Fun questions to ponder about the future of subsims

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

That's what expansion packs and mods are for.

We are still waiting for the expansion pack from Sonalysts. Look, realistically this game would be niche if it was ever made. You can't just ASSUME an expansion pack would be made.

In the event an expansion pack won't be made, it'll be a real pain to make a new campaign in the fan community. One thing about complicated scenarios (the essence of a "dynamic campaign") is that it gets much less customizable, at least to most of the public. It'll take a LOT of blood to work out how to get it all done. Think of how hard LWAMI can be, and that was poking at text files, or making a DW scenario.

They call it "the bubble" sometimes. Inside of "the bubble" around a player in the 3D world (tactical sim), the fidelity of the simulation is at maximum. Outside the bubble in the rest of the 2D world (operational sim/campaign engine) everything is simplified.

Yes. The problem with "bubbles", especially bubbles where outside is a highly aggregated world, is that they work better if they have some warning time. In Falcon 4 or some other flight sim, you are ultimately locked into a particular plane. The computer has plenty of warning time to get everything set up while you fly there. This game, apparently it should allow you to just go in and come out different platforms almost at a whim...

I don't understand why twice now you've said that you can't do the same with a naval sim. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

From where I'm sitting, what I want from a campaign engine is to track the location and status of platforms so that it can place platforms into the tactial sim at the correct position, with the correct loadout, and with the correct level of damage. That isn't very processor intensive. The other important feature would be implementing detection rules. That's going to take some power, but if it gets out of control corners can be cut--you can create a "bubble" around platforms close enough to be potentially detected where sensors are modeled in full fidelity, and outside of that there's no need to model them at all. So you end up with only a small % of the platforms being tracked consuming processing resources at any given time.

Oh, the detection rules ain't my worry. The problem is the whole campaign engine.

If you just want them to move and the locations and status to be stored, you don't need a campaign engine at all. You can just draw a complicated prescripted scenario. The problem is that you want them to react, and have randomness, and all that, without blowing up the CPU so you need a dynamic campaign engine.

Frankly, there several reasons:

Let's start with relative importance. In a fighter sim, even if you can control a few wingmen or strike package, your realistic ability to affect the operational or strategic level is quite small, no matter how good you are. You can wipe out a tank battalion, but there are plenty of those. You can put out ONE airfield, but it is only one and it can be repaired soon. So there's no way you can quickly devastate the script of the campaign engine (though, of course, if you do well consistently, the campaign engine is supposed to eventually reward you by showing you retreating NKs).

In a naval game, however, the chances of getting to operational or strategic effect is much larger, simply because there are so few units. Blasting away a ship at a particular position may be worth more than if you managed to somehow blow away an entire NK division.

When such disasters happen, the situation may be salvageable (so you will expect the AI not to collapse) but clearly some retasking has to occur. With a conventional ground war scenario (like Falcon 4), many units have the same general objective (advance south) so it is easy to retask. Even if a division is blown away, just stuff a second echelon division into the hole and tell it to keep pushing south. In a naval game, all the available units are probably already tasked on wildly differing assignments (one may be patrolling, another running in for a strike ... etc), and it is much harder to decide how best to redeploy the remaining assets. So not only are you much less likely to disrupt the campaign engine's workings in Falcon 4, but it is also generally easier to decide how to best compensate for it.

Further, aggregation is a lot easier with Falcon 4. Ground units especially in conventional war, tend to be composed more homogenously, are deployed over a smaller area and the deployment also tends to be more regular. This makes it much easier to do simple aggregating for combat modelling than ships. Ships are often so far apart, so irregularly spaced and so heterogenous in their abilities, that the aggregation assumption collapses. It is much more necessary to treat them as points like they actually are, rather than a aggregate blob.

Anything beyond that is a bonus, but F4 did a bit more and FC did a whole lot more, so more is certainly possible.

As I said, FC had the big advantage that it didn't have to be the little tactical sim at the same time it is the strategic sim. This new game of yours will REQUIRE this.