going back to the classics lately. playing some of People’s General by SSI which is probably my favorite installment in the original 5 Star General series that spawned all these other ww2 ones i’ve played because it’s fun and i really like the air combat system which again is probably my favorite way any of these games has done it. i really hate having to keep track of air units since they can occupy the same hex as a ground one and you already gotta do that with helicopters in this anyway. just let me send my planes out on sorties thank you
honestly i think this game still has the best looking terrain out of any of these to this day. you compare it to the modern combat mod for panzer corps which is obviously channeling people’s general and it’s crazy how much worse the terrain looks. though I will say the units look pretty nice and I like them!
the delicious 1998 politics of peoples general are something to behold. the united states declares war on china…so china invades siberia…for some reason…its kind of weird to go back to how people used to think about things when you realize theyre thinking about everything that way again right now.
the scenarios in this game seem to reflect an explicit fear that china or vietnam was going to become a world power capable of influencing others on the same level as russia or the united states.
theres a whole campaign dedicated to vietnam taking over the entirety of southeast asia, and despite this campaigns premise floating directly out of a john bircher’s head they named that shit “New World Order” instead of “Domino Theory.” check out SSI fucking up the easiest layup of all time.
i had the same thoughts about People’s General art and visual design, it just feels right for a 2d hex wargame. Panzer Corps’ main problem, besides being mostly being a vehicle for Wehrmacht Alt History Jacking Off, is how the art design is very bland - the map visuals mostly being the same exact sploch of brown/green grass, trees, or towns/cities for 90 percent of the game.
despite the fact that People’s General’s maps are just 2D static images, none of the maps suffer from the same problem Panzer Corps has - they’re more hand-made, so you won’t get eye strain from just looking at the same exact cookie cutter hexes. it’s a refreshing contrast
The new product of Fighting Wings series on Kickstarter reach $30,000, so it’s gonna happen. The series always like to publish new one instead of reprint, I have to add a retail version reminder on my wishlist. Aero wargaming always got too many charts avoid player PnP.
Such was the endless procession coming out of Stalingrad; lorries, and horse sleighs and guns, and covered wagons, and even camels pulling sleighs – several of them stepping sedately through the deep snow as if it were sand. Every conceivable means of transport was being used. Thousands of soldiers were marching, or rather walking in large irregular crowds, to the west, through this cold deadly night. But they were cheerful and strangely happy, and they kept shouting about Stalingrad and the job they had done.
The worst or most funny part of this hobby is like: The Korean Version of Twilight Struggle sneakily add Liancourt Rocks, put super far away from Japan and circle it as a part of its territory on game map.
The more you play, the more you can recognize the tricks of these cypto-nationalists like having snake eye.
ive been reading these posts and i wish wds would go back to posting about historical research for new games instead. like it’s pretty telling the first fucking two things that get cited here are HARRY TURTLEDOVE and eric flint. there’s american alt history and that right wing connection again this time through baen books which is a clearinghouse for like fascist milsf that I’m sure tulpa could explain in much greater detail. perhaps it bears interrogation why every westerner obsessed with alt history is largely concerned with two scenarios, one where the confederacy wins the civil war and the other where the nazis win?
with wds at least their alt history games are interesting from the perspective that they’ve put a lot of research into them and they’re all plausible instead of pure fantasy like the ones listed above. like the entire theoretical cold war ww3 series they made with fulda gap, north german plain, danube front and korea '85 has the benefit of being based on real strategy and planning from both NATO and the warsaw pact because you can meticulously research that stuff now that it’s the 21st century, so it ends up being worthwhile if only from a historical perspective. it’s one thing to read all this info, it’s another when it all comes together on the map in the wds game and you can see everything illustrated over an actual map of germany or whatever. it’s also why i don’t really have beef with their japan '45/'46 operation downfall/olympic/coronet games because they actually did fully plan an invasion of japan with troops allocated and stuff…basically the less shit they have to make up the more value i think these thought exercises actually have. because when it comes to the republican authors listed above those guys are basically completely making shit up in service of their ideology, at least the wds games are held back somewhat by history still.
people already dont understand history we dont need to create new reactionary strains of it for them to hyperfixate on where the CSA invents ww1 tanks and gives them the dumbest name ever, these mfs really call tanks “barrels”
Perhaps from the history class and generation passed. One of my favorite meme is that Trump is the only living US president whose ancestors didn’t own slaves.
tbh I’ve taken this as a default setting for Americans. Letting Americans imagine a powerful pan-Arab leader in an alternate history of Iraq in gulf war would too much to ask even for 90% on this forum. I believe the number who read Saddam Hussein’s novel in US below 100. It’s like the last time I shock about the voting of people who have read Das Kapital. I guess that Americans may be more urgently engaged in fighting in their own lives, and are busy cultivating ideas in the heat of battle rather than having the chance to stop and rethink. In the end, the country is based on a 16th century cult from UK, extend the war to everywhere in life and passed the worst from Europe by generations.
It cultivates a mindset of division and fight both in business and culture. It with the benefit of sparking creativity and keep creating works (which F⁂⁂⁂⁂ like to said, the rest of the world can’t stop loving us.) but the drawback is that each work is like a battle song (also it created flattery song to core white too, which brings more battle song). It often containing hidden or overt combative intentions within a trend. Like WDS things above, inserting a seemingly unprovoked recommendation for a fascist publisher in an article.
