From: Giftzwerg Subject: HPS WAR OVER VIETNAM ... First Impressions The first first impression I had when firing up this package was that this is the ugliest wargame ever created. No attempt was made to enhance the game by using rich, detailed graphics or maps - rather, it looks like they were *aiming* for Butt Ugly. The only good thing that can be said about the graphics is that It Isn't CGI. Beyond that, the entire package was beaten with an ugly stick; the maps are plain white with indistinct, blotchs of "terrain," the roads are ugly, pixelated brown lines, the borders are ugly, pixelated black lines, the water is ugly, pixelated blobs of blue. Even the aircraft graphics are strictly VGA-quality. Of course, it can be argued that the graphics are not terribly important, and this viewpoint is probably correct. The game wouldn't play one bit better if a rich, detailed, pleasing environment had been created. Of course, my Mazda wouldn't drive any worse if the interior looked like a 1987 Plymouth Reliant, either. Of course, the closest competition, FLIGHT COMMANDER 2, is both gloriously beautiful compared to WOV and a half-dozen years old now. CARRIERS AT WAR looked better. Far better. The graphics bugged me much more than this issue usually does, for one very simple reason; it would have been *trivial*, and *dirt cheap* to have produced a nice - at least *decent* - looking map for this game. I mean, there's only *one* friggin' map in the whole game - how hard/expensive would it have been to make it pleasing to the eye? Why not do this? The second first impression I got was that the player can only game out pre-canned missions - already in the air - not select his own strike packages and plan a mission; selecting aircraft, ordnance, routes, and groupings. Every scenario I've seen so far starts with the strike heading into the target. From that point, you can control virtually every aspect of the unfolding mission ... but you have to accept what you were given. There aren't that many scenarios with the package - only 23 - and this, combined with the limited nature of each scenario, could sharply limit replayability. It would have been loads more fun to operate as the Air Staff *and* as the Strike Commander. Oh, and there are only 23 scenarios. This issue is mitigated greatly by the fact that there's a scenario editor - and here the picture brightens considerably. There are year- by-year, squadron-by-squadron OOBs for what looks like the entire Vietnam War. The scenario editor looks tremendously powerful, and it looks trivial to swiftly create large, elaborate scenarios. There's also an OOB editor, so players could create entirely new squadrons. Hundreds of aircraft are represented, from SR-71 recon aircraft to A-1 piston-engined attack aircraft. It looks to me as though every significant aircraft that took part in the Vietnam Air War is present. There's no map editor, but given that the only interesting air war in Vietnam took place over the north, this isn't troublesome. All in all, it looks as though a player could easily game out any interesting air battle of the Vietnam War - and there will probably be any number of user-scenarios posted for the game system. Gameplay is perfectly straightforward. You click on your flight, and information appears in the larger panel on the left. Various readouts about individual flights and targets can be displayed directly on the map, if desired. Giving orders is easy and fluid. Click on a flight, right click on a point on the map, and the flight will head off. Hold down shift when right-clicking to see an options/orders menu - a sort of "mix 'n' match" parameters list. Want to intercept an enemy flight? Click on your fighters, right-click on the enemy. Want to attack a bridge? Click on some bombers, right click on the target. Of course, there's more to it than this, but the interface is suitable to the task, and doesn't bog the player down in any significant way. There are no "turns"; the game runs in Pausible Continuous Time, so you can run the game in real-time, somewhat to greatly accelerated time, or pause the game to give orders. There are no hexes, just a fine-grained map using absolute positioning. There are all sorts of player aids to manage units within the game system; "rulers" to determine range, readouts on expected aircraft range at various speeds, and a dozen or so different range "circles" (arcs, etc) that can be displayed to detail various game and systems distances. The game is "air controller" oriented, in that the player manages the air battle as the strike commander. You can give very detailed orders to the various flights, but the actions of individual aircraft at the single-plane level are beyond your control. You can vector that flight of F4Js to a perfect "zero" intercept, but you're not maneuvering each individual aircraft (as in FLIGHT COMMANDER 2), so if they miss ... well, they miss. There's plenty to keep you busy, however, what with Wild-Weasels conducting SEAD, fighters on TARCAP / BARCAP missions, various strike packages, a host of electronic warfare assets - even tankers and rescue elements. I've played out a half-dozen scenarios, with dubious success thus far, but the game system does take a little getting used to. Once I sort out how all the different weapon and electronic systems interact, I suspect my scores will improve. That said, I'm not finding anything that makes me want to pull my hair out and howl at the moon. Overall, this looks like a pretty good package, and certainly able to deliver $40 worth of gameplay. If the HPS folks would spend the first $39.95 they take in one an 8th grader to color them a decent map[1], and spend another $150 on Stolichnaya for a bunch of scenario designers to cobble together another 50 scenarios, there really wouldn't be anything to complain about. [1] Here's hoping HPS left the map file "open." If they did, it'll probably take all of 15 minutes for somebody to run up a decent map. -- Giftzwerg *** Our military must rise to its responsibility to reduce the pressure on the National Command Authority - in essence, the president - by rapidly and effectively executing orders to root out enemy resistance or nests of terrorists. To do so, we must develop the capabilities to fight within the 'media cycle,' before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can twist the facts and portray