[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

Falcon 4's campaign engine deals with enormous formations and simple missions, which makes it easIER.

NK attacks SK. Just deciding THAT locks in a lot of decisions, such as the general strategic and operational directions the formations will take, and the list of missions for the units of both sides.

But, as SeaQueen's pointed out, there's no reason why the stategic-tactical naval sim can't be theatre specific. You could do a campaign where it's already decided that China attacks Taiwan, for example.

OK, so we have this mob that's supposed to be hundreds of thousands of troops and a few thousand tanks. Because the pilot's view is very limited, it is easy to use relatively simple formulae and norms to plausibly re-enact all those "tens of thousands of units" promised in the manual. Entire SAM units and bases can be aggregated and the algorithm for calculating attrition can be as simple as dice rolling. The advances of entire divisions against entire entire brigades defending can be similarly aggregated and resolved without wasting too much computer power. Add a dice of randomness and the pilot is not likely to get a continuous enough view of enough of the situation to know the result may be all BS.

So if it's possible to reduce direct fire, indirect fire, SAM and AAM shots to die rolls in Faclon, why can't torp and missile shots be abstracted into a naval sim? Or why can't these actions be resolved as they were in FC?

Generating the tactical mission itself when the pilot gets close is really a relatively sophisticated Random Mission Generator. De-aggregate the units closest to the pilot and plop down some targets and some AA, a mix of randomness and following some OPFOR textbook. Bingo, one dynamic mission.

Um, the units present in Falcon aren't random. The AA that is there is there because it is there. The position and movement of these units are tracked by the campaign engine.

Ironically, because there are fewer units, spread farther apart in the naval world, it actually becomes harder to write a good campaign engine. Starting on the tactical level, you can't solve most of the problems in an abstract, aggregated manner - there are too few ships, and they are often spread too far apart for aggregation to bring reasonable results. You have to solve them de-aggregated, which means AI must be running for each naval unit not currently being manned.

Fleet command could handle it. And Falcon kept track of hundreds of ground units, each with dozens of invididual vehicles--the destruction of which was accounted for invididually (ie you destroy the SA-9s with a tank batallion and those SA-9 are still gone when you attack next time).

Further, on a higher operational level, the writing of plausible missions becomes very much harder. We have trouble getting entire human staffs to think operationally or strategically. Let alone a computer.

The difficulty of strategic thought is what makes it interesting and worth playing.