From there, the conflict travels a path of almost infinite possibility and outcome, as long as it's consistent. In other words, the starting point of any conflict becomes the "base case," or "starting node" or whatever language makes sense. Those are not rhetorical questions, but things which need to be answered in a design. Was it likely that the war played out the way it did? Was the historical outcome an anomaly, and thus it becomes hard to design a game which can lead to a historical outcome? Does confirmation bias alter the design of games in such a way that they become design for effect, regardless of how hard a designer tries to make a game that is free of that bias? I'd point to the many WW2 games which have been created that all suffer from the same issue of trying to find the balance between giving players freedom to change history, but of also making the historical outcome possible. This is true, although the same issues crop up with games based on historical fact. You can make a fun game- which is a fine thing in its own right- but I don't think you can truly simulate the conflict. Absent those outcomes you can't test the design decisions and it's at most an educated guess. Yes, you can probably put together a TO&E for a Russian mechanised brigade or whatever, but all the other innumerable factors that go into scenario design are unknowns because these conflicts haven't played out.ĭesigning a scenario which, as you suggest, can contribute to our understanding of conflict, requires testing the design against real-world outcomes. The trouble is that we really don't have enough information to make such a scenario about a current conflict. I know there is always some distaste around that, but the study of conflict via simulation is of considerable value, both for understanding from an academic point of view but also raising awareness and public understanding. New French Indochina scenarios: Nghia Lo, 1951, Dien Bien Phu, 1954.Would be interesting to see a scenario covering a NATO-Russian war, with modern boundaries and troops. New Korean War scenario: Chosin Reservoir, 1950. New WWII North Africa scenario: Tunisian Campaign, 1942-43 (OPART300). New WWII Western Front scenarios: Operation Dragoon, 1944 (OPART300), Operation Market Garden, 1944, Normandy, 1944 (Rommel variant) and St. New WWII Eastern Front scenarios: Operation Barbarossa, 1941 (OPART300), Smolensk, 1941, and Kursk, 1943 (OPART300). ![]() Of the sixteen new scenarios, four must be run with the OPART300 execution file as noted in the scenario lists that follow. This file is used to run both "huge" scenarios (seemingly over 100K) and in the scenario dditor to handle larger files. Of note is the inclusion of a second game execution file, OPART300. In a synergistic partnership with fans of the game, this version updates the game and fixes every known bug report made by fans to the TalonSoft Internet web site and tweaks/enhances game play to even more realistic levels than in the original product. Not only does Battle Pack 1 contain new scenarios but the basic game execution file has been updated to version 1.06. Sixteen new scenarios are included in the package which nearly doubles the total number of professionally conceived scenarios by designer Norm Koger and his associates. 1: Battle Pack 1 is a scenario add-on for the original game, The Operational Art of War, Vol.
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