Friday, September 9, 2011

IHW: Pigboats - Focusing Tighter

I was initially going to allow the submarines in IHW: Pigboats to be from a range of countries - The UK, Germany, The USA, Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands, like I did the pilots in IHW: Aces In Spades and IHW: Aces And Angels. I have decided to forget about that. I may cover a nation at a time in supplements, if it comes to that, but for the released game I will focus on the US Navy and the Pacific war - the US subs were pretty much non-entities in the Atlantic.

Why? Because I can do some interesting things if the scene is limited. I can - for example - craft a mission generator with specificity, changing the locales offered as the war goes on, with new operating areas opening up and new forward bases established. I can make a generator for situations during the R&R period between missions. I can allow add-ons to the subs - the US subs were refitted after each mission with new and better gear. I can make a much better, more focused target selection. I don't have to account for the differences between the small Japanese convoys and the enormous Allied ones, or between Allied and Axis escort gear and tactics.

This is a pretty important decision for me. I've been agonizing over it for days, but it will be better in the long run, I think.

-clash

6 comments:

  1. Here we go again with micro focused misery tourism design. It makes me sick!

    ;)

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  2. You're just jealous because I didn't choose the French Navy, boulet! :D

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  3. The French navy was sunk very early by Churchill at Mers-el-Kébir anyway. It's not like there would have much to make a game about :P

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  4. Actually, I could easily see a game about bitter French Naval officers without ships, swilling arrack and cursing perfidious Albion equally with that vile Hitler in Bone and Algiers, deuling over kohl-eyed odalisques in Marrkesh, or awaiting the assault on Oran, in the predawn dark of the beach, knowing inside that in many ways one would rather the cursed British win than the devil-spawned Huns, yet one still must fight for honor and la patrie, and for the insult about to be tendered.

    Yet that would in a way be the misery tourism you accused me of, would it not? And it certainly would not be named IHW: Pigboats.

    -clash

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  5. I'll pass your offer to play Darlan: the Vichyzing. I can enjoy a book or a movie about collaborateurs and resistants (and let the author handle the protestations from historians and witnesses) but for some reason playing that setting doesn't appeal to me at all.

    And I know you're not into emo tourist gaming, I was just being ridiculous for laughs.

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  6. My son has a way of completely defusing my ridiculous whimsy and deflating my ponderous wit by pretending to take my verbal sallies completely seriously, then staring at me with a smirk when I protest that I was just joking until I realize so is he and crack up. I did you the favor of the same. :D

    Such a game would be intersting is some ways, but would not appeal to me as either a writer of a gamer. :P

    -clash

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