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Rob Zacny

Episode 308: Order of Battle: Pacific

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In the beginning, there was Panzer General and it was good. Soon after that came Panzer General 2 and it was even better. After that was another game we don't talk about. Fast forward a decade or so to Panzer Corps and things were back to good, unless you asked Troy, and some time after that we reach this week's topic of Panzer Boat.

 

Rob, Tom, Bruce, and Troy "HMCS Uganda" Goodfellow get together to talk about Order of Battle: Pacific, a game that superficially shares a lineage with the venerable Panzer Corps and other Slitherine games. Rob and Troy took a shine to it while Tom and Bruce decide that they've sung this song, danced this dance, and sunk that carrier before. Hello Kitty is invoked, JRPGs are explained, and the Pacific Theater in general is likened to Warhammer 40K.

 

Read Rob's review at PCGamesN.

 


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Can't Battlefront just make a Combat Mission set in the island hopping campaign? I want a game set on Tarawa with that game engine.

 

I think I fall between the two camps here. While I didn't think that OOB tackled the Pacific very well, I still really liked it as a game. Much like Panzer Corps, I just see it as a period-themed board game. I should add that I never played the Panzer General/Fantasy General games back then, so this sort of game is new to me. 

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never really managed to get into the panzer general games, largely for the reasons discussed, puzzle like nature etc. The Pacific war does game well at the operational and strategic level. War in the Pacific is absurd. Not sure who thought it would a good idea to make the turn resolution daily. In the boardgame realm however there are a few good titles. Mark Hermans Empire of the Sun is quite good. It really is all about airfields, airfield = unsinkable aircraft carrier. This comes out in that game. The main issue with the boardgame attempts is they are all long and mostly very complex given the strategic payoffs involved.

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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.

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I think War in the Pacific, from what little i've played, is a solid simulation but it highlights the issues with heavy computer war games. In the analogue realm, even the more complex games like the Operational Combat Series or Empire of the Sun focus in on one or two elements of a conflict and give you detailed systems for managing them but simplify everything else. Board wargame designers seem to understand that there is a limit to what the player can deal with and focus on a few things. In video game land, it seems to me that the heavier games try to do everything with all the detail possible, rather than condense the situation down to what the designer feels is genuinely important. Unfortunately there are few games that fall in the middle ground on the PC. We tend to either get simple war games (sometimes made complicated by the UI) or very complex monsters.

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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.

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I'm going to come to the defence of War in the Pacific.

 

Bravo!  I'm glad to see someone doing this.

 

Sam, I love hearing from people who love this game.  I was thinking of writing a "comprehensive intro manual" to the game some years ago, but when I actually sat down to do it I realized I was way behind the curve of where I needed to be to write such a thing.  And I never got closer.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Mark Hermans Empire of the Sun is quite good. It really is all about airfields, airfield = unsinkable aircraft carrier. This comes out in that game.

 

I haven't played EotS in years.  But I remember there were some problems with the game initially - was it all fixed by errata?

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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/. 

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Empire of the Sun is a really good strategic take on the Pacific War, and I don't think it's that complicated in and of itself. It's more reading the situations is unintuitive at first because defense is more about the reaction move possibilities than anything else.

I think it does a good job of giving similar challenges to War in the Pacific without anywhere near as much weight.

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I don't know if I said this on the podcast, but the best game about the Pacific theater of World War II is Sins of a Solar Empire.

 

I'm only 10% kidding about that.

 

   -Tom

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First of all - I love the 3MA podcasts. They are the "thinking man's" podcasts.

And, I hate to be "that guy", but - I'm afraid - that is exactly what I am going to be. It is always a cheap shot to armchair generalize what was said on the podcast, and, I love different opinions, opposing opinions, polemic opinions.

Having said that, I find myself always dozing off when Bruce Geryk starts to talk about his war (gaming) experiences and the inaccuracy of this game and that game, compared to his war stories. It feels like he is criticizing these modern day computer games for not being the games he is imagining in his head? To him, these games sound almost insulting?

As for the "realism" part in war game design and video game design especially, the great American Philosopher, Shane Bettenhausen once said: "It is nice to want things [Garnett]".

I play the games in front of me, not the games I am imagining. Yet, I understand, the games they are imagining make for a good discussion.

Funny enough, I fire these exact kind of argument artillery at Sid Meier's Civilization games and their failed attempt at 'history'. For some reason, I don't care about it in the game mechanics of Vietnam 65 or Panzer Generals, or this game. Of course, I never see the flaws in my own arguments, but always in others. 


As for more realism, I recommend "DCS World" or "Rise of Flight" - try to lift off and stay in the air. Get shot immediately = there is your 'realism' experience? Or play Tripwire's "Rising Storm" FPS ... attack with your "Banzai" cry ... and die immediately too.

Video games are abstractions. They cut exactly that part out, you think is more important. Most of all: death.
 




 

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I played a bunch of Uncommon Valor but never quite made the leap to WITP, I think for the same reasons mentioned above. I didn't really see how the game at that scale was manageable, and at this point I don't have time for much more than a naval equivalent of an old-fashioned panzer-pusher. (Modernize Task Force 1942 and you've got a sale)

 

What I'd also love to play in the Pacific theater is a properly-modernized Close Combat game. I imagine some scenarios might not be interesting in MP for a Japanese player, but my idea there would be to do it kind of like Gratuitous Space Battles. Anyone could design a Japanese defense of a map and upload it to a central server which would make it available to US players.

