On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 9:53 AM, vance victor maclaren wrote:
I am pissed off. � I might open a new account sometime later when I am
feeling less pissed off. � The game is just so ����ing stupid I don’t
want to play it.
–Vance
http://www.harrisgamedesign.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=9549&start=16
Global is hopeless because of the dice. Its pointless to even try. The game is so tight that if you are playing a good player you only need to get diced ONCE and you lose the game. Just once.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was a recent online game in which I (axis) worked hard and got my 8 VCs in Europe as of J8. My opponent, who is a very experienced player, liberated Cairo but I was poised to take it right back and sink his puny fleet so whatever. At this point he made a couple of uncharacteristically careless mistakes, probably because he knew the game was lost and he was just playing it out. What he did was to leave a bunch of American transports off Gibraltar defended by a single destroyer, and to leave Holland under axis control even though I had bombers in Rome. OK so I sent the bombers to sink that but they just rolled 6s over and over until the destroyer shot them down. The Americans unloaded in Denmark, did a suicide run with the airforce to clear Berlin, and of course UK unloaded their 1 transport in Berlin for the great Allied victory!!! That sounds historically plausible now doesn’t it? My opponent claimed that he had been planning this unlikely series of events all along. sigh.
Global would be great if it was a strategy game. It would even be OK if it was a game where you try to not make any mistakes and hope the other side makes one that you are prepared to exploit. But its not that. Playing global is an activity where you roll dice and hope the other guy gets unlucky before you get unlucky. And every little battle is so important that whoever gets diced first loses because apart from bad dice the only way someone can lose is if they make mistakes, and that is rare because all the guys who play it are so good that they really don’t make very many mistakes. The first mistake loses the game, fair enough. But the game is so tight that its more likely that it will be lost to a bad dice roll before anyone actually makes a mistake. So a lot of the time it comes down to dice. I know that some degree of gambling is necessary to keep it from being completely dull and predictable, but a strategy game should be more than gambling. I’m not going to play a game that is impossible to win even if you play really well and make no mistakes but you have bad luck just one time. That’s stupid. It’s also kind of meaningless to win the game just because the other guy got diced first. So I have been finding its not much fun anymore and I’m giving up on it.
I might still play a live game if I could find anyone to play it with and we can house rule to play medium luck or with D5s, but as for playing with regular dice - no thanks. I quit. Maybe the new 1914 game will have different mechanics to it that make your skill and your opponent’s skill have something to do with deciding who wins the game. Fingers crossed.
~Vance
Well that’s that then.