The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#41

Post by livrem » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 9:12 AM UTC

the_af wrote: post #22

MrMember wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a major time commitment during which you must leave the game out and setup for an extended period of time. The Campaign for North Africa is probably the most extreme example of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Afric... A "proper" game requires 10 players and an estimate…

I don't think anyone is on record as having completed a single game of Campaign for North Africa. Likely not even the author. Which I guess makes it a game only in the theoretical sense.

That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and there are those that claim to have played it one or more times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.

Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to download to play CNA: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_...). I saw a thread on a wargame forum just a few weeks ago looking for players to start up a new game. Playing online probably makes it a bit more likely to be played (but also less fun than to gather around a huge table IRL?).

(Aside: By tradition, an old "gentlemens agreement", between the wargaming community and wargame publishers, when playing a game online with VASSAL every player is expected to own a physical copy of the game. You are not supposed to download the CNA module to play it for free without owning the game. There is no DRM or other attempts to police who plays what, but as long as the system is not abused too much the publishers are happy and most keep allowing those tools to exist. It is a nice contrast to how copyright is handled elsewhere, including in more mainstream tools for playing online boardgames. I guess it is only possible in a small niche hobby like that, and possibly only because the tradition started last century before there was big money in selling digital versions of boardgames.)

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#42

Post by BlueTemplar » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 9:22 AM UTC

the_af wrote: post #22

MrMember wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a major time commitment during which you must leave the game out and setup for an extended period of time. The Campaign for North Africa is probably the most extreme example of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Afric... A "proper" game requires 10 players and an estimate…

I don't think anyone is on record as having completed a single game of Campaign for North Africa. Likely not even the author. Which I guess makes it a game only in the theoretical sense.

That's a common issue in 4X games (in a much less extreme form of course), doesn't mean they aren't games, or even bad games.

> [...]

> Because getting seven friends together in the same room for the all-day affair that was a complete game of Diplomacy was almost as hard in the 1960s as it is today, inventive gamers developed systems for playing it via post; the first example of this breed would seem to date from 1963. And once players had started modifying the rules of Diplomacy to make it work under this new paradigm, it was a relatively short leap to begin making entirely new play-by-post games with new themes which shared some commonalities of approach with Calhamer’s magnum opus.

> Thus in December of 1966, Dan Brannon announced a play-by-post game called Xeno, whose concept sounds very familiar indeed in the broad strokes. Each player started with a cluster of five planets — a tiny toehold in a sprawling, unknown galaxy waiting to be colonized.

> [...]

> In practice, Xeno played out at a pace to which the word “glacial” hardly does justice. The game didn’t really get started until September of 1967, and by a year after that just three turns had been completed. I don’t know whether a single full game of it was ever finished. Nevertheless, it proved hugely influential within the small community of experiential-gaming fanzines and play-by-post enthusiasts. The first similar game, called Galaxy and run by H. David Montgomery, had already appeared before Xeno had processed its third turn.

> [...]

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#43

Post by BlueTemplar » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 9:27 AM UTC

the_af wrote: post #25

Suppafly wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a VR headset is hardly a replacement for an actual monitor especially for long periods of time Except whenever a "is VR worth it?" post comes up here, half the comments are people claiming that's what they use them for.

I had a conversation with someone from work who uses VR to work exclusively (meaning, he doesn't use a normal monitor or keyboard for work) and it turns out his setup is really different from what I imagined. He has a high end VR device, not an Oculus (I forgot which though). His chair is weird and positioned weird. He uses a counterweight in his headset. And so on. Not for me, in other words.

> He has a high end VR device, not an Oculus

Well, duh, would you use one of the cheapest laptops available for work ? (Unless for dogfooding purposes.)

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#44

Post by BlueTemplar » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 9:33 AM UTC

Arrath wrote: post #19

te wrote: post #6

> "The turns do not take very long at all and teams of players can get in 2-3 turns in a normal work day." Game does sound very cool, but lol, author has different game-playing expectations than I do.

Yeah for real. So much for "one more turn" syndrome ala Civilization

It's not uncommon for 4X to be Played By E-Mail (or any other way to transfer save files these days), in which case 1 turn per day is a common agreement.