 

 

And, for Bruce: "In the grim future of Hello Kitty there is only war": http://onastick.net/sitz/images/ (it's too big to embed here)

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First of all - I love the 3MA podcasts. They are the "thinking man's" podcasts.

And, I hate to be "that guy", but - I'm afraid - that is exactly what I am going to be. It is always a cheap shot to armchair generalize what was said on the podcast, and, I love different opinions, opposing opinions, polemic opinions.

Having said that, I find myself always dozing off when Bruce Geryk starts to talk about his war (gaming) experiences and the inaccuracy of this game and that game, compared to his war stories. It feels like he is criticizing these modern day computer games for not being the games he is imagining in his head? To him, these games sound almost insulting?

 

Don't worry about being that guy.  I understand what you mean.

 

But I think you misunderstood my point.  My objections weren't about "realism," or as I understand realism.  Rather, they are about theme and mechanics.  The question was about how the game worked as a Pacific Theater game.  That's a very different question from "how realistic is this game."  As you rightly point out, no wargame is "realistic" because no one dies.  I think it was Kevin Zucker (former designer at Avalon Hill and for a long time now the head of his own company that makes beautiful, interesting games: Operational Studies Group) who said: the only way to make a wargame "more realistic" is to play it with the firm understanding that the loser will be shot.  So I get that.

 

But wargames have to be about something, or there is no point in setting them anywhere, or calling the units "infantry" and "artillery."  A game may be a great game, but if your Japanese infantry could just as easily be called Roman legions, or Confederate cavalry, or my cats, then there isn't really any point in setting it in the Pacific.  That's what I was discussing

 

My point about War in the Pacific is that it really captures what the Pacific war was essentially "about" which was the effective distribution and stockpiling of supply.  But to me, that makes it pretty tedious.  Up above, SamS says that the payoff is that after all that preparation, the combat is especially satisfying.  That's a completely legitimate (and frankly exciting) take on it, and I'd love to be in a position to experience it.

 

I play wargames because I love history (and games), and playing games about history is all about touching history in a way I can't do with books or documentaries.  So for me, if I play a historical game, that game has to do something that captures the particular historical moment.  Games can do this with simple mechanics (like War at Sea).  War at Sea is an amazing game, completely "ahistorical" in the sense that it gives the Germans far too good a chance to win, but with very simple mechanics (having them move second, and giving them faster speeds which then factor into the disengagement mechanic) do a great job of demonstrating the essential problems of the North Atlantic campaign.  And I could teach it to a 10-year-old. 

 

At the end of the show, I specifically mentioned that Troy didn't need to "apologize" for liking the game, because even though I don't think he was, it might have sounded like I was making some pronouncement about it.  I wasn't.  I was simply saying that as someone who loves history and how games depict it, I didn't find any particular history in the game beyond the fact that there were Zeroes and Kates and aircraft carriers and jungles.  Because the mechanics in Order of Battle: Pacific so poorly (in my opinion) evoked the historical period, I didn't like it.  Troy didn't find this to be as much of an obstacle, so he did.  That's why we're both on the show.

 

Thanks for listening, and for your regular posts/comments.

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I've listened to a lot of the 3 Moves Ahead archives since discovering the show maybe a couple of years back.  You have collectively caused me to spend an inordinate amount of money on a plethora of games (about £1m) which I think you should be decent enough to refund me for Zacny!

 

However, I found this episode to be possibly the poorest I've heard yet.  As someone who has never encountered the Panzer games, I came to the end of this podcast none the wiser about what Pacific is - how the mechanics work or what the pros and cons of the game are.  Maybe this is unfair and I should give it a re-listen but I just found it to be two guys moaning for an hour about how they're done with this formula (whatever it may be).  

 

Am I being unfair here?

 

(Edit: I've since bought Panzer Corp complete on sale and have played the tutorial missions - so I understand the gameplay now but still don't know why it produced such hostility in the show).

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I just found this podcast, and I've been enjoying them. I was glad to see you talking about OOB Pacific. Personally I like the game a lot. And I like Panzer Corps a lot too, so... 

 

BTW - I heard everyone talking about it being developed by the "Aristocrats" (or Aristocats?). Actually, it's the "Artist-o-crats." A play on words. Maybe they're artists or something?  

 

Yeah... I just joined the forum to tell you that... What a derp I am. :)

 

But I also want to say I really enjoy the wargame stuff. 

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Is there a strategy/wargame that absolutely does not have the puzzly aspects that were often mentioned in this episode?

 

I think it was Tom who said: "The 1st time you figure it out. The second time you solve it." 

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TokyoDan, probably multiplayer wargames are the only ones that are not puzzles. Like Battle for Wesnoth - it's free, it's very simple, and it's definitely not a puzzle when you play it in MP.

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Is there a strategy/wargame that absolutely does not have the puzzly aspects that were often mentioned in this episode?

I think it was Tom who said: "The 1st time you figure it out. The second time you solve it."

Battle of the Bulge is absolutely not a puzzle.

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So Battle of the Bulge is not a game that forces you to 'put your pieces together in a certain way to solve the game?" There may not be an optimal solution but one definitely needs to prioritize certain units early in a turn in order to be effective in the game.  It has opportunity costs, but so does Order of Battle and War in the Pacific.  I think applying the puzzle moniker on Order of Battle is shallow criticism, especially since, as someone stated above, none of the mechanics of the game are really discussed. 

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