Date: Mon, 29 Aug 1994 22:48:43 +0200 From: Markus Stumptner Subject: COMP: Grigsby's Pacific War (long) Basically, GPW has weekly turns, and you get to give orders and a target hex to task forces (such as air combat, surface combat, bombardment, transport, cargo). You can also specify whether a task force should remain at the target at the end of the turn, return, or return according to the commander's judgment. Commanders are rated for land/air/sea combat ability and aggressiveness - not a bad touch, but of course, you'll never see a Ghormley in charge of SouthPac HQ if you know all along he's not the right man for the job. For air units (carrier or land based) you specify a priority type target (port attack, task force, land units, supply, airfield, factories -- I'm not quite sure if that list is too long, it's been a while). The problem here is that if you choose one, most of the others will be ignored. A unit that has been ordered to attack task forces that appear at base X will ignore ships sitting defenselessly in port at base X throughout the turn, even if no task forces ever show up. Movement ======== Movement on land is dot-to-dot (called "base-to-base"), which means that, e.g., in all of Burma there are exactly two locations to put troops, Rangoon and Mandalay, and Imphal is the automatic next station if you lose Mandalay. Naval movement uses a hexmap, BUT the paths used are fixed! That means a task force going from Noumea to Guadalcanal will always move along the same hexes, and you can't do anything about it. These paths usually follow the hexgrid, i.e., you move straight in one direction, then turn 60 degrees and move straight to your target. Due to this L-shape, quite often you will find your carriers hugging the coast to be as close to enemy air bases as possible. You can avoid having your tankers, supply ships and troop transports straying into the middle of the Japanese-held Marshall islands by explicitly sending them off to Fiji and from there to Pearl Harbor or Australia (if you forget one, boom), but you have no such control over a carrier TF that is close enough to reach its target in one turn. Btw, all bases that can be used in the game are fixed from the beginning. (Many start small, though, and you can enlarge them with engineers, so this is not totally brainless.) Movement is not simultaneous, which is supposed to help clarity (?!) but doesn't and results in all kinds of weird effects when task forces meet, e.g., unescorted transports slipping through straits which are guarded by a 50-ship task force, or task forces not seeing each other since one sails past another which has already reached its target. There is a fairly detailed supply system, and you can create your own supply TFs. However, there is also a "get transport" function that will teleport ships from all over the map to where you want them. This is what you usually use since it's so complicated to assemble taskforces and tell them what you want from them. Combat ====== The combat system has all sorts of weird occurrences. If you have fighters and dive bombers at a base, in many cases the fighters alone will attack, and try machinegunning the ships in a task force. Apparently even slightly damaged ships can sink after battles, but you're never told about it. Gives new meaning to the phrase "losing a carrier" (which happened to me on occasion. "What, Admiral Nimitz, we didn't tell you about the sinking of the Lexington when you drew up the plans for Midway?") Land combat can only occur between units at the same base. It gives you the opportunity to experience a division on a (small) island chasing 5 unsupplied enemy squads around for two months. You also have to activate it every turn so it will at least keep chasing. For large units, it appears to work OK (given the restriction that due to the point-based movement it is effectively a morale-, supply-, and leader-rating-affected slugfest). Surface combat is resolved in terms of individual salvoes (!). This is done by lining the two fleets up in order of size (range and surprise are determined randomly though influenced by the admirals), and then firing left to right at the enemy ships left to right. This means there are hardly any light ship losses as the heavies catch everything (also it appears as if Japanese torpedoes are not very effective at night). This also takes a long time to watch (air-to-air combat is similar). If you lower the display detail level to save time, you don't get to see which ships and plane types were involved in the combat. The Japanese torpedo weakness in surface combat is counterbalanced by overrating the effectiveness of torpedoes carried by Bettys. (The Bettys thus are the most effective carrier killers. What's the good of rating planes in five dimensions if this is what comes out of it??) Detail ====== The game has incredible amounts of detail, most of it useless because the game procedures are too coarse or skewed to handle it correctly. Land unit size is given in squads and individual tanks and guns (ok, typical Grigsby), and they are rated in supply and quality. Air units count individual planes and are rated for pilot quality. Unfortunately, airfields come in five sizes, air units grow to fit those airfields and can't be split later, and *any* infusion of new pilots will lower quality. Thus, the favorite way to create elite units by making them overstrength (put a unit from a large airfield on a small one). When you use the unit in combat, no replacements will be assigned for losses (since the unit is too big), but all the pilots benefit from the experience (even those who supposedly can't fly because their planes don't fit on the airfield). The same philosophy (make a unit too big so it won't get replacements and let it shrink in combat while gaining experience) also produces the best land units. PBEM possibility ================ The basic capability to exchange status files is there. Only one player can watch the turn progress - no surprise. However, the battle summaries that can be looked at after the turn are extremely thin on information *and* do not agree with the actual results you get to see if you watch the battles zipping by. (You also don't get any reports of fighter sweeps that may have resulted in dozens of lost planes). The player who can't watch the actual turn both loses out on some of the fun and the information. Interface ========= The interface is the worst part. You can use a mouse, but the interface is designed to fight against the mouse every inch of the way. I've never seen a sequence of mouseclicks as convoluted as that needed to move a ship from one taskforce to another. And you need to click left or right in certain alternating patterns. Miss one and you start again. Same for most other functions. The map does not show any place names. You have to change modes to look at air, land, naval units, and task forces on the map, and there is no way to look at a base and see all units there at once. I've heard many people complain that the information contained in the game is overwhelming. It isn't (compared to V4V, for example). It's just presented in a painfully bad manner. This is a program that makes you work for finding out things. There are also some things you can't find out. For example, the matter of the so-called preparation points. Their level is crucial in determining the effectiveness of carrier air strikes. However, they are assigned to task forces *after* you start execution of the turn so you can't look at them, and the manual doesn't really describe the way they are computed (nor mention that they are that important). One of the earlier patches to the game came with a 30-page "hint file" -- basically 30 pages of manual errata and omissions. I guess that sums it up nicely. Finally, I've already noted the problem of slow display vs missing information. There are situations where you don't have a choice anyway. During movement, the display jumps all over the map depending on where the action goes. In the supply phase (when submarine combat takes place) this is especially amusing, since you're expected to look at the supply convoy routes that briefly flash across the screen to find out where to place your subs. :-) At the bottom of the screen, you are given the convoy's target location. This display puzzled me for a long time, until I noticed that the message displayed always corresponded to the previous map section instead of the one shown together with the message! Btw, I know people who really have fun playing this game, or at least claim it. The main requirement is that you must not care much for historicity or mind that you're being screwed by a program and game that was obviously too much for its designer in the time he had available. I've gone back to Pacific War. Markus