Bletchley_Geek

Happy 500 guys! Thanks for the years of entertainment and thoughtful commentary on strategy and war games.

I enjoyed very much this podcast, and I think Panther Games will appreciate the attention. Thanks guys!

Very bold it was, and still is. That happens remarkably often.

Well, the "on the field" or, rather, "in the saddle" is meant to be part of a immersive experience, which has way more to do with what Mount & Blade does when you go in the battlefield next to your men, than what more traditional war games do. I do think that the original concept of this series (and followed on by the Mad Minute Games titles) has a lot of merit: you are dropped in the middle of a "critical point" of the battlefield, and you need to handle whatever the game throws at you. One gets to appreciate generalship better. Obviously, this concept totally breaks down when you move anywhere past the Division level - there was a reason historically Corps and Army commanders had (and still have!) an entourage of officers around him at all times. It is just too much detail for a human to comprenhend. Automation can go a long way in having those "virtual troops" animated and acting in a concerted fashion. That is, it helps with the mechanical aspects of "pushing counters" forward or backwards. But it does not come for free, as it requires a great deal of technical effort and if you get it "totally right". That is unlikely since you can program as many "clever" reactions in your AI to specific contingencies arising in the battlefield as you have time to actually 1) understand the problem posed by that contingency in the context of whatever the AI was supposed to be doing, 2) work out an algorithm or heuristic to deal with it, 3) test it for "correctness" and 4) get feedback from your beta testers/co designers advising to iron out possible kinks. The amount of time you can devote to that will easily eat out any other time you could devote to improve the presentation (and actually deal with the cognitive overload), work out a useable user interface, develop workable multiplayer modes to nurture a sense of community around your game, and so on. That's why SOW feels "unpolished" or even "unfinished". Because, quite simply, there weren't the resources to do so. The sad truth is that there isn't just enough of an audience out there to support several programmers working on parallel (leaving aside beautiful 3D models or animations). Unless you outsource that to countries were labour is cheap and cheerful, like UGCW does, partnering with a Belarus (?) based development team. If you don't plan to outsource that programming work, and you are not moving to Thailand (as Total War's original designer R.T. Smith has done) or Indonesia, then certainly the only option to work on a war game like these is to do it part time (almost in homeopatic quantities) and have a real job that pays the bills. Because if your audience is, say, about 10,000 people, of which 90% expect your game to be priced at a similar level as other games in the store - e.g. 25 USD - the revenue you will get is capped at about 170,000 USD (after discounting the 30% fee from fulfillment via some established online store). That sounds like a lot of money but it isn't. Since from that you need to cover: - Salaries for the Art and Graphic Design - Expenses in Hardware or Software Licenses or Royalties paid to engine makers - Taxes and Administrative Expenses - Salaries for programmers - A monthly salary for yourself So actually viable development cycles for this kind of games are measured in years not months. This is an issue in the current state of things, where people expect developers to engage in a hourly basis through various social networks, expecting if not fixes for issues on a really short notice, feedback on everything they post, be it an insightful, constructive critique, or an outrageously ludicrous rant. It's just too much to anyone to handle by themselves. That's pretty much why I haven't got involved in this business, other than as a volunteer putting some odd hours during nights and weekends on a project that inspires me. Is that a viable development model for this genre? I don't think so either... If the price of software is what it is for good, then, what is the model that can work for the developers?

The story of this "franchise" or rather, line of games, is truly fraught. Starting with what Polygon called the "The Public Death of Mad Minute Games" http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/2/21/3996460/civil-war-mad-minute and eventually, what we can scoop from the rumour mill on the "Matrix" branded forums of SOW publisher, Slitherine http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3882336&mpage=4&key=# which I quote here with typos and all. This post f I think illustrates some of the themes in the podcast. With a player base which probably can be counted to be in the hundreds, stuff like the "conga lines" or "cartwheels" we get in this installment (and which have been present to a lesser degree in the Civil War titles in my experience) going unadressed just kill the game for good. The UI I think was an improvement in some departments with respect to the "legacy" Civil War games ones, as I find it "cleaner", but there was a distinct feel of it not being "finished" or major features from the ACW games just being cut out. From posts like the above what I read between the lines is that an overhaul of the existing UI wasn't properly supported by a revision of long standing complaints about the AI, neither by revisions to existing systems to please the most discerning - when it comes to historicity of tactics etc. - customers. Anyways, probably it's too late for SOW (and also to HistWar, a title with similar ambitions of scope, but less well thought-out in my opinion). Looking forward to the next iteration of the concept, even if I don't think there's an audience to justify the effort, to be very honest.

