The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

This new stand alone release based on the legendary War in the Pacific from 2 by 3 Games adds significant improvements and changes to enhance game play, improve realism, and increase historical accuracy. With dozens of new features, new art, and engine improvements, War in the Pacific: Admiral's Edition brings you the most realistic and immersive WWII Pacific Theater wargame ever!

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mdiehl
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by mdiehl »

There's some very good intermediate-scale ftf boardgames on the subject, Tachyon. U might check out Decision Games' Axis Empires: Dai Senso for a good grand strategic PTO game that does not bog down with minutiae. DG are the ones who bought out most of SPI's strategy games and republished some, including WitP (revised reprint).
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Empire101 »

Welcome aboard....( blows bosun whistle )

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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Nikademus »

If he can get past turn one......there's a chance for a social life.....a small one.
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JWE
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by JWE »

ORIGINAL: Empire101
ORIGINAL: Terminus
Note: that was not an official statement, just a deduction based on available data.
I've got the horrible feeling that your deduction may be correct.
That might be true, but there’s still some interesting possibilities that the monster games offer, outside the conventional. Granted that GC style play very often devolves, due to the inherent flexibilities built into these games, leading to endless variations on the first year, but not a lot beyond that.

However, the monster games, like WiTP-AE, have a wealth of internal (coding) and external (editor) possibilities that obtain in the mid and late war periods. Little of this is noticed because of the tendency to build, flex, and kill during the first campaign year. Many AARs die a natural death in 1943, just when things could get interesting. So, although set up that way, maybe GCs aren’t the touchstone.

To really utilize the power and flexibility of the engine and the database of these monsters, it might make more sense to think of them as tools and build smaller, more specific, scenarios or Fleet problems, that span the time frame of the game engine. Most of my current involvement with this title is in writing, umpiring and playing small op-problem scenarios using the editor/engine smorgasbord. This kind of play is taking off with many groups in the US and Internationally. Would really like to see some small scenario AARs. They are short, playable, and a serious learning experience, both with the game and with an opponent. And if people play them, more will be done.

Matrix people understood this: never talked to the Slitherine people, don’t know as I would want to. But some of the gaming development community has had an opportunity to chat with some of the professional/grognard users, and gets it.

We will just have to wait and see. But I am somewhat hopeful.
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by crsutton »

ORIGINAL: Terminus

Ditto. It's getting very, very close to the point where the monster games are unplayable due to detail.


Agreed, I have not even looked at WITE simply due to time restraints and have not bought a lot of other games due to my addiction to UV/WITP/AE for the past ten years. So,in a way perhaps it would be healthier for me and the developers if they were selling more less complicated games. It certainly would be better for me from a social standpoint.

However, I have picked my poison and it is AE. and I can play one turn a night of a monster game reasonably in an hour or two (less if I had any organizational skills). Without the computer, this would never have been possible. There have always been monster games. And, I have been a sucker and bought most of them over the years. This is the first that I have ever considered even remotely playable.

But, I should add that I am just as happy playing a few rounds of cribbage with my wife ...
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Sardaukar »

ORIGINAL: JWE

ORIGINAL: Empire101
ORIGINAL: Terminus
Note: that was not an official statement, just a deduction based on available data.
I've got the horrible feeling that your deduction may be correct.
That might be true, but there’s still some interesting possibilities that the monster games offer, outside the conventional. Granted that GC style play very often devolves, due to the inherent flexibilities built into these games, leading to endless variations on the first year, but not a lot beyond that.

However, the monster games, like WiTP-AE, have a wealth of internal (coding) and external (editor) possibilities that obtain in the mid and late war periods. Little of this is noticed because of the tendency to build, flex, and kill during the first campaign year. Many AARs die a natural death in 1943, just when things could get interesting. So, although set up that way, maybe GCs aren’t the touchstone.

To really utilize the power and flexibility of the engine and the database of these monsters, it might make more sense to think of them as tools and build smaller, more specific, scenarios or Fleet problems, that span the time frame of the game engine. Most of my current involvement with this title is in writing, umpiring and playing small op-problem scenarios using the editor/engine smorgasbord. This kind of play is taking off with many groups in the US and Internationally. Would really like to see some small scenario AARs. They are short, playable, and a serious learning experience, both with the game and with an opponent. And if people play them, more will be done.

Matrix people understood this: never talked to the Slitherine people, don’t know as I would want to. But some of the gaming development community has had an opportunity to chat with some of the professional/grognard users, and gets it.

