[WarInEur] Flying the friendly skies

[sgminfo]

Yes indeed,

The abstraction will always leave us with distortions and 
incompatibilities, the Granularity of the front concept was a most 
necessary simplification if you were not to be caught in the dizzying 
spiral of complexity that greater and greater detail was asking us to 
provide.

The problem was self fulfilling,

Simplify in order to make playable,

but the very customers drawn to this type of game,

having mastered the scale,
then mastering the sheer volume of the (rather simpler) rules
promptly began to wish for the very complexity
that  would wreck the delivery schedule,
the market appeal,
and the engagement of the more junior members,
who actually hankered for DNO,
but did not want to grapple with the sheer confusion of the complexity 
of the latter.

In turn this threatened turning the game into a lossmaking behemoth.
As it was, the game hoovered up quite a lot of scarce resources, and 
must have had an impact on on other items going through the production 
system at the time.

"I don't think you are going to find a tight rule that is realistic and 
playable."

is very true, the holy grail of realistic simulation usually dies on the 
altar of complexity.
Generally speaking, the one is always achieved to the exclusion of the 
other, at some point.

The difficult art, is realising where to draw the line.

And in a "monster", to a certain degree one already has both feet across 
the rubicon, before addressing the question.

Simplification was everything in a game manually powered with thousands 
of counters. The physicality limited us all, and we were grateful that 
things were sinple enough for us only to have the odd battle over 
suicide paras etc etc. With the computer though, suddenly the main 
limitation, physicality, suddenly vanishes. We can have automatic 
bookeeping, auto die rolling, transit commands (gotos) that liberate us 
from the sheer drudgery of moving repetitively great heaps of counters 
from A to B all over the map.

We lose sight of the original intentions, and the limitations that 
spawned those design choices.

Once that limitation goes, then the design choices are governed by more 
style and  ethos.

We here ,are very much cast in the position of the interwar Pacific navies:-

Do we

1.Pursue the US design route, keeping on with the best until a 
completely new vessel is built?
or
2.Pursue the Japanese route, bolting on and converting the old until it 
is totally reworked almost into an entirely different beast?

-|steve|-


Hansen wrote:
>
> What I was trying to do was point out the corner cases for the rule 
> you were supposing. I'm not advocating any side for the rule. I can 
> see a good reason for either rule (always have air range/no AP,no air 
> range), but with the air abstraction as is, I don't think you are 
> going to find a tight rule that is realistic and playable.
>
>  
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From:* SGMINFO at aol.com [mailto:SGMINFO at aol.com]
> *Sent:* Friday, August 03, 2007 3:09 PM
> *To:* ultrasoundimages at sbcglobal.net; warineur at mailman.halisp.net
> *Subject:* Re: [WarInEur] Flying the friendly skies
>
>  
>
> In a message dated 03/08/2007 19:15:49 GMT Daylight Time, 
> ultrasoundimages at sbcglobal.net writes:
>
>     I think I agree, but let me pose a couple of corner cases.
>
>     1) German moves first and withdraws all air points from the front.
>     His air
>     range remains 12, even though there are no planes left to fly. Any
>     naval
>     movement covered by his air range is safe from extraordinary (but not
>     ordinary) air-sea interdiction. The cowardly RAF must gather its
>     courage
>     before recklessly flying where the 109G normally flies.
>
>     Wallie moves second and withdraws all of his air points from the
>     front. His
>     air range remains 12, even though there are no planes left to fly.
>
>     Q: Can the German interdict movement in the channel? I would say
>     no as he
>     has no planes on the front. He may have planes coming in and he
>     has planes
>     leaving, but no planes are actively on the front.
>
>     The war continues from the point above:
>
>  
>
>  
>
> Taking your example above, does this not describe the German 
> operational plan for Husky, and indeed Normandy?
>
> Luftwaffe abandoned all forward airfields, taking their forces into 
> the interior, then stocked up various airfields to enable a massive 
> mutiple unit transfer at the moment of decision? In Tunisia a version 
> of this was donee by operating the tunisian bases (and later in Italy 
> and Sicily) as advanced landing fields.
>
>  
>
> Where your illustration breaks down, is the weakness of the airforce 
> whilst it is xferring, leaving you opponent with the initiative during 
> those key turns as you bring the front up to strength.
>
>  
>
> As indeed happened in Normandy, and in Sicily.
>
>  
>
> There are penalties inherent in what you propose, which are not yet 
> modelled (although I do have a version of this that does cater for 
> your proposal).
>
>  
>
>  
>
> -|steve|-
>

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