Scrapulous wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 9:58 pmI finally screwed up my patience and read through this thread. It started ugly and got much more civil. kondi, thanks for returning and giving your impressions after playing partway through the DLC - I didn't expect it based on your first few posts and I think it was a wise and somewhat gracious thing for you to do after the tense exchanges earlier in the thread.
Let me disclose my biases: I have enjoyed both DLCs and have no trouble with the contents of them. Indeed, I like that the franchise is experimenting with innovations to the formula. A total lack of innovation in a game series is a real problem. But innovation comes with the possibility of some disruptive changes and some new features that don't work out. I think that's healthy for a game franchise, and I welcome it.
A lot of the complaints about AO'39 seem to boil down to historicity, as "le lapin" put it, or to realism or immersion. I'm honestly a little surprised. Panzer Corps is not where I come for realism. There is no general who fought in all the battles represented by any Grand Campaign I have seen in either Panzer Corps game. Of course the campaign involves teleporting around and non-historical assumptions. I don't understand the demand for branching campaigns with general choice and a seamless, believable career experience for a general existing the SCW and entering the World War 2 in Europe. The franchise has never provided these things (well, branching campaigns in only the simplest of ways, still quite separate from history).
The other major complaint category seems to be about the partitioning of scenarios. For example, "Five Saar scenarios is too many." I haven't seen any of these folks address Kerensky's point: would it be too many if each Saar scenario was five turns? Isn't the amount of content more important than how many containers that content is divided into? It seems to me that there's more Poland content than there is Saar content, just based on the size of the maps and the amount of time it took to play through. I wouldn't say that they're proportional to the amount of effort expended by the countries involved in the conflicts at those times, but hexaboo clearly articulated my thoughts about that: Panzer Corps has always been very casual about the size and scale of the battles represented, and AO'39 is no different in that regard.
I never played the Panzer General games, so I might be the token noob here, but a lot of the complaints I see in this thread about the current DLCs are very similar to complaints I had about Panzer Corps 1 - but the gameplay was fun and the DLCs made it even better for me. Every time I tried to imagine a solution to the issues I felt, the solution I imagined would have the side effect of making the game less fun for me (either resulting in fewer scenarios to play or really narrowing the scope of battles). So I accepted the limits of the core game design in favor of enjoying some very fun gameplay. I think there are some elements of history that will never be well represented by this franchise, as with all historical games.
Yea this thread is a behemoth, but there is a lot of thought and passionate opinion in it. Thanks for adding your thoughts.nono hard et heavy wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 11:01 pmGood evening to all.
I rarely participate in discussions on PZC 1 PZC 2 and OoB. Maybe because I'm a little bit selfish and I have to translate the text into French (I should have worked more English at school!!!). But I read the different opinions and I allow myself to give my opinion. I agree with Kondi on one point because not everyone has an expandable budget and DLCs can surprise by their orientations. But I'm almost sure that within 6 months, 1 year, a person like Nikki (OoB) will create a mod like "big German campaign" that will enchant everyone with historical scenarios. This has been done for OoB and PZC 1, there is no reason (?) not to do it for PZC 2. Well, it won't be me because I don't know how to do it but there are some good guys on this forum.
I'm happy with the content of the game and the DLCs.
Everyone has the right to give his opinion, negative or positive, it's part of the "game". And everyone has his own vocabulary. I participated with Kondi and others in Skins for OoB and never, even if my work was not as good as his, he never criticized me.
Thank you for listening to me.
Greetings from France.
Bruno
I have a similar conclusion. Just looking at the scenario tree with no scenario context, people instantly were worried about what was in store. Because who knows, it could have been the Saar scenarios were actually gigantic, and the Polish ones were the teeny tiny ones.
Thankfully, the more people actually went hands on with the content, the more satisfied they felt with the distribution. So maybe we worried some people with the initial impression, but were able to satisfy them with the actual content. As problems go, it's better than the reverse of that. If people saw 12 Poland scenarios and were super hyped up for revisiting so much content from the original Grand Campaign, but then each of 12 scenarios was like 5 turns and only had CORE slot limit of 20... All that anticipation would be really let down once people went hands on.
So the lesson I'm taking from this is maybe be a little careful about presentation of the content, because people get concerned about it. But ultimately, the main thing that really matters is that the content itself has to be satisfying and not just a poor rush job to inflate a scenario count just to 'look good' on a store page. Not just 'more' content, but 'better' content matters.
