The Wargamer

Gameplay

The heart of any game is gameplay, and Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater offers a wide range of operational level activity.  The main campaign only will be described here – many aspects are adjusted, altered or not included (irrelevant due to scale) in the smaller scenarios.  Units are generally armies, corps, or sometimes smaller formations for land units, groups/wings for air units, and individual ships for some capital classes or groups or flotillas as ship size decreases.  Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater endeavours to provide a numerous options for players, so there is a wide variety of different land, sea, and air units.  Infantry, armoured, artillery, anti-air and paratroop units are found in most national armies, as well as special force (Marine) units.  Special force units now have the capability to embark amphibiously off the beach, which can be critically important in the Pacific advance of both the US and the IJN. Air units are fighter, tactical bomber, or strategic bomber.  All major classes of warships, from destroyers to carriers, are present.  Since R&D can influence the effectiveness of basically all units in different ways, it should be evident that, while abstracted, the game system does have a fair amount of depth, and that effective coordination of different units and types is necessary for best results.

The land warfare system in Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater  is pretty similar to its immediate predecessor, Strategic Command 2 Blitzkrieg (and the Weapons and Warfare expansion), which has already been reviewed on this site. There are a few differences – additional terrain types, and only Soviet armour gets two attacks, for example – but overall the land war will be familiar to Strategic Command 2 players.

The major change in Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater is in the naval warfare system.  Aircraft carriers, in particular, have undergone a major transformation.  Each carrier icon now has a separate strength for the ship and for the aircraft they carry.  The aircraft can be put into different modes before the carrier moves, either combat air patrol (CAP), naval/tactical or ‘mixed’ (and learning to change modes BEFORE moving can be critically important).  If put into CAP mode, there are options to have the aircraft automatically get assigned (auto), or to focus exclusively on intercepting incoming aircraft or escorting friendly attacking aircraft, or to stay on the ground regardless of events around them.  It also seems evident that the anti-ship strength of carrier aircraft is quite significant, which is not unreasonable as that was one of the major focuses of carrier proficiency.

A second small but extremely significant change to the naval system is that ships now expend supply ONLY when they engage in combat.  Without this change, naval forces in the Strategic Command system would have been severely hampered by the need to renew supply at friendly ports.  Ports are still important, however, as combat results in the requirement to not only re-supply but frequently to repair damage.  The supply change is therefore a positive aspect, as without it the game system would have bogged down completely in the vast expanse of the Pacific, but is a major abstraction. 

Ship speeds, however, have not changed substantially from earlier versions of the Strategic Command 2 engine.  In the European theatre naval forces were not quite as central as they tend to be in the Pacific.  Therefore some of the glaring peculiarities of ship speeds could be dismissed as unimportant.  In Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater the slow, almost stately movement of ships can be a significant challenge, as ships plod – and that is the only appropriate word – across the Pacific.  In the actual war the USS Yorktown participated in the Battle of the Coral Sea, which ended 8 May 1942, and then played a key role at Midway on 4 June 1942, with a repair stop at Pearl Harbor en route.  This type of movement is completely unachievable in Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater.  Another simple example is the challenge a US player faces in simply getting his ships to Pearl Harbor.  In real life the 2250 nautical miles from San Diego to Pearl Harbor can easily be done in ten days by a ship travelling at ten to twelve knots, which approximates the economical cruising speed of conventional hulled ships.  In the game this would be one turn.  However, at game speeds this takes about four turns.

The naval system is hardly realistic, but does it work?  Surprisingly, aside from the plodding slowness of ships in the game, most aspects do work together reasonably well.  The slow speed of ships means that players have to decide their priorities very carefully.  The vessels most penalized by slow speed are submarines, which take what seems like forever to get from the US west coast to the convoy routes off Japan, and are often comparatively easy prey if they then seek to disrupt shipping between Japan and its empire.  The submarine system has never been a particularly strong aspect of the Strategic Command system, and it remains rather weak in this offering.  However, carrier warfare can be quite fascinating, and the dynamics of the first effective carrier strike often deciding a battle are well simulated here.  Fixing the speed issue would probably be more advantageous to the Allies then the Japanese, and from a game balance perspective, this may not be worthwhile. So the naval system has definite warts, but it also does seem to provide some insight into the dynamics of the naval war in the Pacific.

