Fri Jan 20, 2012 10:06 pm
Perhaps his phrasing was a bit off.
No one is suggesting that a real-time Napoleonic game cannot be a fun game.
But games that are merely fun do not interest me, and probably don't interest a lot of serious wargamers. When I want to have fun I play Europa Universalis, which has realistic elements but can't be taken too seriously.
But if I'm going to play a wargame, I want to be able to convince myself that it models the mechanics of what happened in a more or less convincing way.
I haven't gotten around to playing an AGEOD game by PBEM yet, though that's purely circumstantial: I'm an active member of the Blitz wargame club and currently have several HPS/Tiller pbem games in progress. I've also been playing a lot of solitaire hotseat Campaign Leipzig scenarios for a variety of reasons (including working on the next patch). But I completely fail to see how a real time game could be played by e-mail. If you can bridge that one successfully, then you're a real genius, even if I still think that real time is decidedly inferior when it comes to modeling command and control in a realistic way. Command and control, by the way, is probably one of the things that would get described as part of the final essence of Napoleonic warfare once you boil things down.
The necessity for being able to play by e-mail isn't about mere social interaction. No AI is ever going to really be up to snuff, unless you pour money and programming resources into it on the scale of a space program. But a game that has full pbem capability also has full double-solitaire capability (i.e. hotseat against yourself). And if you can't play hotseat against yourself you'll never really be sure that the simulation can model a historically accurate outcome (and you'll also never experience playing against a perfectly matched opponent).
Real time Napoleon feels un-Napoleonic. Not to mention socially awkward because if your pbem oppenents are in the US, Australia, and Europe, you'll never find a convenient time when everyone's fully awake. But the awkwardness of coming up with live opponents that you have any desire to interact with is not that important. Wargames are supposed to simulate history, not game conventions. One of the wargaming explosions occured when people finally realized that it was unrealistic to use the old dog-eared Avalon Hill combat results table from the early sixties to simulate every battle in every era. Locking yourself into a real time environment is probably going to do something similar to your ability to represent command and control (unless you build in some really clever time delays on accepting and acting on orders), and makes testing the model against history close to impossible.
Bottom line: it doesn't ruin live online multi-player if you can build in enough protocols and the players can find enough people that they actually want to play with. But it makes pbem games between two or more players virtually impossible. I think that translates out to destroys pbem (unless you've got a really clever trick up your sleeve).