Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird
Danube - stable? Is it a good title? Sorry, but knowing that you have it, Raptor, helps me nothing. I have no idea what to expect of these HPS titles, how they play, how realistic or unrealistic it is, the sequence of play. Found two links promising reviews, but both links broken.
I know an old cosim, the Third World War series by GDW, also the Assault! series by GDW. How does it compare to these two, for example?
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Sorry, thought you had a specific question about it.
It's stable, and IMO a pretty good game.
The gameplay is a pretty simple IGOUGO TBS. Units are mostly battalion scale (There are some companies, mostly Recon units) and are represented by an equipment type which has the typical values such as soft attack, hard attack, etc., morale, quality, fatigue and some special attributes. Units have movement points which they expend during the turn on actions such as moving (Obviously), deploying to and from travel mode, firing on enemy units, assaulting hexes and the like. Units of course can also suffer from conditions such as being out of ammo, out of fuel, disrupted, isolated...
A few elements are abstracted, such as wing fixed aircraft (You choose a target to call bombers or attack aircraft on if they're available, and the flight might either go through or be intercepted by SAMs or fighters), SIGINT which tells you the location of certain enemy HQs and jamming which puts HQs out of command.
It's hard to judge how realistic or unrealistic it is as the actual war or anything realistically similar to it has ever happened. The fighting seems mostly realistic to me; there are a few cases where casualties seem too low (If I call an attack aircraft squadron against a battalion of tanks, they would usually lose no more than 1 or 2 tanks), though I'm not the best judge of that.
Here's a review of Fulda Gap, it's still pretty relevant as the game system is mostly the same:
http://www.combatsim.com/memb123/htm/2002/08/fuldagap/
(Some of this stuff, like chemical weapons and helicopters blocking units have been changed since then)
Note that the larger scenarios and grand campaign are enormeous, may take quite a while to complete one of those.