Violet Oboe
Junior Member
DEFCON is a game by Chris Delay and Gary Chambers from Introversion Software released by end of september 06. Although the game is based formally on the strategic and technological situaton of 1983, probably inspired by the US movie WarGames the actual scenarios in the game are modified for easier playability since no player would be able to direct more than 10000 nuclear weapons simultaneously (SSBN´s for example have only five missiles, there are only five OTH radar sites etc.).
Most impressive is the cool and eerie design of the game which can be called ´neo classic primitivism´. Naturally you should not expect historical and technological precision since it is a game where up to six ´balanced´adversaries compete with each other but strategic imperatives effective for every nuclear war situation are nevertheless shown quite instructively. After more than a decade (there existed some games back in the late 80´s early 90´s but that period is beyond my knowledge, perhaps you know more guys?!) this is the first professional wargame simulating a nuclear conflict and I think that is much better than nothing. Somewhat irritating is the gamescore statistics which implies that the winner simply has killed a greater proportion of the adversaries population which in reality would probably make no difference at all. The principle of countervalue vs. counterforce seems also to be not fully understood by the developers of the game.
(Hopefully Chris and Gary are susceptible for my improvement proposals for version 2.0.:coffee
So whats your opinion about that eerie game? Of course DEFCON can be played online so a match between would be strategists is actually possible.
More information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON_(computer_game)
Most impressive is the cool and eerie design of the game which can be called ´neo classic primitivism´. Naturally you should not expect historical and technological precision since it is a game where up to six ´balanced´adversaries compete with each other but strategic imperatives effective for every nuclear war situation are nevertheless shown quite instructively. After more than a decade (there existed some games back in the late 80´s early 90´s but that period is beyond my knowledge, perhaps you know more guys?!) this is the first professional wargame simulating a nuclear conflict and I think that is much better than nothing. Somewhat irritating is the gamescore statistics which implies that the winner simply has killed a greater proportion of the adversaries population which in reality would probably make no difference at all. The principle of countervalue vs. counterforce seems also to be not fully understood by the developers of the game.
(Hopefully Chris and Gary are susceptible for my improvement proposals for version 2.0.:coffeeSo whats your opinion about that eerie game? Of course DEFCON can be played online so a match between would be strategists is actually possible.
More information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON_(computer_game)
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