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Saturday, April 13, 2019

The long, slow learning process of War in the East

As I mentioned, I picked up War in the East (and War in the West).

Learning to play is . . . a process.

The manual for WitE is very clearly written. But it's almost 300 pages. It's dense. The detail is immense.

A quick trial of the Minsk scenario quickly put me in my place - the manual must be read before I get anywhere. Got it.

WitW isn't any easier. I fired up Operation Husky - the invasion of Sicily - and it was even harder to get started on.

Both of the games are beautiful. The detail is excellent. The music is good (although I turn it off ASAP - a personal preference.) The graphics are clear. I feel like I need a gigantic monitor just so I can step back and see the frontage more clearly and get a feel for the whole battle area. I probably don't, but it gives that feeling.

My plan is to go back to War in the East after I finished reading this manual, watch a video or two of gameplay, and then try again. It doesn't matter how well I do, just that I learn to play. From there I can try to win the game, and try bigger and bigger scenarios. This is probably time I don't have a lot of, but I can do it in chunks and don't have to worry about jostling the map.

Still, having this game project to work on makes me happy. This is the detailed game I always wanted, on the massive scale I'd always dreamed of. I just can't say no.

2 comments:

  1. To be fair, Operation Husky involves amphibious operations which along with airborne ops are not obvious or intuitive (though they make sense in some respects). Once I got that from the tutorials/manuals, I was able to figure out the basics (and I mean super basic stuff like moving and combat) fairly quickly. Supply is probably the thing I still need to work on. I'm always outrunning my supplies and never 100% sure I know how to get back in supply. That said, there's so much to dive into (reassignment of commanders/units/support, different movement modes, and so on), I don't blame you at all for taking it slowly. Was just happy WitW had a Cobra/Goodwood scenario.

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    1. That's why as physically small as that is, I'm doing better trying with the Minsk encirclement. At least that's land-only and I can mostly just move units and do Hasty Attacks.

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