From: seurer@rchland.vnet.ibm.com (Bill Seurer)
Subject: Re: Patriot: New Design in Wargames
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 14:26:44 GMT
Reply-To: BillSeurer@vnet.ibm.com
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of IBM
Organization: IBM Rochester

I played around with Patriot a bit more last night and here's some more info.

I re-reran the same scenario and got VASTLY different results.  There was much 
less combat for some reason, the allies still won, and their losses were far 
less ("only" 11 M1's and 7 APCs).  Maybe my first run was just a really bad 
string of luck on the allies part.

I saw the reason for my confusion the first time on who was reporting what 
battle results.  The pop up battle report window covers most of the screen and 
prevents you from seeing who it is
that is reporting.  Even if the report is "No casualties" it still pops up the 
whole subwindow.  By turning on the "battle animation" option it slowed the 
game down tremendously from the normal speed (the guns on the icons flare when 
they are in combat with sounds) and I was able to better follow the action.

There is some information on the strength of various units.  You can look at 
(and manipulate) the database the program uses for information on individual 
units in the game via the scenario editor.  Of course that isn't much help 
while you are playing the game and it still doesn't tell you how good a group 
of individual units is.  There is no information in the manuals about how 
effective various units or groups are either.  This is a MAJOR flaw.  As 
someone mentioned, Microprose makes wonderful manuals and from playing M1 Tank 
Platoon I have a good working knowledge of what the various units and groups 
could do but someone who didn't have that experience would be totally lost.

I also went through all the other scenarios to see what they were like.  There 
are quite a few and many of them are "what if" scenarios.  Several are 
variations on the actual war (no Schwartzkopf "Hail Mary" left hook, what if 
the marines had landed, etc.).  And a few are things like what if Iraq 
attacked the allies at various stages during the deployment.  This last group 
set early on in the conflict will be a much more even fight and could be quite 
interesting.

Also, to make the game more even you can fiddle with the air war settings to 
reduce or increase the number of days of ground attacks done before the ground 
battle started (which greatly effects Iraqi starting strength) or to change 
the air superiority situation (from the historical total allies to the fantasy 
total Iraqi).

The "whole war" scenarios look extremely difficult to modify from the default 
settings.  The units are crammed together so closely it is impossible to 
distinguish who's who on the big map and while when you zoom in you see only a 
few groups you then can't see the whole map anymore to tell them where to go. 
 Another serious flaw I think.

I think the biggest problem here is the bane of many such programs: the rush 
to get it out prevented them from fixing a bunch of this stuff.  I'm sure many 
of their beta testers saw these same things.
-- 

- Bill Seurer     Language and Compiler Development      IBM Rochester, MN
  Internet: BillSeurer@vnet.ibm.com    America On-Line: BillSeurer@aol.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games