Orwellian Newspeak LOL. Thanks for confirming my reading. For me it means that I am presented with aliens that challenge anthropocentric preconceptions, for instance "insectoids" = "hive mind" = "inflexible". Or that every Space 4X game needs to a sandbox to re-enact for the umpteenth time the same tired space opera tropes with planets blowing up, great galactic evils being vanquished, and so on. Limited combinations? Would you please run some numbers to see how many different combinations you can generate with Stellaris sets of ethics, traits and FLT propulsion methods? There's 4 ethics dimensions and 4 possible levels, that's 256 different "personalities" for you. If you multiply that by the number of FTL propulsion methods, then there's 768 possible different races. If one starts counting possible combinations of traits, positive and negative, that number goes into several thousand (here I am assuming 2 traits max per race). If all your games have 32 empires, I wouldn't be surprised that your neighbours look pretty similar, after 6 or 7 games. I am playing two Ironman games, about 16 hours in total so far, and I have barely reached the "mid game" on any of them. How many games have you played already to the bitter end? 100? Thanks, that obviously took a fair bit of research. But sorry, of that list only China Mieville's and the scramblers would fit in the same category as Solaris' Planet (or Ray Bradbury's martians). T'ca, Knnn and the Presger could totally be represented by some of Stellaris Fallen Empires - which are not playable though. Have you tried to converse with those? It's quite like talking to a wall. And The Thing from The Thing was a sentient being at all? The movie is deliberately and very effective at remaining ambiguous about that. Now, how does very alien feeling species compare with the Master of Orion "crew of characters"?

Was that Tom's review? There's nothing of the sort in Tom's critique, on the contrary. I find it to cry for familiarity, rather than personality. Of course you remember the Klackons, very much as you remember which is the letter between I and U - you come across the letter 'O' pretty much every five words in English or so. Special rules - both in board games and computer games - are a crutch in order to create asymmetry between sides. In Stellaris asymmetry comes just from the FTL methods, something which I think it is much more meaningful gameplay wise than substituting food for minerals. Other asymmetries come from the randomised research paths and randomised starts (remember that in MOO, every race starts with a very specific type of homeworld) - something that Tom ignores completely. Do those mechanisms introduce a lot of asymmetry? I think that depending on the conditions, there may be playthroughs where everything looks quite samey. You've got a point regarding the ethics in Stellaris being something humans can relate to. That's hardly surprising, since it is a game made by humans, for humans (very much like science fiction is written by humans and read by humans. Please name five different works of science fiction where you cannot find in the aliens some human attitude, value or emotion eventually "leaking" into them (Stanislav Lem's planet Solaris may be one of the very few truly alien beings ever in Science Fiction, but funnily enough, we know about it because how it mirrors and amplifies human emotions, values and attitudes for reasons the author chooses to keep away from us). Whether or not such ethics are universals for sentient life, in a Kantian sense, it is an interesting philosophical discussion to be had.

Obviously Tom is going to love Master of Orion remake. To each his own, I guess.

