Baris wrote:I believe with 'Strategic Command WW1' smaller scale of units some scenarios other than GC are ok to play in that game. Previously bought Breakthrough expansion just to look at Russian civil war scenario , it is fine to play but not have quality nor comprehensive as RUS Gold.
The thing about the Strategic Command games is that you have to realize that its fans and to certain extent its designers have been fairly indiscriminate about where the game engine gets applied.
I don't think the engine works at all well for the smallest scale, and once you are outside the limits of what it was designed to handle, the results are less than optimal.
I can't speak with authority about their Russian Civil War scenario because I've never bothered trying to play it. I've always assumed that political confilict is something that the game wouldn't represent very well.
The game shines in the big scenarios (e.g. Call to Arms) which have corps level maneuvering, and even works at the division level in certain restricted situations (like the 1918 scenarios).
What the game does a poor job of showing is the mechanics of interaction of fleets. The game engine forces you to do unrealistic things (anyone who's played the campaign games for Steam and Iron will know what I'm talking about). But oddly enough the big picture choices that you have to make about naval power feel fairly right, even though the way you act them out isn't.
I actually bought Commander the Great War before the two Strategic Command games. The eye candy factor and game engine polish of Commander is far superior, but Strategic Command does a much better job of showing what the war was like.
The acid test for any of these games, by the way, is to think about what is going on in the two JTS WW I battalion-level titles (France '14 and East Prussia '14) and compare what is shown in detail on the ground to how things get reduced and simplified at a larger level. The comparison can be made because some of the scenarios are quite large (though the battle of the Marne is so big that it had to be shown as five constituent battles as well as a an almost unplayable giant battle scenario covering the whole thing). It really makes you stop and think about how a more strategic-level game should represent the wheel through Belgium. But Tiller's games have an advantage in that, although they are IGOUGO rather than WEGO, the turns only represent a couple of hours of real time, so it all comes out in the wash.