dauntless_dad

I'm so glad you guys chose to cover this game. I am in the same boat (heh heh) as Bruce - I bought the game at Christmastime and have played a couple of the tutorials, but I am still trying to get a good handle on how it all works. I played Harpoon and Harpoon 2 back in the day, so I figured that it was finally time to try CMANO. Like Michael, I started by buying Northern Inferno and then, before I even started any of those scenarios, decided to just go ahead and buy the full game. I would LOVE for you to cover Command Ops later this winter. That's another wargame that I own but have barely scratched the surface playing. I'd love to hear from you whether I should really be devoting more time to it or not. Michael, thanks for those links.

Excellent episode, guys!

Excellent podcast. Best one of the year, perhaps!

I don't know what it is about Lee, but I find listening to him very enjoyable. Now I want to delve back into the archives and download the previous episode in which you discussed Bomber Command, and listen to it again. I hope you have him back next year after Wing Leader Supremacy is released.

I owned both A Bridge Too Far and The Russian Front. Neither one "clicked" with me. Then I bought Combat Mission and never looked back. I find it hard to get excited about the modernized versions today, although I have looked into them.

Speaking as an old-time wargamer of the same vintage as Bruce, I enjoyed this episode a lot. However, I feel compelled to admit that I have never played ASL. In fact, I never even played Squad Leader when it was in print. At the time I was more interested in playing battles between machines (tanks, ships, and aircraft) that those between infantrymen, and the 10 complexity rating on the back of the boxes completely dissuaded me from trying them. And I was firmly in the Avalon Hill camp during the AH vs. SPI debates, too! A few years ago my curiosity finally drove me to buy ASL Starter Kit #1. All that I have done with it is read the rules and put it on the shelf. Even its relative simplicity was more than I wanted to tackle at the time, but after listening to this episode I have the urge to pull it down from the shelf and give it another look. Unfortunately, I find that my brain doesn't seem to have the same reading retention that it did 30 years ago, which makes learning brand new game rules by reading (and re-reading) the rulebook more challenging than it used to be. Nowadays I play far more games on the PC than I do on the tabletop, and wargames make up a small fraction of my total gaming time. When I do play a WW2 tactical game, it's most likely one of the Combat Mission games (original series or CMx2) on the PC. I still play the original CM games by email with a friend of mine on occasion. Speaking of which, isn't it about time to devote an episode of TMA to Combat Mission? It would be especially appropriate now, since Combat Mission originated from early efforts to port ASL to the PC.

Works for me! I love those games. I haven't quite developed the same feeling for the CMx2 WW2 games, for some reason, even though I own them all so far...

Guys, I'd like to recommend that one episode during this winter of wargaming be dedicated to the development history of the holy grail of PC wargaming, WW2 tactical-level games. I'm talking about games like the very early Avalon Hill PC game, TAC, and then running through some of the landmark SSI titles like the Steel Panthers series, the Close Combat series, the Combat Mission games, and ending with today's games. For PC wargaming community labored for a very long time trying to make ASL for computers, and in the end they never really did so, but ended up creating PC-appropriate games in their own right.

I am looking forward to the Winter of Wargaming, even though I don't do as much of it as I used to. I'd really like to find out what Bruce and Rob think about the new Combat Mission series of games, considering how much Bruce liked the original series (which I still love as well). For some reason I can't seem to get as much enjoyment out of the new games as I did from the older ones, and I'd like to get a second and/or third opinion on the matter.

It is noteworthy that all of the railroad strategy games discussed in this episode are old games. This genre seems to be life support, even though there are still Pulling Billy tournaments at many board game conventions. There is more new railroad game activity right now in the tabletop world than there is in the electronic world, especially considering that a lot of the latter activity is the porting of board games like Ticket to Ride and Wabash Cannonball (also known as Chicago Express) to electronic platforms. About the only place to find new railroad games on the PC these days are in the simulator world, either with Trainz Simulator 12 or Railroad Simulator 2013. So, what is killing the railroad PC strategy game genre? Any ideas, anyone?

It's worth the $5 that it currently sells for on Gamersgate, but not much more than that. There's a video of the tutorial on YouTube. The idea that you have to send out explorers to discover full-grown towns and cities in the great unknown is pretty strange, but it resembles RR Tycoon enough to still make it mildly entertaining. It runs on my XP machine. I haven't tried it on anything more modern.

It sounds like you are describing Railroad Pioneer, which is a mash-up of RR Tycoon and an exploration game.

A good episode. I've spoken to Paul briefly at the last couple of Origins conventions, and I've got a couple of his postcard games around the house here somewhere. I've got the High Flying Dice Games web site open in a separate window even as I type this. If I may suggest a similar topic for a future episode, consider talking with the folks behind Amarillo Design Bureau about their long-lived success as a small publisher of strategy games set in the Star Fleet Universe, and their involvement with the Starfleet Command series of PC games. There are very few game publishers that have been in business as long as they have.