Unity of Command Forums

Hi guys, it's Matt, longtime fan of the series and social media manager for Unity of Command.

I posed a little question on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/unityofcommand that I've wondered about since I started playing Unity of Command a few years ago. And it's just past the 100th anniversary of the outbreak, so it felt appropriate

How well would the Unity of Command system and interface translate to combat a generation earlier in WWI?

Obviously there would be less movement and armor, especially armored divisions, would be radically different - perhaps tanks would only appear as specialist steps?
Would UoC, with its high emphasis on maneuver and supply, even work in a static conflict? What about in the less static Eastern and Middle Eastern fronts?

What do you guys think?

Note: I'm not speaking in any official capacity and, to my knowledge, there has been no discussion of a WWI DLC or sequel. It's just something I'm curious about and want to see if the community comes up with some ideas.

Over the weekend I put 17 hours into Commander: The Great War. The scale was different, but the mechanics felt similar to Unity of Command with fewer breakthroughs and less maneuvering. (I prefer a few mechanics in UoC, such as the out-of-supply model.) The eastern front was a lot more interesting because of the open space, though creating a WWI eastern front game is probably marketing suicide.

It's hard for me to tell how it would work as a series of campaign scenarios on a smaller scale. I'm sure I'd buy it regardless.

I think its an excellent idea for the future. As mentioned above then creating game mechanics to suit both the east, med. and west is the tricky part. Scale could also become an issue... Fighting over 2-4 hexes would be the fate of many scenarios if kept historically accurate. This wouldn't necessarily be boring - but special efforts would have to be made to avoid static boredom in the west and in the Alps and Gallipoli. Anyway, WWI is underexposed (at least compared to WWII), so it would certainly fill a void. So although WWI is not as 'sexy' as WWII it might work...

Tim James wrote:Over the weekend I put 17 hours into Commander: The Great War. The scale was different, but the mechanics felt similar to Unity of Command with fewer breakthroughs and less maneuvering. (I prefer a few mechanics in UoC, such as the out-of-supply model.) The eastern front was a lot more interesting because of the open space, though creating a WWI eastern front game is probably marketing suicide.

It's hard for me to tell how it would work as a series of campaign scenarios on a smaller scale. I'm sure I'd buy it regardless.

I was thinking it would have to involve a change in scale - either up to corps and armies and grand strategy - or down to brigades and regiments and hexes representing smaller pieces of terrain.

It was actually playing Commander: The Great War that got me thinking about this topic. C:TGW does include static or slow-moving lines, particularly on the Western Front, but can be quite fast paced when a breakthrough occurs or on the secondary fronts (The East, the Middle East, the Balkans, etc). A scenario or campaign focused on the initial Schlieffen Plan invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Northern France would be particularly exciting.

Again, this is all just speculation for the fun of it and does not represent the plans of 2x2 at this time. But, it's fun to bounce ideas off the wall.

Main goal for the original "Unity of Command" was to get maneuvering, battle lines, encirclements and all of that right. So yeah, to the extent that you have a maneuver-rich campaign like the eastern front of WWI, it could probably work with only slight modifications.

My heart's not in making a WWI, east-only game though, so that's not what we'll be doing. If someone really really wants to, they could do a mod I suppose.

On the other hand, to create a WWI game that not only replicates the stalemate on the western front, but also somehow meaningfully "tells the story" of how that worked on operational scale, and why east turned out different than west... I have no clue how to capture all of that with game mechanics. I agree it would be very cool though.