We will just have to wait and see. But I am somewhat hopeful.

And..to Termie Doom & Gloom, Light (tm) shines on DaBigBabes. [:D]
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by JWE »

ORIGINAL: Sardaukar
And..to Termie Doom & Gloom, Light (tm) shines on DaBigBabes. [:D]
Now you gone and done it Sardaukar, you put your (Light (tm)) pud on the chopping block, there, big fellow. Accordingly, we will be using your enthusiasm to help us with this and that. Hope your PM inbox has some bandwidth left?

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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Bullwinkle58 »

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

good article. However based on my experiences with WitP and later AE as a tester slash developer.....i'm hoping future wargames will take a step back from the urge to represent every gritty details down to the nth degree. Like the article pointed out......a Supreme Commander didn't have to fill in as a Junior officer in charge of logistics much less fill in for an Albert Speer type and manage an entire war economy. The mega-wargame can be fun, but i think most will agree that it is also virtually impossible to finish, esp if playing by PBEM.

I think the Grigsby type detail level in regards the combat resolution can be preserved without having to go further. I feel this more strongly than ever after playing around with the new War in the East. I actually find myself prefering Grigsby's earlier work on the subject.

I feel as if I wasted a good bit of money on WitE. Not that it isn't what they said it is, but I thought I could look past that what it is to enjoy the theater and learn. I found that the game was essentially "cold" even relative to AE--no animations, the counters don't feel like real men (even the ship icons in AE have more personality), and the massive amounts of data are laid out in the most mind-numbingly boring spreadsheet formats that playing even a few turns feels like a job. The tremendous map and level of historical detail in the OOB is lost in GG's standard morass of an interface and data representaiton. Where one picture would do he uses 1000 numbers.

I think it would be possible, with a lot of money and programing talent, to take the best of the Grigsby Form and bring it into this decade. I sometimes lurk in the Usenet wargames newsgroup, and the regulars there hate mega-games with a passion due not to scope so much as workload. Too many games move it up a level or two by abstracting events into higher-level algorithms. A battle is decided on a diceroll as it were. GG's method has always been bottom-up, accreting results from small unit or single unit rolls and player inputs. The problem with his method is not the architecture--bottom-up is the way to go for grogs--but with the interface, data presentation, and tool set given the player to manage it all. AE is wonderful, but it's an electro-mechanical device in a digital world. I can almost hear servos whining in there during the night phase resolution.

So much of the game control depends on the player remembering to do a task, or doing a task over, and over, and over in a way a simple template could relieve. How many times must I set up an atoll invasion Bombardment TF? I could do it once, save it as a three-letter-definition template, and call it when I need one. The code could round up ships for that TF from player-defined bases or ranges or HQs, and auto-send them to the forming base, just as a staff would do. I could put in escort constraints for that marshalling process once, and tell the code to only bother me if the constraints can't be met with local assets. Similarly, pilot training set-up is a human-driven iteration now. If the game could be programed to let me set universal training parameters by plane type, geopgraphy, skill level, etc.--once--I could then let it crank away until it auto-harvested pilots into the pool. Imagine setting up pilot training with drag&drop mechanics, dumping training formations into a folder and giving the total folder instructions--once. With a one-time programming investment the game could save literally thousands of man-years of clicking across the installed base. And if the system let the true grog go in and tweak the individual units as now, removing them from the cranking from that point forward, everyone could be happy.

If modern interface concepts were designed in from Day One, combined with the powerful OOB databases AE has left as a legacy, I believe the game could still be as detailed under the hood as now, but much easier to wrangle. Much easier to spend more time thinking about strategy and less on mundane manual tasks PCs were built to do fast and error-free. If data presentation were really thought through by using colors, icons, shading, routing lines, roll-overs, right-click menus, and sorts going both horizontally and vertically through presented data I think most of the tedium of the PBEM game could be relieved, and more games would, unlike now, go the distance.

In short, I don't think the game size is the issue so much as control systems. A PC with a quad core and 8 gigs of RAM isn't even breathing hard running AE. The hardware will never be the constraint ever again. Time to play is the constraint, and future mega-games have to think about player workload and data presentation first, not at the end of the design process. I'm not sure GG can change that much at this point in his career, but younger designers could take his core ethos of detail and bottom-uip results and blend it with modern understanding of how software works with users.