Of course, in a major theatre of war such as this, not all countries enter the war immediately.  Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater has a quite sophisticated diplomatic model that tracks neutrals and has them enter the war at a point that is sometimes a result of an occurrence in the game, or sometimes the result of diplomatic initiatives or unit movements (or non-movements) on the part of a player.  The main campaign opens with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and an expansion of the war in China.  Generally the Japanese will declare war on Thailand as well in order to get better access to Malaya.  However, after that the entry of neutral powers or warlords will be triggered by player actions.

Do all of these different units and capabilities result in a reasonable facsimile of the Pacific war?  Well, sort of.  Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater certainly provides an extremely good insight into the incredible breadth of Japanese ambition.  From the outset of the main campaign in December 1941 the Japanese have to juggle offensives in China, Southeast Asia, the Southwest Pacific, the Central Pacific, and conceivably the west coast of North America.  The very different nature of various battlefields is also evident.  In China and Southeast Asia Japanese land and air forces tend to dominate, while naval forces augmented by a small number of land units head off into the Pacific.  The rather small industrial base and limitations on Japanese R&D also highlight the challenges faced by anyone trying to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (aka the Japanese Empire).

Allies land in Japan in the summer 1945 in a view from a recent PBEM game.

All production, R&D, and repair of damaged units is conducted with the basic resource in Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater, the Military Production Point (MPP).  This abstracted economic approach works quite well, as it reduces the types of products a player is concerned about to just one, and forces the player to prioritize how he will use the always too few (for the Japanese player, anyway) MPPs he has. 

The Allied player faces a very different situation.  Initially he has extremely limited military resources, and the challenge is exacerbated by different nationalities seeking to coordinate their efforts against the Japanese aggressor.  Much of the initial Allied forces can be swept away by an aggressive Japanese player, but whereas the Japanese have serious economic and R&D limitations, the main Allied player, the US, will soon see his industrial power grow and will have much greater R&D opportunities. Fortunately for the Allied player, there is a long production queue of units already in the pipeline, available as time passes in the game.

The overall result of these two contrasting situations is that the Japanese player can expand quickly and aggressively at the outset, but soon starts to have difficulty finding enough units to keep expanding, and is likely to find his existing units becoming less effective in the face of more sophisticated Allied, particularly US, weapons as the greater US R&D capacity bears fruit.  The various limitations and capacities of the different powers is done within the system by placing limitations on the overall amount of R&D (ie a maximum of 800 MPP in research for Japan as compared to 1750 for the US), as well as by some mild adjustments of the cost of conducting various research.  The Japanese have to pay a little more for some areas of R&D, and this also acts as a curb on their achieving advanced weapons.

In the end the more difficult challenge appears to face the Japanese player, despite the initial starting advantages.  Unless the Japanese forces can make really dramatic advances quickly, and retain these captured territories, the overall weight of Allied resources will make progress increasingly difficult.  The game also simulates the growing opposition that aggressors often face quite well, as successful drives by Japanese units can result in more opposing units coming into play, or neutrals shifting their allegiance more to the Allies, or even joining in the war as an active participant. 

AI

The game has a reasonably competent AI opponent, which is very useful for learning the game system, but on the offensive the AI is seldom very effective.  The AI will occasionally do strange things – an American HQ landed by itself on Hokkaido, for instance, in one of my recent games – but overall tends to play a reasonable if conservative game.  The AI is also clearly augmented by extra resources that a human player would not receive, and this makes the difference between playing the AI and a human opponent very significant.  However, the extra resources somewhat compensate for the less inspired play of the computer, so it does tend to make the game more challenging.  Those who seek an extra challenge, or find themselves outmatched by the computer, can adjust the difficulty level appropriately at the outset of a game.

I found guiding the Allies to victory over the computer AI reasonably straightforward, but trying to triumph over computer directed Allies as the Japanese is significantly more challenging.  This does not seem to be an unusual result, based on a number of comments on the reasonably active Battlefront forum devoted to Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater.

 

 

The Soviet Union can enter the war, as shown in this view of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in the summer of 1945.

