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Originally Posted by Molon Labe
I agree that OPFOR should be a higher priority, but a dynamic campaign engine is pretty much an expectation for this sort of sim these days.
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The thing about a dynamic campaign engine for DW, is that I suspect it would mean that you wouldn't have as much flexibility in designing campaigns and scenarios.
For example, suppose they did the same thing they did in Falcon and just focused on the North Korean campaign. EVERYTHING you do with Falcon is framed in those terms, unless someone goes through the substantial trouble of figuring out how to build another campaign (which eventually someone did and made Bosnia, the Persian Gulf, Afganistan, etc) but it wasn't at all straightforward. It wasn't something that they intended most users to do.
Also, the time scale of naval warfare is very different from air combat. You don't fly "missions" per se. They're usually at sea well in advance of a conflict, and operating continuously throughout the conflict. Modern warships are usually given specific tasks to accomplish that take a lot of time (days or even weeks might not be uncommon). There's no such thing as a "general war patrol" anymore. Given that, I'm not sure that people would really be happy with a realistic dynamic campaign engine for naval warfare. Take the FFG for example, do you really want to spend weeks maintaining a specific position relative to a combat logistics ship as part of it's screen,
hoping that
maybe you'll run over a submarine attacking the SLOC? It's mostly pretty boring, and if it's played realistically, you'll most likely run away if you don't detect the submarine at a useful distance.
A dynamic campaign would probably mean that players experienced less variety in their assignments. Take the FFG example, for the duration of the campaign your job might be to protect the SLOC, and that's it. That vast majority of that time you're just sailing in a straight line looking at nothing.
Or a submarine, you're given a box and you need to kill the enemy surface ships in the box. That mission goes on continuously for weeks until you're out of torpedoes and then you go home.
The way DW is done now, you can play anywhere in the world, which is nice. One day I'm playing in the Persian Gulf, the next day I'm playing in North Korea, the next day I'm playing in China. You're not limited in your missions by specific tasking, you can make anything up. So... I guess my thoughts are be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. A dynamic campaign in a naval sim might be a lot less dynamic than you might think.