A Modern Total War? (Discussion, Oppinions)

[Fisherking]

I have never played a RTS game set in WWII. But knowing what I know of combat and armored vehicles I don’t know how you could maintain control of the situation if it were larger than company scale. Every element has a task and every leader fights his own little engagement as best he can. Trying to micro manage 12 to 17 tanks even without infantry support would be draining. Trying to get fire support also takes time. Artillery doesn’t just start shooting. It has to be called up, the guns have to be laid for the target area, and then they have to be adjusted to the target. They can’t see what they are shooting at.

One person can not hope to control everything going on in such an environment. Each tank has several types of ammunition for different types of targets. Every platoon has a limited objective. This is to help maintain control of what is happening. Trying to understand what is happening over the radio net can be difficult in its self.

Let’s just say for the purpose of this that infantry starts engaging targets at 500 meters. Tanks begin engaging at 1000 meters and supporting artillery and mortars at about 5000 meters and stops at a minimum of 250 meters. The standard interval for a tank platoon is 100 meters between vehicles. Ideally infantry is spaced at about 5 to 10 meters. Artillery is positioned one terrain feature to the rear of the battle line. You want to have air power do its attacking just as far away from your position as you can. From up there it is hard to tell who is who and the direction of attack can be crucial.

Can you see what a wide area just a company sized element takes up? Then you add in smoke, dust, explosions, and so forth and it gets really hard to tell where anyone else is. And that is in good weather! It seems though that you never fight in good weather! And we haven’t even gotten to terrain yet.

For this reason everything is broken down into 4 or 5. Four or five men on a crew, four or five infantrymen in a team, four or five tanks in a platoon, and so on up the line, so someone can keep a handle on what is happening.

Now of course games are not real life so the complexity can be reduced a little but you are still not going to manage 10,000 individual men on the battlefield. If there were, it just would not be an enjoyable experience. If you have the computer control most of the units while you watch for the most part, and just make critical adjustments then you have an operational scale game, and not a tactical one. If you change the scale to go with abstract units it just is not the same game anymore.

For those reasons a 20th century game might best be something for a different series, rather than a Total War. (or more rightly Total War as we have come to know it)

Also I don’t think that the period exactly meets up to what they like to have. Wars in the 20th century were either small scale one on one brush wars or massive coalitions struggling over whole continents or the entire world. In effect just a larger one on one conflict.

I have no problem with CA creating what ever game they care to in what ever time period but it doesn’t require it to be part of the Total War Series.