Twilight Struggle: An AAR – Part 3
How’s the new digital Twilight Struggle play? ~
Michael Eckenfels, 19 April 2016
PART 3
TURN ONE, ROUND 2: USSR GOES FIRST
04/19/16
Month: April 2016
04/18/16
Twilight Struggle: An AAR – Part 2
How’s the new digital Twilight Struggle play? ~
Michael Eckenfels, 18 April 2016
PART 2
TURN 1: HEADLINE PHASE
In the last article, I described the basics to Twilight Struggle to pave the way for anyone that’s not heard of the game (which is probably only two of you). Here, my possibly disastrous game of TW begins officially.
04/17/16
Twilight Struggle: An AAR – Part 1
How’s the new digital Twilight Struggle play? ~
Michael Eckenfels, 17 April 2016
Everything You Wanted To Know About Letting Godless Communists Overrun The World (But Were Afraid To Ask): A First Look/AAR on Twilight Struggle (GMT) on Steam
Twilight Struggle is a highly-rated board game by GMT that came out way back in 2005 (in fact, I reviewed it back in the day, somewhere else). It is an immensely popular one, too; BGG has it as the number one, number two, and number three game among war games, board games, and strategy games, respectively, on their site. It’s been a LONG while since I’ve played it, though we did try our hand in the forums a year or so ago (I think the links have long since been closed down, though). It took a while for things to come back to me, and I don’t think they fully did.
So, when this Steam version of Twilight Struggle was released, the first thing I checked was to see if there was an AI component to it (there is). Of course, the quickest way to learn a game is to get your butt handed to you by a pro at the game, but I figured it would be better to not try to be quite so awful when playing a live person, by trying out the AI, which was sure to be a min/maxing devil.
04/15/16
News! Battlefront Releases Combat Mission: Final Blitzkrieg
Check out the latest from Battlefront ~
GrogHeads Newsdesk, 15 April 2016
Battlefront has released the latest Combat Mission game, and it’s back to WWII.
Centered on the frozen battlefields of the Battle of the Bulge, Combat Mission: Final Blitzkrieg depicts the desperate struggles between Allied and Axis forces during the latter stages of the Western Front in 1944 and 1945.
04/15/16
The Zombie Apocalypse, Part 11: Red Dawn in our lifetime?
What to do when the movies come true ~
Jonathan Glazer, 15 April 2016
I am going to take a slight departure with this installment and move in a different direction for the moment. Of course we must always keep our eyes open for the first sign of the dead rising with a taste for human flesh. But for now I want to talk about a more immediate threat. This one is very real and in the news daily. I am talking about the invasion of the United States by a human hostile enemy.
The United States Armed forces have always been accused of preparing to fight the next war by training to fight the last war. As Santayana is often paraphrased “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it”, the lessons of prior conflicts must be studied, but that does not mean we will be fighting the same war over again. The United States Military command still teaches amphibious assaults, as executed on the beaches of Normandy, Sicily and the Pacific Theater of Operations throughout World War II. The reality is that while we do land troops in this fashion, such as in Somalia and a few other engagements, such landings are always unopposed. This is because technology has rendered the survivability of a true hostile amphibious landing to be not acceptable. Surface to shore missiles and man portable rockets along with increasingly sophisticated targeting systems mean that landing craft will be an endangered species by the time they reach a contested beachhead.