Quote:
Originally Posted by c13Garrison
RR, it sounds like what you are proposing is an 'ahistorical' game wherein equipment and nations are the Only thing the player is sure of, where they are told 3 days before a battle that SigInt indicates there may be a fleet encounter at xyz, and said encounter is randomized to replicate an encounter of battlefleets. Departing from history is the only way to subject the player to true realism.
I am intrigued by this idea, but is SH the vehicle to do it? It sounds like we'd need to start from scratch for such realism. True realism might even mean randomizing land masses and seas.
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Well we have to be a LITTLE rational. Land masses and seas do not change shape depending on events in the war except minutely if thermonuclear devices are dropped in littoral areas. Ocean depths don't change much either. No reason to randomize any of that.
But as far as traffic goes, what the submarine does changes that during the war. You sink a freighter who squawks on the radio. Do merchies continue to ply their way through your sector as if you were not there? In R/L no! They would be interrupted or routed around you. That is why submarines moved around a lot. But RSRD will continue to feed you with victims you would never see if you were in the real war.
Now, so will the stock game. It was made without a feedback loop too. But at least the traffic is random within limits and you cannot predict what you will find. And there are defects in what you encounter: way too many single merchants, not enough convoys or escorted merchants. Wrong kind of traffic in the wrong area. The traffic mod guys are right. When you analyze it there's very little sense in it all.
But random encounters, even defective random encounters much more faithfully represent the experience of the real participants of the game, who NEVER said well, what's the longitude and latitude of the main Japanese force for the Battle of Midway on June 6?
And it's fun to check that stuff out in SH4. It's fun to see the carrier attacks for the Battle of Midway. It's fun to sit in the Slot and watch the Tokyo Express thunder by. But once you engage the action what follows is definitely not historically viable.
When producing a simulation of war you have all kinds of paradox to deal with. Every sailor was afraid for his life. Almost 24% of American submariners didn't come back. But looked at from a boat's perspective it was ungodly safe out there! Trying to reproduce the actual percentage losses, Beery, when he was the RFB guy, made depth charges less and less effective.
In his last RFB you could just sit at periscope depth ignoring all the escorts and torpedo the merchies because the depth charges couldn't sink you! The result was realistic in the percentage of boats that would be lost.
But when you were playing you were John Wayne in some movie where you knew that after you were shot you'd get off work, go home and have a beer. Your playing style became totally unrealistic. Realism sometimes leads to unrealism.
So Ducimus came into the picture and suddenly DDs were making accurate runs with deadly depth charges. They would make an accurate run without even pinging you, and you better take evasive action because if you didn't change course and speed after they dropped just get a key from St Peter and find your room. It was completely unrealistic in mechanics but YOU ended up playing in a very realistic manner: afraid for your life and squirming for your life. Unrealism sometimes leads to realistic game play.
That would be my goal. Constrained randomness. Ships would appear unpredictably in expected groupings and with appropriate units for the area. If you were on the tanker routes, you would encounter tankers. Off tanker routes, no tankers. But you would not be able to predict where a convoy will be, go there and sink it, as you can with RSRD.
Ahistorical? What do you call historical? I call historical an analogy of the experience of a submariner in the war. Their experience included fear, not knowing where the enemy was, patrolling empty sectors, unexpectedly discovering convoys, an expectation they might not survive. Introducing rationality and predictive events loses more reality than it produces.