The first design group/publisher combo to do that will make a pantload of money.
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Commander Stormwolf »

WITP: AE is pretty awesome.. period

some of the mainstream strategy games could learn from megagames too

if Rome Total War was a mega-game, with *actual* numbers of troops on the battlefield
and the production system were even half as good as AE, it would be pretty awesome

- right now the whole Total War series is completely wrong, and seems like a cheap arcade game

basically need the scope, size, and detail of mega-games with the interface and graphics of mainstream strategy

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=141110

check out my aar

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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Alfred »

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

... A PC with a quad core and 8 gigs of RAM isn't even breathing hard running AE. The hardware will never be the constraint ever again...

Hardware does remain a constraint in the background. Agreed, a modern computer easily copes with GG monster games. Even a 2 year old computer should cope. Unfortunately, it is such a niche market that developers believe they can't afford to alienate any potential customer. Therefore they attempt to cater for prehistoric computers still in use.

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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Bullwinkle58 »

ORIGINAL: Alfred

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

... A PC with a quad core and 8 gigs of RAM isn't even breathing hard running AE. The hardware will never be the constraint ever again...

Hardware does remain a constraint in the background. Agreed, a modern computer easily copes with GG monster games. Even a 2 year old computer should cope. Unfortunately, it is such a niche market that developers believe they can't afford to alienate any potential customer. Therefore they attempt to cater for prehistoric computers still in use.

Alfred

I agree it's a business constraint, but it shouldn't be. Eight-hundred USD will buy three times the PC AE needs, and could run what I'm suggesting. Today's $800 box is 2006's $3000 box. If you lose the folks who can't swing $800 I guess you lose them, but OTOH how many of them could afford a $125 mega-game either?

Looking at the bios on the forum in another thread I think the 1% is pretty well repped here already. [:)]
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by dr.hal »

Bullwinkle, I remember the days when it was a board game from Victory Games and I was able to find ONE player in all those years I had that game to have a match over the "big one". The board was spread out in an unused dorm room in the University of Aberdeen Scotland. We kept the board up for a YEAR. We got to November '42 and then we had to take it down. We wrote down ALL the locations of our pieces (over a thousand as I recall) and vowed to take the game up next chance we could do so. I still have the game and the papers of where his counters were (allied) and my counters were. But we never did take it up again (he is now in Finland!). Boy was that HARD to deal with, so when I think how EASY this game is in terms of play and portability I marvel. However I think you are right, the next generation will be a quantum leap over this game, and that is going to be fantastic! Hal
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Sardaukar »

ORIGINAL: JWE

ORIGINAL: Sardaukar
And..to Termie Doom & Gloom, Light (tm) shines on DaBigBabes. [:D]
Now you gone and done it Sardaukar, you put your (Light (tm)) pud on the chopping block, there, big fellow. Accordingly, we will be using your enthusiasm to help us with this and that. Hope your PM inbox has some bandwidth left?

If thou art righteous and the challenge comes to thee, what shall thee say? You are a righteous dude Sardakuar, we would be pleased to have you.

Bloody hell...what have I done! [8D]

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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Captain Cruft »

If I didn't have to work I'd do something like what Bullwinkle suggests. I estimate it would take about 2 solid man-years of coding to get started.

The problem with computer wargame developers is that they always make things hard for themselves by creating a non-customisable UI using low-level graphics libraries, and and then embed the actual stuff that matters within that UI. This is just not necessary. Wargames are bitmaps with a bit of animation, not full real-time 3D worlds. Javascript and HTML will do for a baseline.

The idea would be to do a client-server thing with a documented API, then open-source the development process outside the core code.

This would allow things like:-
  • Multiple GUIs on multiple platforms.
  • Various ways to script orders.
  • Creation of AI robots.
  • Modification of current game state.
  • Asynchronous multi-player games.
So you could order up exactly the type of game you want based on choosing a base scenario, then mixing and matching the various interface components and computer/human players.

I also believe you could wrap all this up in a business model that works rather better than the record industry analogue which is currently the norm.
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Bullwinkle58 »

ORIGINAL: dr.hal

Bullwinkle, I remember the days when it was a board game from Victory Games and I was able to find ONE player in all those years I had that game to have a match over the "big one". The board was spread out in an unused dorm room in the University of Aberdeen Scotland. We kept the board up for a YEAR. We got to November '42 and then we had to take it down. We wrote down ALL the locations of our pieces (over a thousand as I recall) and vowed to take the game up next chance we could do so. I still have the game and the papers of where his counters were (allied) and my counters were. But we never did take it up again (he is now in Finland!). Boy was that HARD to deal with, so when I think how EASY this game is in terms of play and portability I marvel. However I think you are right, the next generation will be a quantum leap over this game, and that is going to be fantastic! Hal

