.... :p

[BrubakerII]

Hmmm... seeing at how easily the AI sometimes kicks my butt, maybe I should be using that combat advisor more.... :p

[Belisarius]

I'd be disappointed if you couldn't calculate odds at a regimental or higher level.

As Gus said, Decisive Battles as opposed to some other designs is an odds driven system. So the ability to calculate odds by clicking units and playing around with the combat planner is valid.

In this game once units have closed to within a variable number of hexes, fog of war is nullified. So there's no issue. The AI obviously maximizes its mathematcial abilities in using odds to exploit its moves, so there is no problem in letting the human explore similarly. There's no need for it to track bullets and helmets.

And two points have already been noted - Achtung Stef is wrong in that a battle can be undone after execution, it can't (unless you save/reload). And secondly the combat advisor is by no means fool proof and I personally find it more of a hindrance. Many 10:1 forecasts mean shifting much of the line away from its current position - obviously something we'd rarely do. So I experiment by clicking individual units and using the "max" button to get results I'm happy with before going into battle.

Hmmm... seeing at how easily the AI sometimes kicks my butt, maybe I should be using that combat advisor more.... :p

I agree - the combat advisor is more of a guide. Beware of trying too hard for those 1-10+ odds, as your line will be a mess...also, it might be more rewarding to slug at an 6-1 hex and have units left for a second attack. The combat advisor won't show you that.

[Sonny]

I agree - the combat advisor is more of a guide. Beware of trying too hard for those 1-10+ odds, as your line will be a mess...also, it might be more rewarding to slug at an 6-1 hex and have units left for a second attack. The combat advisor won't show you that.

Exactly! The combat advisor is only that - an advisor. You still are the one making the decisions - wherein lies the fun of the game. The combat advisor just lessens the searching for unit availability.

[Rob Gjessing]

Unless you are specifically looking for a retreat result from combat (Thanks Nickel - who effectively got one of these on my units who were sitting pretty defending nicely in Bastogne!)..

.. I would suggest that two - or three - combats at lower odds are better then scratching around and pull all of your troops up for a 10-1+ assault.

Of course unless you can get an overrun. Whilst we mention Overruns, I NEVER use ART for overruns. ART doesnt count when a possibility of an overrun is being calculated. I figure, if I can get an overrun then I generally dont need it for this combat - and I dont assign it.. I save it for another battle.. so with overruns if you do press MAX, make sure you remove any ART from the combat.. you may be surprised to see that you dont need it..

Whoosh!