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

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

#51

Post by the_af »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #42
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'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. P.S.: related : https://www.filfre.net/2020/01/master-of-orion/ > [...] > 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 p…

Agreed, but do most 4X games even have an endgame? Many sandbox games are endless by design, and the intersection of sandbox & 4X seems to be pretty big.

I think it's different to CfNA in that this game simulates an actual campaign with clear goals, but that endgame cannot be reached in a reasonable time by any owner of this piece of cardboard. I'd say that's bad game design...

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

#52

Post by rendaw »

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…

Is that one player per day, or all players complete 1 turn in a day? If the latter, how does that work with player turns needing to be made serially?

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

#53

Post by the_af »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #45
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...

True. I forgot PBEM!

I used to PBEM an old, VBasic-coded 4X game called VGA Planets. We usually did 1 turn per week!

(VGA Planets was a terrible game for all sorts of reasons. But we still managed to have fun)

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

#54

Post by the_af »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #43
the_af wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Well, some people do claim one use of the Oculus is this. I remain skeptical that most consumer-grade VR headsets are useful for real work.

(As an aside, in my work experience of more than 2 decades, almost every workplace provided me entry level laptops/computers. Only relatively recently have they started handing out MacBooks or similar equipment. You can do work with entry level laptops in a way you absolutely cannot with entry level VR headsets).

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

#56

Post by JoeDaDude »

rareitem wrote: post #13
anigbrowl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't upvote this hard enough. I'm fascinated by large scale games of this kind and have a loose acquaintance with some people who run them, but it's a very tiny industry that's almost exclusively based around DC for obvious reasons.

Are they online games or real life games (e.g. board games)?

I think it is a safe bet that they are mostly computer games by now, though there is a long history of using board games for training. That said, there was Freedom of Information Act request to uncover some of the games Mr. Rhunke developed for the CIA and they turned out to be physical board games.

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

#57

Post by the_af »

rendaw wrote: post #52
BlueTemplar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that one player per day, or all players complete 1 turn in a day? If the latter, how does that work with player turns needing to be made serially?

Some PBEM games, like the venerable VGA Planets, had all players complete their turns and then play those simulatenously by the host program, resulting in the next universe state.

There are rules within the game engine to disambiguate in which order some interactions resolve. If I remember correctly, the classic boardgame Diplomacy plays the same way (all orders are simultaneously, with some precedence rules for conflicts).

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

#59

Post by KineticLensman »

User23 wrote: post #11
bane wrote: post #7

I have a friend who is very into these types of games, having dedicated about 1200 sq ft of their home to them. The commercial ones are usually centered on specific historic battles, and often follow a sort of "script" where things happen at specific turns e.g. the introduction of new units or weather conditions, that sort of thing. They seemed interesting, and I came away with two main observations: 1 - A game can t…

> But I quickly learned that the ability to spread out a map, that might be many square meters, and see everything happening on it at once, without having to slide a monitor's viewport around (or zoom in and out) has a number of massive advantages -- and (at the time I was looking at this) there's really no display technology today that can replicate this. This is why I’d love a wall size monitor.

The key bits of the battles would still always be on the corner of the map.

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

#60

Post by maxglute »

defsectec wrote: post #29
bane wrote: post #7

I have a friend who is very into these types of games, having dedicated about 1200 sq ft of their home to them. The commercial ones are usually centered on specific historic battles, and often follow a sort of "script" where things happen at specific turns e.g. the introduction of new units or weather conditions, that sort of thing. They seemed interesting, and I came away with two main observations: 1 - A game can t…

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…

I think modern war also truncates decision making, things happen fast, you need computers to crunch the numbers and update battle field realities.
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