P.S.: The most recent thread for MP Civ4 on the biggest Civ forums is literally this :

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/new-returning-players...

> Please note this is a long term commitment of multiple months requiring you to play a turn every day. We all realize life happens and when it does we just ask you post and ask for an extension.

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#45

Post by BlueTemplar » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 9:37 AM UTC

the_af wrote: post #24

It may not be immediately obvious, but these are not "games" in the hobbyist sense of the word (though I suppose hobbyists may get interested, though access to this one in particular seems to be restricted to the military) but "simulations" for teaching and training. They are not supposed to be "fun". They are supposed to be analysis tools. Their goal is different to a wargame for hobbyists, where "playability" is us…

Multiple turns per day is faster than your typical 3+ players 4X PBEM game, here a recent example for Civilization :

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=11199...

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#46

Post by Arrath » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 9:50 AM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #44

Arrath wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah for real. So much for "one more turn" syndrome ala Civilization

It's not uncommon for 4X to be Played By E-Mail (or any other way to transfer save files these days), in which case 1 turn per day is a common agreement. P.S.: The most recent thread for MP Civ4 on the biggest Civ forums is literally this : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/new-returning-players... > Please note this is a long term commitment of multiple months requiring you to play a turn every day. We all real…

Oh I know, I've observed more day-by-day War In the Pacific Let's Play's than I care to admit.

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#47

Post by KineticLensman » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 10:13 AM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #31

ranger207 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about the face-to-face decision making and teambuilding. The lack of a computer is also somewhat of a bonus as it forces players to be intentional about processes, because in battle the computer probably won't be able to handle every process that comes up and so experience doing it by hand is useful

I hope that they at the very least use a computer to calculate the outcomes of a battle.

> I hope that they at the very least use a computer to calculate the outcomes of a battle.

From the article:

The real core mechanic is how dice are used in the game. The dice act as an instant adjudicator and the system uses different sizes of dice that can be adjusted during game play.

The map and counters also encode a lot of rapidly accessible state information. Using a computer would require all of this state info to be maintained in the computer, which would be a very different game, probably without the person to person interactions that make the game what it is.

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#48

Post by itsdavesanders » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 11:22 AM UTC

livrem wrote: post #37

defsectec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that these days the more modern military wargames done by legitimate organizations, that aren't physical simulations (a.k.a. laser tag for grownups), do use computers and have integrations with full-size flight sims and data analysis tools. I play game called Command: Modern Operation ^¹ which can barely be a called a game, but rather a military command simulation at the operational level masquerading…

Played some Harpoon, the older series that Command: Modern Operations came from (long story: https://retroviator.com/harpoon/ ). Then I got hooked on Rule the Waves recently. Matrix games publishes the latest game in that series as well (from last year): https://www.matrixgames.com/game/rule-the-waves-3 It is a game mostly about staring at a spreadsheet, showing all the ships in your (usually early 20th century) flee…

I worked with a Navy Vet in the 1990s that would play Harpoon and reported that it was pretty much just like sitting in the sub looking at his displays. I don’t know how true that was, but I remember them marketing it as something that the Navy used in training.

I loaded it up once and decided that I really wasn’t into games I had to study for.

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#49

Post by ycombinete » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 12:42 PM UTC

te wrote: post #6

> "The turns do not take very long at all and teams of players can get in 2-3 turns in a normal work day." Game does sound very cool, but lol, author has different game-playing expectations than I do.

In war games the terms “turn” and “round” are inverted from how board gamers usually use them.

Re: The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

#50

Post by michaelt » Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 2:53 PM UTC

livrem wrote: post #41

the_af wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is on record as having completed a single game of Campaign for North Africa. Likely not even the author. Which I guess makes it a game only in the theoretical sense.

That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and there are those that claim to have played it one or more times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign. Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to download to play CNA: https://va…

> You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.

I think you might be under-estimating how long a 1500 hour game is. A person who works 8 hours a day works 2000 hours in the course of a year.

And if the game's in-person, there's travel time - it's not like a computer game where you can do a 1-hour session every evening for 4 years.

Even a the longest RPG adventures like "Dungeon of the mad mage" (famous for people getting bored without completing it) tend to be less than 500 hours.