Pacific Fighters Bombed - inadequate maps

[Former_Older]

Originally Posted by tater

The primary issue was one of focus, IMO. SoW is right to concentrate on a narrow time frame, and I'd hope additional content would try to add on that, either before or after. Narrow theater, narrow the content to fill the time/theater.

PF should have focused. Somewhere.

If CVs were the centerpiece, they should have improved the shipping in more ways (better DMs, moving ships on DF maps, realistic CV ops, etc)

If using the more complete land-based campaign engine was the way to go, then pick someplace and make some useful maps for it. Don't waste time on maps that are useful for ONE MORNING of the war (and have no ships to put there), and instead build... The Slot. Or a better New Guinea map(s). Or A few Burma maps to have fighting go from early to late in the war.

tater

Good points. It's interesting to note that although we here in the USA or Great Britain, or the Netherlands, or Australia, or New Zealand, or a few other places, seem to know the basics of the war in the Pacific, it seems very evident to me that the PF team did not know very much about the war in the Pacific- and maybe, why do we expect folks from the former Soviet Union to know a lot about it? They were after all not involved there, and I doubt many schoolbooks devote pages to the Solomons on most Russian text books- the same as how my local schools do not teach much about Stalingrad or Kursk

It seems to me that the "famous highlights" were given a look, but the basic and needed infrastructure of the war in the Pacific was not looked at, or maybe simply misunderstood. So Pearl harbor, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, etc, are given maps that at worst fairly represent the areas, or at best can encompass a segment of the Island hopping campaign

But when looked at in detail, there is no framework- what of Rabaul? What of Vella LaVella or the Slot in general? Missing. Inexplicable, to us. How can Guadalcanal exist without the Slot? Well to me that's an obvious question, perhaps to the dev team, not so obvious.

And it might not be hard to understand if looked at like this:

What type of Russian Front sim could somebody do, if they did not have enough info about the Russian Front? Or- better yet- they were under the impression that they *did know* but were wrong about the scope and scale?

Therein lies the story of PF in my opinion- the dev team underestimated the scope and scale of the war in the Pacific. The "high spots" were covered, or the high spots as they saw them were covered. When instead, the war in the Pacific was so complex and intertwined and non-linear that a "hit the high spots" approach leaves so many holes in the net that the omissions are more obvious than what's included

I love PF not for it's maps and campaigns, but for the tools it gave me to make PTO content. But as a sim unto itself it is a flawed work in my opinion