Octopus Overlords

I've been reading a lot of books on the First World War lately (Castles of Steel, The Great War in Africa, etc) and its prompted me to think that a game based on the war wouldn't be too bad. Lets totally disregard the Western Front of course (at least after the first month) and look for different theaters that stand out. In my mind their are two...

1. The naval theater, throughout the war both Great Britain and Imperial Germany had huge fleet centered around Dreadnoughts, a naval sim with the Silent Hunter III engine would rock.

2. Some sort of simulation of the war in German East Africa or the Middle East. Probably an RTS, though a wargame representation of Lettow-Vorbeck and such would be great.

If I recall correctly there was a old naval sim in that era in the early 90's. It was called Jutland I think.

More recently, there was The Entente, but it got poor reviews.

I have Entente. It's just a typical RTS with a WW1 setting. HPS has the real time Jutland that's not too bad.
There's Wings of War a "sim" type WW1 flying game that is a little more arcadish than sim but a lot of fun none the less.
The Operational Art of War:Century of War has a WW1 scenario in in it.
Matrixgames is working on a WW1 game but who knows when it'll be released.

Victoria has a 1914 scenerio.

No one really wants ww1 games because no one liked the way the war was from what ive heard with the slow tanks to the crappy airplanes and guns they say that a game for ww1 would be boring and a piece of crap

Sgt.Abomb wrote:No one really wants ww1 games because no one liked the way the war was from what ive heard with the slow tanks to the crappy airplanes and guns they say that a game for ww1 would be boring and a piece of crap

...did you just jump the shark there?

Sgt.Abomb wrote:No one really wants ww1 games because no one liked the way the war was from what ive heard with the slow tanks to the crappy airplanes and guns they say that a game for ww1 would be boring and a piece of crap

Speak for yourself. I love crappy WWI airplanes.

Sgt.Abomb wrote:No one really wants ww1 games because no one liked the way the war was from what ive heard with the slow tanks to the crappy airplanes and guns they say that a game for ww1 would be boring and a piece of crap

I disagree ww1 flight sim games are great because you have to get up close to your enemy and it is great fun to try and fly underpowered planes as well as fight the enemy and plus tanks as a new technology could work well as a game as far as run on sentences go you would do well to add some punctuation marks and separate sentences once you come up with a different thought

raydude wrote:

Sgt.Abomb wrote:No one really wants ww1 games because no one liked the way the war was from what ive heard with the slow tanks to the crappy airplanes and guns they say that a game for ww1 would be boring and a piece of crap

I disagree ww1 flight sim games are great because you have to get up close to your enemy and it is great fun to try and fly underpowered planes as well as fight the enemy and plus tanks as a new technology could work well as a game as far as run on sentences go you would do well to add some punctuation marks and separate sentences once you come up with a different thought

Well done, sir.

I want to see Avalon Hill's 1914 made into a PC game.Tiller could do it I bet.

I was always under the impression WWI doesn't make a good wargame because much of the battles were bogged down with trench warfare.

While it's true that WW1 land warfare doesn't have all the spectacular manuvers of WW2,that just makes it unpopular,not necessarily a bad wargame.

Lee wrote:I was always under the impression WWI doesn't make a good wargame because much of the battles were bogged down with trench warfare.

The early months of war was a war of manuever. It wasn't till the German advance stalled in France that the trench warfare begun.
Edit:Stopped by a French counter-attack.

The WWI mods for BF1942 were/are great fun. Those would be, er, The Great War and BF1918.

The WWI scenario for Civ II that (I think) came on the Conflicts in Civilization expansion was fun.

World War 1 could be a fantstic setting.

The only possible way for a game to be boring would be if it were poorly written and executed.

The technology of the time underwent rapid growth with many new machines being developed and tested.

They had planes, zepplins, submarines, tanks, battleships; everything you need for a good wargame.

Fantastic battlefield settings through out the world.

Iron Storm is an alternate reality game based on WW1, except that the war did not end and is still being fought. It is a FPS.
Not a great game but I enjoyed parts of it in my thirst for a WW1 offering.

Some of the WW1 biplane games are pretty good capturing the flavour of this war very well. Flying Corps, Red Baron 3d, Knights of the Sky to name a few. Wings of War as dbt1949 said is arcady, but I found lots of fun in it as well.

Noted war author/sometime-wargame builder James Dunnigan had a wargame company (counters and paper maps) called SPI waaaaaaay back in the late-seventies/early '80's. He did a ziplock bag "minigame" of WWI that was all grand strategy, and managed to be both playable *and* fun.

Yes, the Western Front would end up being fairly static, but it *did* move back and forth as battles took place. It also illustrated nicely *why* things bogged down so badly on the Western Front: hexes in north and north east France were worth tons of Victory Points for both sides, and the VP totals for the Allies went up exponentially if they could get into Belgium and/or Germany, and vice-versa for the Germans getting into central France.

Anyway, it worked nicely, allowed you to open fronts in Russia, Italy/Austria, and yes, the Balkans/Ottoman Empire.

I remember that game. That was one of the best of the magazine games that SPI put out. I wore the couners out on that one.

dbt1949 wrote:I remember that game. That was one of the best of the magazine games that SPI put out. I wore the couners out on that one.

Yeah, it was well ahead of it's time. At that point in wargaming, the big thing was: my stack of counters attacks your stack of counters, we compare my total attack strenth to your defense strength, modify by terrain, and roll dice to see how many counters we lose.

What this game did was make it so that it was very hard to eliminate a counter, as each one counted as an "army". No stacks. Instead, each country had "Resource Points", and every attack and defense was about costing you those points. So--if I had a French salient into the German lines on the Western Front and could attack them with three counters, I could bring x number of RP's to bear in the attack, against their limited RP's available in defense. The combat results die roll would probably have the French losing a number of RP's and forcing that army to retreat a hex or two. Obviously, the idea was to *try* to maneuver to get enough armies on separate facings to attack a single hex, but failing that--attrition baby. It was a neat concept, and one which wouldn't come back into vogue with wargaming until computers came along and made the tracking of RP's and cohesion to armies a simpler task (this WWI game had Resource Point tracks all over the periphery of the map, and you moved a counter up or down depending on territory conquests and/or operations/defeats/defenses in combat.)

mori wrote:

Lee wrote:I was always under the impression WWI doesn't make a good wargame because much of the battles were bogged down with trench warfare.

The early months of war was a war of manuever. It wasn't till the German advance stalled in France that the trench warfare begun.
Edit:Stopped by a French counter-attack.

I would think a good trench warfare game might be possible, too--say, with each soldier really mattering (sort of like Starships Unlimited, in which each ship is tough to build/replace).

WW1 is probably one of my 3 favorite wars of all time.

I would want a WW1 game that is good, runs great, and is historically sound.

I would love to fight the Ottomans at Gallipoli with my 10th Light Horse Australians in 1915-16 or try and make the vonSchlieffen Plan work.

Though I can see an arguement for flight-sims or RPGs and such; I think WWI isn't used as a setting for strategy/FPS type games because of two words: trench warfare... How boring can you get?

...I am reminded of the fourth season of Black Adder(not for being boring, but pointing out how pointless WWI was from most perspectives)...

I have no idea if this was ever released, but here is 1914: The Great War. It is not the same as "The Entente"

1914: The Great War

Also, if you're into nostalgia, you could try this

gorham09 wrote:I have no idea if this was ever released, but here is 1914: The Great War. It is not the same as "The Entente"

1914: The Great War

A Kraut version of 1914: The Great War was released in Europe, but an english language version was never released in the states.