WWI Game Strategy Game

[Gusington]

Thank you. Is it worth it or shoud I just stick with Commander, Strategic Commander, etc?

[Bison]

If you don't like or get the Ageod engine, I cannot imagine you'll like, or in the very least invest much time into, the game Gus.

[bbmike]

I also found Spirit of War in my Steam library. Like a lot of other games I haven't tried it yet so I don't know how it is. It looks very light but it is turn based.

[Pete Dero]

This might give you a good idea about the game : WW1 Gold absolute newbie tutorial / AAR project (by Jason Pratt)

http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=6547.0

[Gusington]

Thanks!

What about Making History? Anyone playing that?

[Philippe]

I still haven't decided which WW I strategy game I like best, probably because I haven't put enough time into Ageod's To End All Wars.

I've played a bit of Matrix's Commander: The Great War and while it is alright as a casual game if you want to kill a few hours looking at WW I - themed maps, it just doesn't do it for me as a serious or semi-serious simulation of the WW I.

I've played a fair amount of Battlefront's Strategic Command: The Great War/Breakthrough and put together a few mods for the game which can be found in Battlefront's repository.  The game works pretty nicely at the larger scales (if you don't look too closely at how naval warfare works), but creaks when you get down to the tactical/operational level. 

The main weakness has to do with the limitations of the game engine.  At the two largest scales (and maybe even three largest) I really like it because it gives you a nice uberblick of what's going on in the war as a whole, with enough detail to help you realize that you really are simulating WW I and not just pushing counters around a few squares on a map.  Even at the largest scale it lets you see the war at closer range than Commander: the Great War, though what Commander has that Strategic Command doesn't is very slick graphics.

The game's use of squares rather than hexagons can sometimes be a little offputting, but you get used to it.  At certain scales squares actually work better than hexagons, provided they're handled correctly. My one regret is that Strategic Command doesn't handles squares as well as RBS in Pike and Shot.

If you're interested in the game here is a link to Battlefront:

http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse&category_id=34&Itemid=26

Unfortunately to get the proper experience you'll need to buy both The Great War and Breakthrough. Breakthough has a lot of engine improvements that make it a significantly better game than Great War, but it won't run unless you already have Great War installed.   Great War is still worth owning, because it includes a couple of my favorite WW I scenarios that weren't ported over to Breakthrough.  Breakthrough also comes with a some really nice bonus material -- a wonderful simulation of WW II in Europe (another of my flag mods) on the same scale, as well as the Russian Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war, and has several interesting user-made scenarios set in the Far East.

[JasonPratt]

If you don't like or get the Ageod engine, I cannot imagine you'll like, or in the very least invest much time into, the game Gus.

That being said, it isn't really the Athena / AGE engine. It's a set of monster board-game rules ported into something that partially resembles the AGE engine.

Worth noting that the actual AGE engine WW1 game is not overly popular, while WW1G has a dedicated fan base.

I still fully intend to do a more proper continuation to the Absolute Newbie AAR one of these days. WW1G is still, to me, the most interesting attempt at strategic-level WW1 (per se). Not that Breakthrough etc. are bad games, I especially like Breakthrough but there are literally "other games out there like it" (and CommanderWW1, and Ageod's TEAW, and GoA which is kind of generic in its approach, and Darkest Hour for that matter). There are no other games out there quite like WW1G.


Note: I haven't played Making History's WW1 game yet, although I hear good things about it. Still, same as with the others, there are other games out there like it. (But I'm thinking of getting it before TEAW.)

I never purchased HOI2, so I didn't realize that Darkest Hour was totally stand alone.  I remember Jason doing an excellent AAR based on it, so I'll need to look at getting it also.

Jason, If you play the 1914 scenario, does it end in 1918 or does it keep going.

I've actually done two quite different AARs based on it, one being a narrative for Ethiopia based on the vanilla DHFull ruleset (there are three levels of Darkest Hour implementation rules, but only Full offers a WW1 game), and the other being a more puzzle-based abstract piece on how to survive WW1 as Russia, using the latest (at the time) edition of the "AAR" mod. Note that the Ethiopia game was intentionally very hacky, as I was constantly haxoring the research rules (mostly) in order to bootstrap Ethiopia up to some useful extent. I appreciate the complement for whichever one you were thinking of!  Both can be found in the Groghead Digital AAR category.

