NationStates Jolt Archive


What I Want In The Next US Invasion of Another Country

My Gun Not Yours
09-12-2004, 03:19
Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.

There were no whiny anti-war Hollywood types or questionable war motives or granola-munching human shields. I'm starting to think that even Command and Conquer: Generals, a game so "realistic" it took a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.

Well, below is my open letter to the Real Time Strategy gaming cartel. I want a War Simulation. A real one. I don't want little cartoon tanks jostling around in a video sandbox chewing down each other's health meters while a preteen opponent insults my sexuality using every key on his keyboard except the ones with letters. I want an RTS game that will give me a stress headache after an hour and an ulcer after a week. I want to identify experienced players on the street by their Thousand-Yard Stares.

I want a War Sim...

1. ...where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a "nuclear missile silo," only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage. I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack. I want congressional hearings demanding answers to these atrocities.

2. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another "orphanage" turned out to be a NOD ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn't level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier's daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan.

3. Every War Sim has a "Fog of War" that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullshit" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over.

4. I want those awesome rooted monsters from Starcraft that wait until the enemy gets close and then launch tentacles up their asses. Just think of how demoralizing that would have to be. But I want to lose points off my Public Support meter every time one of those monsters accidentally impales a schoolgirl in a horrific bloody mess that will shock all but the Japanese.

5. I want that "Public Support" meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 Public Support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my Mutalisks happened to be caught on video accidentally eating one clergyman. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city goes unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime.

6. Speaking of innocents, I want a War Sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in Red Alert 2. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all, with 30 carriers. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to Hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.

7. I want my Mission Objectives to change every 30 seconds, without anyone letting me know. I want little talking heads to pop up on my screen - commanders, politicians, allies, military intelligence - each giving me different sets of victory parameters, all of them conflicting and many of them written in bullshit ass-covering doublespeak.

8. I want CIA Field Agents that operate completely on their own agenda, the little units spreading clouds of brown wherever they go. I want to go after enemy weapons scientists only to find out said agents have spirited them away and put them on the payroll.

9. I want a super-cool custom weapons lab where I can design mech armor for my infantry with wicked acid-tipped missiles and guns that shoot spiders. Then I want to watch as a hundred men are cooked alive in the desert because of a defect in the internal air conditioning units that shorted due to condensation in the fusion coils and insufficient insulation in the wiring units bypassing the laser reactor core, due to the contractor's decision to use over-the-counter components instead of the military-grade ones mandated in Subsection 12:94A, Paragraph B of the Military Weapons Platform Procurement Act of 3013, a document that is 14,724 pages long and contains some 81,301 loopholes that allow congressmen to bypass component testing and funnel lucrative military contracts to cut-rate suppliers from their home districts at the peak of every election cycle.

10. Geneva Convention be damned, I want to drop Anthrax.

11. Gamers complain about bad "pathfinding" (that is, your units wandering around the map and falling into the river against your orders). Well, I want worse pathfinding. I want entire platoons who wander into the mountains because somebody bled on the map. I want tanks to get stuck turret-deep in mud flats and have to be rescued by helicopters while snipers pick off soldiers trying to keep their boots from being sucked off their feet in muck.

12. I want mutinous units that chainsmoke hash and frag their Sargents and sell Heroin on the side and rogue commanders who go mad and shave their heads and set up fortresses in the jungle decorated with human skulls. I want to have to send a CIA assassin in to take him out. And then they chop up a donkey, for some reason.

13. I want factions. Not a simple alien vs. humans vs. bugs three-way war orgy. I want to share the map with powerful forces who are not friend or foe or anything else, a News Media, Private Corporations, asshole allies and friendly enemies, everyone jockeying for their own interests and me unable to bend over at any moment without turning my codpiece around first. I want a France.

14. I want fat, left-wing documentarians carefully editing the only the most incriminating footage, countered only by low-IQ country music singers crooning my praises while in American Flag-colored cowboy hats.

15. About every five minutes I want one of my helicopters to crash, completely on its own, for some fucking reason.

16. I want a fourth of my casualties to come from friendly fire and non-combat or training accidents. I want a big-name hero unit who rallies the troops with his Magical Sword of Slaying, only to be killed when an ammo crate falls off a loading dock.

17. In my Public Support display let me find out that the news media has run, in the same magazine, one story blasting us for going to war for minerals and another story blasting us for not acting on the continuing mineral shortage back home. There should also be simultaneous stories about the outrageous expense of the war effort, and another about how the troops are under-funded and under-equipped. Set it so that I somehow lose Public Support points with each story.

