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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
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If you think of a sliding scale with 'Serious Wargame' at one end and 'Beer and Pretzels' at the other, Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa is fairly deep into the 'Serious Wargame' side and Strategic Command: WW2 is more on the 'Beer and Pretzels' side. Not as far into 'Beer and Pretzels' territory as Order of Battle, but there nevertheless in spite of a pretty large dollop of chrome.
There's a lot going on in SC: WW2. It's a fun game, and the complexity level is pretty high because there are a lot of moving parts. But one aspect of its design is that it generally prefers to model the Strategic Command game system rather than attempt to model what happened in actuallity. Naval warfare uses pretty much the same combat system as land warfare, there is no stacking (a huge problem), and size limits for the units is pretty arbitrary. Air bases, which aren't very big in reality compared to a division (and SC: WW2 doesn't really use division-sized units) will block an entire corps from occupying the same hex because the game doesn't use stacking. Air units re-base to another location by flying. In reality what would happen is that several dozen trucks would schlep their machine shop, refueling tanks, and parts and equipment to a new location which the planes would fly to, but the planes wouldn't be able to conduct air missions until all the ground support had arrived and set themselves up.
There's a lot that SC: WW2 does right, and it's one of the few games out there that gives a good feel for the production and diplomatic side of the war, for the entire war. But to give that strategic overview it has to cut some pretty big corners, and the difference becomes glaring when you compare it to a game that focuses on just the Eastern Front for one campaign.
The problem with Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa is that after you play it, even if you play it with the role-playing and management layer turned off, you'll have trouble going back to playing Strategic Command. The Eastern Front in both games is on a fairly similar scale, and SC: WW2 tends to do a better job with place names on the map. But because SC: WW2 doesn't use stacking, when you play the Barbarossa scenario in SC: WW 2 you'll be surprised by how few Soviet units there are and this distorts realistic game-play. If you're playing the Germans, you'll spend most of the time until the winter Soviet counter-offensive playing whack-a-mole chasing a few Soviet units with your panzers around an essentially empty Eastern Front. This is not what the experience of the initial German invasion of Russia was like in any respect.
Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa focuses on the combat operations of one campaign from the war, but tries to model what was actually happening rather than its own game system. It starts with a modified version of the combat engine that it used in DC: BWtP and DC: CB, but adjusts them to reflect the different scale and game focus (the two earlier games are fought on a more zoomed-in scale with four units to a division instead of one, and individual air squadrons instead of large abstracted air groups). It then tries to re-create all of the headaches that would have made your life miserable if you were commanding either army. When your panzers start breaking down and running out of fuel because the guy in charge of moving supply from the railheads to your forward supply depots hates your guts, you'll have entered a whole new dimension of wargaming that doesn't exist in any other game of this kind. Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa is a unique wargame, and unlikely to have any imitators.
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Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa covers the initial German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and paints a unique picture of what goes into conducting a successful military operation. It can be played solitaire or against a human opponent, and sports some of the strongest AI in the industry.
The game combines an easy-to-play but very deep turn-based divisional scale wargame with an extended role-play of command management. This combination creates a brilliant and unique game system that is as important and revolutionary as the invention of card driven games for board wargames. After playing Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa you will never look at another wargame in quite the same way, because without the role-playing command layer something very important will be missing.
The German player has to slalom around cranky colleagues, unruly subordinates, and irrational superiors while conducting a demanding military campaign that threatens to come unravelled if you run out of fuel or if too many of your trucks or panzers break down. The Soviet player gets to be Stalin, wrestling with ineffective subordinates and growing paranoia while trying to keep the military situation from falling apart.
The game is not an orgy of micromanagement. Many things appear to be handled abstractly, but appearences can be deceiving. The game focuses on the important decisions an overall theater commander must make and their influence on short-term combat operations.
Anyone who has ever worked in a large organization has at some point taken a proposal to senior management for approval. You may already know the executive who has to sign off on the proposal, and you scan his face while he reads it hoping for advance warning on what is going through his mind. You listen carefully to his questions, trying to understand his thought process. You answer even more carefully, trying to steer him into your way of thinking. And to your delight, the questions that he come back at you with tell you that he is thinking about the proposal the way you want him to. When he summarizes the issues and the decision he has to make, you know that he fully understands why he needs to sign off. And then the unfathomable happens: he turns you down.
Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa played from the German side puts you into the role of that senior manager. You are constantly being asked to make decisions or delegate the choices to a subordinate, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. It is often painfully clear what the intellectually correct choice should be, and you repeatedly find yourself compelled to make a poor choice, or even the worst choice, with full understanding of what the unpleasant consequences are likely to be.
Any action you take is likely to upset someone. Antagonize a subordinate and he'll be slow to carry out your orders, which won't do wonders for your next performance review. Annoy your peers and your fuel allocation will get diverted to Western Europe, or your supply trucks won't get repaired when they break down. Anger your superiors and count yourself lucky if all that happens is early retirement. Anything you do or don't do comes at a political cost, and you rarely have enough political capital stored up to do what absolutely needs to get done, let alone what you really want to do. So you perform a heart-breaking triage on the decisions you have to make, repeatedly making bad choices so as not to upset the apple cart because you need to keep your political powder dry for the big fight over that one thing you think you absolutely need.