But to your question. It depends on a couple of things. If you're playing DHFull vanilla (the version of Darkest Hour Full that ships with the game (the other two versions of vanilla DH being meant only for WW2 -- I won't digress further into explaining that unless you or someone asks)), you can set the end date within the game to be around 1944 (if I recall correctly, anyway most of the way but not entirely through historical WW2). If you're willing and able to do a bit of light data file tweaking, you can set it to 2015 if you wanted (or 2035 or 2530 or whatever). However, the scripts for the WW1 campaign only go out to around 1923, and the tech only goes to 1970.

If you find and install the "AAR" mod (which is easy to do, just involves replacing some folders with others), there are scripts bridging into the DHFull WW2 game with a smooth continuation, plus some new scripts expanding both WW1 and WW2 periods, including some scripts out into the 60s. My impression is that the AAR mod designer has scripts going into the 90s. The tech goes up to 2010. So if you start a game with that mod, you'll start a month or so before the historical WW1 kickoff, and you can play seamlessly on up to the present day (5 years off tech ;) , but the 'event-scripts' will run out sometime between the 60s and the late 90s.

[OJsDad]

Thanks Jason.  I was talking about your Ethiopia game.

If I wanted to apply the AAR mod, would I need both Darkest Hour and HOI2, or just DH.

[OJsDad]

Actually, I've got Making History.  It's ok, just doesn't seem to draw me in. 

[Gusington]

Me neither but what I played wasn't complete.

[JasonPratt]

Darkest Hour is totally standalone, no need for other HOI2 material. The "AAR" mod works only with DH. I definitely recommend it.

To clarify some game option choices within DH, there are three levels of install. One is actually just the base HOI2 game with all official expansions, but with a few DH details added in -- so you're getting HOI2 with all expansions, too, if you'd rather play that sometime. This is meant to allow the game to work as a co-install with other HOI2 mods. (Possibly including the other competing Paradox-sanctioned-and-sold supermod, Arsenal of Democracy.) You can't play WW1 with this install.

Two is DHLight, which adds more DH features but leaves over some things from HOI2 (I forget the details).

Three is DHFull, which is the install you'll want, as it offers the WW1 campaign.

The "AAR" mod installs over a DHFull install, to overwrite various things and bridge the WW1 campaign with the earliest WW2 campaign start. I very much recommend you go with this option.


I don't recall if DH now works natively on Win 8.1, but there were some things you had to do to get it to work on Win 8. Whether it works on Win 10 who knows?

According to my notes (borrowed from someone on Steam, thank him), you should do this on a Win 8 system, and I'll add that you should do it before installing AAR (and then maybe recheck afterward to be safe):

0. Make sure latest patch is installed (at least 1.03, which so far as I know is still the latest official patch).

1. Go to your Darkest hour folder.

2. Right Click on the Darkest Hour exe and select properties.

3. In properties go to compatibility.

4. Press reduced color mode.

5. Then select 16 Bit color in the box under Reduced color mode.

6. After that you have to go open your settings.cfg (in the Darkest Hour folder)
and write 1 instead of 0 in the display mode.

7. after that the game will be windowed and it has to be like that to work.

If you wanna play the game you have to launch it from the Darkest Hour.exe not the launcher
If you wanna change what mod you are playing change it in the Settings.cfg

It wont work if you don't run it in windowed mode!
And remember to only launch through the Darkest Hour.exe or it won't work.


If your window goes over the windows bar you can do this: You can right click on your windows bar and select it to hide it automatically
and when you hover you're mouse over it then it will appear again. [/quote

[OJsDad]

I don't know why I missed it before, but someone has a WWI mod for HOI3.  Just downloaded it, but haven't had a chance to play it yet. 

I'll probably still pick up Darkest Hour.  Not sure about the others though. 

[JasonPratt]

Didn't know one existed for HOI3; where from?

[Bardolph]

After reading this thread I downloaded a WWI Gold demo from somewhere to try it out but it ran very slowly on my Win 8 64 computer. Map movement was very slow and jerky. I know WWI Centennial was supposed to work better on newer systems, anyone playing it on Win 8 successfully?

[OJsDad]

JP, on the Paradox forum.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/ww1-mod-for-tfh.648550/