A holiday confession and best wishes!!!

[MarkShot]

A couple of years ago, I bought all/everything of HOI4. It was a complex game; not like GGs, but you don't learn it in a day.

Now, I knew it was not produced for historians or system modelers, but just because simplifying assumption are made doesn't mean the results cannot be realistic and not fun to play.

Our weather models, don't perfectly predict hurricanes, not because we lack the math, but data cells would have to be much smaller. Who wants a hurricane forecast which arrives 3 days after the storm? But they are close enough to be useful.

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HOI4 was a huge disappointment. I don't even want to go into it, since I could write both a 10 page op-ed and 10 page tech systems piece. Suffice it to say, I would not hire Johan to program the light switch for my light bulb.

GG's WITW and WITE-2 have been everything I could have every wished for and more. Yes, the scope is narrower, but I really feel as HOI1 was once described "war in a box"; this is WITW and WITE-2. They are immensely satisfying, and the complexity is not arbitrary ... it actually models something which maps on to the key processes and/or subsystems of war.

Finally, I must say from a system professional point of view, both the modeling and UI is as detailed as I have seen trading work stations. Especially, WITE-2's CR for data analysis is superb.

Some dislike that the RNG approach which GG has taken. But it all comes down to math in computers. As long as a function computes the correct answer, the calculation is a black box. It does not need to be physics based. In science we have the Ideal Gas Laws which is similar to what GG is doing, but the answers are good enough for F1 racing without tracking of every molecule of gas in tires or impacting the airfoil.

If GG gave used every soldier, we would need to wait for Intel's 20th gen technology. So, this is a perfect accommodation (like hurricanes) of modeling to realistic limits.

Lastly, I haven't seen it commented on. But GG's design of these two games is largely batch oriented.

Today's systems have many moving parts interacting which could best be characterized as a complex network. Now, GG does have some of that like Air Superiority and Ground Support.

But on the whole, processing follows a model that was very common in the 60s and 70s for building systems: phased transformation of large data sets step by step. Most processing is linear and global. It is very impressive as few games are done like this. But I think GG also found a methodology ideal suited for high performance in working with large data sets. When we manage complexity as a step and do highly redundant processing, then we find many chances to optimize calculations. (Yes, we gave up much performance of HW as we made smart phones into personal assistants.) So, it is truly fascination seeing GG leverage the best of approach to systems design to create a vast game like WITE-2. I learned from GG not just knowing World History, but knowing Computing History is very valuable. It makes you better at what you do.

Well, happy holidays to GG, 2by3, betas, players and all who contribute to such a master piece! Thank you for one of the pillars of my retirement!

[Teo41_ITA]

I can relate to your post. I did spend months in recreating the historical OOB for both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army for HOI3 - Black ICE only to see the developers rejecting it because it was too "railroaded". I did recreate via events the loss, transformation and reforming of around 500 Red Army brigades/divisions/rifle corps/field armies as well as all the historical German "waves" of mobilization... all for nothing. The frustration of an autonomous modder and youtuber was immense.

Then under one of my HOI4 videos, one guy suggested to give it a shot to GG WITE1 and by that time, WITE2 had already been released... and nothing, I am addicted to it. Despite my 200 hours, every time I am still learning something new. I can only praise the developers for their outstanding job. While I am still too shy and noob to start a PBEM, kudos to whoever programmed the AI, it's really giving me headaches!

[kahta]

I could not agree more. This game is a work of art.

[Zebtucker12]

Best wishes.
Regards
Sven

[jasonbroomer]

High praise but so justified

[PeteJC]

It was my frustrations with HOI4 that made me give WiTE2 a look when it was released last year. From the first click I was hooked. This game is incredible. Now if I could only create a parallel universe or clone myself so I could play WiTP AE and WiTE2 all would be perfect.

[821Bobo]

It was my frustrations with HOI4 that made me give WiTE2 a look when it was released last year. From the first click I was hooked. This game is incredible. Now if I could only create a parallel universe or clone myself so I could play WiTP AE and WiTE2 all would be perfect.