That was very interesting to read, thanks. Something that strikes me of Stellaris is that there's a curiously "organic" feel to how empires grow and develop. When I say organic I mean that there's a clear pressure to increase the "carrying capacity" for your species/empire by colonising, and the lack of growth in one direction is usually due to "astographic" features - a gap preventing a warp drive using race from expanding, a lack of inhabitable worlds, or lackluster resource distribution. Sooner or later, all the "easily reached" space is occupied and empires become "boxed in", having reached some sort of "equilibrium" where the empires have maximised greedily their potential to growth. We see this kind of "mid game" on pretty much every 4X game out there, yet in Stellaris the process is more apparent for whatever the reason, and kind of mesmerizing to watch. I am reading through the Paradox forums and I see that the sleepy stasis Rowan complained about is common... but it is also common to have starts where players have neighbours which are less accomodating, or just plain xenocidal crazies. In the latter, the mid game seems to be quite a game of life and death - either you prevail over those competing species, or you're gone for good. Certainly I may be over-analyzing the dynamics of Stellaris' design, but this looks to me a lot like the Lotka - Volterra models for studying population dynamics in Ecology, where one can account for direct and indirect positive or negative interactions. In the context of Stellaris, indirect negative interactions between empires do happen when one snatches prime real state by establishing colonies or frontier outposts, and direct negative interactions follow from the friction between anti-ethic empires. Very much as the lion doesn't choose the tofu laksa soup over the gazelle, the interactions between zebras and giraffes do not really set the scene for high drama. EDIT: That is not to say that one could do with some more interesting "interesting" pressure or "self-competition", see my previous posts. Thanks for the heads up on that, I think it was something very easy to do that for whatever the reason they weren't bothering doing. And LOL @ the video! Hilarious

Thanks for the clarification @Gormongous. I does have to do with the proliferation of intricate paths through the user interface after all. Again, I think I am pretty much of the same mind as you. The last CK2 game I remember I walked into the shoes of King Alfred (just not yet The Great) and I basically spent a few decades setting up the bases of a feudal system. That was a cool game, since it felt like I was playing a weird socio-economic Minecraft, half of the systems in the game were just not working as designed or just inert, coming into life as my dynasty survived the wrath of the Danes and my carefully engineered feudal hierachy of dukes, counts and whatnots started to interact with each other. I am not entirely sure my experience was an intended result of the "design". But certainly I enjoyed doing that. I don't even know about the stuff you mention in your last sentence, I tuned off for good after The Old Gods. Tell that to Dwarf Fortress' designer and programmer Certainly, one of the reasons I tuned out of CK2 was that I wasn't really channeling an inner Rajah or Horse Lord. Some of the "secondary" features though, may be interesting (yet minor). This did indeed happen to me with EU 4 The Cossacks expansions. I couldn't care less for the leaping horsemen in the steppes between the Don and the Volga, but the Estates addition I find was a very good one. Fiddly, yes, but it has changed the way I relate to EU 4. One thing that Paradox does need to do is to start adding sub-menus to the "Gameplay" tab, so people can switch on or off, or modulate the effects of certain mechanics. They seem to leave this to modding... On the other hand, the original EU 4 systems were harsh, and when they complied to the outrage EU 4 became SO much easier. It took a while until they got that more balanced. In the setting of Stellaris, rather than outright military rebellion, which is a somewhat lazy and cheap way to deal with "internal pressure" as Rowan put it, I'd love to see events/event chains such as strikes in mining stations (production shutdowns or reduction in efficiency), terrorist acts (escalating from damaging/destroying structures), piracy, widespread smuggling (syphoning energy out of the system), and other acts of more or less overt subversion motivated by disaffected POPs. That would go a long way to remedy the "revolution out of the blue" thing you mention: there is an escalation, and if the player has chosen to ignore it or came in too heavy handed... well, then there's a price to pay for that. Regarding options of dealing with this, I think that there's a great majority of players that do like the idea of liberty and freedom as an abstract concept to guide themselves in the real world, but start channeling the ghost of Pol Pot when some virtual characters in video game tell them "No Taxation Without Representation" or "Don't Tread on Me" or start waving "Appeal to Heaven" flags when they turn the screws hard on their subjects. I am not sure that lavish simulations, offering all kinds of feedback on what is pissing off your POPs is ever to content those people who have trouble managing their expectations of absolute control when playing a Video game.

