WitP:AE Demo

[Currahee]

I haven't seen a demo; nor does the game (which I have, and am now getting familiar with) seem to have a tutorial, like WITP did. There's so much to the game, I'm not sure where a demo would start.

But it's an excellent game, I would venture to say the best there is, and although as Mike pointed out to Jobu88, it is very detailed and very immersive, it's also strangely playable; even in a very large scenario, after micro-managing the first move or so, you can sit back and watch the game unfold, in a way that's hard to do with, say, TOAW III, where every move is a new round of scrutinizing detail. Grigsby's games are not (usually) I go, you go, but each side plots moves, and they're played out and observed in a common "resolution" phase. This makes for a relaxing start to each turn, and reduces the amount of management required. I look forward to each move; I love TOAW, but sometimes in a large scenario, I heave an audible sigh before I get started. Not so in WITP.

This game started as SSI's War in the South Pacific, 1986, for Apple II (64k). The entire game was on one 5 1/2 " floppy, one side the game, the other side, the scenario. Came with a highly detalied, very fine print, 16-pg manual, with in some cases, more detail than the present electronic manual; it contained a lot of the formulas/algorithms, many of which have never changed. The graphics were primitive, but the game was basically there! One-day turns, which could be interrupted at 1, 4 or 8 hour pulses to change/update orders. No mouse interface, you had to hotkey, but God was it fast. It worked great, but as you can see, would not be easily translated to the entire war for the entire Pacific, as most of us won't live long enough to fight WW II in one-hour pulses.

It was later ripped off by another publisher, as Battles of the South Pacific; Grigsby ignored that, moved on to other things for a few years, but finally came back to it, ca. 1992, and expanded it to the entire Pacific, and it became Pac War, but that was a flawed effort, because the publisher (still SSI) forced Grigsby to go to weekly turns only, abandoning the daily turn cycle. This was pre-internet, we chatted it up on Delphi, and some brave souls, in the AOL forums. Well, it just didn't work, primarily because of the detailed timing nuances involved in carrier vs carrier battles. But the graphics and certain strategic elements were refined, and the whole Pacific was now in play....and also, the whole war, 1941-45.

Enter, then WITP- back to daily turns, with day & night, and day actually broken into half-day cycles for air ops....but the human player can't interrupt the daily cycle, so just issues commands a maximum of once per day...an elegant solution, allowing less human input than straight half-day turns, but still letting the carrier engagements play out realistically, and permitting a nice mix of day & night engagements.

In some ways it is indeed a monster, and I don't disagree with anything Mike said in his posts to Jobu88; but I'd hate myself if I didn't plug the game, there's nothing like it, and AE just makes it better. It has literally been in development for 25 years.

So buy it, and don't start with a campaign game; start with Coral Sea, and play it several times from each side. Read the manual, play the game, re-read the manual, re-play the game, re-read the manual, etc.

Then, move up to Guadalcanal. By the time you get through that, someone will have ported some of the other, shorter WITP scenarios to AE. Marianas, Rising Sun, etc. It has a good scenario editor, with its own PDF manual.

But at some point, maybe a year or two from now, start the big campaign game with someone you can trust not to flake. It'll be a milestone wargaming experience of a lifetime.