Mon Apr 16, 2007 6:04 pm
Well, Jim, I hate to be disagreeable, but I disagree.
There are a lot of problems with strategic games that attempt to depict tactical battles, and I have yet to see one that succeeds (my wargame club has copies of most of the big ones that have come out in recent times, like Forge of Freedom and Crown of Glory, and we have knocked them about for some time, the general consensus among us being that they just aren't very good. Of course, we are pretty much all the old, crusty grognard type, so, you know...).
First, it interrupts the flow of the strategic game and forces you to re-focus on a level different from the one you took when you started playing the game. I find this more annoying than entertaining.
Second, the designers of the strategic simulation sweated bullets over getting the "historicity" right - numbers of casualties, possibilities for success by both sides, the general sweep and flow of the war. When you allow player manipulation of tactical battles, you have merely opened another can of worms, presented the possibility of any number of spanners being thrown into the works, and (insert another hopelessly trite metaphor of your choice here). For example, how have you skewed the game when you allow the human player to beat up on the poor old AI in the tactical battles? We all know how to figure out an AI's weaknesses in battle games and eventually become invincible.
Third, how do you depict these things without doing the generic "Imperialism" approach where there are just a few battlefields, and the program picks one that resembles the area in which the battle is taking place? I don't want to fight Gettysburg on a map that "kind of" looks like Gettysburg.
Fourth, what about how the battle fits together with the strategic game? In AACW, for example, you have the "march to the guns" intra-army corps mutual support feature (gee, I love that kind of talk, makes me sound like one of those insufferable "logistics" colonels I used to have to deal with). How do you handle that? How big is the tactical battlefield? How do you depict fortifications (which can change on the strategic level) and riverine combat?
How much design and development time do you want devoted to all this messing around, adding drastically to the amount of time needed to produce the strategic game and ending up with, the way I see it, a beast that is inferior to what you would have had without tactical battles.
Fifth, ... ummm ... I can't remember what was fifth ... maybe it's time to go open up a fifth...
Anyway, Jim, I'm just trying to present a friendly, contrasting viewpoint. I appreciate your taste in gaming, and I hope you're getting what you want from the hobby. I don't care for those odd "hybrid" games - they just don't work for me.
It's nice, by the way, to discuss things with the good, intelligent folk (I would add "reasonable and normal," but would have to eliminate myself by definitional exclusion) who populate these forums (as opposed to another place, which shall remain nameless, that seems, of late, to have been overrun by punks, pismires, and woodpeckerheads).