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RE: Wolfpack or Midway
From a scale perspective, Midway is more operational and WP more tactical. While Midway of course has individual ships, the AI and player fight mostly as a battlegroup/s. Airstrike planning takes some practice, but becomes pretty natural. Airstrike monitoring is essential, and once the plane groups engage, you have a mighty click-fest! The biggest weakness to me is that plane groups will not completely engage their assigned targets and then fly off straight line until (if you do not catch them) fuel exhaustion. This is not a deal-breaker, AS YOU GET USED TO IT, but is quite annoying and may easily turn off new players.
Example: You have fighters up on Combat Air Patrol (CAP) and then detect an inbound strike of Dive Bombers. Your fighters ***may*** engage automatically, but I always manually assign them to intercept. So your fighter 'counter' engages an enemy DB 'counter,' and dogfight occurs. You may shoot down 1 or 2 DBs and then your fighters disengage on whatever course they seem to have been on and commence flying straight line. If you are monitoring the engagement, you can certainly reassign them to reengage the target, but it requires very close control.
So the decisions needed go all the way up and down the chain of command. You are grand admiral, then air boss, and all the way down to flight leader/controller.
Your own strikes are somewhat the same. Unfortunately, the strikes are not real good at navigation and will usually 'miss' their assigned target battle group, even though you still have spotting planes with eyes-on. So then you have to go and select the flights and manually assign them to the enemy CV/s you want to hit. It's pretty manageable with DIve Bombers, but Torpedo bombers require a lot of close control. Rarely do I have a TB strike go out and auto-attack their assigned targets. I have to 'catch' them and reassign them to a target and manually conduct the torpedo launches. This is all doable and certainly raises the pucker factor of fun, but it is also kind of sad that the player has to do this.
And again, if you take manual control of DBs or TBs, then you have to manually tell them to return to base. Can't tell you how many times I've come to a lull in the action and then noticed some icons on the BIG map. What the heck are they doing out there?
Midway does have a number of purely tactical scenarios in that a portion of a big battle is represented. Say the First strike against Midway Island, for example. The scenario begins with the IJN air groups inbound and the player fights a 20 - 40 minute scenario as either side. Exciting.
Wolfpack is pretty much pure tactical. The big decisions have already been made, so to speak. The convoy cannot change base course and speed, the subs are usually placed where contact generally occurs pretty quick. As the U-boat commander, you have decisions to make on how to approach and set up your attacks. As the Allied player, you literally have nothing to do until a Uboat is detected. Then it gets very exciting very fast as you attempt to manage your escorts and prosecute the contact. Even after U-baot contact, the convoy is still locked into base course and speed, but all escorts release at once. For the later, well-escorted convoys, this can make for quite the traffic control problem as you must decide how to assign your non-engaging escorts to a course and speed such that they do not collide with the zig-zagging convoy. ASW prosecution is FUN!!! This is a huge strength of this game as you can play as the Allied and attack the sub.
Hope this helps, and glad to answer any further questions. Bottom line: The sale is on so get BOTH!!
Steve
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