Fri Feb 26, 2010 2:49 am
I'd vote for B in an ideal world. That is, ideally, a game could be written so intricately that it would simulate reality to a much higher degree than we can hope for at this time (or ever). Historical events are largely intended to provide the flavor and restraints that cannot be produced with today's programming/processing paradigm.
That's not to knock the programmers and researchers. The amount of detail and research required is astounding, the kind of thing that requires funding & time that supersede the budget of a game with as limited appeal as any wargame. Then you need behavioral theorists and statisticians to duke it out and come up with ways to get unique, probable, and improbable events to occur in proportions that make sense. For instance, how does the Trent Affair occur in the absence of a scripted event? And how much work is it to set up the conditions for an event so peculiar and with so indeterminate a probability of happening?
I think AACW does a very good job of modeling a lot of different factors into the war. It also has a lot of gaps, some of which are plugged with scripted events, and others are just left for the player to discover and take into account. I don't think I've yet played a historical wargame so well-modeled that historical events were recreated with any kind of fidelity without the heavy use of scripted events; AACW does better than most, but the wars that I fight usually end up bearing little resemblance to history.
Like a previous writer, I am often torn between wanting historical constraints and wanting to do much better than my historical counterparts. I think that AACW does a good job of granting the player a pretty free hand, while scripting the necessary events that cannot be modeled. Ideally the simulation would be so good that events could occur without scripting, but c'est la vie.