Well, the Stellaris podcast came pretty much at 1 minute past 00 hours of release day. I am listening again to this podcast, as I think it will be interesting to revisit it after listening (twice) to the Stellaris show.

I mostly agree with the above, just a few observations. - Indeed, Paradoxian design "patterns" are all over the place. Yet I think they have done a great job blending stuff that has worked greatly for them in the past - the Division designer from HOI3 is in the Ship Designer in spirit, even if most of the design itself is a bow to Sword of the Stars I, the memorable POP system from Victoria I and II, to deliver novel mechanics that fit well within the Science Fiction setting. The latter especially can be the thing that delivers a killing blow to the MOO-clone crowd: I was playing this weekend the remake of MOO and while I was getting bored out of my mind checking out the 16 colonies I have plonked by turn 180 I couldn't help thinking "these little ragdolls loook lovely, but other than sometimes sitting down with a placard they seem quite lifeless". Even if it is just because of the animations, I do find that Stellaris makes a great job of making me care about those guys... just not too often - I stopped following CK2 a few years ago, so I don't get the "salted earth" comment, but I guess has to do with Rob's distaste of the proliferation of "context menus" in CK2. I think that if you are adding new mechanics, and those mechanics are intertwined with already existing mechanics either you 1) re-design the whole interface to accomodate comfortably every control exposed to the player or 2) take an incremental approach using tooltips, context menus and pop-ups, basically extending the existing metaphor. I don't think that 1) is something you want to do for a mature game every 6 months, really. And 2) works as well as flexible and extensible was the initial design. For all the criticism of Stellaris UI, I think that the relative "blandness" of it, is basically because I find to be easily extensible, and that requires some degree of "genericity" in order to happen. - Regarding the pre-emptive balancing of rebellions, I think that solo players wouldn't appreciate either wayward Sector Rebels assaulting virtual Winter Palaces whenever one decides to incomodate the POPs for the sake of the war effort. At EU IV launch I do remember very well that having a war that goes on for more than a few years or where your fleet/armies get the crap beaten out of them was a very scary thought: I remember a game with Spain where the BBB totally overran my field armies, only to be stopped by the massive, massive rebel armies that popped up all over the Peninsula. They actually defeated the French, and I could ask for a White Peace (and then caved in to these rebels demands, of course). That was kind of cool, but I can also see that about 90% of Paradox games' solo players wouldn't like that one tiny bit (and they didn't, the forums went up in flames).

Very interesting. For The People is one of my favourite strategic American Civil War games... and Mark Herman is indeed a designer that isn't afraid of contradicting players that come with baggage to his games. Makes me wonder how off the mark diplomacy is in all the strategic WW2 games I have played, from Clash of Steel to Hearts of Iron III. Herman's concept is amazing, and I am not surprised it is controversial.

There was some discussion on the podcast as well about to what degree it made sense to insert storytelling elements in strategy games, or how well KODP heavy storytelling elements would work on other strategy games. I am not sure I followed the discussion (I am ESL) and I was left with the sensation that, for the majority of the panel , storytelling in strategy games is "nice to have" but not essential or too hard. Actually, that could totally be the topic of a future podcast. Besides Jon on-going project there are a few games out there where it has been attempted - with varying degrees of success to do so: Gaslamp Games' Clockworld Empires: they're using Twine to work out the story arcs followed by their random event generator, still early days, though. If events were to be triggered by the state of the game as influenced by player actions, it could be a very interesting system. Civilization Beyond Earth: the Quest system in Civ BE didn't really go beyond the "explore the map, bump onto the goody hut" paradigm of Civilization (you could say it was streamlining it, doing away with the busy work of having the explorer unit to frolic around the map). It could have been so much more than that. Another poster requested a podcast con Rising Tide... and I humbly propose a topic to discuss in that show Crusader Kings / Europa Universalis / Hearts of Iron event engines. In the former one can see actual story arcs, in the latter we see event chains mimicking long term processes of social, economic or religious transformation. Also, in the latter, there are 'faction-based' mechanics to model the inertia of governments If anyone knows (or has a readily available memory) of other attempts at integrating storytelling (or rather, interactive fiction) into strategy gaming, I'd love to hear about them.

