I've been going on a WWII kick recently--reading Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Kahn's Seizing the Enigma, and Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And, naturally, being a gamer, playing Gary Grigsby's World at War, Hearts of Iron II and Strategic Command: European Theatre.

So when Slitherine sent a link to the current beta of Commander: Europe at War, I jumped on it.

This piece is something of an early look at Commander, along with a "contrast and comparison" of the early games.

Gary Grigsby's game is an old favorite; I bought it when it first came out, and have played it many times since. It's a turn-based, area-movement game of the entire war, playable in 7 hours or less--about at the level of Axis & Allies, but far more closely tied to history. I like it a great deal, but there are some things I find frustrating. For one thing, the Japs are a paper tiger. With any reasonable Allied strategy, the Solomons campaign is pointless and should be avoided, and the Home Islands can fall by late 43, early 44 at the earliest. Indeed, adopting a "Germany first" strategy will simply delay the end of the war; you're better off concentrating on the Nips, and shuffling troops back to Europe for the late 44/early 45 assault on Germany. Indeed, if you don't go after the Japanese first, you're probably condemned to a 46 victory.

For another thing, while the game claims that a tech level of 10 for Heavy Air is equivalent to "the atom bomb," in fact there's no atom bomb in the game; a strategic attack with tech level 10 heavy air does not trigger a surrender, which is frustrating, if you've devoted the time and resources to develop your tech level so far. Bit of a bait and switch.

Also, the high level of granularity of the game means that a lot of the important aspects of the war are lost. While the Germans can knock out the French on turn 1 (which is Spring 40, and historical as far as that goes), there are only two French provinces facing the eastern frontier, so that the attack is through the Low Countries, and indistinguishable from the Schlieffen Plan--whereas the reason the French collapsed so quickly is that they rushed forces into Belgium in the expectation of facing another Schlieffen plan, leaving the Ardennes largely undefended, and that's where the German armored assualt happened, quickly pinning both large French forces and the BEF to the Channel coast. In other words, I want a little more detail.

Hearts of Iron II is also area-based, but at a far more detailed level, with even the North African littoral having a depth of several provinces (except at the Qattara). It's also a "simultaneous, pausable turn-based" game, along the same lines as most of Paradox's other titles (EU II, Crusader Kings, and the rest). It also has a highly detailed production and tech system, which I like, as well as the ability to start the game in 1936--so you can play with a lot of historical what-ifs that most games don't allow (French resistance to the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Allies making a stand in the defense of Czechoslovakia, etc.). Conversely, the complexity of the political system often means that the game diverges in wildly ahistorical ways--Turkey joining the Axis, say--which makes for a more interesting game qua game, but you do wind up wishing that you can turn on something binding the game more closely to historicity.

For me, however, the real problem with HoI II is in its level of detail; playing the full war takes forever, and beyond a certain point, I'm not all that interested in piddling little details of day-by-day combat. If World at War is too high level, HoI II is too low level.

Strategic Command plays far too much like Third Reich to me. Pace Prados, I never much liked that game; the production system, in particular, seems more based on the limitations of the countermix than reality. It (and Strategic Command) are perfectly good games qua games, but neither feels much like the actual war.

Which leads us to Commander. Like Strategic Command, it uses a hex map, is turn-based, and is limited to the European theater. In general, I tend to think that hex-based wargames are humorous--we adopted hexes for boardgames because they provide a better tesselation of territory than a square grid, but computers are quite capable of calculating true distances trivially, so to my mind, the use of hexes in digital games has always been a technologically unnecessary homage to an earlier non-digital style. (Of course, one might say the same of provinces.)

But never mind. Commander has what I'd consider the right level of detail; you are able to distinguish between an attack through the Ardennes and one via the Belgian coastal plain, but the turns (and geography) is sufficiently granular that you don't feel tied up in slow, petty little force deployments, as you (or I) do in HoI II.

The production system is reasonable, if still, in some ways, flawed. You have three constraints: production capacity, manpower, and oil. Production capacity is directly tied to cities (which is somewhat unhistorical--e.g., the conquest of France certainly reduced Allied production capacity, but did not add to Germany's to anything like the same degree). Manpower is based solely on the nation. Oil doesn't affect production directly, but all units bar leg infantry consume oil with each action, which in the late game is a dire constraint on the Axis (but not on the Allies, nor on Russia, unless the Caucasus should fall).

While Commander does provide for longer construction times for some units, the disparity here is far less historical than in, say, World at War. E.g., in Commander, leg infantry is available the same turn (week) as produced, while battleships take 6 turns (weeks). Realistically, you need more like multiple seasons between the time a battleship is laid down and the time it launches--something that World at War handles pretty well.

Reasonably, Commander has the concept of 'national effort;' e.g., in 1940, the Soviet Union and the US are devoting only a fraction of their national productive capacity to military construction, and increase it over time. However, the Germans are producing to their limit from the inception, which is historically wrong; not until late 1942 did the Germans decide to mobilize entirely for war. (The Nazis had an ideological attachment to the idea that women should remain at home, preferring to keep men in the factories rather than drafting them, supplementing them as necessary with slave labor from the conquered territories.) However, given that the cities in Germany provide only a small production basis, and the game gives the Germans most of the productive capacity of conquered cities later in the game, this is probably necessary to make the production levels balance out to something reasonable--pointing up the flaw of the city-based production model, of course.

