this looks AWESOME

[Witchblade]

Exact simulation of board strategy on computer?

Seems kind of silly to me.

Have you ever played a serious wargame?

How is it relevant? What's the rationale behind simulating, to the point of rolling polygonal dice around, a table-top strategy?

The idea behind games is providing experience that would be otherwise unavailable or too risky. Playing a table-top wargame is neither.

Chess, poker and bridge computer simulations haven't been doing too badly...

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

I grew up on WW2 wargames. World maps. Corps, divisions, air wings, named ship counters and rulesets that you had to study for weeks on end (and usually abridge them yourself. I hate rule arguments that last for hours).

In comparison, computer wargames are trivially simplified.

 

[sheek]

A board game simulation... interesting... Well not really. Board games inherently have to be fairly simple to allow gameplay to continue to flow. If you're not even going to add graphics or something, what's the point?

Yeah... whoever would want to play Chess? Or Go? Or Backgammon? Rules that fit on one page?? Must be dumbed down. If there are no Elven princesses or special achievements, kill ratios and pages and pages of irrelevant spreadsheets... what's the point?

How about that the best games come from having design limits and trying to achieve the most within that?

You should know from RPGs, the more resources and leeway you give developers the lazier and more incompetent they'll be. You get 3D real-time animation but the interface is more useless and uglier, levels get bigger and loading times go up to several minutes but actual content goes down, you get thousands of lines of David Gaider intra-party romance banter but no story to remember... the list goes on.

As for strategy compare Risk! with Hearts of Iron. I must have played Risk! over a thousand times and am planning a game this weekend. Meanwhile I have just uninstalled Hearts of Iron from my computer for the final time, sickened despite all the mods and barely two years into my latest game. Risk! has a fraction of a percent of the provinces, one combat unit and only two unit statistics, but it has balance, it constantly surprises you with new strategic challenges, it has endless replayability. It is fun and challenging to play if you put the minimal amount of effort into mastering it. Hearts of Iron is for basement dwellers with way too much time which they spend exclusively on their computer and masturbating over WW2 bibliographies.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I also don't see any problem with adapting board games on a computer. At least for the users of the original sets that could be an interesting novelty, while it also helps find a new customer base.

The mechanics may be simple, but at least they work and provide solid gameplay. And I would expect this to provide some sort of hybrid mechanics anyway.

 

[Panthera]

Try some of the more interesting boardgame wargames. These things go deeper than most computer games do.

The point of computerising a boardgame has traditionally been to take all the dull mathemetics out of the hands of the player and increase the flow of a game. Considering that with mp it's often a lot easier to find opponents than in rl I can seriously see the appeal here.

Exactly. Not only does it make the game play easier and faster, but it allows for multiplayer over the net. How is that silly?

 

[buccaroobonzai]

Damn, I didn't look too closely at the counters and hoped that someone finally made an accurate PC version of Advanced Squad Leader.

There is a computerized version of Squad Leader,as thereis for Warhammer and Battletech. Of course they are freeware and mods for a boardgame engine. I will look for the links...

 

[Panthera]

Accurate being the key word there. I know about Megamek, and I know they used the Squad Leader license for some really awful games in the 90's, but that's about it.

 

[Trash]

So, any news on this game? The website and forum seem awfully dead.