Matrix Games Forums

I've played a TON of games on PC and board including a ton of monsters like Longest Day, Fire in the East, etc. This game is not dumbed down. It's DEEEEP. But the nice thing is that there are some aids to help you play it at a higher level if you want to. You can let AI run various things, and use commanders report to set things up for multiple units at once. Or you can go into every single unit and customize - it's up to you.

The micromanagement is not the problem, unless you specifically want to micromanage. You may, for example, select AI to handle airfields bombardment (and that's not a setting, but a command that you may select every turn). There is virtually no economy/tech development (which I would rather like to have [:(] )

Learning the game well is pretty hard. The manual is about 400 pages and even experienced warplayer (I have played tactical/strategical wargames since 1985) will do mistakes without reading the manual. But if you want to learn by mistakes rather than reading the manual first, then that's no problem.

The truth with every game is that if you like it, you want to spend time with it, thus you are addicted. If you have a little less sleep because of a game, or think about the game when you should think of something else, you are addicted. I believe that at least 95% of this forum readers have either experienced addiction or are addicted at this moment.

Personally I was very worried of getting too addicted when I bought this game. I'm still learning and I'm not yet addicted, but who knows what happens when I have learned more of the game and it becomes more fun.

ORIGINAL: Indy68

The manual is about 400 pages

Actually it works out to around 340 pages if you take out the history, credits, ads, disclaimers, etc. (you could pare that down even more by killing the "look, this is the main screen" stuff)

And for gee whiz, kinko's wanted around $40 for a bound b&w print of it. It ended up taking an entire black ink cartridge on an ink jet printer here (and then most of the graphics are between hard and extremely hard to read in b&w, by the way).

IMO, the "it's not WITP" means the interface is much more efficient and so you spend much less time on 'housekeeping'. It has the detail of WITP, with emphasis on the ground war (obviously), but the detail is presented and manipulated in a much better fashion. Your OOB, commander's reports, and other management tools in WitE are much, much more useful that WITP's, where such information is pretty much 'dumb' lists with limited interaction, compared to WitE.