Its possible. Some WitPAE turns, especially it initial ones, are time consuming and take many hours but after things start rolling getting turn under one hour is normal.

[Saturn V]

Finally, I must say from a system professional point of view, both the modeling and UI is as detailed as I have seen trading work stations.

There is one UI thing which seems to appear in every GG game (and a lot of games in general) that drives me nuts, because it is so typographically incorrect:

Columns of numbers that are LEFT-aligned.

That is just wrong, wrong, wrong. It makes it much harder to quickly and intuitively compare the numbers in that column because the ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc., digits are all under each other.

Columns of numbers should always be RIGHT-aligned.

Right-aligned numbers are much easier to read and quickly compare because the ones are under the ones, the tens under the tens, and so forth. (Also, if the numbers go to five digits or more, a thousands separator should always be present.)

The one exception to right-aligned numbers would be if some of the numbers include decimal values. In that instance, the numbers should be aligned on the decimal point.

[MarkShot]

Agreed and the lack of units. Even if the world was just the USA, all numbers should have units. There are cases where it is not obvious whether it is feet or yards; and even the US military is now very metric. Further numbers not having real units, but game concept quantifiers should have a symbol so indicating.

But I have to say this is cosmetic programming versus foundational system design. (That is not to say that it is not a lot of work to fix; it is.)

Example of foundational: PDS HOI4 built ground movement first, and political units states on terrain regions. It was so much work and so useful that the air system and naval system mimicked it. So, I cannot create air missions over the coast (land and water). And naval missions also reflects same abstraction of political control of bodies of water. But such has no basis in the world of air or sea combat. But it made coding it trivial ... even if BS.

Is this the worst of it? No, I could present a paper of examples spotted as a programmer. Like in EU4 there was an army templater and navy templater. But someone forgot to rename the NAVY TEMPLATER window title which still said ARMY TEMPLATER, but this vast additional work done for the customers is used to justify DLC prices when often the actual coding effort borders on fraud, and could be the basis of a breach of contract suit if this was B2B and not nickle and diming marketing.

I am convinced GG sets out with a new game identifying the real world sub-systems and mechanics and then how to model. Unlike PDS which says we got ground movement, we can just clone this for sea and air with a few tweaks. You are seeing the difference between personal integrity and greed.

I have no doubt if GG had the market PDS does, the UI issues would simply be done.

[Karri]

Example of foundational: PDS HOI4 built ground movement first, and political units states on terrain regions. It was so much work and so useful that the air system and naval system mimicked it. So, I cannot create air missions over the coast (land and water). And naval missions also reflects same abstraction of political control of bodies of water. But such has no basis in the world of air or sea combat. But it made coding it trivial ... even if BS.

Is this the worst of it? No, I could present a paper of examples spotted as a programmer. Like in EU4 there was an army templater and navy templater. But someone forgot to rename the NAVY TEMPLATER window title which still said ARMY TEMPLATER, but this vast additional work done for the customers is used to justify DLC prices when often the actual coding effort borders on fraud, and could be the basis of a breach of contract suit if this was B2B and not nickle and diming marketing.

I am convinced GG sets out with a new game identifying the real world sub-systems and mechanics and then how to model. Unlike PDS which says we got ground movement, we can just clone this for sea and air with a few tweaks. You are seeing the difference between personal integrity and greed.

I have no doubt if GG had the market PDS does, the UI issues would simply be done.

Not quite sure what you are talking about here. WitE, or WitW for that matter, don't have even abstracted naval warfare. And if they did, hexes certainly aren't a "natural" solution for it. I can't say I am a big fan of the air war either. I do like the production, logistics and land warfare. However, pretty much everything is hard coded, and oftentimes quite difficult to understand. Not only that but at times impossible to influence. HoI4 might come up with some pretty strange situations, but you can also pretty much do anything. Even mod it into a whole new game.

GG pretty much combines excel sheets with boardgame mechanics.