us as the villains. Before the combat encounter is politicized globally. Before allied leaders panic. And before such reporting exacerbates bureaucratic rivalries within our own system. Time is the new enemy." - Ralph Peters From: Giftzwerg Subject: WAR OVER VIETNAM: Second Impressions... First, a couple of important caveats: (1) Perhaps this is unfair, but if not for the fact that there are almost no other games like this one, I would be *slamming* this title. Limited scenarios (and not terribly good ones at that...), no campaign game, off-the-shelf clunky interface, abysmal graphics... The only thing that tempers this list is the fact that unless you want to pull out a dusty copy of FLIGHT COMMANDER 2 or similarly ancient (in PC terms) titles, this game and its future siblings are your only choice. Unfair or not, this game is going to benefit from the fact that there aren't a pile of other, better efforts covering the same topic. (2) All anyone can really "review* is what they put in the box (Well, CD wrapper...). I *suspect* that many of the problems with this game as it exists relate to the limited and badly-designed slate of scenarios - and the game does include a nice editor to create better ones. But it's impossible to judge the *potential* to correct the lack of decent scenarios, particularly since the game parameters are so poorly detailed in the accompanying documentation. With these in mind: They forgot the campaign game. Virtually everything that's wrong with this title can be laid at the door of the above. Had the system included facilities for a campaign game - a linked series of strikes over several days on a slate of targets - then this game could be a world-beater. The big problem is that the 23 scenarios included almost all start with the air assets on station - and the strike elements virtually on top of the target. It's perhaps the ultimate instantiation of what I call the "heart attack" model of player command; these scenarios all put the player in the role of a second-in-command taking over an already-planned effort at absolutely the last minute, to game out somebody else's strike (presumably, the overall air commander, who suffered a heart attack). This leaves the player with precious little to do when compared with what you could be doing. Sure, you can move the assets around and tactically game-out the strike, but ultimately half of the fun - planning the strike - is already missing from the game before the player even sits down. It's like taking over from another chess player on move 15. A game with campaign features would have changed this. In a campaign game, the player would *have* to have the ability to plan *and* conduct his own strikes, rather than just game out someone else s strikes. This would open up a whole new dimension for the game; selecting strike assets and ordnance packages, putting support assets in place, allowing for SEAD based on intelligence, planning routes to and from the target - hell, selecting the *target* in some instances. But having decided not to include a campaign, the focus of this design became "gaming out the strike," and that's fundamentally brain-damaged. Consider an example. The Thai Nguyen Steel Plant scenario. The player starts with four F-105 SEAD aircraft right on top of the target. The main strike is about to turn at the final IP to the target. What decisions can the player make at this point? All you can really do is plot the Weasels to hit the AAA and SAMS as they pop up, and plot the strike to hit the steel plant. Sometimes a lot of your planes will be shot down, sometimes fewer of them. Sometimes you bomb the steelworks flat, sometimes not. If MIGs appear, your F-4s can generally handle them. But there really isn't the feeling that *your decisions* are the difference between victory or defeat - just that sometimes you get better die rolls on SAM intercepts and bombing accuracy and dogfights. What the player cries out to do is plan his own strike on the Thai Nguyen plant. Take some of the F-105s configured as bombers and load them as SEAD aircraft. Load some of the F-4s with bombs. Fly a fighter sweep ahead of the strike package. Fly the sweep in concert with the Wild Weasels. I mean, this isn't even a "what-if" type question; the *actual* strike planners could have done any or all of this, and this is really the level of command that most players will want. Heck, it's the level of command players *get* in any number of flight simulators that allow mission planning. Of course, you can do this with the editor, but that's not the point; there is no support in the *game* - DYO points-selections, for example - to allow a player a game-limited, tied-to-victory-conditions-way to make planning choices and then conduct the strike. Sure, you can throw out this scenario and design your own - or you could throw out WAR OVER VIETNAM and play FLIGHT COMMANDER 2. And this brings us to another criticism; it's unclear what support *has* been built into the game for scenario designers to take advantage of. For example (and I posted this earlier...), the editor will let a player create a scenario that's several weeks long - and the game will let players re-arm aircraft and send them back out on new strikes. But the documentation fails to answer the crucial questions this raises; does the game just let a player keep sending strikes out over and over and over as though the pilots were robots and aircraft never need servicing? Do airbases run out of stores and fuel? What determines which weapons are reloaded back at base? Can a player change this, loading his F-4s as bombers instead of fighters? What about weather? Can it change over time? Visibility? Are there day/night cycles? None of this is addressed in the Help File that comes with the editor; it just says you can specify, say, a Duration for the scenario. No details are provided. My *suspicion* is that no support is built in for multi-day missions, and that this sharply limits the ability of the editor to create such missions ... and allowing long-Duration missions is simply an oversight. Perhaps The Amazing Kreskin can puzzle this out on his own, but some documentation would have been useful for the non- psychics among us. The overall impression one gets after spending some time with the system is that this game is unfinished, and was rushed out the door to suit the timetable of someone other