18. I want to be able to build a POW camp structure where enemy soldiers and suicide bombers are held should they somehow survive battle or should their suicide bombing only be half-successful. I want to right-click on the building and open an option that says "Interrogate Prisoners," which will make parts of the map open up and reveal enemy positions, saving my own units from ambushes. Then, I want a little cutscene to pop up to announce that photos of my prisoner interrogations have emerged, sparking international outrage because several prisoners were upset and humiliated and some even physically harmed.

The whole world is shocked. Because people were physically harmed.

In a war. So, I leave the battlefield...

...and brush the flaming chunks of bomb victims off my boots to address the worldwide outrage over the enemy soldiers who had their self-esteem damaged. The game will bring me up on a Court-Martial, everybody pointing out that it was I who clicked the little Interrogation icon. I want to lose tons of Public Support points and have every game objective suddenly put in doubt.

19. Now, beating the game will depend on how I play to Ivy League politicians who think a gun is something you hang over your mantlepiece to be occasionally dusted by the maid in your Connecticut Summer home. And when it comes to that point in the game where this panel demands the truth (and says they're "entitled" to the truth) I want a little drop-down menu that will let me tell them that they, in fact, can't handle the truth.

With a couple of clicks (or maybe a Hotkey) I'll tell them that we live in a world that has walls and that those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. I will tell them that I have a greater responsibility than they can possibly fathom. They weep for mistreated prisoners and curse the military. They have that luxury. They have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that the naked human pyramid and homoerotic torture, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to them, saves lives.

I'll tell them that they don't want the truth, because deep down, in places they don't talk about at parties, they want me on that wall. They need me on that wall. I'll tell them that I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to men who rise and sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it.
Nsendalen
09-12-2004, 03:31
Yeah, that article's funny. Maddox, right? :P
Derscon
09-12-2004, 03:49
Funny, but unfortuantely, true.
Armed Bookworms
09-12-2004, 04:04
Nope, I think it's his.


NM, it's from pointless waste of time, Ultimate War Sim.
Andaluciae
09-12-2004, 04:23
It would admittedly be interesting...
Docklebaln
09-12-2004, 04:34
Man thats crazy....just crazy.
International Terrans
09-12-2004, 04:57
That was an awesome read. But I have my own kickass ideas for an RTS - like one where you have to drop Marines into a city, surrounded by enemies, and then dig in and hope you don't get slaughtered to the last man.

Oh wait, that's been done. Damn. Well, give it better graphics, then ;)
The Forty Day Weekend
09-12-2004, 05:22
hey that's very impressive. nice work.

got a couple more

20. Every 4 game-years I want to have to defend myself against a challenger from an opposing faction, and if I lose the game is over. I want to have to raise money for attack ads by reducing every issue to the simplest possible rhetorical stump line, repeating it ad nauseum until everyone gets sick of the whole thing and votes for me because they think we are in danger and need to be tough. Or against me cos they think we are not in danger and are being too tough.

During this time I will have to justify every single action I took not only since I started playing but also those that happened before I even bought the game. Including that time I claimed to all my buddies that I clocked mortal kombat with straight perfect rounds but actually I couldn't even get past scorpion. And the time I played Leisure Suite Larry yet now claim to defend the nation's moral values.

21. I want enemies who grow stronger based not on how many bases they control or how much money they have but instead based on how many of them I have killed. For every one bad guy who dies five of his extended family will change from civilians to bad guys. The next generation of nephews will have 10 bad guys for my successor to deal with. And for every civilian I kill twice as many will become bad guys.

22. I want to have to hold nation-wide elections within 2 years of invading a country. On all but the easiest levels these countries will be split ethnically by roughly 2 to 1 or some other ratio making democratic government difficult at the best of times. I want to have to figure out a way for 22 million people to vote at 9000 polling booths using only 35000 combat troops and no air support to defend those booths.

23. I want my intelligence services to be so overly bureaucratised that information-gathering becomes impossibly slow. I also want to be able to stovepipe my intelligence services so that I can increase the speed of obtaining necessary information. I want to be able to do this so well that all oversight checks are lost and the information on enemy positions that I get is so hopelessly wrong that I invade the wrong countries on a regular basis.

24. I want to have to build sprawling cemetaries at home for my fallen soldiers. And mass graves for my enemies.
Tactical Grace
09-12-2004, 05:22
Very nice, except war is not about defending freedom. Freedom is incidental. Dictatorships fight wars too, the US would be every bit as powerful militarily if it went totally fascist tomorrow. There really is no correlation between the fighting of wars and freedom. The two are entirely separate issues, as far as I can see.
The Forty Day Weekend
09-12-2004, 05:40
Very nice, except war is not about defending freedom. Freedom is incidental. Dictatorships fight wars too, the US would be every bit as powerful militarily if it went totally fascist tomorrow. There really is no correlation between the fighting of wars and freedom. The two are entirely separate issues, as far as I can see.