The setting - Glorantha - is unique in many respects. One of them is that the diverse cultures and civilizations in there make "sense" given their setting. Greg Stafford development of Glorantha was informed by studies on religion and it shows. I do agree with your position regarding KODP "randomness", yet for different reasons: * In a game like KODP, do we really need to prop with a "simulation" the tale the player weaves as it interacts with the game? I'd say that an uber-detailed simulation - say, using Chaosium's percentile-based RPG system - would be overkill and not all that interesting. With the exception of people who approach strategy games as an adversarial search problem to be solved with the minimax algorithm. * There are indeed "hidden" tests, as in "not obvious unless you're roleplaying", but I have never felt those in the Hero Quests. If you use a follower of a particular God to do his/her hero quests, and you don't fumble with the questions, you'll get through. Exploration, trading and combat are indeed subject to randomness. But in all cases, the player has obvious instruments to influence possible outcomes. For instance, when setting up a caravan, the number of weaponthanes, size, etc. influence strongly the chances of coming across bandits and how the encounter plays out. The size of exploration parties is another example: the smaller the party the higher the chances it finds something interesting, but also higher the chances that you never get to hear back from them. I write this with the Android version of KODP - I do remember that in the original PC version there were a few bugs affecting this and other aspects of the game.

No worries, it was a great show - you guys had an awesome discussion going on and probably your comment didn't register in my brain.

I didn't pick it up through the podcast, but maybe people will be interested to learn that Dave Dunham is working on a sequel for KODP, titled "Six Ages". He's been documenting - rather sparsely - the development process on this blog http://sixages.blogspot.com

Bruce, you got into the proverbial minefield when discussing the revision of World War 2 Eastern Front hisotry. Since I heard you're looking forward to read more on the Eastern Front I can't help recommending this book here http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Moscow-1941-Northern-Flank/dp/1781590702/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid= Yes, one of the authors of the above is Jack Radey's . He's a very funny man. And his Korsun board wargame is THE best covering that episode. I know from very good sources that Ian Trout played that one quite a few times I personally don't see him being unfair to the Germans... he's giving very fair treatment to both sides (in contrast with 'classical' accounts such as the one by Earl Ziemke, for instance). If you've read the two first books by Glantz on Stalingrad, you'll see as well a fair treatment being given. German blunders are well-documented, along with Soviet blunders Another difference with Ziemke's account (or derivations) is that rather than resorting to the post-war German generals blame game (it was all the fault of the Austrian corporal, if we had been allowed to do our jobs, etc.), here we see that the blame for German's failures wasn't such a clear-cut deal. German commanders also fell into self-delusion and wishful thinking (both are very human qualities, by the way). Another one I can't help by recommend - and kind of complements the above - is the (first) book by David Stahel on Operation Typhoon http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Typhoon-Hitlers-Moscow-October/dp/1107035120/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1389854864&sr=1-1 Stahel discusses Typhoon from a mainly German perspective, going to the bottom of German archives, and his work gives an unprecedented insight into the minds of German generals and soldiers, as well as the parlous logistics of the German Army. And his narrative doesn't really disagree with Radey's at all.

Terrific podcast - I thoroughly enjoyed it. I must say I was quite surprised when I made the connection between one of Twilight Struggle authors - even my girlfriend loves it, yet I must say she's got a degree in Political Science - and the guy who was taking the interviews for the upcoming X-COM Enemy Within. My bad: in this day and age I should have checked on LinkedIn or something, and the mention in the Designer's Notes to Twilight Struggle to Chris Crawford's classic Balance of Power should have rang a bell :-) Couldn't help smiling while listening to the comments regarding Terror of the Deep - I think it's a vastly overrated game. Yet I wouldn't mind seeing an expansion to Firaxis' X-COM featuring very restricted environments. Really looking forward to both Enemy Within and Imperial Struggle. The latter totally sounds like A Few Acres of Snow brought to a world-sized stage

Well, I've always thought that the Take Command / Scourge of War games are indeed the closest thing to Sid Meier's masterpiece. I'd suggest you to try one of their demos, although be advised that the production values on the user interface might put you off.

