War in the East 1941-1945

[Skybird]

Just returned from town and had picked up Gary Grigsby's War in the East for a shabby 5 euros, with DVD and a nicely done, thicker, printed manual. For 5 Euros I thought I could not make much wrong. The screenshot on the DVD box with old-fashioned counters and strategic hexfield map just looked too tasty.

My first WWII-era hexfield strategy game, usually I am not that much into WWII, I heard of this game, they call it one of these monster games, but I not really know what I have embarked on. Well, will find out soon enough.

Any advise on must-have knowledge is welcomed.

[Skybird]

First quick impression: superb map, visually well-done, informative, looking nice, different zooming levels via scroll wheel all disp0laying nicely and comfortable for the eye. I think that is worth to be mentioned, becasue there ahve been very many strategy games of this type who really sucked in this regard.

And that map is big. I mean it is really biggy-big big.

Think I found a new hobby.

Released in 2011, last update in April 2012 - maybe indicating that the version I now installed hopefully is troublefree, bugfree and stable.

Skimmed through the print manual, nice to get started with 124 pages. But help-help: there are pdf's, and the printer friendly main manual still has over 300 pages. :dead:

[Crécy]

picked up Gary Grigsby's War in the East for a shabby 5 euros, with DVD and a nicely done, thicker, printed manual.

5 euros? 5 euros!? 5 EUROS!?!?

[Skybird]

5 euros? 5 euros!? 5 EUROS!?!?

Saturn in Münster, centre town, inside the so-called "Arkaden". The shelf is full. It's no auction, but the regular price tag. I strongly assume our second Saturn at the York Ring is not any different.

German Amazon has it for 8 Euros: http://www.amazon.de/Gary-Grigsbys-War-East-German-Soviet/dp/B004S93TW0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369663246&sr=8-1&keywords=War+in+the+East

:D

[Skybird]

:haha: :har: Was wondering, due to Crécy's reaction. Just found out Matrix Games still sells the download version for a hilarious 66 Euros, the boxed version plus download option even for 74 Euros. :woot: :haha: :har: even the addon costs 2-3 times as much as my pick today...

[Crécy]

It would be cheaper to fly there and get a copy than buy it from matrixgames... For a moment I thought the impossible had happened and I could get it cheap from German amazon but of course it has to be a German version. I've been wanting to get that since release but the outrageous price has kept me away.

Not fair, not fair! :/\\!!

[Skybird]

Which country do you live in?

Edit:
Dang. German version. For a moment I thought I could get it for you and send it to you. But it is still a German version. Stupid me. Sorry.

Edit again:
British Amazon has it for 39 and 43 Pounds.

[Crécy]

Which country do you live in?

Edit:
Dang. German version. For a moment I thought I could get it for you and send it to you. But it is still a German version. Stupid me. Sorry.

Edit again:
British Amazon has it for 39 and 43 Pounds.

Finland. Yeah, figured that it was still a German version. Thanks for the thought though!

And actually the Matrixgames' version is something like 84 euros as the prices listed doesen't include VAT. Thanks for the Amazon info, never really thought that you could buy those games somewhere else than directly from Matrixgames.

[Skybird]

The pack I got today seems to be an exception from the rule. While it can be ordered from US, UK and FR Amazon as well, its always the German import version. So other countries' markets do not seem to offer localised versions of WitE like here.

Spent the last 2 hours with checking it out, and the manual. This is a killer application, no doubt. What Wart in the Pacific is for naval cosim, this is for land cosims.

By size of theatre, only Modern Campaigns: Danube '85 by HPS comes to my mind - from Scandinavia to the Balkan the map reaches, with units being brigades, batallions, partially companies. But it is by far not as much in depth like WitE. WitE is a predominantly administration- and logistics- simulation, it seems. I like the interface very much so far. Very very accessible, intuitive.

Will need plenty of time to familiarize myself with this.

[eddie]

I haven't played it in a while, and hope their latest patch fixed the problem with the Russian Air Force. Before, if you as a German player, broke through the Russian lines, and your units were coming close to a city with a Russian Headquarters there, all of a sudden, it would produce a large number of Russian Air units in the area.

I'm no expert on the history of this part of WWII, but my understanding is that the Luftwaffe decimated the Russian Air Force early in this campaign to the point they were a non-factor in the opening months of the German assault. So where are these Russian air units coming from?

