WHY ARE WE NOT PLAYING IT ?
Until now I’ve seen as much as some 5 matches of PacGen being played on my 2 years of intensive internet wargaming .Why ?
I’ve been observing the interesting discussion brought about by Desert Tortoise and now - after some experience of playing - I agree that PG I is the best wargame until now released . What happened is that SSI tried to reuse a formula that they didn’t expect it would be so good . They added some new form and features to PG II , PacGen and the following... but it didn’t work as well as in PG I . Because if you carefully watch you can see that PG I was made to be a sole game with no sequels ... but as we all know the immense ability of our good yankee boys to develop new things and revive corpses...
Well , back to PacGen , I don’t know really what is good on it . At a first look I feel myself disappointed becaused I expected that inside the 5-stars system that they would develop something really close to the old naval warfare wargames with difficulty of surveillance and some form to avoid naval surface combat - that old WW II naval warfare games never solved ! - but none of them happened ... and the 1st thing didn’t because people probably would not like a wargame where it’s really tough find the enemy !
But that was the charm and the soul of WW II naval warfare...
Sometimes the search for reality is a fancy inside wargames . All of our combat men inside the clubs know very well that the only way possible to feel the reality is inside the battlefield - where many of our fellow wargamers would like to stay as far as possible... - but in the case of PacGen the absence of that element cut some way the interest on it ...
At least that is my opinion , there are other features that probably repulsed wargamers from it : difficult on killing units , on control the battle results while playing , great variety and uncertainty of results , and why not : lack of identity as many of us are europeans and americans ... who will play the japanese side feeling it ? That are some hypothesis I ‘ve brought about . Perhaps I’m wrong but I really would like to know the community talk over them . Specifically over this topic : WHY ARE WE NOT PLAYING PACGEN ?
It’s not difficult to answer why are we not playing FanGen ... Me at least didn’t even buy it ... I want to play against real people with real possibilities , a situation I could reproduce on a battlefield and/or it could help me to understand better how the things happened . Despite sometimes the wargames have the opposite effect ! Anyway it’s easy not play Fantasy General when I want to feel myself at the battlefield .
Due to the lack of partners I have not even played all of PacGen scens but some scens are really defying ones , mainly the aerial naval ones... the terrestrial battles are too soft as I told before with the difficulty of killing units , but on the air and sea the things comes really into a good bloodbath and there are the interesting factor of the possible navy damages
Here I end my comments hoping that some answers pop up ... and some partners as well ;-]
All the best to my fellow wargamers !