Rome II has a lot of flaws, both from an implementation and design perspective. While I appreciated very much podcasts like #229, this one was a bit hard on the ears. Listening to people trying to come forward with the most - in their opinion - funny remark or pun about Rome II shortcomings, obscured what could have been an stimulating discussion about what they got wrong, and what got right. To be fair, Rob tried to keep the discussion on track, but I was left with the lingering sensation that there quite a few of the members of the panel contributions can be summarized into phrases like "it's f*cking stupid" as a surrogate for an explanation that was "too complex", or just because "it's f*cking stupid" (which is a quite circular line of reasoning). Or the remarks about the "French accent" thing. C'mon guys, not talking about the graphics - not the art direction, which I particularly like in its realism and grittiness - is fine (even if positive), yet it's not Okay to gloss over a mostly irrelevant aspect for an strategy game such as the voice acting. This was too much of a rant. Going beyond the rant, I do indeed agree with most of the issues being pointed out: the meaningless of the political game (for the Roman faction) is perhaps the worst thing and the shallow connection between the different systems in place (economy - military - political - diplomacy). Even if the the latter - in Ancient times - weren't by any measure sophisticated affairs like the Spanish Succession War of 1701-14 or the preamble to First World War. I'll just point out one thing they got right and yet Paradox hasn't: limiting the number of field armies the player can control, putting into place stronger garrisons (which can be buffed by further development) and allowing to recruit outside of the "cities". Getting rid of that micro-management is perhaps one of the best things of Rome II (and it's sad that there are so few good things to note about it, than this relatively minor and subtle change). Micro-management aside, this makes a lot of historical sense. Let's remind that Republican Rome never fielded more than 2 armies before the Second Punic War: one for each of the consuls. And that way of waging war (a few field armies seeking enemy field armies to do battle or lay siege to enemy cities and fortresses, many mostly static detachments guarding cities and fortresses) goes all the way from the Romans to the Seven Years War in the 18th century. Not even AGEOD, with its very well researched orders of battle, unit ratings and battle resolution mechanics in their exquisite wargames, has got this right.

Perhaps I sounded a bit too harsh, but I think we tend - in general - to think too little about the underlying economic constraints and complain about prices too quickly. I assume you're British spelk, and depending on where do you live, you'll probably know well what mass distribution companies aggressive pricing policies - like Tesco - mean for owners of small farms. When you see a 10% rebate on one item, it's more likely that most of that rebate means less income for the producer, rather than the distributor. There was quite a ruckus on Battlefront.com forums regarding the pricing of the engine upgrade for Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy. They were asking 10$ for it. Compared with similarly priced DLC's - like that of X-Com: Enemy Unknown - I think it 10$ is a lot of value for money, even if in easier times, a similar thing would have come for free in a patch. Indeed, exposure and ease of access are the two angles Steam uses to attract developers willing to publish their stuff on their marketplace. It's also true that in the event of Steam losing the rights to publish the game, as far as I can understand the Legal English in the EULA, the game will be gone from your library. This means that Steam games, even the AAA games selling at 50+ $ prices aren't really yours. You can't back them up in the cloud (as I do with Matrix's titles) since you don't own a copy, rather, you owe the right to use a copy of the game. For many practical purposes, it's the same thing, but not for all of them. But I don't want to go into bashing Steam, they're quite decent folks and they lay openly the rules of the game for us to inspect before engaging in it. Regarding the Red Turn DLC. That's far too cheap for the amount of content you're providing (even if all the scenarios are due to the volunteer work of ComradeP), guys. 20$ would have been a fairer price, in my humble opinion.

