How to design a better game
Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 7:17 pm
[font="Times New Roman"]I thought I'd start a new thread on this subject as otherwise it will simply get buried over in Ray's poll on a new WitP game. My response is to Apollo's post in that thread.[/font]
__________
Not bad suggestions.
But with regard to port size and "anchorages": it isn't just an issue of space for actually parking hulls, but what to do with those hulls in terms of servicing them with supplies, maintenance, etc. Just for example, the lagoon at Ulithi Atoll could accomodate an enormous gross number of hulls, but it was never a port per se. I know that the 18th Special battalion was stationed there in 1944 and serviced the fleet ship-to-ship, but the amount of bulk supplies that could be transferred was limited. To what exact extent I'm not sure, but the Pacific Wrecks site gives a figure of 20,000 tons per month. You can check that out here: Ulithi
Whatever the port potential of Ulithi was, I seriously doubt that in 1943 even San Francisco could simultaneously load and unload 200 large ships efficiently. In fact I know damn well it could not. I live on the Bay and have lived here for years, and I'm telling you that even now there simply aren't that many berths and cranes and railroad facilities for ocean-going ships. Even with staged arrival schedules one can easily count at any given time any number of ships swinging idly at anchor out in the harbor waiting to be serviced. What was it like in 1943 with the press of shipping which a world war brings? Can you imagine?
(Someone might argue that the Port of San Francisco has taken a hit since World War II in terms of its harbor facilities, and to a real extent this is true. But it is not difficult to take that into consideration by counting the possible berthing stations which might have been made available 60 years ago.)
Think about this truth. The game moves too fast. The crying need is to slow the game down. Almost any change which accomplishes that must be good. A more realistic concept of "harbors" would not be a bad place to begin our game reassessment.
Also, come 1944 the USN was, incredibly enough, able to do most of the work of a medium- to good-sized harbor with modern facilities while it was at sea. That needs to be addressed as well. (Makes one wonder just what might have been accomplished at Ulithi had the Navy decided, or more to the point needed, to employ that facility more extensively.)
The game system needs to get serious about how repair yards function, and also in relation to how and why ships accumulate incidental (as opposed to combat) casualties. The approach taken presently is a joke. There are countless examples of USN warships conducting combat operations at sea for months at a time with no serious degradation to their operational capabilities. A carrier pulling into Pearl harbor with serious damage will not necessarily take months to repair. After the Coral Sea Yorktown returned to Pearl and was initially assessed a repair time of ninety days. Then someone got the good idea to give her the once-over but good. So the Navy spilled some 2,000 workers onto and into her, and lo and behold two days later this ship was able to steam out of harbor into harm's way in better shape than she'd ever seen according to reports.
Another idea: someway somehow supply needs to be more intelligently defined.
There is no sense whatsoever to imagine that the SRA or China or anywhere else on the map except the home islands can provide combat supply to the Japanese. So, at the very least there needs to be two kinds of supply. For the sake of simplicity let's call that 1) Organic Supply and 2) Combat Supply. Organic Supply (OS) might be found at almost any spot on the map. Think of OS as "food." On the other hand, CS would only be made available at limited spots on the map. Basically this would amount to the home islands for the Japanese and the west coast of the United States for the Allies (Provision would also need to be made for off-map CS coming into India for the British and limited CS at Australia-New Zealand for those Commonwealth nations.)
Huge differences exist between unrefined crude oil, fuel for ships, and aviation gasoline--and especially the latter. That needs to be addressed, too. It's true that toward the end of the war the Japanese in desperation used the crude from Brunei to fill the bunkers of some of their ships, but with unhappy consequences.
These are not mere "details" and we do not want to talk about the distinction between rice, SPAM and toilet paper.
Speaking about rice, by the way, there's a good reason the Japanese occupied the Ocean Islands. There were good deposits of phosphates there which the Japanese needed back home for fertilizer. Whether or not the game wished to get into that sort of "detail" is another question, but at the very least the Ocean Islands should be given some "resources" in order to make them an attractive prize.
