On Tactics and Turns

[TheBigRedOne]

This has been a great discussion, thanks to grofaz for bringing this up. I think one of the things I wish happened more around here is discussions like this where ideas are thrown about and the merits of the game-play are discussed.

My take on the scenarios and how they are approached are a combination of two quotes.

1. A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. G. Patton
2. When I'm in Hue, when we're in Hue City, it's like a war, you know? Like what I thought about a war, what I thought that a war was supposed to be. There's the enemy, kill 'em. Cowboy, Full Metal Jacket

Battles are never flawless, and there's never enough time, planning or resources to do what you want to do. To that end, it's hard to plan a scenario that will make both sides feel completely satisfied with how things are set up. As has been mentioned, the attacker is *always* going to want more time to complete the mission, and the defender is always going to want less. Because actual battles don't have time limits, the designers do their best to simulate a typical battle. I'd say that a large percentage of battles in history have a full frontal assault component to them, mainly due to the fact that time was of the essence. If you're an infantry company commander that doesn't exactly know where your enemy is, pretty much every encounter is going to potentially be a frontal assault...

I think that objectives can oftentimes be deceiving in SB as well. I know that there are many scenarios that have multiple objectives. Some are reachable, some aren't. You don't always need all the objectives in order to 'win' a scenario. The key is to pick the *right* ones and execute your plan quickly. Part of the fun is screwing up a scenario by choosing the wrong path. You learn and move on to the next battle. As OLJW said, enjoying the battle is truly the fun part. Winning and losing, at least in my mind, is secondary.

The early game scenarios were not balanced well, but they are probably somewhat realistic in their setup. Some battles you just can't win, and I think Tiller tried to impart some of that reality into the early scenario design. It makes for lousy PBEMing, but as was said, the larger portion of SB game buyers play solo, not PBEM. We are the vocal minority, believe it or not.