Make no mistake, this is a wargame. There's a big detailed map, with lots of units to move around and lots of places for them to go. But you're playing as theater commander. You sit there looking longingly at the map, thinking of all the brilliant maneuvers you could make and all the clever things you could do, if only you could get your subordinates to follow orders. And then you remember your inbox. It's a big inbox.
So why do you have to read through all those reports instead of focusing on moving your troops around ? You could delegate to your staff, and you can even ignore your inbox entirely. Many commanders throughout history have done precisely that. But it's part of your job, and sooner or later not understanding fuel consumption, railroad track gauges, and broken down trucks will bite you in the ankle, especially when the weather is starting to freeze over and your troops haven't been supplied with winter coats.
Played from the Soviet side the game presents you with a different but equally challenging set of problems. You have to figure out how to get a brain-dead, incompetent, and terrified officer corps to do something (anything) while navigating around Stalin's episodes of paranoia. Less than ten years before the game begins the functional part of the Soviet officer corps had been purged, and the consequences of that purge are still very much in evidence in 1941. You survive in the Red Army by towing the party line and not being too prominent or conspicuous: showing too much competence or initiative was a one-way ticket to Lubyanka prison or the Gulag. In that environment, the natural inclination of a Red Army general with any hope of life expectancy is to do nothing. When he isn't descending into paranoia, Stalin can nudge the Red Army into action by dispatching Zhukov or Khrushchev to keep things under control or restore order. When playing the game from the Soviet side a player will find himself in a constant war with inertia.
Playing from either side you have the option to remove the management exercise layer from the game before it begins, and what you'll be left with is an engaging division-level wargame in the style of its predecessors in the series, Decisive Campaigns: Blitzkrieg Warsaw to Paris and Decisive Campaigns: Case Blue. But playing with the management layer turned on elevates Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa to a unique experience that demonstrates at a visceral level that there's a lot more to being a good general than just making the right moves.
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Flexibility and freedom of action are what you get in games but not in real life (tm).
DC: Barbarossa is about big picture management issues at a theater level, whereas DC: Case Blue is more about micro-managing at Army Group level and below. That's why it's inappropriate for things like artillery batteries and individual fighter squadrons to show up in DC: Barbarossa: sometimes it's more realistic to use an abstraction. A lot of little units were left out of DC: Barbarossa because they simply didn't belong. Theater commanders don't play unit-shuffling games with individual battalions because it's not their job (and that's one of the many reasons why Hitler lost the war).
DC: Case Blue is a remarkably good game, but it's not about the same thing as DC: Barbarossa and has a different gestalt.
besides the fantastic presentation of relations superior - subordinate and the decisions level DC B has another big improvement the ( R ) Report button where you can actually see in detail what is hindering the specific division to be 100 % operational !!!
To be honest, im not sure i would like the whole "role playing" aspect of the game. And i really appreciate you making me aware of this feature in the game, as i had no idea it has it.
I prefeer focusing more on strategies, tactics, manouvers, etc. Even some economy, management, diplomacy, production, etc. Is fine, as long as it doesnt take so much time that actual warfare is relegated to a secondary task. This is why i prefeer games like Strategic command ww2 in europe over say the HOI series. It has (to me) the right balance of "non warfare tasks".
I cant tell for sure that i wouldnt like the RPG element of this game as ibe never had it on a grand strategy game so ibe never actually tried it. Still as i understand this feature can be turned off if i wish, so i could try it out, and if i decide the rpg stuff isnt for me i could turn it off and just play the game without it. The other aspects of the game look good.
I think im gonna give it a try.
thanks a lot!
thanks again for all your input guys
For DC: Barbarossa
http://steamcommunity.com/app/454530/discussions/0/357284767240361134/
For DC: Case Blue
http://steamcommunity.com/app/354600/discussions/0/611704730326931757/
For DC: Blitzkrieg Warsaw to Paris
http://steamcommunity.com/app/337760/discussions/0/620703493317544883/
I dint buy Case Blue as i tought it would be redundant with barbarossa (that plus my i cant afford a 4th game right now hehe), but i did buy warsaw to paris. I see there is a historical mod for it as well. I will get the mods immediatelly.
Do you know if there is such a mod for strategic command ww2 in europe?
thanks!
DC series becomes better with each iteration - thus actually DC WtP is the weakest of them all with less features !!!
What if i play as the ussr? does it take me all the way to berlin in 45? or just repell the 41 invasion? so i wont be able to play operation bagration?
also I did suspect newer iterations would get better, but i wanted a detailed game where i can fight in the west, agains poland, france, uk, etc. hence i bought DC:WtP.
In any case, i cant afford to buy another one right now :( i bought SC:WW2 iE, DC barbarossa, DC WtP, and a few other (non GS) games this summer sale.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/454530/discussions/0/1368380934255691791/
I haven't followed the game since beta when I decided not to make a mod for it.
DC: Case Blue covers a very different kind of experience than DC: Barbarossa, and it would be a mistake to think that one game makes the other redundant.