An ideal strategic WW2 game

[Neilster]

I'm a World in Flames fan and and am eagerly anticipating the completion of Matrix World in Flames. It's a brilliant system and Steve is doing a heroic job converting it to the PC but it is what it is because it started life as a paper and dice wargame.

If we are starting a strategic WW2 game from scratch using today's computer horsepower, I'm interested in starting a debate about what features others would like and to proffer a few ideas of my own. Obviously this sort of thing could be applied to WW1 and earlier conflicts but to stay focused, perhaps those who want to discuss those could start new threads about them?

This is my list...

1. A global map in the style of Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations. For those not in the know, think Google Earth. The controls would allow you to spin the globe, zooming in and out etc. In a global war it'd be good to have a map that accurately reflects the entire Earth.

2. A command and control system like Command Ops, where the player can micromanage as much or as little as they like. This is realistic. Want to be Rommel at the front with his panzers? Cool. If not, you can leave the details to your lieutenants and concentrate on the operational or strategic picture. As a result, I wouldn't use hexes. I love hex based games but they are an abstraction with their origins in the paper universe. We've computer power to handle all those details.

I need to think about how naval and air stuff is handled. My instinct would be for some abstraction, but with major units like capital ships and perhaps air-fleets represented directly. One of the strengths of World in Flames is its naval model, which is abstracted to a certain extent. Also, unlike land units who are essentially somewhere 24/7, naval and air forces are highly mobile and often transitory.

3. Fog of war, including friendly FOW.

4. Possibly pauseable real-time, as the command system specified above would mean the AI could handle any theatres you aren't concentrating on, but I lean towards some sort of turn based. The system in the original Combat Mission, where you plan and then there is a period of action where you rely on your AI subordinates to react to new situations/exploitation opportunities/danger, followed by another round of plan modification/replanning and so on, would seem to work quite well.

To make it manageable, that period of action would be perhaps a week. Using that, WW2 would be a 312 turn game, which seems a lot but there could be some catastrophes if you couldn't intervene in operations about that regularly. What I'm thinking is that you would do your planning and then a week of action would occur around the globe. You could then, as in Combat Mission, replay the action as many times as you like, swinging around all the theatres to check out what happened. Then you'd modify your plans or completely re-plan as required.

Such "impulses" and the spherical global map raises the possibility of a real day/night situation being displayed, with half of the Earth in darkness (with the sun-lit portion moving during the "action replay" of the impulse)/midnight sun etc etc. Otherwise it might just be easier to adjust the pace of action depending on length of night/season/weather in the various parts of the world.

6. A complete resource transportation and production model. This could involve tech trees. Every self-respecting supreme overlord wants to control their war economy.

7. Partisans? politics? A Cold War extension? Dunno. I'll have to think about it.

8. An extensive replay feature, with DVD style controls.

Your thoughts?

Cheers, Neilster

[dje]

Steel Tigers

[Alchenar]

You are describing Hearts of Iron.

[GaryChildress]

My personal ideal WW2 wargame would be based on the War in the Pacific game engine done on a Google-earth-like globe. Two main caveats:
 
1. Use slightly larger Nato counters for land units for aesthetic purposes.
2. Improvements in the game interface to help alleviate micro-management more as it will obviously be an even bigger problem on a world map.

[JWW]

Real time 1 to 1 (i.e., one counter = one person or vehicles/ship/airplane) with infinite zoom from world map to 1 inch on computer screen = 1 inch of real terrain. Point of view that allows you to take control of a nation, a corps, a company, a squad, one person, and see the war from that person's point of view or from anywhere on the map. Include not only military operations but economics and the home front. If Private Jones goes home on leave, should be able to follow him bar hopping or bedding his wife. Time scale is of course literally real time but with option to speed up or even slow it down, with full replay. With the ability to customize scenarios so we could fight for example a German invasion of Louisiana. Allow the AI to control any or all of your side except one soldier, one division, one tank and crew, whatever. Fight through World War II from the point of view of a baker on a US destroyer in the Pacific, for example, in real time, where your baking ability affects the moral and cohesion of the ship. OH, and zombies. Have to have zombies.

[warspite1]

I'd take WIF as the starting point and then refine/amend that game as appropriate. The core key facets of WIF though would remain: A strategic level WWII game that has a sound historic basic structure to give the feel of a WWII game but, aside from certain restrictions, a player is free to do what they want. Both sides will be able to win (and to that end there must be certain liberties taken with OOB and unit values accepted).

