ORIGINAL: wosung
ORIGINAL: Zorachus99
1) The game designers wanted to make the flow of the game follow the historical events, but allow changes to the master plan be allowed.
That's why I distinguished between recreating the setting of the Battle of France and recreating the Battle of France. And political geography is exactly neither historical event nor master plan.
And most posts against changing the Dutch border were based on the argument that such a change would make the Battle of France harder/impossible to win for the German player. Thus they were based on the strict historical course of the war themselves. Obviously the "right" amount of historical rigidity/openness of WIF is debatable. (Admittedly, the recreation of the Battle of France in 1940 as WW1 trench warfare in every 2nd game of WIF wouldn't be very much fun.)
2) Changing a map which has been extensively playtested, griped about, etc... is not within the scope of what Steve was commisioned to do. He was asked to translate the board game, not re-interpret what the original designer had done in regards to balancing either the map or the land units.
But, as you wrote, map changes are implemented all the time, even on the European map (esp. Scandinavia = less important parts of the map)
BTW, Steve has already slated a few ideas for changing the European map in V2.
There are plans for V2?
Regards
The changes to the map in Minnesota, for example, are because we are pretty much starting from nothing. The WIF FE mini-map of America uses a scale that is nowhere close to what MWIF uses (WIF FE European scale). Now CWIF had made a pass at filling in the terrain for the entire world using the European scale, but that was an enormous task and "perfection is an elusive goal".
Patrice, with the help of numerous other forum members has been making the terrain (hex terrain, hexside terrain, rivers, lakes, cities, rail lines and on and on) more accurate. If at all possible, I keep my involvement in the map minimal and work on other stuff. But the task of making the map more accurate is a truly worthy goal. There seems little sense in creating a world that is inaccurate, regardless of the practically zero chance of players of MWIF product 1 ever using most portions of the map. The rivers that run north out of Siberia come to mind.
Changes to Scandinavia were more or less required (and I made some important decisions there) because: (1) CWIF got it terribly wrong, and (2) WIF FE distorted that portion of the map, probably for game play purposes. Case in point was the location of Bergen.
For a long time we had a "no changes" policy for the European map, since it was designed by ADG using the "European Scale". Only in Scandinavia did we deviate from that policy. One other change came from Harry Rowland at ADG (the change in the Bessarabia border). And there might be a few other small corrections. I seem to remember that CWIF had made a change that we 'undid' in eastern Hungary.
About 2 weeks ago I asked Patrice to stir up this discussion, because we were evaluating whether to make the changes in Tunisia and NW Africa that had been proposed, and more or less agreed to in the forum as being more accurate. I wanted a thorough review of proposed changes to the European map - basically so I could have a tidy list.
The discussion has drifted rather far from my original modest objective.[8|]
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The only thing certain about MWIF product 2 is that it will not be released before MWIF product 1.[:D]
