WW II in the Pacific and Wargaming

[FarAway Sooner]

Why are there so few war games set in the Pacific Theater of WW II?  And what is the best Pacific Theater war game covering WW II? 

Is it because, aside from naval battles, nothing about the theater lent itself to the sort of maneuver and strategic problem-solving that makes most war games interesting to the sorts of folks who post here? 

My own sense is that, while there was a lot of room for strategic planning in the Pacific (where to invade, when to invade, what you had to do before invading, etc.), once the battles were joined, they were mostly just huge attrition struggles against largely fixed defenses.  The levers to be pulled for success involved developing the right equipment/doctrine and getting enough men and materiel into the battle to win the war of attrition.  But that's not really the stuff that war games are made of.

I've often observed folks here lamenting the lack of good Pacific-theater war games.  But I'm not sure anybody's ever asked why?  I thought I'd pose the question in this forum, although it would be just as comfortable in the (less attended) board-gaming forum...

[acctingman]

maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific

[FarAway Sooner]

maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific

"Armor vs concrete" doesn't quite capture the imagination so much, does it?   :o

Does one need tanks to made a good WW II game about land combat?  Is that it?

[MengJiao]

maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific

"Armor vs concrete" doesn't quite capture the imagination so much, does it?   :o

Does one need tanks to made a good WW II game about land combat?  Is that it?

  I did a lot of work on WitPAE scenarios: reading the official US accounts and other secondary sources.  It seems like you really have to work to get your
imagination to picture things in the Pacific:  Indochina for example.  Borneo.  The Japanese drive to get that oil from the Dutch.  The fact that the Japanese
held off the US, had a huge army in China and got reasonable terms on surrender.  There's no real popular imagery for what the Japanese were like.

I think to make good Pacific games, understanding the Japanese is the key.    I certainly don't get what they thought they were doing or why they were doing it.

[sandman2575]

I wonder if it has something to do with the challenges of creating a competent AI?

If you look at the Hearts of Iron series, for example. Pdox has never been able to get the Pacific War right -- I'm holding out some hope that HOI4 might finally break the curse, but I'm not very optimistic. HoI can simulate something like a convincing land-war in the European Theater, but when it comes to the Pacific, it's just a shambles. The difficult of 'island hopping,' programming an AI that knows how to launch proper amphibious operations (a huge bug-bear of Hearts of Iron), the supply and logistics problems, the problems of proper fleet composition for different tasks.... Tanks and troops rolling across the grain-fields of the Ukraine seems a whole lot simpler by comparison.

Or looking at WitP:AE -- the AI does a fairly credible job there, but it's highly scripted, rather than an AI that actually knows how to respond to an evolving strategic situation. I don't blame 2by3 for that, given the enormous complexity of the game. But I again think it goes to the point that creating a dynamic, reasonably competent AI for the incredibly complex Pacific Theater is ... very hard...

[Rayfer]

Well...from a strategic level there are choices. WitP:AE, Uncommon Valor, SC:Pacific Theater, Storm over the Pacific, HOI3 come to mind. At a smaller level there's Squad Battles Pacific War, the Campaign Series, Order of Battle: Pacific...probably others?

[mirth]

I think this is a matter of perception. There are plenty of WWII PTO games, PC and board. Are there as many as ETO? Probably not, but there are still many to choose from.

This is one of the more interesting board games I've played in the past year, the designer is Japanese and the game definitely has some unique mechanics and components - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14083/fire-sky-great-pacific-war-1941-1945

[FarAway Sooner]

Mirth, that Fire in the Sky board game looks fascinating.  I wish I had the money, or anybody to play it with!  Maybe one of these days, I'll have both.  Always seems to be one or the other...

But the mechanics that the game uses to simulate the challenges of each side are fascinating.

[mirth]

It's a great game, but I don't own it myself. A buddy of mine has it and we played a few times last year. I'd like to revisit it. We really only started to figure it out before we were distracted by something else. That tends to happen a lot :P

[bbmike]

maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific

"Armor vs concrete" doesn't quite capture the imagination so much, does it?   :o

Does one need tanks to made a good WW II game about land combat?  Is that it?

