felicity said:
Mefi said:
WITP is complicated and has a lot of micromanagment it is good! Rhetorics. Rhetorics.
What a pointless post. I see you're those who have yet to learn how to think properly. Let me spell it out for you.
You said people play WITP for the micromanaging elements. I said:
80% of your time is doing this:
To which I said, operational/strategic level games of depth should be about this. You have a fundamental misconception of what this level of wargame is about.
What I meant was much of the micromanagment in WITP is in fact trivial-management - you spend 20% of your time to make a plan, then spend the remaining 80% of your time fighting through the interface to realize it, and as such is not fun, so your point is moot. If you want to counter my argument, you at least have to address this, but you didn't, worse you didn't even acknowledge the fact that if what I said is true, it could undermine your argument that micromanagment is fun, or at least worth doing, in WITP.
Address your inability to use the interface? Why? As I said, if one foul up with the interface screws up your operation, then your operation is obviously dubiously planned to start with.
Actually. 1% of my time is taken making a plan. Any dick can make a plan. If you're spending 20% of your time making the plan, then the chances are it's likely to be overly complex and liable to fail in the way which you seem to hint at as being the cause of your problem with the game. 99% of my time is spent figuring out how to make that plan work. Which for a war-game which tries to approach simulation is actually fantastic to see implemented. Not your cup of tea? Groovy. Thanks for sharing and all that but stop being a dumbfuck and missing the raison d'etre for the game. You may not like it, but hey, keep sharing out your deep and insightful views on why logistics should be abstracted to irrelevance.
Now back to the topic. You're right that my criticism is not new, in fact many people within the wargaming community share the same criticism. I'm surprise you are not aware of this, WITP has always been something you either love-or-hate since its release. Operational wargame does not necessarily requires excessive trivial-management. Check out the decisive battles series from SSG, they make games that are sufficiently complicated without turning it into a bloat-ware. There are some wargame geeks who think complicate/control more stuff = better. This mindset is not unlike those RPG players who think more level/skill = better despite gameplay balance.
Decisive Battles aren't strategic/operational level games - they are straight operational level and exceptionally similar to HPS' games in scale and 'depth'. Their logistic rules are close to retardedness too. But don't let that get in your way when making false comparisons.
More control doesn't equal better. More focus on the sinews of war is. More control is a function of the inability of any AI to perform as well as a human in assessing options without a lot of scripting for all eventualities. That's why human grandmasters can be beaten by a good Chess programme, but a good Go programme struggles to beat human amateurs.
One of the most important aspect of strategy game is balance, how is balance in WITP? I can't say because I have yet to finish a campaign, but I doubt anyone can either, including the developers themselves. When a campaign takes you years to finish, how the fuck do you play test? Best you can do is make piece meal balancing changes based on piece meal play tests, but this almost ensures the changes will lack full scope perspective which is required for proper gameplay balance. And the bottom line - why do you play a strategy games (expensive one at that) that cannot sate your strategic needs in SP (since AI is shit), and MP is impractical? The combination of these flaws (refer to my first post) broke the game.
What has balance got to do with a historical based war game? Are you sure you've played one? The 'balance' in a historical war game is always going to be wonky, because it's very rare for both sides to be perfectly equal. Want balance, play a game with a points-to-buy system for a battle or something. That's why there is a points based system to reward better than historical performance with most decent operational and strategic level games.
I'll let you into a secret - for the first two years, Japan will be on the attack, for the rest of the war, Japan will be on the defensive.
The AI is poor. That's a reflection of the complexity of the game. No more, no less. I've yet to find any decent AI for an operational level game and above. The best AI in a wargame is probably that for Conquest of the Aegean which is so processor intensive it struggles above corps sized units and is only that effective because of the AI controlling the orders issued by the player and the orders being done in real-time (advantage for the AI). Hopefully, the AI in AE will be an improvement and it can now be modded and scripted.
Oh sorry, we were discussing why you want a game where you design cunning plans and then you click a button and they happen. Sorry, you're right, this isn't the game for you. Jog on.