There's a lot to look at. The list is almost endless, for when it comes to the study of logistics it isn't a case of merely this and that, but rather how this and that all weds happily together in the end. There is no magic to a functional supply system. There is only hard work combined with fastidious planning implemented with innovation and hardware of the trade.
In a nutsehll, one might typify the Japanese in game terms as hard workers, to be sure, and they were extremely innovative in some respects, but they lacked good planning all across the board and suffered dearly from a relative lack of competitive tools. The Allies, to begin the war (we'll just look at the Americans here in isolation, as the Pacfic theater was primarily an American show) started with better and more tools looked on as a whole, and immediately began to harness their own hard work to the production of many more and much better tools still. Planning in terms of war aims was something the Americans proved to excel at, and their bent for innovation took a backseat to no one--there's a reason the expression "American know-how" came into being.
Finally, the database needs to re-examined. It's off in some cases by an alarming degree. I mentioned the operational radii of both the Hudson and Ventura bombers the other day--both have been truncated for no better reason than ignorance. There are other problems that I've run across just with airplanes in mind, and the truth is I have not studied the database closely. This is just stuff I've noticed along the way while playing the game, and then bothered to check it out for myself. This is important work, important work which not only needs to be done by careful people but by careful people who do not entertain bias for anything other than a representatively historical rendering of the war.
So, as Ron was fond of saying . . . maybe someone should read a book.
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ORIGINAL: Apollo11
Hi all,
ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag
Logistics is the number one thing on my list.
As you think through it, you come to the conclusion that by having logistics, it also entails expanding the concept of what a base actually is, how ships are handled, air mission frequency/repair, etc.
I agree 100% with Raymond!
Here is my old (and many times repeated - since I bever give up hope) WitP wish <SIGH>...
I know that it is very late in WitP developement but I still have hope that the below issues will be looked upon because geography and supply played huge role in how and where TFs were located in the Pacific (i.e. not every bay can be made into major harbour and not every ship one side posseses can be placed in such bay)...
#1 Ammo replenishment should be depending on port size
In current WitP we can replenish ammo of almost any ship in any port size.
IMHO it is impossible to believe that some lowly port size 3 would have, for example, 16" shells for BBs.
This should be altered to reflect historical situation and something simple could be implemented (numbers are just for example):
port size 1-3 : ammo for all guns up to 5"
port size 4-6 : ammo for all guns up to 8"
port size 7-9 : ammo for all guns
#2 Number of ships anchored should be depending on port size
In current WitP we can anchor as many ships as we want in any port size that is larger than 3.
IMHO this should be altered and something simple could be implemented (numbers are just for example):
port size 3 : MAX number of anchored ships = 10
port size 4 : MAX number of anchored ships = 15
port size 5 : MAX number of anchored ships = 25
port size 6 : MAX number of anchored ships = 50
port size 7 : MAX number of anchored ships = 75
port size 8 : MAX number of anchored ships = 100
port size 9 : MAX number of anchored ships = 150
port size 10 : MAX number of anchored ships = 200
Leo "Apollo11"
Not bad suggestions.
But with regard to port size and "anchorages": it isn't just an issue of space for actually parking hulls, but what to do with those hulls in terms of servicing them with supplies, maintenance, etc. Just for example, the lagoon at Ulithi Atoll could accomodate an enormous gross number of hulls, but it was never a port per se. I know that the 18th Special battalion was stationed there in 1944 and serviced the fleet ship-to-ship, but the amount of bulk supplies that could be transferred was limited. To what exact extent I'm not sure, but the Pacific Wrecks site gives a figure of 20,000 tons per month. You can check that out here: Ulithi
Whatever the port potential of Ulithi was, I seriously doubt that in 1943 even San Francisco could simultaneously load and unload 200 large ships efficiently. In fact I know damn well it could not. I live on the Bay and have lived here for years, and I'm telling you that even now there simply aren't that many berths and cranes and railroad facilities for ocean-going ships. Even with staged arrival schedules one can easily count at any given time any number of ships swinging idly at anchor out in the harbor waiting to be serviced. What was it like in 1943 with the press of shipping which a world war brings? Can you imagine?