[Red October1984]

I had looked at this game....til I saw the pricetag. :har:

[Skybird]

I said the last update was from April last year, v1.06.06. Well, I used the ingame update function for that. When just having visited their forums I learned that they have released several more updates since then, every couple of weeks and months, last one just being ten days old. The ingame updater does not recognize them. I currently manually download the latest patch 1.07.08, roughly 100 MB.

Well, nice to see ongoing support since Decembre 2010. Also nice to have missed the published payware beta test phase of 2011 :)

There are two addons available also, adding not only new scenarios, but also new rules and refined elements.

[Skybird]

I'm suffering from total and complete data overload. Tables, tables, and more tables. I read on some sites that Grigsby maybe went even beyond the level he already did that in his pacific game.

Comfortable interface, I like it - finally a really good interface in a game of this type, many cosims I knew suffer here. But it is really tough to get into the non-superficial stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFvyNvnz1zk

[eddie]

Well Skybird, have you captured Leningrad yet?:D

[Skybird]

I still... perfect my warplan and finetune the details - by help of this 340 pages heavy manual.

[Skybird]

For those interested, this is almost the complete map, from Mid-Germany to the Ural, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
The map can be zoomed in 5 levels, I post the highest and the lowest zoom-factor, so between the two screenies,
there are three more levels.

Hexfields are 10 miles/16 km. Around 25,000 of them. :doh:

Original size from my monitor, 1680x1050. I intentionally did not shrink the screenies.

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/41/fsscr003nw.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/189/fsscr003nw.jpg/)


http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/9204/fsscr010z.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/844/fsscr010z.jpg/)

[Skybird]

I have stumbled over a map mod that uses almost the same visuals that I used in Modern Campaigns: Danube '85.
They both can be found on Volcano'S site:

http://www.hist-sdc.com/MapMod/index.htm

While I liked the default map already, this replacement also is nice and pays mopre attention to visual clarity. For example the
railnetwork is much easier to see. I am still undecided which map to use. I give the same map screenshots like above, with
the new graphics this time, and for comparison I again do not shrink the images, but leave them at the 1680x1050 that
I see on my monitor.

I have not replaced the counters, I think the default ones do a very good job (in Danube, I colour-coded my own sets, basing
on what I was used to from the GDW tabletop series The Third World War :) ).

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4570/fsscr003y.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/20/fsscr003y.jpg/)

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/6379/fsscr008m.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/29/fsscr008m.jpg/)

[eddie]

There are some map mods made by this group in Germany that you might like too Skybird-

http://www.designmodproject.de/forum/viewforum.php?f=1831

[Skybird]

Thanks, I just checked it, the map, counters and interface. That team and me seem to look at different directions, I think. They are focussing on what I would call "adding patina", to give it all a more historic mood, but as I see it it is at the cost of easy reading of the maps, and visual clarity. I admit, not so much my taste.

While I like the map mod I just posted, it is very possible that I go back to the default set anyway. In the end, I think they did a very good job on that already. And the symbols of the interface have clarity.

[Skybird]

Just had a brief look at Danube 85 again. That map still was slightly bigger, I just realised. 65,000 hexes, compared to WitE's 25,000. Probably the reason why I played the big, major, full scenario just once. :D 3-hours-turns, you know. And that on 65,000 hexes from Scandinavia to the Balkan. :D One must be crazy to play the full major big bang thing.

BTW, I lost. Total administrative overload.

[Otto Fuhrmann]

Which country do you live in?

Edit:
Dang. German version. For a moment I thought I could get it for you and send it to you. But it is still a German version. Stupid me. Sorry.

Edit again:
British Amazon has it for 39 and 43 Pounds.

I would think that there is language options in the menu? Most games sold internationally have that especially since there are English, Russian and German versions that I know of. Or maybe it doesn't. I am on the same boat that I don't want to pay a huge price for the game, but now that you found it on German Amazon I will get it there. My German could do with some testing anyways :)

[Skybird]

Sorry, no way to turn this into English, at least as far as I am aware of. The options do not have a language setting, and I find no config-file where maybe changing a text entry manually would switch it to English.

You do not see this game on DVD in shops in England or America, it seems. Checking both countries' Amazon sites gives you only this German DVD as a direct import. Sometimes you see games brought to the stores in exclusive countries only. Why? I do not know.