Comments on: Frontline Report: Order of War Impressions

By: Serondal

Serondal — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:26:27 +0000

Another point, this isn’t SquareEnix’s first RTS< they’re already agreed to publish Supcom 2

By: BlazerKnight

BlazerKnight — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:25:17 +0000

Err, I don’t want to be THAT guy, but just a small note… the brand name Squaresoft has been defunct for 6 years, ever since merging with Enix to become Square-Enix.

By: Torgen

Torgen — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:36:41 +0000

@Guy,
we are arguing from different viewpoints. “Maneuver” and “attrition” are dependent on the scale you’re looking at. However, let’s not commandeer the comments section. BTW, my job is historical research. ;)

EDIT: and I will heartily disagree with your assessment of French morale in the ranks in 1940, having read many personal accounts

By: JD

JD — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:04:49 +0000

Kieron,

Ah ok, I understand what you mean :)

For me, the in-game cinematics, the “stillframe phone calls” and the “loading screen dialogue” still made the overall story to be totally awesome, even though most missions fell on that part…

Thanks for the reply!

By: Guy

Guy — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:03:43 +0000

@Torgen
Which is why I used the word ‘largely’ ;) WW2 was largely fought out of foxholes. It was hardly exclusively foxholes, it was never always foxholes but chances are if you picked any time, any place and went to the frontline the majority of soldiers would be in foxholes.

The comment about attrition was focused on your comment on WW1 games. WW1 itself was not attrition at the lowest tactical levels (most of the time- a comment which also holds true for WW2) though both wars were attritional at the grand tactical (semantics I know).

Your examples don’t particularly hold up. One off battles (El Alamaein) and campaigns (Italy) were frequently attritional. Most campaigns involved attrition as the key concept. The Battle of Normandy was only won by the maneuver element of Operation Cobra because the attritional battle of Operation Goodwood had created the conditions for a breakout.

The Battle of France itself is something of a one off, representative not of the effectiveness of maneuver warfare but of the shockingly bad state of morale in the British, French and Belgian armies. Your comment about blitzkrieg is right but in the wrong order. Blitzkrieg was almost wholly an invention of the press in order to find some way of understanding the shock loss in the Battle of France in 1940. I know its a bit goit-ish to post a bibliography on a gaming site but I hope you’ll forgive me as the following two articles will absolutely turn your world upside down (as they did for me!):
J.P. Harris, ‘The Myth of Blitzkrieg’, War In History, 2 (November 1995)
Glyn Prysor, ‘The “Fifth Column” and the British Experience of Retreat, 1940′, War In History, 12 (2005)

Your comment that all wars are attritional is applicable in reverse. All wars are maneuver wars because they involve combatants moving around. On the Eastern Front the key battle was the Battle of Kursk…an attritional battle that gained no territory but dented the Axis forces so badly they never recovered. Similarly in North Africa it was attrition at El Alamein that was decisive. In Burma it was Imphal. In Normandy it was Op. Goodwood. etc. The reason WW2 took 6 years is because that was the time period necessary to exhaust her armies, to exhaust her nation and to exhaust her people.

The stagnant activity comment is interesting because WW1 was anything but stagnant. Aside from the previously mentioned examples (Eastern Front, Italian Front, Middle Eastern Front etc.) the Western Front was incredibly active in 1914 and 1918. It was only for 3 years, on one front (the Western) that mass stagnation took place. Though even there trench raids, attacks and the thousand other small battles meant that the frontlines were constantly changing. The majority of the war, fought by the majority of the soldiers was not even on the Western Front (though it was the key front) and was not stagnant.

Edit: holy crap thats long. Sorry folks!

By: Torgen

Torgen — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:14:29 +0000

Which is why we won!

By: Rich_P

Rich_P — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:54:24 +0000

WWII was a war of logistics. Then everything else :D

By: Torgen

Torgen — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:37:16 +0000

@Guy
Anyone that pontificates that WWII was fought ENTIRELY in trenches is going to be dismissed as an imbecile by me, sorry. ;)
Also, I am going to disagree that WWII was mostly attrition (in the tactical sense, which is what we’re talking about, as we’re discussing a wargame.) Aside from sieges like Tobruk and Stalingrad, this was a war of maneuver. The Battle of France was totally about maneuver, as the German tanks were inferior to the French ones. Had it been a stand-up battle of attrition, the French would have won, and were _expected_ to win. This is why the “Blitzkrieg” was such a shock to the world. I think you place far too much weight on the periods where one side or the other were gearing up for a battle of maneuver. If you want to be pedantic, ALL battle are battles of attrition and supply, even the air war, because men and equipment are consumed. Even on the Eastern Front, first the Russians, and then the Germans, the majority of the troops were forced from their positions by maneuver, not attrition. Each side probed for weak spots (or made them through brute force) then exploited them to force neighboring forces to withdraw or be surrounded. Note that this is totally separate from the “national” level, which of course was decided by destroying the other side’s capability to produce the weapons of war at a rate to replace losses. At the battlefront level, we did not see months or years of stagnant lines in WWII that were seen in WWI.

By: Serondal

Serondal — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:56:28 +0000

Agree with Kieron, I was often confused why I was falling back when I was handedly whipping the enemies on hard mode. Couldn’t figure out why we had to nuke a city with very few enemies in it O.o I would say nuking a city would like 20 tanks is a waste of a city and a waste of a nuke.

By: Kieron Gillen

Kieron Gillen — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:53:15 +0000

The plot itself was fine, and all the moments of drama in there people talk about were cool.

For me, the actual missions failed to have any drama whatsoever. They felt totally artificial. When we were ordered to fall back because we couldn’t hold, I was laughing – I could have stayed there blowing them up all day.

I quite liked it, but only in a gormless shooter kind of way. The MP was brilliant, however.

By: JD

JD — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:43:36 +0000

Kieron, maybe I misread your article, but are you saying that Wic has a bad single-player campaign from a drama perspective?

“The aforementioned World in Conflict does seem to be the best comparison in terms of its single-player attempt to make drama – and there’s certainly room to do that better than World in Conflict.”

I think Wic did the story in the SP campaign better than any RTS game ever (and most games in general)…

By: Serondal

Serondal — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:41:05 +0000

Agreed @ guy. If they ever made a game that faithfully recreated the realities of WW 2 it would be boring as hell 99% of the time.