SamS

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Posts posted by SamS


  1. Your Pacific War link above points to Empire of the Rising Sun - the correct link to Mark's (1985) game is https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5622/pacific-war

     

    I actually have War of the Suns sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read Rana Mitter's 'Forgotten Ally', Peter Harmsen's 'Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yantze' and Jonathan Fenby's 'Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China he lost' (and probably a host of others). It is certainly a conflict where you need to wrap your head around a lot of the internal politics to get a good grasp on how that all translated onto the battlefield. Leonard To, the designer has put an incredible amount of research into this over the last few decades (he would be an interesting choice for an interview!)

     

    As you point out, the War in China was a colossal conflict that has almost sunk without a trace outside of China, but to be honest it is not much better inside China with the hagiographic treatment the CCP gets for its involvement. Interestingly though Chiang Kai-shek (or Cash My Cheque as FDR called him) has undergone, if not a rehabilitation, at least a re-evaluation on the mainland as a patriot (if misguided one) for his efforts against the Japanese. I was in Nanjing last year and Chiang's headquarters there from pre-1937 are still preserved (including some disturbing life sized mannequins of Chiang). 


  2. My favourite part of Stellaris so far has been the enforcement of different techs between races (which by the way seems to be what Civ6 will be doing as well). Paradox games have always been two armies of identical dudes mashing up against each other. But when the enemy in my first war (which happened in the first 3 hours) turned up with torpedoes and shields when all I had were railguns it really gave the impression that 'whoah, these guys are really alien to me'. 


  3. Great show. On the topic of making the player think like their historical counterpart I would recommend R.G Collingwood's The Idea of History, that sets out his theory that the job of the historian is the 'recreation of an historical thought'.

     

     

    How, or on what conditions, can the historian know the past ?In considering this question, the first point to notice is that the past is never a given fact which he can apprehend empirically by perception. Ex hypothesi, the historian is not an eyewitness of the facts he desires to know. Nor does the historian fancy that he is ; he knows quite well that his only possible knowledge of the past is mediate or inferential or indirect, never empirical. The second point is that this mediation cannot be effected by testimony. The historian does not know the past by simply believing a witness who saw the events in question and has left his evidence on record. That kind of mediation would give at most not knowledge but belief, and very ill-founded and improbable belief. And the historian, once more, knows very well that this is not the way in which he proceeds ; he is aware that what he does to his so-called authorities is not to believe them but to criticize them. If then the historian has no direct or empirical knowledge of his facts, and no transmitted or testimoniary knowledge of them, what kind of knowledge has he: in other words, what must the historian do in order that he may know them?

    My historical review of the idea of history has resulted in the emergence of an answer to this question : namely, that the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind. What we must now do is to look more closely at this idea, an see what it means in itself and what further consequences it implies.

    In a general way, the meaning of the conception is easily understood. When a man thinks historically, he has before him certain documents or relics of the past. His business is to discover what the past was which has left these relics behind it, For example, the relics are certain written words ; and in that case he has to discover what the person who wrote those words meant by them. This means discovering the thought (in the widest sense of that word : we shall look into its preciser meaning which he expressed by them. To discover what this thought was, the historian must think it again for himself.

    Suppose, for example, he is reading the Theodosian Code, and has before him a certain edict of an emperor. Merely reading the words and being able to translate them does not amount to knowing their historical significance. In order to do that he must envisage the situation with which the emperor was trying to deal, and he must envisage it as that emperor envisaged it. Then he must see for himself, just as if the emperor's situation were his own, how such a situation might be dealt with ; he must see the possible alternatives, and the reasons for choosing one rather than another ; and thus he must go through the process which the emperor went through in deciding on this particular course. Thus he is re-enacting in his own mind the experience of the emperor ; and only in so far as he does this has he any historical knowledge, as distinct from a merely philological knowledge, of the meaning of the edict.

    Or again, suppose he is reading a passage of an ancient philosopher. Once more, he must know the language in a philological sense and be able to construe ; but by doing that he has not yet understood the passage as an historian of philosophy must understand it. In order to do that, he must see what the philosophical problem was, of which his author is here stating his solution. He must think that problem out for himself, see what possible solutions of it might be offered, and see why this particular philosopher chose that solution instead of another. This means re-thinking for himself the thought of his author, and nothing short of that will make him the historian of that author's philosophy.

     


  4. Well this prompted me to fire up Age of Rifles again - (or more accurately, faff around trying to remember how to execute command lines in DOSBOX until I found the top reply in this page http://www.myabandonware.com/game/wargame-construction-set-iii-age-of-rifles-1846-1905-2e2  where some enterprising chap has put the whole AOR package together, user scenarios and all, in a simple, executable file).

