Fog

[Didz]

I think its true to say that over the years the trend has been to 'demote' the player, further and further down the command chain.

Shogun units more or less took care of themselves. You told them where to go, they went there, if they met opposition they fought it. 'Fire at Will' was pretty logical and units knew not to kill men on their own side. You could as the general overide that and order them to do it, but unless you intervened personally they did the sensible and honourable thing. So, commanding an army in STW was largely a case of choosing a formation, choosing a place to fight and then monitoring the battle to decide where and when to commit your reserves.

As each successive game has been released the player has had to take over personally more and more from the programme.

Until now we are more or less the equivalent of 'Company Commanders' than generals. In ETW, units will do nothing without being told to do it.

'Threatened by Cavalry?' who cares,
'Friendly Troops standing in front of my gun mussle' so what?

I suspect in the next TW release we will be required to click a button to order our men to reload, and eventually we will be reduced to tapping the 'left foot' and 'right foot' button alternately to get them to march.

Whether this is an honest belief that players are turned on by the desire to micro-manage every aspect of a game, or whether it just makes good economic sense to cut down on coding by getting to the customer to do all the work is difficult to say, but its definately a trend in the gaming industry.

A couple of years ago I bought a game called 'Uncommon Valor', which took this trend to extremes. In that game the player literally had to micro-manage the loading and unloading of every can of spam being transported to your troops. The really weird twist being that whilst you had to micro-manage every aspect of the logistic's, you were not allowed to decide what targets your aircraft attacked. So, that game not only demoted the player to the rank of 'Quartermaster' it actually wouldn't allow you to be the General.

Needless, to say that game is gathering dust on my bookshelf as we speak. I think I played it for a about 3 days tops, big waste of money and a big shame as it was supposed to be a simulation of the war in the pacific in WW2, but 10 hours of managing supply convoys was enough for me. I know supplies are an important aspect of war, but I want to be the General, not the Quartermaster.