Many other games (including World at War) tie tech development directly to production--that is, you use production points to increase your tech level. To my mind, this is fundamentally flawed--except in the case of the Manhattan Project, few technical advances in the war depended on the use of productive capacity. Rather, they were limited by available technical talent and, e.g., scientists devoted to cracking codes or building better radar inherently weren't available to making better airplanes or building an A-bomb. In other words, available technical talent was certainly a constraint, but a different constraint from the size of your industrial base. I've yet to see a game that acknowledges this.

Commander is a little different; you have to use production points to build science teams, but once you've done so, you can allocate them among different tech development priorities independently. Also, new tech, when developed, doesn't automatically devolve to your usings (as in World at War); instead, you must spend tech points (as in HoI II) to upgrade your units, which is reasonable.

Commander does an excellent job simulating the fluidity of blitzkrieg warfare--indeed, far better than the province-based games, because the granularity of the hexes allow you to better represent penetration and encirclement. In fact, this is where the game excels, at least for me; particularly in East Front battles, you get a far better sense of the nature of mechanized warfare than you do in either HoI II or World at War, where things feel much more like a frontal assault slugfest with armor as your stormtroops.

Seemingly (in my limited number of plays), both the US and the Soviet Union will intervene on the Allied side by end 41, regardless of what the Axis does; while this is probably essential to provide a balanced game, it's also (from my perspective) annoying. While Japan is off-map, and presumably attacks in December 41, I do want the option (as Germany) to avoid Hitler's mistake of declaring war on the US--and let Roosevelt try to get a declaration of war on us through a reluctant Congress that would rather crush the perfidious Nips first. Similarly, despite many warnings from both his own commanders and the Western Allies, Stalin seemed obvlivious to the potential of German attack in 41 until Barbarossa was well under way; if Hitler had wanted to string the Russians along another year or even longer, it's quite possible he could have done so.

I like WWII games in which Seelöwe is possible--admittedly in reality it was fairly unlikely, but with enough commitment and minor differences in strategy, perhaps it would have been feasible. In Commander, however, it's almost too easy (at least starting in the 40 scenario); when France falls, there will be only a handful of corps in the UK (which is realistic). However, any unit next to a port can turn into a transport, move to the UK and, on the next turn (allowing a turn of attacks by British naval and air), land. They will then be out of supply--unless a German naval unit is on a coast traceable to the invading unit.

So all you do, basically, is move the one German battleship unit into the Thames estuary to provide supply, land a half-dozen German corps, and Bob's your uncle. This is, frankly, absurd; in reality, the Grand Fleet would steam out of Scapa Flow, blow the tiny German surface fleet to kingdom come, and savage the eclectic collection of merchant ships and destroyers the Germans were relying on to transport troops to England. Germany's only hope of pulling off an invasion of Britain relied on first achieving air supremacy over the Channel (and therefore the ability to destroy or at least badly damage the British fleet if it intervened)--which is what the Battle of Britain, which the Germans lost badly, was about: an attempt to achieve air superiority.

But in Commander, the British do not retain a reasonable naval reserve at Scapa Flow, instead sending every available ship to fight the (in 1940 minor) German U-boat threat in the Atlantic--and when the German transports appear on the British coast, they're not positioned to respond. Even after the German landing, when their supplies depend critically on the positioning of a single battleship unit, the powerful British fleet never appears to challenge it. England falls forthwith.

Hrmph.

Oil becomes a major constraint on Axis action by the mid-game. They're critically dependent on the Ploesti oil fields in Romania (historically true); every time you use a naval or air unit or armor, 3 oil units are expended, and 1 for mechanized inf. By mid-1942, this means you've essentially run out of oil, and are limited to one minor offensive per turn. Since Soviet production ramps up much more slowly than historically (even in 1941, the Russians were producing more tanks per month than the Germans by a considerable margin, and as their battlefield losses declined, the preponderance of forces shifted with remarkable rapidity), the oil constraint is about the only thing that shifts the control of the offensive to the Soviet side. So okay, it suffices to produce an historical shift, but it also pretty much forces the Axis into a drive for the Caucasus--which, of course, Hitler insisted on, but the rest of OKW fought against, in favor of a renewed drive for the conquest of Moscow. Also, there's no simulation of the successful German effort to build factories inside the Reich to transform coal into petroleum, which helped immeasurably during the war (until those factories were destroyed by the Allied bombing campaign in 1944).

Still, all of this is criticism on the margin. In total, this is a comprehensive, thoughtful simulation of the European conflict, at what I'd consider the "right" level of granularity--a level capable of showing important strategic considerations without bogging you down in the petty detail of HoI II. The production model is susceptible to criticism, but is no worse, and in some ways better, than those of the other games. I've devoted some dozens of hours to it already, and expect I will devote considerably more before I've tired of it.

For those of you interested in strategic-level WWII games, I'd say it's definitely a game to look forward to.

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posted by Greg at 8:17 PM 33 comments