     

    Before you could say 'Chinese Gordon' I was in the Soudan at the Wells of Abu Klea with 'The Square that Broke' against the Mahdist hordes. Has it aged well? It certainly looks like a game from 1996, but the hex-grid, turn based combat is not that different to what I have been playing recently in Order of Battle: Pacific. I would say it has aged OK, a bit like Jeff Bridges - looks rough but can still put in a great performance.


  5. I always find the first dozen or so hours of the Hegemony games to be the best part of the game. The part where you only have a few cities, don't have long supply lines and are engaged in a long war of attrition with your neighbours until the balance finally tips in your favour. This stage in H3 in particular was incredibly difficult, but really rewarding. Once you get up to 10 - 15 cities however Hegemony becomes a chore in economic management and - as you note in the podcast - never ending whack-a-mole. I'll happily play the first part over and over with different cities, but I could not think of anything worse than trying to conquer all of Italy.


  6. Great show. I was so excited to hear about the upcoming China game - particularly the decision to make the 4th faction the warlords - not the allies. I have a copy of Leonard To's War of the Suns sitting at home which is far too massive to ever play that also includes the KMT cliques and warlords as an important part of the design. A COIN game will be much easier to play - looking forward to more updates.

     

     

    edit: Research shows Brian considers Thunder from China to be 'years' away. Gah!


  7. I never really knew what to do with China in the game, and still don't.  I suspected there was no way to win.  Glad to see my surmise was correct.

     

    For most of the game China is a quagmire that does nothing. It does come into play in late '43 and '44 when you re-open the Burma road and it gets better supplied troops. If you can re-take Shanghai, that airport is close enough and large enough to base a strategic bombing campaign against the home islands. But by that time you have an enormous carrier advantage anyway.
     
    Great real-time AAR of the game here that was written up daily over 4 years http://lparchive.org/War-in-the-Pacific/. 

  8. I have a picture in my head of Gary Grigsby making War in the Pacific as Gary Oldman in The Professional.

     

    'I want to model everything in the Pacific Theatre'

    'What do you mean, 'everything'?'

    'EVERRRRYYYYYTHIIIIIING'

     

    I think Grigsby agrees with the design principle to only focus on what is important. However the thing he thought was 'genuinely important' about the Pacific War was logistics, which is a fair enough assertion. But if you're going to build a game about logistics, then ships, planes, shipping lanes, supply dumps, port sizes, factories and all the other parts of the logistics chain need to be expressed separately in the game rather than 'factored in'. Once that has all been modelled, there isn't much left.

     

    That said, there are two parts of the game I wish had been abstracted. Firstly - China. A landwar stalemate that doesn't really have anything to do with the Pacific War except tie up Japanese troops. I would have been quite happy to just have that represented by an off map box. (Although to be fair, the game does come with a 'Quiet China' scenario where the AI ignores that theatre). Secondly - pilot management. Technically pilots were a resource that had to be managed as part of the logistic chain, but this part of the game is just terrible. I've been playing the game for years and still don't know exactly what I'm doing with pilots. Happily the game does not need to be 'min-maxed' and is forgiving of players bumbling around.


  9. I'm going to come to the defence of War in the Pacific. Yes it contains absurd levels of minutiae that are hidden behind an opaque interface, but it gives you exactly what Tom says a Pacific War game should give you. The IJN's roving KB carrier group is a constant terror that will obliterate any Allied ship it comes across - including the Enterprise and the Lexington - forcing you to engage in a constant game of cat and mouse. (There is nothing worse than watching the end turn report cycle through battles and then you suddenly see 100 Zeroes roll up on your precious battleships - RIP Prince of Wales).

     

    As Bruce points out, the game excels at explaining why certain islands were important and island hopping naturally evolves out of the game's supply system. OK, you may spend 50 turns building up to an attack, and only 5 turns attacking. But boy howdy, those 5 turns will be 5 of the best goddamned turns you have ever played. If you can get to that point (and granted, it requires some patience), your investment in time is well rewarded.


  10. Another very interesting look at wargames and the Vietnam war. I almost want to buy 'Vietnam 1965-1975" just to look at it and try and 'read' it as a work of history, but it would never get played and that would make me sad.

     

    I hope that after the already recorded trilogy is done, there will be a return to this subject if/when additional guests can be found. Also an overview of the Vietnam war based wargames that are available and worth checking out would be really cool.

     

    This show has piqued my curiosity too greatly not to pick up a copy. They're under $100 on ebay.


  11. This was a Good episode. Great work by Troy coming in with an early statement of definitions to stop the show falling down the semantics wormhole and then a late game home run with the observation on lack of starship engineers in popular culture.

    One game though that I wish you guys would have played and been able to talk about is Aurora. It's a real outlier that would make a good reference point for discussion. It doesn't quite model the plumbing as Cliff says, but it does go into insane levels of minutiae regarding customization, yet still holds together.