Yeah I think he is being specific to this particular war though.... where freedom is an issue... whether you think it's an empty piece of rhetoric to justify imperio-capitalist war-mongering ... or an essential human right under threat and requiring superpower intervention.

As to My Gun Not Yours' point about freedom, ie

"I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to men who rise and sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it."

Which is a quote from A Few Good Men... I would take exception to this, it is a patriotic duty to question the manner in which your government provides freedom.
Chodolo
09-12-2004, 05:44
Here's the article: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/wargames.html

(It has pictures too).

And it is one of the better examinations of war that I have read. I hate the way war is so politicized. In any case, it makes for an amusing read on the surface, but there's some sad truths in there David Wong picked up on.
Niccolo Medici
09-12-2004, 11:53
This is really, really good. Well done whoever did this!

I applaud this tirade and look forward to not being able to play the RTS on my laptop.
Smeagol-Gollum
09-12-2004, 12:06
How about :

A realisation that war is not a game.

A reasoned response to world opinion and the UN (they just might be right about such finnicky details as the existence of WMDs)

A lack of such obviouse desire for the "next US invasion of another country".

A press that is not constrained by being "embedded" (read : "in bed with").
United State of Europe
09-12-2004, 12:19
What I want in the next US Invasion of another Country

An Ameriscum defeat.
Los Banditos
09-12-2004, 12:29
How about :

A realisation that war is not a game.

A reasoned response to world opinion and the UN (they just might be right about such finnicky details as the existence of WMDs)

A lack of such obviouse desire for the "next US invasion of another country".

A press that is not constrained by being "embedded" (read : "in bed with").
How about:

A sense of humor?
Torching Witches
09-12-2004, 12:32
How about :

A realisation that war is not a game.

A reasoned response to world opinion and the UN (they just might be right about such finnicky details as the existence of WMDs)

A lack of such obviouse desire for the "next US invasion of another country".

A press that is not constrained by being "embedded" (read : "in bed with").
Did you read it, SG? It was not a genuine desire for such a game (or another war), but a critique of the actions of all parties during the war - and a realisation that war games give a false representation of war.
Torching Witches
09-12-2004, 12:33
An Ameriscum defeat.
Hello. Nice to see you again.
United State of Europe
09-12-2004, 12:34
Did you read it, SG? It was not a genuine desire for such a game (or another war), but a critique of the actions of all parties during the war - and a realisation that war games give a false representation of war.

'All Parties'?

We all know that the redkneck 'My Gun' (His name implies he is a redkneck) is a war mongering pro war marching Ameriscum fool.
Torching Witches
09-12-2004, 12:36
'All Parties'?

We all know that the redkneck 'My Gun' (His name implies he is a redkneck) is a war mongering pro war marching Ameriscum fool.
Like I said. Hello.
Los Banditos
09-12-2004, 12:37
'All Parties'?

We all know that the redkneck 'My Gun' (His name implies he is a redkneck) is a war mongering pro war marching Ameriscum fool.
If you read some of his other posts you might find out that he is not. He is quite a bit more open-minded then that.
Jeff-O-Matica
09-12-2004, 12:42
Some games are fun. This proposed game, or non-proposed game is not as good as "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift, if it is intended to be some sort of satire.

As for war, I say forget about it. War is not good for anything. Let's make peace.

And as for people who lable all Americans as some sort of scum, well, it's easy to see this type of person is quick to judge and slow to think. That would be like saying all people in England have rotten teeth or all people in France are afraid of their own shadows. It is this type of bigotry that feeds the hate required for war.

So, my choice is to forget the bigotry and stop promoting war.
Jeff-O-Matica
09-12-2004, 12:51
I wondered if "hatred" would have been a better word to use, instead of "hate" in my last post. I decided it would be only slightly better, and since I write in this type of medium (forum) quickly, it does not matter enough to change that word now.
Unaha-Closp
09-12-2004, 13:37
Further to the Rant:

When playing the home team, I want to know that no matter what I do I will not be able to beat off the attack. I want the enemy to arrive like invincible space invaders, an endless surge of incredibly powerful weaponary that takeover the map. I want all my best weapons to be destroyed.