Multiplayer Gaming

As with most games, playing against a wily human opponent is a much more enjoyable experience than matching wits with silicon chips.  Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater offers both PBEM and network play.  I cannot speak for the network aspect, but, similar to its Strategic Command 2 predecessors, PBEM is very well implemented.  I definitely prefer playing this game PBEM, and the replay feature provides a good recap of events during your opponent’s turn that the fog of war would have allowed you to see. Curiously, the replay feature is not present in hot seat games, which means that players in the same room have to employ PBEM if they want to have this very helpful part of the game available.

The more balanced amount of resources that both sides have when facing a human opponent makes these games very different from contests against the AI, to the point where applying techniques and strategies that work against the AI would be fruitless against a human.  In other words, while the game doesn’t actually change, the play is so different against a human as compared to the AI that players need to adjust their styles significantly if they wish to do well.

Overall, though play balance in the Campaign game in PBEM seems to be similar to that found against the AI – heavily weighted against the Japanese; the human-controlled Japanese player will be hard pressed when faced with a competent human Allied player, while the Allied player is more likely to achieve some level of victory, and if he cannot achieve decisive victory it is likely to be because time ran out.

Editors, Expansions, Replay Value

As with earlier offerings, Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater comes with what appears to be a very robust editor.  I do not do mods, so my assessment is pretty superficial, but it does seem to be all that someone interested in using an editor would want.  Previous iterations of SC generated a number of expansions, and this is possible again here – I have not heard of any plans, though.

Replay value is pretty good, especially if you can find a human opponent.  The game system does have inherent dynamic changes built into it through the script methodology, and the basic game comes with not only a very comprehensive overall campaign for the entire Pacific war, but the eleven mini-campaigns.  You really do get a lot of game for your money.

Finally, it is very likely that the game will be tweaked and improved by future patches.  Hubert Cater has learned not to leave well-enough alone. 

Summary

Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater is a good game, although not perfect.  It provides an impressive simulation of the vast scope the Pacific war from 1941 to 1945, although its representation of the sweeping offensives that occurred in the Central Pacific is rather tortoise like.  Not as complex as – but much more playable than –War in the Pacific, and providing more detail than War Plan Pacific, Strategic Command WW II: Pacific Theater  fits neatly into the middle ground of wargames on this subject.  It tackles an extremely complex theatre of Operations and makes it less daunting.  Gamers familiar with the Strategic Command games will slip into this new theatre easily, while newcomers to the system should be able to quickly move their units with confidence.  Mastery of the comparatively simple game system, however, will take lots of effort, and will likely come easier to players of the Allied forces than the Japanese. 

System Requirements                                           Reviewer’s System

CPU: 1 GHz                                                               CPU: 3.4 GHz

RAM: 512 MB                                                            RAM: 1 GB

OS: Windows XP/Vista                                              OS: Windows XP

DirectX: 7                                                                   DirectX:

Video Card: 128 MB with color supporting               Video Card: GeForce 6800 256MB

at least 128 pixels height and 768 pixels width

Sound Card: 16 Bit DirectSound Compatible

CD-ROM: 8X or better                                              CD-ROM: 48X

HD: 1.2 GB free space                                               HD: 85 GB free space

About the author

Doug began wargaming with Panzerblitz back in 1972.  He transitioned to computer wargames in the early 80s, and still spends far too much of his time on them.  He spent 30 years in the Canadian Navy, although he did not go to sea much after the 80s.  Now retired he mainly coordinates domestic administration.  He recently edited (and wrote one of the six chapters of) a book entitled Fighting at Sea: Naval Battles from the Ages of Sail and Steam, published in October 2008 by Robin Brass Studios.  He would also like to thank Bob Hills for his comments on the draft of the review.

Select Bibliography

There is a vast amount of literature on the Second World War, and the Asia Pacific aspect is well documented.  Just two books will be mentioned here, one an overview and one dealing with the lesser known end game of the war.

The first book is perhaps the best single volume of the entire war available.  Anyone seeking to understand the global cataclysm would be well served to read Gerhard. L. Weinberg’s A World at Arms.  It covers the European and Asian theatres, bringing a full perspective to the conflict that is unmatched.  The second book is Richard B. Frank’s Downfall, which covers the much discussed but generally poorly understood process by which the Japanese agreed to surrender.  (Franks also wrote a quite decent book on the Guadalcanal campaign.)