Wwii Scenarios With Generic Units?

[Willhelm II]

If one was to make a scenario that was made entierly of Generic units it would be possible to have a very nice and detailed tech tree, similar to that Hearts of Iron.

For example, rather than having individual infantry units for each nation why not simply have one generic unit for all countries? You could have a series of different stages in infantry research then, starting with 1918 Infantry, 1936 Infantry, 1939, 1940, etc. That also goes for tanks too, as well as planes and other units. IT would allow the player to also make a conscious descision what exactly he wants his plan of stradegy to be - does he want good infantry and tanks, or a balance between tanks infantry and the airforce?

To me generic units are the way of the future for scenario design, for it would allow for scenario designers to truly develop a realistic technology tree that could span into many different branches - so many that a player would have to pick what root he would want to go down.

It just makes for a more-open ended scenario in my opinion.

[Willhelm II]

In fact, I'm in favour of the community to develop a standard 'WW2 tech tree' that we could all agree on, and which could be taken by any scenario designer and simply set to any WW2 scenario they wanted to make - it would allow for more work on unit balances, stradegy with regards to city placement, etc...

[N35t0r]

The problem is that, with the lack of a 'historical date' tag, you won' tbe able to keep the trees completely fifferenciated, or you'll end up with people having '45 inf in '40, or tanks, or whatever...

[Exile]

The problem here is scale.

In a global, or even continental scenario set in the 20th century, individual "infantry" units represent much more than simple infantry formations. At the scale normally used by scen designers, these units represent infantry AND their supporting artillery, their intrinsic tank/anti-tank support units, mortar and howitzer batteries, recon companies and battalions, and even temporarily attached units assigned for special purposes. Have you ever looked at a typical WWII era infantry division's table of organization?

In most cases, the infantry units in these scenarios MUST be representing corps or even army level units, in which case they'd be even more diverse in composition.

And while this applies to infantry, it also applies to virtually every other modern unit. Air units represents air FLEETS. In most cases, this is even true of naval units, though individual CAPITAL ships are, and have been, the exception to this rule.

This is the key role of the scenario designer; to determine the relative strengths of units, both for purposes of historical "accuracy" and for game balance and playability.

A generic unit set, while easy to implement, offers little or no flexibility to the designer.

This idea has been tried, btw. In the late 70s, the military game company SPI created an entire range of generic tactical units, to be used in a series of tactical games geared to specific historical periods. Because the unit sets were generic, a spartan phalanx could be matched against a swiss phalanx in a hypothetical game. The idea never caught on, though, for the tactical context, it was sound.

[Eivind IV]

No need to re-invent the wheel. This very much influenced by HoI. http://sleague.apolyton.net/index.ph...litzkrieg_1936

And the tech tree: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=137028

@Nestor:
Where the hell did you go? You just disappeared from EVO??

[fairline]

It's already been done. See Case's WW2 scenario of last year.