I want to have the option to welcome their invasion. Only to find they have taken over the mineral mines and are shipping it off to their homebase. When I protest, they gun my marchers down in the street.

When I click the rebellion option and attack the invaders, I want to be called a terrorist, scum, baby-killer, lunatic and fool. When I kill one space marine using a sniper I expect to see the enemy bomb the neighbourhood not killing my sniper, but annihilating my grandmother.

I want my side to consist of 2000 different factions. I want to have to take funds from anybody offering, even lunatics that chop the heads off women and make the enemy more determined. I want to blamed for everything the 2000 factions do, including those from neighbouring states. I want some of the factions to come from neighbouring states allied to the enemy. I want none of my factions to trust each other.

I want my weapons to consist of slingshot, dagger and high explosives. When I choose to use the explosives in roadside bombs, car bombs and suicide attacks, I expect to lose standing. I want the option of sending suicide bombers to attack my enemy at their homebase and be condemmed, I want them to reply to my attack by killing 100x as many of my civillians to near universal applause. I want the option of not sending and them still killing the civillians.

The enemy will have the best tanks, artillery and rifles in existance, be able to call in air-stikes to any part of the map without me having any hope of shooting down the air-strikes. I want the enemy to have nukes and use them to threaten me if I look like winning.

I want a war where I do not get a single victory. I want a war where victory is unachievable. In the end scenario I want to achieve victory by losing 30% of my women and children. I will win only if the enemy gives up and expect this to happen when I kill about 0.03% of their population.

After I have won I want to have the enemy threaten to invade every day. I want the enemy to impose an embargo that will kill 20% of my population. The game ends with my character being killed by the enemy or my 2000 factions, no matter what.
Stroudiztan
09-12-2004, 13:51
Helicopters that crash every five minutes? maybe I can interest you in some Sea Kings.
My Gun Not Yours
09-12-2004, 13:53
Helicopters that crash every five minutes? maybe I can interest you in some Sea Kings.

I think that's right up there with submarines that sink after you bought them. You aren't Canadian, are you (throws the contracts in the shredder...)
Derscon
10-12-2004, 01:53
An Ameriscum defeat.

I seriously hope you are at least a European.

And if you are, I hope America decides to invade the nation you currently reside in, and then proceeds to kill every single human being in that nation, just to get rid of assholes like you.

Merry Christmas from your pissed off gun totin' bible thumpin' Real American Redneck
Goed Twee
10-12-2004, 02:29
Further to the Rant:

When playing the home team, I want to know that no matter what I do I will not be able to beat off the attack. I want the enemy to arrive like invincible space invaders, an endless surge of incredibly powerful weaponary that takeover the map. I want all my best weapons to be destroyed.

I want to have the option to welcome their invasion. Only to find they have taken over the mineral mines and are shipping it off to their homebase. When I protest, they gun my marchers down in the street.

When I click the rebellion option and attack the invaders, I want to be called a terrorist, scum, baby-killer, lunatic and fool. When I kill one space marine using a sniper I expect to see the enemy bomb the neighbourhood not killing my sniper, but annihilating my grandmother.

I want my side to consist of 2000 different factions. I want to have to take funds from anybody offering, even lunatics that chop the heads off women and make the enemy more determined. I want to blamed for everything the 2000 factions do, including those from neighbouring states. I want some of the factions to come from neighbouring states allied to the enemy. I want none of my factions to trust each other.

I want my weapons to consist of slingshot, dagger and high explosives. When I choose to use the explosives in roadside bombs, car bombs and suicide attacks, I expect to lose standing. I want the option of sending suicide bombers to attack my enemy at their homebase and be condemmed, I want them to reply to my attack by killing 100x as many of my civillians to near universal applause. I want the option of not sending and them still killing the civillians.

The enemy will have the best tanks, artillery and rifles in existance, be able to call in air-stikes to any part of the map without me having any hope of shooting down the air-strikes. I want the enemy to have nukes and use them to threaten me if I look like winning.

I want a war where I do not get a single victory. I want a war where victory is unachievable. In the end scenario I want to achieve victory by losing 30% of my women and children. I will win only if the enemy gives up and expect this to happen when I kill about 0.03% of their population.

After I have won I want to have the enemy threaten to invade every day. I want the enemy to impose an embargo that will kill 20% of my population. The game ends with my character being killed by the enemy or my 2000 factions, no matter what.


So...you HAVEN'T played Civilization 3 on Deity setting?
Eastern Coast America
10-12-2004, 02:33
I just want the US to have a war with an evenly matched country.
Say...England? Germany? *skips france*

Why? Just so we can re think our military strategy.