Whats the point of setting it in a real war with real consequences if you are just going to erase all those realities? So many games seem set up so people can play war without consequences, but if you do that at least do it in a setting where you aren't insulting the real victims.
CapricornNoble|5 years ago
Because these games are first and foremost a form of recreation? Certain things are abstracted because most people don't want to be bothered with them in their entertainment. Nobody would play wargames if they had to write a 5-paragraph operations order or FRAGO at the start of every turn either.
>>>but if you do that at least do it in a setting where you aren't insulting the real victims.
Short answer: ego. People want to think that, if given the opportunity, they would make better military decisions than the real-world leaders. "Yeah, Manstein won the Third Battle of Kharkov but I would have accomplished it with FAR fewer casualties." To exercise that, you need context and data that only comes from the accuracy of a real setting. Do you attack on the 19th of February, or a week later? How many kilometers is it to Kharkov? Do you want the culminating point of your attack to reach the objective with full lunar illumination, or none at all? What if there was one less Soviet mechanized corps due to an orders mixup? It's easy to cover all those different what-ifs by digging through the available historical records. To do that in a fake setting requires extremely laborious world-building that most people aren't willing to invest the time to execute.
Also, who says the "real victims" are insulted by sanitized wargames anyway? I know we have a large contingent of Eastern European members on HN, I'd love to hear their thoughts.