than the designer (not that this lets him off the hook in any meaningful way...). I've already mentioned the terrible look of the graphics and the interface, but there are dozens of ways the game system could have been improved ... and, one suspects, *would* have been improved after a significant period of testing. For example, the sounds that accompany the game are perfectly worthless. You get some pilot "banter" ("Cabbage crates coming over the briny," to quote the Pythons...), over the "radio," but it's just noise - unconnected in any way to game events. It strikes me that it would have been fairly easy to implement a database of meaningful sound events and tie them to what was actually going on in the game. This is even more poignant as the game fails to alert the player to some very, very important stuff that just happens to be taking place outside of the visible portion of the map. Why not issue a meaningful sound alert when enemy aircraft are detected? As it stands now, if you miss a little red dot on the map in your zeal to prosecute some other area of interest, the enemy could eat your lunch. Why not just have the audio go, "Bandits! Bandits!!" when a little red triangle is drawn on the map for the first time? Similarly, the player isn't alerted when his aircraft are about to do something very, very dumb - like roaring over Communist China at full 'burner because the player forgot to give new orders and the flight just continued onwards. Ooops. Overall, I get the impression that there's a pretty good game lurking under the raw, unpolished surface. The tactical elements - what actually happens over the target - seem to work correctly. But ultimately the player is strictly limited to the painfully tactical problem of a single airstrike, generally so much "in progress" that player choices are almost comically precluded. The earlier poster who asserted that there wasn't much to do except watch as the planes flew down the white lines to the target was uncomfortably close to the truth. What should have happened - and what would make this game worthwhile to anyone other than us desperately air-strategy-starved wretches - was to build the solid tactical system into a campaign-capable wrapper that would allow players to do more than game out somebody else's airstrike. As it stands now, my personal position would be that this title should be avoided unless the gamer has a tactical air combat jones that he just can't service any other way. I certainly won't be availing myself of any other titles in this series unless something more interesting is designed-in. -- Giftzwerg *** "Here's a good question to gauge whether you're sane or not. Which would you prefer: four more years of Bush, or a military coup that put Kerry in power? If it takes you more than 2 seconds to reply, and you follow your answer with any sort of amplification that contains the word 'but,' seek help." - James Lileks From: joadpar@bigpond.com (Adam Parker) Subject: Re: WAR OVER VIETNAM: Second Impressions... Giftzwerg wrote in message news:... > Speaking for myself, so long as the basic focus of the title - and any > sequels - remains moving airplane counters on individual missions that > someone else planned, my involvement is going to be short. I hear you Giftz but for potential buyers, something should be made clear. In nearly all wargames, scenarios start with forces on map. PC wargames and board wargames alike. Some forces in land games may be fixed, battle damaged etc., all for scenario ambiance. With WoV, this is manifested in the fact that some forces MAY have a flight path preset, some may not. (To those not owning the game, you left click your assets and right click the map to assign flight paths to them. How you do this and where you do this amongst other things, defines your various orders. The paths are then shown as white lines with time segments, distances etc., to assist your planning). The thing is, where flight paths have been preset, these are MERELY guides for the less experienced players to get an idea of what is capable. Other than the assets available, WoV places NO other restrictions on players. WoV in this way, caters for the newbie (to strategic air warfare) and the grognard alike. The experienced player will simply disagree with many preset plans and assign his/her own. You guys should know this - this explanation is for the prospective buyer. HOWEVER - EVERY flight path for EVERY asset is then at the player's full control. Everything is at the player's FULL discretion. Therefore you will see flight paths you just don't agree with. EVERY asset therefore, is IMMEDIATELY able to be re-set, re-assigned, re-ordered, re-scheduled, re-arranged, re-anything. Someone posted once about the 1967 "Thai Nguyen Steel Plant" scenario (spelling may not be correct here). The criticism was made that forces start right on top of the target. I played this last night and unless I was playing the wrong scenario, I just could not see this! This is a brilliant scen and I won't give anything away. But it starts with 2 flights of F105 Thunderchief Wild Weasals with AGM's and MK82 bombs leading the way in a beeline to the plant. About 5-10 minutes flying time away on a totally perpendicular course is the main body comprising numerous F4C Phantoms and more Thuds configured for Iron Hand bombing. To the south east about 10 minutes more flies an assorted rescue package. Jamming and ancient Air Radar packages are on map too, refueling is there. So are plenty of North Vietnamese radars... Well, the task looked pretty simple to me and I queued my main package for a strike, sent some F4's on Combat Air Patrols where I thought danger might exist. I then took my 2 Thuds nearest the action and straight off went looking for SAM's. I'll give no more information, albeit to say - SPLASH! Two flights of Thuds hit the ground in flames. It wasn't that simple after all. It would be a bad day for the Air Force... Happy gaming all - this is a superb wargame title in my book. I heartily recommend it - not being involved in any official way with it, owing to its subject matter and design. Plenty of opportunity for added chrome to come. Nice an initimate, just love it. Giftz I hope you get to take it off the shelf again for as you said, it's nothing like RGW (or Bombing the Reich/Battle of Britain for that matter - games I too wish I could enjoy). Adam.