Obvious changes would be:

- The computer would limit each country to a historically realistic number of men for employment in the armed forces and industry.

- The naval war would be much further polished so different ship types are used according to their historic purpose.

- The Land units would probably be at Division level. Maybe battles - naval and land - would be fought on a separate area so that more detailed battles could be fought.

[Alchenar]

One that's set in an alternate universe where the political factions and technology are roughly equivalent but the geography and resource distribution of the world is completely different. The problem with all WW2 games is that you play them from a perspective of (for wargamers in particular) perfect hindsight. Ironically this means that the players rapidly diverge from history as fast as they can and as much as the game lets them because they know what worked and what turned out to be a mistake.

So my ideal WW2 game doesn't actually replicate WW2 at all. It sets up a scenario with the same actors (aggressive Germany, war weary France, isolated Britain, terrorised Russia) but crucially drops the player in the position of the real leaders in 1939 - with no reliable knowledge of how things are going to play out.

[Neilster]

I should have specified a strategic WW2 game. I'm changing the thread title.

Cheers, Neilster

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: JW

If Private Jones goes home on leave, should be able to follow him bar hopping or bedding his wife.

Don't forget the impact of the clap on combat readiness!

[Neilster]

ORIGINAL: JW

Real time 1 to 1 (i.e., one counter = one person or vehicles/ship/airplane) with infinite zoom from world map to 1 inch on computer screen = 1 inch of real terrain. Point of view that allows you to take control of a nation, a corps, a company, a squad, one person, and see the war from that person's point of view or from anywhere on the map. Include not only military operations but economics and the home front. If Private Jones goes home on leave, should be able to follow him bar hopping or bedding his wife. Time scale is of course literally real time but with option to speed up or even slow it down, with full replay. With the ability to customize scenarios so we could fight for example a German invasion of Louisiana. Allow the AI to control any or all of your side except one soldier, one division, one tank and crew, whatever. Fight through World War II from the point of view of a baker on a US destroyer in the Pacific, for example, in real time, where your baking ability affects the moral and cohesion of the ship. OH, and zombies. Have to have zombies.

Unfortunately I haven't had an alien spaceship crash in my backyard and hence haven't salvaged its quantum mission supercomputer [;)]

Because, not only would the game have to keep track of the trajectory of every bullet, every Guadalcanal mosquito and the actions of every combatant etc but it would also need to account for every non-combatant as well, as they might affect the outcome. So that's a global population in 1939 of about 2.2 billion people. Frame rates may suffer slightly [:'(]

Cheers, Neilster

[Alchenar]

ORIGINAL: Neilster

I should have specified a strategic WW2 game. I'm changing the thread title.

Cheers, Neilster

You are still describing Hearts of Iron.

Anyway one thing nobody's noted is the utter dearth of Strategic WW2 games focusing on the campaigns on the moon in 1946 to mop up the last Nazi bastions of resistance.

[JWW]

Hey, it is something to shoot for. An aspirational goal. You have to aim high.

Honestly, I try to keep my games somewhat on the not quite monster game side.

[Neilster]

ORIGINAL: Alchenar

ORIGINAL: Neilster

I should have specified a strategic WW2 game. I'm changing the thread title.

Cheers, Neilster

You are still describing Hearts of Iron.

Anyway one thing nobody's noted is the utter dearth of Strategic WW2 games focusing on the campaigns on the moon in 1946 to mop up the last Nazi bastions of resistance.

I didn't mention Hearts of Iron. Anyway, although I haven't played HoI, from what I've seen of it, I am not "describing Hearts of Iron". My idea is more of a combination of Command Ops and Matrix World in Flames played on Google Earth.

Cheers, Neilster

[Ironclad]

deleted post.

[Chris Hampton]

I long been a fan of HoI, I like the feeling of directing the war effort of the entire nation. But it would be nice to be able to zoom in and control individual battles....

[aaatoysandmore]

ORIGINAL: Neilster

ORIGINAL: Alchenar

ORIGINAL: Neilster

I should have specified a strategic WW2 game. I'm changing the thread title.

Cheers, Neilster

You are still describing Hearts of Iron.

