Quality of printed manual

Gary Grigsby’s War in the East: The German-Soviet War 1941-1945 is a turn-based World War II strategy game stretching across the entire Eastern Front. Gamers can engage in an epic campaign, including division-sized battles with realistic and historical terrain, weather, orders of battle, logistics and combat results.

The critically and fan-acclaimed Eastern Front mega-game Gary Grigsby’s War in the East just got bigger and better with Gary Grigsby’s War in the East: Don to the Danube! This expansion to the award-winning War in the East comes with a wide array of later war scenarios ranging from short but intense 6 turn bouts like the Battle for Kharkov (1942) to immense 37-turn engagements taking place across multiple nations like Drama on the Danube (Summer 1944 – Spring 1945).

Moderators: Joel Billings, Sabre21, elmo3

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firehall
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Quality of printed manual

Post by firehall »

I'm considering buying this game and wanted to know what I should expected if I get the Standard Edition with the greyscale manual. What's the binding and paper quality of the manual like? I image the manual would be full of the maps I see in the screenshots. Are the greyscale images clear or do you really need colour? Thanks.
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Gandalf
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by Gandalf »

Be aware that the printed manual in the boxed version of the game is NOT the complete manual. It's roughly half the information contained in the PDF version and probably has not been updated nearly so much as the PDF manual.
Member since January 2007 (as Gray_Lensman)

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johnnyvagas
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by johnnyvagas »

For what it’s worth, I bought the full blown boxed version of WiTE a year or so back. This included a color version of the rules book. But at that time the hardcopy manual provided with the boxed version of WiTE was abridged. It included something like only the first 100-pages of the manual. I thought the short manual to be fairly worthless as I wanted a hard copy that I could flip back and forth between rules sections while playing the game. Had I read the fine print a bit better I probably wouldn’t have bought the boxed version of the game for this reason. Oh well.

For whatever reason, psychological or physiological [8|], I don't like reading big chunks of text from a computer screen. I ended up printing out the entire pdf version of the manual in BW. This works fine for me. The manual is graphically intensive in that it has lotz of nice pictures. But I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything by looking at the manual in BW vs. looking at the abridged manual in color.
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firehall
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by firehall »

That's useful to know. Thanks Gandalf.
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krieger
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by krieger »

The problem I see with the manual is that it refers to version 1.0 of the game, at least afaik. Changes in the rules are documented in the readme.doc file in the game folde. For example in the mud period of 41 (under v1.05.42 beta) the german units lost their CVs (all 1 CV) and recovered them in the following snow period. I dont know if this is documented in the manual or elsewhere (I searched the readme but didnt find the new rules about mud that made CVs so low, maybe my mistake). On the other hand searching in the electronic version is much easier than in the printed one (ctrl+shift+F), that's a big plus when you try to pinpoint particular aspects/rules.
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Joel Billings
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by Joel Billings »

I could have sworn we had noted in the readme that attack CV values are divided by 8 during mud, but I can't find it either in the manual or the readme. I know it's been discussed in the forum several times.

Only the first 5 sections (basically the interface) plus important charts and tables from the rest of the manual is in the printed manual. About 125 of the close to 400 pages. We do have a "living manual" that has the readme added as an addendum, and work has been ongoing to move the readme items into the main text. Once the changes have been put into the main manual, that would be the version to print (but I don't have an ETA on when that will be available).
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krieger
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by krieger »

Yeah that updated game manual would be great, but I guess that work only ends after the last patch is released (I've no idea when this will be). Thanks for the heads up on the mud changes.
jazman
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by jazman »

I had the War in the Pacific - AE manual printed at Staples for about $20 (with binding, too) when it first came out, but I can't come remotely within hailing distance of that now. I can get it around $140.
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firehall
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by firehall »

Thanks all for the feedback. It doesn't sound like the printed manual would satisfy me. I'd hope to have a copy beside the computer while playing and maybe reading at bed time but I'd want it up to date and complete.
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Gandalf
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RE: Quality of printed manual

Post by Gandalf »

ORIGINAL: firehall

Thanks all for the feedback. It doesn't sound like the printed manual would satisfy me. I'd hope to have a copy beside the computer while playing and maybe reading at bed time but I'd want it up to date and complete.

If you have a smartphone or equivalent w/Adobe app, you can upload the full PDF manual to it and read it at your pleasure. I currently have a dozen or so Game PDF Manuals on my Droid X and take it everywhere with me.
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