And you were pre-med too? Wow. I bet you never even TALKED to a girl! [:)]

I've been messing with computers in some form or other since 1977. The pace of change has always been in fits and starts, but recently it's hit the afterburners. Tablets and smartphones are literally changing society in ways the PC never came close to achieving. A cam chat five years ago took a geek of some renown and a suite of new cameras and software to get running. Now you can send Grandma an iPhone in the FedEx, she presses one icon, and you're in two-way video chat with Grandkids, all built-into the phone and seamlessly just working. No fiddling, no drivers, no logging on. It just works. I'm just hoping for some small measure of that to leak into gaming before I take the dirt nap.
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by johnbmac »

War in the pacific turned out to be very much like a game i played as a teenager. There used to be a magazine that came out 6 times a year called Strategy and Tactics. Inside each magazine was a full board game.

I remember when a game called USN came in the mail. I couldn't wait to play it. WITPAE is everything any player of USN could ever dream of.
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Dili »

So much of the game control depends on the player remembering to do a task, or doing a task over, and over, and over in a way a simple template could relieve. How many times must I set up an atoll invasion Bombardment TF? I could do it once, save it as a three-letter-definition template, and call it when I need one.

Excellent post Bullwinkle58 that what i have been saying, a wargame with like Photoshop Actions. For those that don't know an user can save all sequence of various clicks he makes in Photoshop and when he have a repeatable action he saves it and can reuse it anytime he wants. For wargame we should even have the ability to give triggers for an action to start.

I am seeing computer board wargames technologically stagnating - with abstract counters -and i wonder if the age of developers isn't showing. First of all wargaming have been something very American so there is already there an advantage and at same time a limitation, second if it is true the age of developers is increasing that will have consequences.



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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by JeffroK »

I cant read through all of this and keep the thread of it in my head[:@]
So some odd thoughts
mega Games owned at some time: HTTR, Battle for Nth Africa, WITP, Eagle and the Sun(dummy), Wacht on Rhine, WIEast & WIWest, Descent on Crete, must be more!!!

Sadly, terminus is right about WIF, IMHO they should have put out a "Lite" version and expanded, just like they did with the board game (I own a version 1 of this, never got into the rest)

Monster games are OK, if the right subject and approach are taken. The UV, WITP, WITPAE engine and subject work together but might not for a Europe or Russia based game.

Detail has to be useful, its no good if you have to hit tens of buttons where 1 should suffice, I find AE getting a bit tedious when setting up the "housekeeping".
If we can set up a TF, why cant we set up a LCU Corps??

While I hate matrix's business plan of hitching onto an existing game, i would like to see DG's War in Europe given a thorough overhaul with an AE type Naval module and Bombing the Reich Air Module.

There isnt enough money in it for a gaming company to keep us happy, too many want FPS or Fantasy.
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by Nikademus »

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58
I feel as if I wasted a good bit of money on WitE. Not that it isn't what they said it is, but I thought I could look past that what it is to enjoy the theater and learn. I found that the game was essentially "cold" even relative to AE--no animations, the counters don't feel like real men (even the ship icons in AE have more personality), and the massive amounts of data are laid out in the most mind-numbingly boring spreadsheet formats that playing even a few turns feels like a job. The tremendous map and level of historical detail in the OOB is lost in GG's standard morass of an interface and data representaiton. Where one picture would do he uses 1000 numbers.

I think it would be possible, with a lot of money and programing talent, to take the best of the Grigsby Form and bring it into this decade. I sometimes lurk in the Usenet wargames newsgroup, and the regulars there hate mega-games with a passion due not to scope so much as workload. Too many games move it up a level or two by abstracting events into higher-level algorithms. A battle is decided on a diceroll as it were. GG's method has always been bottom-up, accreting results from small unit or single unit rolls and player inputs. The problem with his method is not the architecture--bottom-up is the way to go for grogs--but with the interface, data presentation, and tool set given the player to manage it all. AE is wonderful, but it's an electro-mechanical device in a digital world. I can almost hear servos whining in there during the night phase resolution.