Regarding pricing strategy at Matrix being "milking the captivated audience". I'm not entirely sure what is the information you have that makes you so positive about that, spelk. Sales numbers are one of the best kept secret in the hardcore computer wargaming industry, but one would say they're not really nothing to write home about. While everyone appreciates that enjoyable cheap stuff is readily available, I'd like to note that these kind of electronic marketplaces - such as Apple iStore or Steam - are only benefitting one entity, and that's Steam. Let's say that UoC sells 10,000 units on Steam (and that's probably 5 times more than WitE has already sold since release). Then what's Steam cut? 20%? 40% of that? At 20$ per unit, that makes 200,000$. A competent programmer salary in a country with decent salaries is at about 70,000 to 90,000 $. After paying the cut to the publisher, that leaves very little money (if any) to pay for artists, historical research and design. The thing is that wargames - very much like their boardgame counterparts - are usually developed by very small teams, spending relatively little in art or user interface design - more expensive, in a per hour basis than programming - and relying mostly on volunteers to do the research and Q&A. Will that change? Perhaps titles like UoC are genuinely something that will become more common in the future. But I wonder whether UoC devs will want to wade again into these waters.

Nice podcast, but I think you guys missed a big point about the scenarios in WitE Don to the Danube: most of them are there because somebody requested them in some way or another on the forums. People seconded Zac's (?) feelings about the limited selection of scenarios available at release, some were requesting scenarios with an scope similar or higher than that of the tutorial. The rationale for these - as far as I can remember - was that they'd became good 'entry level' scenarios, somewhat more complex and interesting than the tutorial, covering well known episodes of the struggle on the eastern front (the Korsun pocket, the 1942 Kharkov foiled Soviet offensive, the struggle at Demjansk, etc.). John (bcgames) added to these requests some small scenarios covering a number of post-Uranus Soviet offensive operations, which would lead to the infamous Manstein's "backhand blow". You can see that John focused on these small to mid scale scenarios. And since these are small, there's quite a number of them. Last, but not least important, John started just as another player, learning the ropes with WitE editor. But he distinguished himself by devoting much more time and perseverance in his interest about making scenarios, and produced tutorials and manuals which were valuable 'WitE scenario making primers'. There weren't many others like John because the imagination of a great majority of WitE player base is captured by Grand Campaigns. Joel Billings posted some stats about what scenarios were being played over Slitherine PBEM server http://www.matrixgam...b.asp?m=3230405 obviously, these figures don't account for on-going PBEM games which don't use Slitherine infrastructure as an umpire, but I'd be very surprised to see that those deviated significantly from the proportions quoted by Joel. On the other hand, the larger scale scenarios in the expansion are there also because having been requested by the community. Red Army Resurgent, covering from Uranus to Manstein's backhand blow, Disaster in the Ukraine, covering the battles from the Dnepr all the way to the Carpathian Mountains, and another very nice scenario covering the massive encirclement of Army Group North in the Baltic, right at the same time Bagration was just steamrolling Army Group Center. These are made by Trey Marshall, and there are less of them because they obviously take more time to get done and playtest. The expansion came up as a second thought, and some of these scenarios - such as Korsun Pocket, Red Army Resurgent - were available for free download for most of 2011. Threads discussing these scenarios have been heavily edited by the end of Summer 2011, possibly at the time 2by3 and Matrix had decided to go ahead with the idea of bundling these scenarios for WitE http://www.matrixgam...b.asp?m=2931023 You can still find the original versions of some of the scenarios bundled with Don to the Danube http://www.matrixgam...m.asp?m=2805531 http://www.matrixgam...m.asp?m=2790631 others were deleted by the end of Summer 2011 (if my memory serves me well). In any case, great podcast, guys. And about your question about what kind of games are good to introduce people into wargaming... certainly not War In The East, nor Battlefront's Combat Mission Battle For Normandy games. I'd say that good entry level games would be stuff such as Unity of Command - very neat design, very little chrome - for the same subject matter, Panzer Corps - basically because it's just Panzer General 21st Century Edition, and Panzer General was probably the first computer wargame for a bunch of dudes out there - and Battle Academy, which has always have this flair of being a quite light introduction to WW2 tactical-level wargaming.