Comparison of Steam1942 versus TripleA

[Teferi]

The user Interface is a Struggle. Every Combat is a Struggle - every instance of every step of every combat on your side you need to click a button - but you aint doing anything. The Game rolls the Dice, the Game auto-assigns the losses to the opponent (he aint clickin anything either), and then you click it again, step by step, each and every combat.

Where in tripleA I would be mashing the spacebar ONCE to resolve ONE round of combat ; in Steam1942, I click up to 5 times on my own go around every round (having no agency however), and then 5 times to roll the dice on the enemy go around, inbetween clicking single losses into Infantry and clicking confirm;

So where the tripleA ; which is for heavens sake a free software ; can resolve a combat in a single spacebar-press ; in Steam1942 you need to be making 20 tedious clicks!

This is not even getting me started on how clunky it is to get transports to work, onloading one unit, moving a space, onloading another unit, moving another space, offloading these - ALL OF THAT is single clicks each, you need to execute in the precise order, or else your naval invasion will FAIL! And then you need to do this sequence for every transport, one by one, every time, every go around. For the average american chuck of 5 transports, thats 5 clicks to select transports, 10 clicks to select units, 5 clicks for the intermediary step, 5 clicks for the final step, EACH AND EVERY TIME.

In Triple A ; I select 8 Infantry and 2 Artillery, put them in a Seazone with 5 Transports, then click all the transports in that Seazone once, get them into the target seazone and can then distribute the landunits as I wish - no need to cautiosly adhere to sequencing for every single transport! The effort to do repeated Naval Invasions in Steam1942 is easily twenty to fourty times as many clicks and sequences which you need to keep in mind higher level of complexity than tripleA!

For Moves! It is incredibly clunky to get an overview of what goes where. So I click on an infantry in one country, and click into an enemy country, and I do this for some airplanes, and some tanks, and all the game will show me is a generic Marker telling me that there is say, 18 units going into a territory. If I want to figure out what these units are, I need to click the territory, I click the tab on the bottom left to expand, and then I can start figuring out what I got - and GOOD LUCK trying to decipher which specific unit you want to undo the move for to send her elsewhere you need to click “undo” in the bottom left expanded window, then!

Meanwhile in tripleA, I click once on any unit or units(!) I want to select and put them into the country I wanna put them In! On the Map, IMMEDIATELY; I see exactly which units are where, and if I feel the need to undo a single move, its a quick scroll and single click in the bar on the right side of the action history.

So then I do all my combat moves, and the entire Map is a coloured mess of overlapping arrows pointing any which way, but often nont even the country they should go to (which is most egregiously in Northwestern Europe! Put some Naval Landing, some Shore Bombard and some Airplanes in there! WITHOUT FAIL one of the arrows will point STRAIGHT at Paris and the France Territory, as opposed to the Northwestern Territory! Ten more clicks to figure out you did not screw that one up!)

And all these colours and overlapping arrows make it so hard to tell which units where are even remaining untouched or where they can go. God have mercy if some tanks move through a territory - their arrow may well straight up hide from you the presence of some Infantry.

Next: Readability. I have a slight red-green-colourblindness. The American and Japanese units are NOT AT ALL DISTINGUISHABLE FROM ONE ANOTHER. And it aint a quick zoom in either to figure it out - because all unit sprites look the same, but slightly chromatically recolourd, and they all look from bottom left to top right, in the same orientation and direction.

In Triple A ; the Colours are Clear, and all Axis ships ALWAYS look from top left to the bottom right, while all Allied ships ALWAYS look from top right to bottom left - they always look at each other, you can at a glance always distinguish which one is which.

I have paid Money for this game.

And I cannot believe some Developer did his HOMEWORK ( ! ) looked at what was out there ( tripleA ) and managed to screw the UI up so badly. INCREDIBLE!
and this is not even yet getting into the slow Animations playing inbetween you pressing a Button where you havent any other choice: After concluding the last combat of the combat phase, a small window will animate after the small flags and battle animation; and this window will have only a single button to proceed to the next Phase (the entire rest of the game is greyed out). Upon the press of the button, all this stuff is animated again to disappear, only then letting you proceed to the next phase.

Who thought this was a good Idea? Why waste 15 seconds of every players Life each and every Combat Phase if there is not any action to be taken and nothing to be done except advance to the next Phase?

[Boston_NWO]

I came from playing a ton on Triplea, so I had a similar feeling to you initially. After playing the steam version for 5-10 hours, I became used to the interface and actually prefer it in some ways.

The big advantage of the steam version is a ranking system that holds players accountable to finishing games. I got really tired of playing players of far lower play level or ghosting when I was ahead.

[Teferi]

@boston_nwo this happened to you on tripleA ? I only experienced this once. Maybe the trick is to figure out a circle of “Regulars” on whom you can depend; I suspect that the way the play by mail works on 1942 is not actually conducive to games not taking forever and ever after :)

if you ever wanna play a game on tripleA ; write me a PM :)