Jazzist said:
I'm not interested in a game that aims for total realism, that's why i bought TOI. The plateau rule caught my attention because it's not just a simplification such as having different types of roads allowing the same speed or different woods providing the same cover. It's an element of unrealism "actively" introduced to the game, and since I didn't see the usefulness of the rule, this bothered me.
On the topic of this thread, I played the scenario Liberation yesterday. I played the germans and the americans beat the crap out of me. By the end of the third round, I had only one squad left. Both of us made sensible choices and neither of us got exceptionally lucky rolling the dice, and we even forgot about the "merciless assault" operations card for the entire game, so the feeling we both had was that this scenario is very unbalanced.
I agree totally with Gamer4Life in this discussion, and I welcome further discussions on how to implement some degree of balance to the scenarios. I don't care about historical accuracy or about what FFG intended. I want a fairly easy tactical wargame where equally skilled opponents can have about equal chances of winning, and I'm certain that TOI can be that game for me.
I suppose every game has its quirks, the plateau rule certainly being one of them in TOI. I usually don't make much effort to seek out any level of realisim in a game, personally I usually shoot for a balanced and challenging game that offers up some customization and for those real Gems dynamic mechanics that change from game to game. The last one their, Dynamic mechanics are rare in board games, they usually only end up in card games but thats kind of what I like about TOI as their is some dynamic in the fact that cards are used in the game.
In any case, ya I mean the whole scenario discussion is really a matter of preference and opinion. I don't think longagoigo had any oppossition to changes and adjustments (I think he spoke quite highly of the games adaptability), but what I think he was saying is that the scenarios are more like examples of what a scenario can be and adjustments to make a scenario are impossible to some degree because their are so many variables involved with the players themselves (aka skill level, experiance with the mechanics, experiance with board games). What might be unbalanced for one group may be totaly screwed up for another. I can understand that and I concluded that my version of balanced assumes that players are of equal skill and equal experiance, in which case it can be arguably said that the scenarios that come with the book are not balanced (note I said arguably, not trying to rehash it here).
I haven't played Liberation yet so I can't say much about it, but judging from experiance it does sound quite off. I will have to check that one out.