Back in January, I wrote about traditional wargames and their somewhat problematic nature. Still, it’s a genre I enjoy when I’m in the right mood. Digging deep into a historical battle and then re-reading a military history book to see how my experience differed from reality scratches a unique gaming itch.
One of the most popular conflicts in wargaming is World War 2. There’s a host of reasons for this – the conflict was worldwide and all-encompassing, technology advanced quickly, there were a ton of interesting battles that could have gone either way, and the war ended in a clear defeat for the bad guys.
Within the vast genre of World War 2 wargames, subgenres cover different fronts and phases of the war. D-Day is a popular topic, as is the failed but interesting Market-Garden operation. Tank warfare on the sands of North Africa has its passionate fans, as does the Battle of the Bulge.
My own personal favorite WW2 theater for wargaming is the conflict between Germany and Russia on the Eastern Front. The scope and scale of the conflict there dwarfs anything that happened in the West. Many World War 2 scholars point to the battle of Stalingrad as the true turning point of the war, an academic position that has a lot of merit.
Then there is the sprawling, complex conflict in the Pacific – opening with the invasion of China by Japan, drawing the United States into the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor several years later, then finally ending with the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the dawn of the atomic age.
The Pacific theater is one of the hardest to properly simulate, especially if a game designer attempts to bite off the whole conflict with a strategic-level game. Though the number of soldiers and sailors involved was fewer than that engaged on the Eastern Front, the geographical scale of the conflict was vast, with naval power – and eventually, carrier and air power – ruling the day.
the invasion of China. It’s a slog
in most Pacific theater games.
Logistics and supply play a role in any good Pacific War simulation. The AI has to be able to handle both a grinding land war in China as well as island-hopping. Properly simulating carrier battles is a complex problem all in itself and has been the subject of games that purely focus on that aspect of the war.
Yet the complexities of the Pacific conflict haven’t kept wargame designers from taking a crack at it. In fact, three titles – all from Matrix Games, the predominant publisher of PC wargames – tackle the Pacific front from a similar strategic perspective, with varying degrees of success.
Strategic Command: Beer and Pretzels
The most polished and most recent of the contenders is the just-released Strategic Command WWII: War in the Pacific.
The Strategic Command series has been around for a while. The same engine was used for a couple of previous WW2 games, as well as a WW1 title and even a highly playable American Civil War game. It’s a flexible system reminiscent of the classic Panzer General titles.
Like the other games on this list, Strategic Command covers the entire Pacific conflict – from India in the west to the coast of the Americas in the east. For novice wargamers, it’s easily the most accessible of the three. It’s a polished, modernized experience; hopping in and starting to push ships and soldiers around is simple and intuitive.
If you’re a Panzer General veteran, the game will feel instantly familiar, albeit with a much grander scope. Production of units is straightforward and supply is simplified but evocative. A basic research system allows broad focus but is weighted toward the traditional strengths of the combatants.
On the field, the game does a passable job of simulating the conflict. The land war in China is simulated especially well. It feels appropriately sloggy, requiring attention but not too much micromanagement. Land war is a setting where the core Strategic Command systems work especially well.
Yet cracks in the simulation reveal themselves with extended play. There’s no stacking of units, even at sea, so ships are limited to one per hex. With a scale of 50 miles per hex, this is almost unforgivable. Large fleets – even in the early game – choke up great swaths of the Pacific like too many toys in a toddler’s bathtub.
clutter the Central Pacific.
Neither immersive nor realistic.
Land-based airpower, such a dominant part of the conflict, feels underpowered. Playing as the Allies against the AI, the Japanese first turn generally results in a historical outcome, but there’s no opportunity to mount any kind of token resistance to a lightning-quick conquest of the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies.
While historically, the early war Japanese juggernaut should absolutely win these fights, it feels oddly lacking in player agency that there’s no time or space to do anything as the Allies but watch the inevitable unfold.
For newcomers to the wargaming genre looking to step up to a medium-complexity experience, Strategic Command WW2: War in the Pacific is more than playable. It won’t give you the deeper insights into the strategies of the conflict you’ll get from other titles, but as a fast-moving experience that paints the broad strokes of the Pacific’s challenges, it’s a solid choice.
War in the Pacific: The Insane Granddaddy
Okay, you knew it was coming. Let’s talk about War in the Pacific – specifically, the Admiral’s Edition, released in 2009. This is famed wargame designer Gary Grigsby’s masterwork, and if you have a bajillion hours to spare and interest in the topic, it’s the only game you’ll ever need.