  I did a lot of work on WitPAE scenarios: reading the official US accounts and other secondary sources.  It seems like you really have to work to get your
imagination to picture things in the Pacific:  Indochina for example.  Borneo.  The Japanese drive to get that oil from the Dutch.  The fact that the Japanese
held off the US, had a huge army in China and got reasonable terms on surrender.  There's no real popular imagery for what the Japanese were like.

I think to make good Pacific games, understanding the Japanese is the key.    I certainly don't get what they thought they were doing or why they were doing it.

I'm reading a book right now that Toonces recommended called The Rising Sun by John Toland. It does a really good job of explaining the Japanese thought process. Highly recommended!

[glen55]

Second Toland's The Rising Sun.  One of my favorite military histories ever, if not THE favorite.

War In The Pacific and Uncommon Valor are excellent strat-/op-level games, but I would really, really like to see a Guadalcanal campaign game made by  somebody who tackles the naval and air aspects in as much detail as those games do but also has detailed and realistic ground combat.  Heck, Guadalcanal is just one island, somebody should be able to map it in detail and make a good ground-combat game.

NO OTHER CAMPAIGN IN HISTORY can compare to Guadalcanal as a well-matched contest between major land, sea and air forces.  Of course, there were other land, sea and air campaigns in the Pacific, but Guadalcanal was an extremely balanced affair.  Operation Shoestring, we called it from our end.

[BanzaiCat]

Carriers At War was a great game...one of my old favorites on the Apple IIc back in the day. Matrix re-did the game a few years back. I have a copy of it and keep meaning to do an AAR or article otherwise on it, but other things keep popping up.

Also, I'd recommend DVG's Fleet Commander Nimitz. I'm doing an AAR in these very forums if anyone hasn't seen it and wants to check it out. It's not without some issues, but the game overall I enjoy very much.

Another good one that had some of us riveted for a while was Order of Battle: Pacific. Not very detailed and very Panzer General-like, but still, it was a decent game for the 35 hours it had me invested in it.

[jomni]

Because PTO does not lead to balanced gameplay?

[Toonces]

I've often wondered about this myself.

I think it's a problem of scale.  When you get right down to it, the Pacific war was a naval war that took place over half of the globe.  One thing that WitP has helped me appreciate is that the war in the Pacific was a war of logistics.  For the Japanese it was seizing the resource areas of the NEI and then keeping those SLOCs open; for the Allies it was securing SLOCs to flow troops and materiel into theater to progressively capture islands to establish land based air support. 

Therefore, if you're going to take any kind of meaningful look at the Pacific war from a strategic level you have to give the logistics system a hard look.  In land war we tend to just say if  you can trace a line of supply from a unit to a base it's "in supply."  I don't think that works as well in the Pacific because the nature of naval vessels that can traverse large amounts of territory in a day, and that you can't really hold a piece of ocean like you can a piece of land, means that you need to build a logistics game that rivals your war game.  This is something that really took me a long time to appreciate in WitP, but it makes sense.

[Rayfer]

I've often wondered about this myself.

I think it's a problem of scale.  When you get right down to it, the Pacific war was a naval war that took place over half of the globe.  One thing that WitP has helped me appreciate is that the war in the Pacific was a war of logistics.  For the Japanese it was seizing the resource areas of the NEI and then keeping those SLOCs open; for the Allies it was securing SLOCs to flow troops and materiel into theater to progressively capture islands to establish land based air support. 

Therefore, if you're going to take any kind of meaningful look at the Pacific war from a strategic level you have to give the logistics system a hard look.  In land war we tend to just say if  you can trace a line of supply from a unit to a base it's "in supply."  I don't think that works as well in the Pacific because the nature of naval vessels that can traverse large amounts of territory in a day, and that you can't really hold a piece of ocean like you can a piece of land, means that you need to build a logistics game that rivals your war game.  This is something that really took me a long time to appreciate in WitP, but it makes sense.

+1 I've just this past month begun to wrap my head around WitP:AE so I understand what you are saying. An incredibly deep game.