Anyway one thing nobody's noted is the utter dearth of Strategic WW2 games focusing on the campaigns on the moon in 1946 to mop up the last Nazi bastions of resistance.

I didn't mention Hearts of Iron. Anyway, although I haven't played HoI, from what I've seen of it, I am not "describing Hearts of Iron". My idea is more of a combination of Command Ops and Matrix World in Flames played on Google Earth.

Cheers, Neilster

So you basically want an overlay of turn based strategy and real time battles?

Wasn't Axis n Allies II something liken to that. Not on a realistic scale mind you but it's the only thing to come to mind right now.

The Total War engine may get there someday but for now I don't think it's even an idea. They've gone Warhammer on us for now.

Now there is a turn based strategy overlay with a turn based tactical game underneath it but only for D-Day: The Beginning of the End by Impressions I believe. But, nothing major like you are picturing on a grand scale.

A game like you are envisioning would take ages to play out a WW2 campaign though. That's probably why there is nothing like it.

[Neilster]

ORIGINAL: aaatoysandmore

So you basically want an overlay of turn based strategy and real time battles?

No. I wrote that I'm unsure about whether a turn-based or pausable real-time would be the best way to go. And by real-time, I'm not actually talking about actual "real time", as then the game would take six years to play if you played it 24/7 [:)]

A turn, which might represent a week, would be displayed in perhaps two minutes. Alternatively, in a pausable real-time system, the action flows at a pace in which a week of WW2 takes perhaps five minutes. This would give the player more time to spin around the various theatres to keep track of what's going on. Even with AI subordinates, the latter might be a bit tricky, which is why I'm leaning towards a turn-based solution with a discrete time period of action displayed, as in the original Combat Mission.

ORIGINAL: aaatoysandmore

A game like you are envisioning would take ages to play out a WW2 campaign though. That's probably why there is nothing like it.

I wasn't envisioning what you thought I was envisioning.

Cheers, Neilster

[Agathosdaimon]

switching from strategic down to tactical battles would be hard for a global sized war given how many times this would be happening, you would have to just be deferring often to the ai to avoid the repetitiveness of it, also though alot of battles would not be realistic if it is just set piece encounters, but i suppose even these in games are a type of abstraction, though then to abstract any part of ww2 raises up the wider questions of what to and what not to do

for me, i would like just a redo of '1944 Across the Rhine' - i suppose the graviteam games comes close to that in some ways

have you played Supreme Ruler 1936? - i havent but it looks to be a global scalable real time game with the means to zoom down to lower levels also, though i am not sure how operational it gets with its battles

[aaatoysandmore]

Even the Total War games are getting long winded with just 40 units max. Games can take days or months to play out. It's getting too busy with so many things to do on the turn side of things and then what used to be fun rts combat is no longer as much fun since they sped them up to adjust for the long turn based turns.
A WWII game like that just wouldn't be realistic. What used to be 30min to an hour long is now 5 to 10 minutes at the most if you're any kind of tactical strategist at all. The longest battles I have are when the ai attack. It ain't too smart.

Making History I and II or that Supreme Ruler 1936 would be the best models for what you think you want. I wouldn't want to play that game you are thinking of with a 10ft pole as just a turn would be massively long.

[Neilster]

ORIGINAL: Agathosdaimon

switching from strategic down to tactical battles would be hard for a global sized war given how many times this would be happening, you would have to just be deferring often to the ai to avoid the repetitiveness of it, also though alot of battles would not be realistic if it is just set piece encounters, but i suppose even these in games are a type of abstraction, though then to abstract any part of ww2 raises up the wider questions of what to and what not to do

for me, i would like just a redo of '1944 Across the Rhine' - i suppose the graviteam games comes close to that in some ways

have you played Supreme Ruler 1936? - i havent but it looks to be a global scalable real time game with the means to zoom down to lower levels also, though i am not sure how operational it gets with its battles

No I haven't played Supreme Ruler, but it looks quite interesting.

Yes, in my hypothetical game you would generally be controlling at the army level, with your AI subordinate handling things at perhaps corps level unless you wanted to micromanage. The engine itself probably wouldn't model things below divisional level, as that would be many hundreds of units on the Eastern Front alone. Many games have hundreds of units per side (TOAW, WiTE etc) so that should be possible. Matrix World in Flames models land combat at the Army/corps level with some divisional elements but there is no subordinate AI, and that works well.

Cheers, Neilster