Here’s the questions to ask yourself: do you want a historically-researched simulation of every single ship, pilot, and airplane in the entire Pacific conflict? Do you want to spend twelve hours – literally twelve hours – on the first turn of the game, assigning orders, setting air bases to expand, and micromanaging supply convoys? Do you want to play out the entire multiyear conflict in one-day turns?
That’s right – one-day turns, and even after the initial setup, turns are going to take you an hour or two at a minimum. You’re going to play over twenty turns before you even get to 1942. The Allies taking the Solomons are a couple of hundred turns away, assuming you plan it right and get all the troops in the right spots to even execute the invasion. Iwo Jima and the end of the war are years away in real-time.
So yeah, it’s all kinds of grognard insanity – the opposite extreme compared to a beer-and-pretzels game like Strategic Command. War in the Pacific is a micromanager’s paradise.
Does it simulate the conflict accurately? Honestly, even after years of dabbling with the game, I couldn’t tell you – I’ve never finished a full war. It certainly gives proper weight to the importance of logistics and supply; you often feel more like a quartermaster than a general. (The game does include a set of smaller scenarios that are far more playable by normal humans than the full campaign, including an excellent Solomons scenario, and I have completed several of those.)
on turn 1 of War in the Pacific.
I’m exhausted already.
When the game clicks, it’s amazing. Carrier battles feel accurate and deadly. The scale feels right, with massive fleets stacking in a single hex. Planning and coordination are paramount; invading anywhere involves syncing up the shipment of massive amounts of men and material to the right place, at the right time.
All this is wrapped in a package that’s showing its age. To get the game to run full-screen on modern machines involves adding command-line parameters and tweaking options. The UI is an unintuitive mess, with critical commands hidden several layers deep.
Yet for the wargamer who wants to truly dig into the details – who wants to manage which pilots command which squadrons, or where individual oil tankers are stationed – War in the Pacific is unique. There’s never been a game quite like it and there probably never will be again.
Warplan Pacific: This One Is Just Right
Closer to Strategic Command than War in the Pacific is WarPlan Pacific. A passion project from a solo developer, based on his previous WarPlan title which focused on the European conflict, WarPlan Pacific is a smartly-designed wargame that strikes a great balance between playability and complexity.
The game is far from perfect. It’s arguably the ugliest of the three, with a dull and lifeless map littered with equally dull board game-style counters. Indeed, it’s the title that feels the most like a board game – one of those monster wargamers that old graybeards would spread out on a table for months, carefully stacking chits and taking a couple of turns a day.
Yet the core design is robust, making solid compromises between ease of play and grognardy realism. Navies can be stacked, up to a limit (there are two stack size options available as two different scenarios). Ground units are limited to one per hex, but an air unit can be in the same hex. A distinction is made between the single hex of smaller islands and an adjacent beach hex, used for landings; this makes the late-war island-hopping campaign of the Allies feel much better than in Strategic Command.
Solomons, scene of an iconic
Pacific engagement.
It’s interesting to compare the results from the first few turns with the results from a game of Strategic Command. The designers emphasized different aspects, leading to different outcomes. I prefer some things about the way Strategic Command simulates the war in China, but the results in India, Singapore, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies are more historically accurate in WarPlan Pacific.
Land combat is weighted heavily to the defense in WarPlan Pacific, dragging out battles. But proper application of combined arms can usually crack the egg, and there are some interesting tools at the player’s disposal. A finer control over replacements and upgrades avoids the extreme micromanagement of War in the Pacific but allows for far greater operational flexibility than Strategic Command.
Bountiful Seas
Despite the Pacific theater being less popular in wargaming circles than the European conflict, there are still plenty of great, meaty wargames to feast on. The three I’ve listed here all play in the same strategic or grand operational space, and each is a unique take on the conflict.
All three games are best played against human opponents. No matter how good a wargame AI is, managing both the island-hopping naval campaign of the central Pacific and the vast land war in China is a tall order. Yet all three games do include a half-decent AI opponent, typically relying on scripted openings to achieve a reasonably historical challenge for the average player.
I don’t think the ideal Pacific theater wargame has been made yet. I’d love to see something with a touch more complexity than WarPlan Pacific, but less complex than the spreadsheet lover’s dream that is War in the Pacific. I’d love to see a game that adopts the robust WEGO system from War in the Pacific, rather than the IGO-UGO systems of the other two games.
And I’d want any Pacific theater game to emphasize the logistical challenges of the naval conflict and the unique problems of distance and space.
Overall, the theater is well-served by the three titles I’ve mentioned. They’re different takes on the same subject by three smart teams. Each game has its own quirks and flaws, but each has moments of brilliance that evoke the nature and feel of the conflict.
In the end, if you’re interested in the topic, you can’t go wrong with any of them. (Though maybe think twice about War in the Pacific unless you’re a little nuts.)
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