My weekend was pretty good-I finally finished up my month-long Silent War endeavour (with a resounding success, more on this later on in the post, and had a chance to play some Combat Commander: Europe Friday for a few hours.
Now that I finished the campaign of Silent War, I can say that I both hearty recommend the game and wish to warn people about it. First of all, the game really is a simulation first, and a game second. The game is exceedingly evocative-to the point of dropping into light role-play was not uncommon-and as a high level recreation of unrestricted submarine warfare, it is almost flawless. You'll want to get frustrated,be tempted to throw dice, wish you could sack all of your incompentent skippers, etc. Basically a large spectrum of emotions that the real commander felt.
However, at some point you get into a groove with the game, and the decisions being made per turn get less suspenseful and meaningful, and later on they really draw out as the number of subs that you need to patrol per turn increases. You have your set patrol patterns, and it's just a matter of working your way to the next war phase (one of the few times when the board state really changes) and compensating the best you can for the events that come along your way. I feel that at those times the simulation just isn't interactive enough. The removal/trivialization of the shipping tonnage quotas about nine months into the game also doesn't help, as it means that all of your metrics are long-term goals instead of having to approach things with a short-term perspective as well.
I think that Steel Wolves, the U-boat/Donitz sequel, will offer a much better game experience while not having to really compromise the simulation, due to the nature of that campaign (where things get harder and Hitler gets angrier as time goes on). So a big thumbs up to Silent War, just be ready for a) a VERY long game (took me over 100 hours to finish up my campaign, which ended early historically) and b) have periods, especially later in the game, where it's more book-keeping than stimulating decisions.
On the bright side, I did save my spreadsheets of every single patrol and encounter in the entire game. Which rocks, if only for the sake of my own personal nerdery pride.
Combat Commander: Europe played great on Friday and I've already asked for a copy for my birthday next month. It's highly interactive, not too gamey, and is pretty straightfoward. I'm going to try to talk my Dad into trying the game over the computer to see if we can set up a few matches-he'd love this stuff.
So with my table clear from Silent War, I busted out my copy of Fields of Fire for my solitaire fix this morning and started trying to grok the ruleset. It really isn't as absurd as people make it out to be-the rules are consistent if very complicated and I'm itching to give the game a go when I get home. Really need to get some sleeves for the cards though. The command and control mechanism looks tremendous.
I got an invite also this week to join in a ACW miniatures campaign using the Fire and Fury system. The guy running the campaign is spotting everyone minatures for their commands, as he owns his own miniatures company over in Raleigh, and I'm looking forward to seeing how a more grown-up sort of minatures game plays out. I was never a very big fan of GW's stuff when I saw it in action and haven't seen Flames of War so I can't speak to that.
Also, Hearts of Iron 3 comes out this week. :lol What a total nerdfest of a week, can't wait wish I could take a day or two off.