Living under this combative level, Americans are practically unable to take a step back to understand the world abroad and the overall structure. For Americans, the world abroad is often viewed through the lens of their local lives, to some extent, as an extension of ethnic and cultural battles on block.
The current imperial dominance of the United States exacerbates this issue, as the conflicts they experience can have a direct impact on other countries. In turn, this reinforces the American perception that the cultural wars in their own backyard are the entirety of the world’s concerns. Consequently, they tend to focus on what they consider most important, which is often their immediate surroundings.
I’ve also been thinking about this recently. The Bolsheviks style Red Terror was totally wrong and particularly brutal in human rights and freedom, but looking at it as a videogame lab, physical death cut the hidden evil mind passed by generation. From this perspective, Americans ongoing cultural and multifaceted wars can also be seen as a mild level terror. But it keep fighting for 200 years, the negative impact on individuals is profound and far-reaching. Brings us back to our previous conversation, where we discussed how white people often say it’s fine or it’s just a game until they are directly affected by war and no longer hold an absolute advantage. In a sense, this is exactly what’s happening right now. If you get bored of in such conflicts, you won’t like America any more.
I just opened Japan '45/'46 once cause they’re too much units and too jam, and same as Korea 85, I guess I only opened once or twice. No courage to start them.
You really start to understand why everyone involved in planning such things thought it was going to be a complete nightmare
I haven’t really played any of their alt history games too much because I don’t own them. The only full WDS games I own are the Spanish Civil War, Korean War Squad Battles games and Campaign Antietam. I have John Tiller’s Campaign Series of all his old TalonSoft games but I still need to get Battleground Civil War from Matrix at some point. I love Tiller stuff but at this point I get like one or two in the holiday sale every year and leave it at that. These games have so much content. He was one of the best to ever do it.
I guess I own almost all of WDS and JT games except one naval and some PcZ games. But mostly I only played SB series caused it’s easy to cross-cloned some good idea in different tactical systems.
I always overthink things and miss out on the enjoyment of game winning but that’s fun to me of this hobby. 1000 counters don’t a lot to me and I played more on board. What really brother me is clicking through the dizzying array of units under each Platoon, heck that there are specific numbers for each one unit with image keep in mind. Whenever I try to plan and operate on an higher level, the number of 219 remain men or something in some hex corner in my mind just gives me a headache.
The Daily Content written by Mike Bennighof to market Avalanche Press products is much more humor and informative than WDS news. But due to their poor product delivery capability and that link embed don’t seem to work on forums, I rarely repost them. If you remember to avoid pre-ordering products from them, it’s actually worth a read.
Through the Wayback Machine, you can read earlier ones. I recall that he has been writing for nearly 10-20 years on all kind of stuff appears in their games, from war elephant’s truma to Rockefeller’s warship deal.
I’m probably never going to bother playing it myself, but I’m glad someone’s taking on the challenge of preserving Kuma\war.
This was the first military propaganda shooter I played; and I appreciated then as now that it tracked the bullets remaining in each magazine when you reloaded. And speaking of reloading my other memory of the game is that it was basically unplayable without memorizing every enemy location from constant failures. Things are so hard for our heroic boys overseas, having to walk through a courtyard seven times to figure out where all the guys hanging out on rooftops are.
Sounds like a game I played 20 years ago, it called Cold Zero. The manual reload without any automatic is still keep in my mind. And also if you wanna play in perfect, it will be hard as hell: try to figure out where the enemies walking around and how many bullet bonus they left.
Even worse is the exceedingly clumsy reloading of any weapon. Not only is it extremely loud, alerting anyone within (and sometimes outside of) earshot that you’re nearby, it also takes a while to do. If you’re in a safe or a cleared area, this is fine, but as you sometimes get swarmed by numerous melee and ranged fighters, this is detrimental to John’s health.
…
Instead, players will quickly find that they are required to constantly manipulate the camera to gain any kind of perspective on the action. This may not seem like that bad a problem until you find yourself caught in a firefight with bullets coming at you from some off-screen position. By the time you actually find out where the attack is coming from, John’s already suffered a lethal case of lead poisoning. That’s right, back to the load screen…
It torched IGN editor very much LOL. But it’s good as hell actually.
i play a lot of wargames against myself, so i liked this article. i think it explains how to play a wargame solitaire really well but also why one might choose to do this even when you have real opponents available
a thing I like about tiller games is that the scenarios are already setup for you so it’s easier to get in the mindset of playing both sides to win and run it like a fun little simulation. I have played a bunch of scenarios solitaire before, especially since authors can only do so much with a purely reactive AI. there are some really good scenarios designed to be played against the AI in tiller games, though!
like the author of this article points out, it’s a lot more interesting to think about why a commander would make a decision and when instead of “well I know how I’m going to attack so I’ll react to it immediately on the next turn”
Solitaire play trains you to think from both sides. This is a critical command skill. It is easy to see through our own eyes. How does the enemy see us? What do they know? What don’t they know? If we move here, how will that look to the enemy? When will they realize what we are up to? What is the enemy’s intent? How can we conceal our own intent?
it’s very meditative moreso than wargames already are
also I was looking at the games they sell on this site and I was super interested in them! kriegspiel style, cool wooden blocks, hiding unit details, multiple people on a team commanding different divisions/brigades, the randomly chosen movement…that all sounds so awesome!!