So much of the game control depends on the player remembering to do a task, or doing a task over, and over, and over in a way a simple template could relieve. How many times must I set up an atoll invasion Bombardment TF? I could do it once, save it as a three-letter-definition template, and call it when I need one. The code could round up ships for that TF from player-defined bases or ranges or HQs, and auto-send them to the forming base, just as a staff would do. I could put in escort constraints for that marshalling process once, and tell the code to only bother me if the constraints can't be met with local assets. Similarly, pilot training set-up is a human-driven iteration now. If the game could be programed to let me set universal training parameters by plane type, geopgraphy, skill level, etc.--once--I could then let it crank away until it auto-harvested pilots into the pool. Imagine setting up pilot training with drag&drop mechanics, dumping training formations into a folder and giving the total folder instructions--once. With a one-time programming investment the game could save literally thousands of man-years of clicking across the installed base. And if the system let the true grog go in and tweak the individual units as now, removing them from the cranking from that point forward, everyone could be happy.

If modern interface concepts were designed in from Day One, combined with the powerful OOB databases AE has left as a legacy, I believe the game could still be as detailed under the hood as now, but much easier to wrangle. Much easier to spend more time thinking about strategy and less on mundane manual tasks PCs were built to do fast and error-free. If data presentation were really thought through by using colors, icons, shading, routing lines, roll-overs, right-click menus, and sorts going both horizontally and vertically through presented data I think most of the tedium of the PBEM game could be relieved, and more games would, unlike now, go the distance.

In short, I don't think the game size is the issue so much as control systems. A PC with a quad core and 8 gigs of RAM isn't even breathing hard running AE. The hardware will never be the constraint ever again. Time to play is the constraint, and future mega-games have to think about player workload and data presentation first, not at the end of the design process. I'm not sure GG can change that much at this point in his career, but younger designers could take his core ethos of detail and bottom-uip results and blend it with modern understanding of how software works with users.

The first design group/publisher combo to do that will make a pantload of money.

Good commentary. I'll want to read it again more carefully, however at this point i was only able to skim a bit. Mostly agree. The old Grigsby style of allowing you to control minute indiv. elements worked well back in the day because there were hardware limitations, but since then the hardware (aka the computer) has expanded exponentially in capability which allows the building block method to be expanded to the point where it becomes mind numbingly repetetive and overly commplex.

For me......my heart fell the most in WitE when i tried to just look at the basic divisional unit in the game. Back in Grigsby "Lite" days, you'd see the unit reasonably laid out......exp, morale, fatigue.......and for add'l detail #'s of squads, weapons, even specific AVF types for armored units. WitE? Holy crap........a HUGE spreadsheet denoting not only every device unit, but an exp value assigned to each subunit within the org of the div. So the Pz Grd component could have an exp level of 93 while Pz BN #1 would have an exp value of 95. WOW! not. The overall effect was overwhelming detail that ultimately means little. Why do i need to examine 16-20 different exp levels within a division's components when the average diff. is less than 5 points? Its cluttery, messy and ugly. Give me "War in Russia" any day over that.

Then there was the "flexible" ability to build an entire army (the Red Army at least) from the ground up.....from indiv BN's and companies all the way up to Corps. Back in the day you could build "divisions" using a couple of templates. Detailed yet easy to use. Now......practically need a college course on Army management and org theory. I feel like PM'ing JoeW, Chez and other military types along with a statician like JWE to teach me how best to proceed.

Its crazy. Note.....the scale remains the same.....the war in Russia. What changed? the level of detail using the same Grigsby type model. But its gone too far. And of course the more detail and player control over said detail you provide.....the more opportunities for exploitation of the rules. One of the biggest complaints i've seen on the WitE forums is that while the German army is constrained to a set model......the Red Army player can litterally customize his or her army to best exploit the rules. Sound familiar? in WitP or AE.....that takes place in the economy....The Japanese player can exploit rules and build reams of only the best devices that will give the best results from the die rolls.

Warning signs were there back even in the day. I'll never forget the otherwise awesome game that was USAAF.....but with the Luft. player able to 'control' the economy could soon produce fleets of only FW190's (vs. a mix of 109/190) because stat wise that type gave the best results.....and then after that...build all jets. But Player two was hamstrung by no production to be altered. If it could....the result would have been equally silly.....all P51's or 47's.......whatever gives the best die rolls.

Control and detail are good things....but they are also traps. Hence i think the developers of the future need to step back, esp. now given how powerful our hardware has become with Skynet like processors and Terabyte hard drives along with Gigs of onboard RAM.

That or they need to develop "team" wargames that allow people to take on limited and/or specific roles.....such as has been described to me in the days of board games.
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RE: The Immense Pleasure of Huge Wargames

Post by PaxMondo »

I haven't bought WITE because I can't change the production like I could in WIR.  I like the logistical /production side.  Without it, not so interesting.
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