Several Moscow 42 Questions

[Strela]

Guys,

Just a comment as the designer of the game. Though it's fun to pull out every feature and examine it in isolation it misses the point that all these parts have to come together to represent a reasonable facsimile of the fighting around Moscow in 1941/42. I can promise you that you will be able to fault every 'feature' of the game. These units are too strong, movement rate is to slow, weather is having too much of an impact etc.

There was a lot of work done right up front to make certain the game was representative of what we had read/heard about the fighting - we pushed a lot of counters around in our test scenario to get the 'feel' correct. Add to that the fact that we had a guide from history in terms of advance rates, losses in vehicles etc and we had a reasonable set of outcomes to look at emulating with the game. We believe we have managed to do that.

Now everyone's mileage will vary. There are some areas that we will look at tightening up because they have game play implications, for example the maximum visibility distances in the first couple of days of the Grand Campaign to prevent early release of fixed units. Others like the weather are there to put a little more randomness in for the player. It will differ from game to game, but if players believe they have a better set of assumptions please feel free to go and change the Weather.dat file and lock the frozen weather in!

My take on the weather debate is that at best weather is a generalisaton. For a start it covers the whole map, not the various different local climates that would be present. The variation between snow & frozen is meant to be representative of all the difficulties armies have fighting in winter. One day a river is easily crossable, the next it is much more challenging. Warmer weather will help the Germans more than the Soviets (no frozen penalty) etc etc. I deliberately laid out my assumptions in the designer notes so that people would understand the whys. If you disagree, then again please edit the weather file.

Finally, the design team are paying very close attention to player's experiences. If we believe that there is a design flaw that needs correcting we will. But that said, lets ensure we get enough games played so that we can see that there is an issue rather than just a few players thoughts & experiences.

All comments are appreciated!

David