ORIGINAL: IronDuke
Well, as a serial offender when it comes to holding invalid concerns [;)], my first reaction to this was that given that the individual units will (presumably) be modelled down to individual squads, tanks and artillery pieces, and the screenshot above saw the deployment of some Regimental sized units, how can the game avoid exploring these battles at the operational level?
To be clear, I didn't say your concerns were invalid, I said they would be _more_ valid if the focus of the game were on certain operations and exploring land combat within those operations. There are games that cover these areas at a lower ground and time scale and allow you to explore every historical operation that happened before Cobra. That may be your main focus, but it is not the focus of this game, any more than replaying Kursk in detail was the focus of War in the East.
My second reaction was that are we now saying that the game is not intended to be a detailed operational simulation of the land fighting in the western theatre? Is that how we should interpret the fact the game is not "focused on exploring some of these battles on a more operational level".
What I wrote above may help clarify this. Joel's responses will probably explain it better. While you have divisions that can be broken down to regiments on the map, just as you did with WITE, as a player you are thinking much more like Roosevelt, Churchill and Eisenhower than like Patton or Montgomery. Your focus will rarely be on a small section of the front, but rather on the whole and on the combination of land and air and amphibious operations rather than just land combat.
Taking the Kursk analogy again, Prokhorovka in War in the East consists of a battle for a single hex. If you are interested in that particular battle, it's not really the best way to get into the details of it, despite the fact that the historical units with their historical and detailed TO&Es and Leaders are there. Despite that, playing out the weeks of 1943 during and after Kursk is a great experience that gives you a great sense of just how much of a blunder Kursk was and how it played into the Soviet position as well as the challenges that faced the Wehrmacht afterwards with the Soviets going over to the strategic offensive. That's what I'm getting at. Now if you add in a much more detailed and realistic air war as part of this and include amphibious operations and a coastline that covers Western Europe, the options get quite interesting and even though the game is not a game just about Normandy, you will get a good sense of how important Normandy (or the other landings) were and when and where you could or should land, what impact each landing has on the overall strategy for the Western Front, etc. It will be a heck of a good game and one that lets you see the big picture while keeping many of the interesting and historical details, just like War in the East.
With respect, whilst a new air model and naval model will be nice, it was boots on the ground and operational art that liberated France and Italy. A naval model for anything bar a few months in the mediterranearn version of the game, and 2-3 turns in the 1940 game, will be largely pointless given the Kriegsmarine lacked the fuel, tonnage or numbers to trouble the RN, particularly in the period 43-45 covered by this first title.
I think air and naval power had quite a lot to do with the Allies' successful landing in Normandy and air power had a large role to play in how the land combat proceeded after the landings.
Likewise in the air, this first game is set in a period of Allied Air supremacy. Whatever the Allied player chooses to bomb in the air portion of the game, waves of P-51s and P-47s will attrit the Luftwaffe to nothing by turn 50 of the 1943 campaign, whatever the AXIS player attempts to do (unless he puts everything into national reserve).
I think that given the start in 1943, the Axis player will still have options that can cause the Allies trouble, especially given that the outcome is not predetermined and player skill and strategies can vary. Let's assume that your prediction about the Axis being without airpower in 50 turns is correct, which I'm not sure it is if the Axis player plays well. That would still be a year in which the Axis has a lot of decisions to make and could seriously affect the Allied player's options as to where and when to land and how much to risk.
Which essentially brings us to the one section of the game where the Allies didn't have it all their own way, being unable to prevent a well organised fighting withdrawl from sicily, having to crawl a bloody crawl up Italy, and having to slug it out in the Bocage for three months before gaining space to manouvre.
Arguably, the only part of the WitW which gives the Germans any options (although these are all still slim) is the ground fighting, and it is precisely this part which is to be played out at a scale that will largely remove meaningful manouvre and decision making.
Please see my responses above. I feel that you are not seeing the forest for the trees here and are talking yourself into minimizing the gameplay that will very much be there while focusing on your concerns.
In your next post you also express frustration that we are not listening. In fact, you've had several responses now from key people involved in the project. We are listening, even though we do not share the degree of your concern, largely because we know that this can and will work as a great game from past experience. The other point to make here is that creating the map for War in the West (and War in Europe) has been a nine month full-time project on its own so far, with much more work still to be done before it's ready for the release (probably another nine months to finish it). We do not agree that the map scale needs to change, but I want to also give you a sense of how much work it takes to even begin one of these games.
The eventual goal is to have these all fit together as a War in Europe. That's worth keeping in mind as well. A War in Europe at this scale will be an incredible game for any wargamer and we aim to keep it playable.
As Joel also pointed out to your later reply, the idea that we could do the entire West, 1940-1945 in one project is not realistic. It would take five or six years to do that and the game would likely never release as Joel and Gary would not be able to support themselves long before the release date. The release plan allows us to explore some logical sections of the war in ways that make the additional features and the amount of work required in each area realistic for our development costs and time. I wish we could do it all and do it four times faster, but we cannot and this market will not support a larger development team.
Finally, I'd (with the very greatest of respect and a gentle tone) point out that the man who gave us the cinematic magnificence that is Star Wars, also gave the world Howard the Duck. Past performance is not a guarantee of future....etc etc etc.
Using George Lucas on us is a bit of a low blow...
Well, firstly, the game is surely fundamentally broken if the Germans can beat the western Allies from an historical starting position in either 43 or 44. If this is a turn of phrase (one to note down for the publicity blurb, it was a nice soundbite [;)]), and what you mean is "lose less bad" a la the victory models for WITP and WitE, then I would continue to argue that it is absolutely essential that the ground combat is modelled meaningfully because only here can the Germans affect the outcome.
I was really speaking about this from the Allied perspective. The German player will have his hands full from the start trying to figure out a strategic defense without enough resources and playing bluff/counter-bluff with the Allied player until the first landing in Western Europe. As the Axis, you may be able to eliminate a landing if the Allied player gives you the opportunity, but you are fighting a strategic defense and deciding how best to achieve a victory within the game's terms. As with War in the East, this will be a very realistic game, not a fantasy game for either side, but within historical realism it will give you many options.
The argument about a numbers game that the Germans can't win applies equally to War in the East, yet players there enjoy playing in 1943 and 1944 as well. It's a great defensive challenge for the Axis. The Germans did lose this war and they will face the forces that liberated Europe, but how the war unfolds and whether they can achieve a performance better than their historical counterparts is the real question for their side. Again, since you are in the role of supreme commander, the question comes down more to if you didn't have Hitler and Himmler but instead had Kesselring and Model in charge of everything, would it have been different for the Allies?
Regards,
- Erik
