An idea for a new class of units - medical unit types

[K K Rossokolski]

This is as good a thread as I have seen here in a long time, because it covers matters germane to what CS did then, does now, and might do in the future.....if, indeed, there is one for our old game. When did it first appear?....18 years ago or thereabouts, with East Front, about six countries, but recognisable today. I think the only transport in the first version was wheeled..trucks and 1/2Ts. Boats came later, I think. The game sold itself as a strategic level historical game, with the ability of players to create their own battles, and of course to play games via email.. Later, along came WF and the much maligned RS..but which included night combat. Last was DG, again much criticised, which was modified by Jorge Grillo and others to produce DGVN. The latest important completed mod is Mike Amos' excellent Korea.
New versions of the game brought in a world of new combatants, and a plethora of new elements.
What other game could have you developing an organisation for a small Spanish Civil War battle one day, researching the map for the Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol battles the next day, and finishing the week placing your formations, units and elements for O'Connor's attack on the Italians in 1940? We have seen force development to vastly expand such matters as engineer capability, transport capacity etc. Clever ideas have sprung up to enhance realism, for example we can blow full hex bridges by dint of a little map adjustment. By making a one digit adjustment to the battle file, we can tell the sun to rise or set. Marvellous stuff.
But that ability to accept change is NOT without limits, and I fear that is the problem we face now. Ongoing success in development has lead, I think, to the belief that anything can be done. Up to a point, that is true for land warfare, which by its nature is a two dimensional affair, with bumps.
The CS world does this nicely...eastings/northings, elevations, bit of swamp here, village there, some hills here, river running at the foot there. You can do a nice accurate map within the limits of the available terrain features. So, why not bring in full naval and air warfare? An aeroplane is just a highly mobile tank, after all. Isn't it? And a battleship...well, sort of a super landing craft., bigger guns, harder to sink. Easy-peasy, as my grandson Tom says.

The blokes who gave us CS knew better. They knew that CS can do relief, it but cannot do altitude. They understood that CS, being essentially two-dimensional, couldn't do sea and air warfare, which by their very nature are THREE DIMENSIONAL. So they reduced air and sea elements to the land requirements. Paratroops apppear without seeing the aircraft from which they jump. Works for me. Naval guns are simply off-board arty, whilst a very adequate simulation of amphibious landings was achieved. Air strikes, set at the scenario level, zip across the screen, not always on schedule, sometimes miss their target, sometimes go blue-on blue , sometimes don't turn up. JUST LIKE HOW IT WAS.

However, attempts have been made to give us the whole gamut of air and sea warfare. Thus we have such gems of simulation as the non-submersible submarine which can torpedo things ashore, the fleets of immobilised battleships, their crews not interested in damage control and repair, and cargo ships that can carry no more cargo than a truck... On-screen aircraft seem to have spawned something called the airfield bomber, which whilst never getting airborne, somehow shoots its bombs at the enemy. What absolute rubbish, and I can understand buyers of CS thinking they might have chosen the wrong game to spend their hard-earned.

As for medics. No way..what effect would they have except as eye candy? And I for one have ethical issues with introducing an element that by all the laws of civilised warfare are not to be targeted. In gaming terms, very difficult to set a score. How do we give a quantitative value to the destruction of say a hospital in Russia in 1943. No real time TV then!

Enough for me. Those who started reading this are probably asleep by by now. I will start another thread with some ideas on how the old game can be improved.