stunned that the fascists at paradox are going with “soft times make soft men” here. why bother developing a simulation that actually works? this is an admittance of failure.
This is perfectly recreate the arc of early 20th century fascist movement: when a reductionist face the dead end of Mechanistic Materialism, they subconsciously turns themselves to the Oswald Spengler. When they give players this system, the irreconcilable seeds are almost sown.
Compared to the game of Paradox, Dwarf Fortress was initially coded with more detailed unknowns beyond the data and limit player activities, which passively created a complex system where the natural environment or unknown disasters from the underground ultimately consumed the Fortress. Now even if Paradox were to follow the footsteps to add more environmental data, they would only be trapped in Ecofascism. Just because most of their original system gameplay is all rooted in conquest the KNOWN. Unless they rebuild the game system in the very first beginning.
What a paradox.
The world according to Standard Oil Co. (1940) (created by Richard Edes Harrison for Fortune Magazine)
Why does this old Colt 1911 have a weird wire cage around the slide?
Early in World War I, pilots flying open-cockpit planes carried Colt M1911 pistols as their sidearms. This was before aircraft had machine guns.
When the pistol was fired, the empty shell casings would eject and bounce around the cockpit. They could jam the foot pedals or other controls.
A simple wire cage was added over the slide and ejection port. It caught the hot spent casings after each shot so they couldn’t fly loose.
i do really hope that C&Rsenal does an episode on this variation of the M1911 meant for pilots
PREAMBLE
Originally I was going to post this in this thread, and then I reached out to @iguferon being like is this appropriate for this thread and initially she was all naw and then I was trying to figure out what thread it should go into, and was about to make a new one since we don’t really have a 4x/historical thread where it would seem appropriate for this to go into and then Veronica got back to me and was all actually I was thinking about it, and is there anything more grognardy than having an argument about whether this belongs in this thread? So here we are.
A VIDEO
THE POST
I’ve watched a few videos from this person, in particular they like to approach games about “historical strategy” for the lack of a better term from the perspective of…actual history, and by that I don’t mean “what class of ship did the Ming have available to them at this point in time” and more, these games are supposed to be, at least nominally, simulations, or attempts at simulating, actual human activity over a period of time, albeit on such a grand scale that most of the actual humanity is lost and it becomes much more about how you represent grand historical events and trends using sliders and checkboxes, and also how you then make that experience compelling to the end user, where ‘user’ adequately describes somebody who wants to see how your modeling of the Middle Kingdom Tributary system aligns with their understanding of how that worked according to their understanding of the scholarship that they’ve been exposed to, and also somebody who is like “time to map-paint Korea, truly I will correct Ming’s greatest failures”.
Historicity v. Fun
Taking the more general problem of simulation of human activity and putting it gently in a far corner, there’s the more specific design problem of to what obligation games that are intended to replicate human history have in terms of “historical accuracy”, or Historicity, versus the experience that they offer as entertainment media, and more and more pertinently, as the leading names in the genre move from hobbyist to established team, as capitalist products. The huge stumbling block here, especially in terms of wargames, is that in many cases the Historicity is an already poisoned well, you can make a very compelling argument that say, Hearts of Iron is already in deep trouble simply because so much of it is dependent on UK-based scholarship of WW2 from the 1960s, which the further we get from it, the more questionable it gets in terms of over-estimating the Nazi army in particular.
Always the pragmatist, I would say that the first goal of games should always to be broadly accurate as per the understanding of the creator, and then to try and make that compelling, whether that be descending into modeling all the possible different ammunition types used for sidearms, or creating an engine where it’s possible, if not plausible, for somebody to “win” WW2 as the First Syrian Republic.
post making me think about how the lead designer (a dedicated liberal) tried to make vicky 2 a highly realistic simulator but it kept creating outcomes where communism is better than capitalism for the wellbeing of the people and whatnot which the designers weren’t happy with which is why every paradox game now seems to have extremely bizarre contingencies built into the guts that undermine its efficacy as a “simulator.” this is how we get to victoria 3 “simulating” colonialism in a completely backwards way where the colonized nation wields an immense amount of power over the metropole and can even usurp them through the power of the great god Economy because the relationships are designed to be so beneficial that it no longer resembles uncomfortable historical realities.
imo the real underlying rot in hearts of iron didn’t emerge until we got to the choose-your-own-adventure focus trees in 4 - before it was about as wehraboo as every other wargame - which are half deranged alternate history jerkoff and half reducing extraordinarily complex systems into “press button economic reform happens”. you literally are supposed to sit there and get really excited watching your identical infantry units with signals company and support artillery slowly grind through every province you’ve assigned to the front for the AI to worry about. full on deranged map painting shit now where you literally only have to think on a base level
An ex-Type 95 Ha-Go light tank (via @arakichi1969)
I guess there was a channel 4 show in 1997 where they made military guys play wargames. It’s presented extremely seriously and is a great example of why staff planning is so fun. They have to send and receive orders by courier which is some grog expert who shows up so they can argue with him over their guys refusing to follow said orders. It fucking rules.
The other two episodes.
Real e-sport.
It really is. The way they’re handling information between both sides is so fantastic. And I love that the Duke of Cambridge is totally fucking useless, and the general can’t help but make it worse by sending messengers with impotent threats for several hours because this is 1854 and he’s getting his ass sacked the second Queen Victoria finds out he bitched out her cousin in a manner most unbecoming of an officer of the service. I also love that one of the game masters is like “are you really sure you want to do this” multiple times.
‘the french are repulsed’
‘weak rigid, unthinking’
this show has some amazing potential for discord sound buttons
The Canadian Armed Forces have modelled a hypothetical U.S. military invasion of Canada and the country’s potential response, which includes tactics similar to those employed against Russia and later U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, two senior government officials say.
Canada does not have the number of military personnel or the sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American attack, they said. So, the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics.
One of the officials said the model includes tactics used by the Afghan mujahedeen in their hit-and-run attacks on Russian soldiers during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War. These were the same tactics employed by the Taliban in their 20-year war against the U.S. and allied forces that included Canada. Many of the 158 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 were struck by improvised explosive devices or IEDs.
Theoretically, any game we know of from this era can be modified now and also can start a new campaign of Twilight 2000.
I’m not sure the mujahoserdeen are a realistic threat, but they’re probably no more unrealistic than anything else in alt history wargames.