Video covers game play up to turn 4.
I’m now on Turn 8! I can see a hundred cool mods or tweaks you can make. This feels like a very nice framework for modern warfare.
I’d love to see the ‘missing bits’ and minor errors fixed and this re released.
There is a lot of nuance here in terms of tactical depth as you consider how to achieve your objectives.
The biggest issues with this system (which is descendant from Kampfpanzer, Desert War, Mech War ’44 and Mech War ’77) are the whole Disruption combat results system and the now-derided “panic” randomization method. The D1/D2/D3 combat results just **don’t work** with armored vehicles. Infantry, yes, you can make the case that they can be “disrupted” and then recover from it during a battle… but vehicles (the main focus of the system) who sustain direct fire aren’t disrupted; they suffer HARD LOSSES: ( flaming hulks) or NO RESULT at all (occasionally, a hit vehicle is recoverable, but not in the context of the time period of a battle in game terms).
At the time this was produced, SPI hadn’t yet come up with a better way to handle troop quality and cohesion that was any better than randomly selecting a number of hexes ending in 1 – 10 numbers, applying it to a 10/20/30/etc. % chance of panic and having those units “panic” for a turn. An awful mechanic by any standard.
If you want a decent “version” of October War, I’d look into the Suez to Golan half of MechWar2, which is a markedly better game system than this one. It wasn’t more *popular*, but it was still BETTER, in my august opinion. MW2 was also a Mark Herrman design, if that name means anything to you.
I dispute your assessment of the panic mechanic: I have friends actually fought in ’73 with the IDF and they found many Egyptian tanks and other AVF had been abandonned by panicked crews when they felt the tide of a battle was unfavourable.
I remember getting this issue game in S&T way back when and having a blast with it when playing with friends. What struck us most about the game was this idea that the platoons were three vehicles and–instead of these abstract disrupted or double disrupted results in other games–one could readily visualize one step loss equating to a single vehicle, two step losses equating to two vehicles. Wanted more games using this system but it was not to be; the step loss idea would be kept but a whole new system wrapped around it for PANZER BATTLES and MECH WAR 2. Rats. My only criticism of this title was that the OOBs seemed a little too “cookie-cutter,” but that’s because I was also playing AH’s ARAB-ISRAELI WARS at the time where the OOBs didn’t feel that way at all. Anyway, I thought at the time and still think this was one of the better magazine wargames published by SPI.
Eric, did I misspeak by saying that October War was still using the D# system of the earlier KP/DW/P’44 games? I guess I did… I just went and reopened my old ziplock bag with this game and found that it used a *hybrid* of disruption and hard “proportionate* losses. So, this was then the beginning of SPI seeing the problems with disruption for vehicle combat. Also, panic was improved over the “hex-ending-in” schtick from earlier.