Soapbox and Pot Stir.....Bunkers and Pill Boxes

[Mike Abberton]

All games are going to have limitations on how real they can get. And an "I-go-U-go" style game has a ton of them. Obviously there are no "turns" in real life where only one side acts and the other is forced to only react. And the sides definitely don't alternate who gets to act and who gets to react.

So things like artillery fire happening in the next turn, not the present one, are a compromise necessary due to the basic nature of the game engine. In comparison to reality, neither case, the present turn or the next one, is an exact simulation of how artillery works, but in the developers interpretation indirect fire happening in the next turn is a closer interpretation of reality than in the present turn.

For a WWII game, I generally agree with them, although one could probably make the case that it would depend greatly on the time frame, the sides involved, and the situation being modeled. Modelling US artillery effectiveness in a set piece battle in 1945 the same as Russian artillery "effectiveness" in the early days of Barbarossa probably isn't very realistic, but different artillery models was out of the scope of the game.

My thoughts at least.
Mike

P.S. If you'd like to see a different model of artillery, I'd suggest trying out the Combat Mission games. CM's "we-go" simultaneous turn resolution and shorter scale (explicitly 1-minute turns with no ambiguity) allows a much different interpretation of artillery fire with varying command delays and accuracy by artillery level, type, nationality and troop quality, plus spotting rounds and the ability to correct fire as it drops.