New game: Germany at War

[ComradeP]

I thought the Command Ops people were working on Little Saturn and the Combat Command group was working on a tactical destruction of Army Group CEnter?

Correct regarding Command Ops. I have no idea what the Combat Command people are working on.

I bought Command Ops during the Christmas sale after sitting on the fence for a long while because I'm not all that interested in the Battle of the Bulge, but I haven't played it in months. It's an interesting game, but I had some objections to the way the scenarios I played tended to make a German victory exceptionally difficult. The majority of the points came from occupying objectives, which lead to the typical wargame problem of it being irrelevant for either side whether his force was combat capable at the end of the scenario, and I also didn't like being able to fire every artillery piece at a single target, if I chose to do so (and in some of the scenarios I couldn't think of any better way of going somewhere as the Germans, taking the inadequate forces at my disposal into account). Depending on what parts of the Little Saturn offensive are modelled, there could once more be a significant gap in the quality and quality of the attacking and defending forces. I don't even want to think about being able to manually control every Soviet artillery unit.

Part of the charm of games like Panzer General/Corps and Germany at War comes from the game itself being fairly simple, which also means that aside from problems with overstrength elite units, you don't run into the problems you can encounter in some of the more detailed wargames.

[Bison]

I'm not getting your point on objectives ComP.  Every wargame I can think of uses objective capture as a scoring system.

[ComradeP]

I'm not getting your point on objectives ComP.  Every wargame I can think of uses objective capture as a scoring system.

But many have a system where losses also cost you a serious amount of points or are at the least worth something. In the Command Ops scenarios I played, the value of losses was much less than that of objectives, so you get the typical small scenario problem of placing a wall of units in front of objectives or otherwise ignoring losses because they're largely irrelevant. For detailed wargames, I'm not a fan of a system where a side can lose most of its troops and still win.

[MengJiao]

I thought the Command Ops people were working on Little Saturn and the Combat Command group was working on a tactical destruction of Army Group CEnter?

Correct regarding Command Ops. I have no idea what the Combat Command people are working on.

I bought Command Ops during the Christmas sale after sitting on the fence for a long while because I'm not all that interested in the Battle of the Bulge, but I haven't played it in months. It's an interesting game, but I had some objections to the way the scenarios I played tended to make a German victory exceptionally difficult. The majority of the points came from occupying objectives, which lead to the typical wargame problem of it being irrelevant for either side whether his force was combat capable at the end of the scenario, and I also didn't like being able to fire every artillery piece at a single target, if I chose to do so (and in some of the scenarios I couldn't think of any better way of going somewhere as the Germans, taking the inadequate forces at my disposal into account). Depending on what parts of the Little Saturn offensive are modelled, there could once more be a significant gap in the quality and quality of the attacking and defending forces. I don't even want to think about being able to manually control every Soviet artillery unit.

Part of the charm of games like Panzer General/Corps and Germany at War comes from the game itself being fairly simple, which also means that aside from problems with overstrength elite units, you don't run into the problems you can encounter in some of the more detailed wargames.

I skipped the Command Ops battle of the Bulge.  I thought Conquest of the Aegean was a fantastic game and their Little Saturn should be pretty interesting at the very least.

I don't recall artillery being a big problem in CAegean, but maybe there just wasn't that much of it.

[LongBlade]

Who is the developer? It looked like the field was blank on the product page.

[ComradeP]

I think they're called Phobetor now.

[LongBlade]

I think they're called Phobetor now.

Thanks!

[Bison]

I'm not getting your point on objectives ComP.  Every wargame I can think of uses objective capture as a scoring system.

But many have a system where losses also cost you a serious amount of points or are at the least worth something. In the Command Ops scenarios I played, the value of losses was much less than that of objectives, so you get the typical small scenario problem of placing a wall of units in front of objectives or otherwise ignoring losses because they're largely irrelevant. For detailed wargames, I'm not a fan of a system where a side can lose most of its troops and still win.

Well I think it's a matter of accepting that the primary focus of the game as a simulation of operational command is seizing objectives.  I'm not disputing the fact that a force which has sustained heavy casualty rates are still able to hold an objective and win.  Historically that is not an unheard of occurrence were an army while on the face of it loses due to high casualty count still accomplishes the mission by holding or seizing key objectives at an operational level.  I've also not really seen too many occurrences in the game where a unit that suffers high casualty rates doesn't rout off of a position.  One point I do agree with is that occasionally an objective will remain in contention because both forces have forces in the area of the objective.  Even though one side may outnumber the other in terms of numerical personnel counts or number of units in area.  That can be frustrating.