(Someone might argue that the Port of San Francisco has taken a hit since World War II in terms of its harbor facilities, and to a real extent this is true. But it is not difficult to take that into consideration by counting the possible berthing stations which might have been made available 60 years ago.)
Think about this truth. The game moves too fast. The crying need is to slow the game down. Almost any change which accomplishes that must be good. A more realistic concept of "harbors" would not be a bad place to begin our game reassessment.
Also, come 1944 the USN was, incredibly enough, able to do most of the work of a medium- to good-sized harbor with modern facilities while it was at sea. That needs to be addressed as well. (Makes one wonder just what might have been accomplished at Ulithi had the Navy decided, or more to the point needed, to employ that facility more extensively.)
The game system needs to get serious about how repair yards function, and also in relation to how and why ships accumulate incidental (as opposed to combat) casualties. The approach taken presently is a joke. There are countless examples of USN warships conducting combat operations at sea for months at a time with no serious degradation to their operational capabilities. A carrier pulling into Pearl harbor with serious damage will not necessarily take months to repair. After the Coral Sea Yorktown returned to Pearl and was initially assessed a repair time of ninety days. Then someone got the good idea to give her the once-over but good. So the Navy spilled some 2,000 workers onto and into her, and lo and behold two days later this ship was able to steam out of harbor into harm's way in better shape than she'd ever seen according to reports.
Another idea: someway somehow supply needs to be more intelligently defined.
There is no sense whatsoever to imagine that the SRA or China or anywhere else on the map except the home islands can provide combat supply to the Japanese. So, at the very least there needs to be two kinds of supply. For the sake of simplicity let's call that 1) Organic Supply and 2) Combat Supply. Organic Supply (OS) might be found at almost any spot on the map. Think of OS as "food." On the other hand, CS would only be made available at limited spots on the map. Basically this would amount to the home islands for the Japanese and the west coast of the United States for the Allies (Provision would also need to be made for off-map CS coming into India for the British and limited CS at Australia-New Zealand for those Commonwealth nations.)
Huge differences exist between unrefined crude oil, fuel for ships, and aviation gasoline--and especially the latter. That needs to be addressed, too. It's true that toward the end of the war the Japanese in desperation used the crude from Brunei to fill the bunkers of some of their ships, but with unhappy consequences.
These are not mere "details" and we do not want to talk about the distinction between rice, SPAM and toilet paper.
Speaking about rice, by the way, there's a good reason the Japanese occupied the Ocean Islands. There were good deposits of phosphates there which the Japanese needed back home for fertilizer. Whether or not the game wished to get into that sort of "detail" is another question, but at the very least the Ocean Islands should be given some "resources" in order to make them an attractive prize.
There's a lot to look at. The list is almost endless, for when it comes to the study of logistics it isn't a case of merely this and that, but rather how this and that all weds happily together in the end. There is no magic to a functional supply system. There is only hard work combined with fastidious planning implemented with innovation and hardware of the trade.
In a nutsehll, one might typify the Japanese in game terms as hard workers, to be sure, and they were extremely innovative in some respects, but they lacked good planning all across the board and suffered dearly from a relative lack of competitive tools. The Allies, to begin the war (we'll just look at the Americans here in isolation, as the Pacfic theater was primarily an American show) started with better and more tools looked on as a whole, and immediately began to harness their own hard work to the production of many more and much better tools still. Planning in terms of war aims was something the Americans proved to excel at, and their bent for innovation took a backseat to no one--there's a reason the expression "American know-how" came into being.
Finally, the database needs to re-examined. It's off in some cases by an alarming degree. I mentioned the operational radii of both the Hudson and Ventura bombers the other day--both have been truncated for no better reason than ignorance. There are other problems that I've run across just with airplanes in mind, and the truth is I have not studied the database closely. This is just stuff I've noticed along the way while playing the game, and then bothered to check it out for myself. This is important work, important work which not only needs to be done by careful people but by careful people who do not entertain bias for anything other than a representatively historical rendering of the war.
So, as Ron was fond of saying . . . maybe someone should read a book.
