4th ed T2K

[Southernap]

Originally Posted by Spartan-117

It's Spartan Time! Two G&Ts in, here comes the wisdom!

The great irony is that all the left believe the right is in an echo chamber and all the right believe the left is in an echo chamber. Because yeah, social media AI feed us the meals we want to eat.

Listen, you guys who were pre-Alpha and are still upset, consider this - You already moved the needle. If this is better than it was before, congrats! That's truly an accomplishment. I mean really, over the Internet, you helped someone else move from an extreme position you absolutely disagreed with to something closer to the middle, that maybe you hate just a touch less? Mark your f-ing calendars; on the Internet, in the echo chambers previously mentioned, that's not something that normally happens.

What do we do when we move the needle but don't get it to where it needs to be? We keep pushing. We enlisted allies (I know, I know.. but yeah, everyone needs allies) and we try to move the needle some more.

Unless you gain some spectacular and applicable insight into how to move the needle by over-analyzing someone else's political leanings, it's probably a better use of everyone's time to gather input and feedback and offer it in as-a-constructive manner as possible.

You've already had some success and this project is still in alpha. Don't fold now, the game is just getting started.

At the same time if the needle was moved, but it was only moved a tenth of an inch. Then did it really matter? If they were unwilling to talk about or even make adjustments to the lore, then what does that say if they start to get rule questions or concerns where things don't work in the rules? You want changes to character creation? Yea we might consider it....okay we did some tweaks and here you go with the rule changes. [Narrator: The changes were minor and not what the play testers found were issues]. I have also seen in other places both in board games and wargame miniatures that play testers have found issues with not only the lore, but the rules. Kvetching, hair pulling, and rending of garments occurred. Only for the designer to offer up insults and ban folks or attempt to ban folks from commenting on how messed up the game is at either the alpha or beta phases.



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To me there are ways to try and make a new TL work for Tw2k post 1991. That would be exploiting Yugoslavia. To drag Sweden, like what FL wants to do into the game it isn't that hard and I really think that you can take the 1991 coup and make it work. You can work the "Peace Dividend" in and still make the whole idea of the Twilight war work.

Not that it matters much but take this:

• 1991 - Coup occurs and Gorby is disposed. Hardliners come into play
• 1991 - Even with the hardliners in power the need to feed folks and get the economy that Gorby destroyed back up causes USSR to go internal for a while. PACT collapses and the Eastern Europe tries to come up to speed fast with democracy and capitalism. The cracks start to falter
• 1992 - Clinton comes to power. With the collapse of Soviet Union. High off win in Iraq in 1991. Peace Dividend comes into effect in the west. Yet, the needs for the US to be the Hegemonic power starts to play. The US has troops in Somalia, Arabia, Korea, and the American Hemisphere. All while NATO scales back.
• 1992 - Bosina war starts. the USSR pledges military and financial aid to keep the Yugoslavia states together or at least to defend the Slavic peoples.
• At this point I think have the incident at Pristina Airport occur earlier, this starts to give a cause belli for the war in the west. Have the ChiComs decide that going after the Kamchatka Peninsula and its bases along with the traditional 1969 border crisis creep up again. Introduce an economic collapse of some sort that throws everyone into the doldrums, whether it is the 2008 Great Recession or not. So some see the rising Soviets at this point fat and flush with cash making communism work and capitalists go count trees.
• 1994 - The PACT comes back into play after the economy in the east falters. With the New Soviets promising to share their oil wealth.
• 1995 - The PACT goes west after "reports" of NATO atrocities in Yugoslavia when IFOR fails to protect Slavs from genocide.
• 1996 - To assist in securing the Northern Flank with war against NATO. The PACT invades Sweden to either allow for breakout of the Soviet Naval Forces in the Baltics or to attack Norway.
• At which we take everything else in either V1 or V2 timeline to have occurred at some point after 1996 with the course of the war.

The only other change I would make is maybe have the the RDF books shift and instead deal more with Iraqi in some way, shape, or form. Maybe even have it being that the Soviets invade Iraq to drive into Saudi Arabia oil fields. Since by this revised timeline Iran isn't a reason for the Soviet Invasion and most anyone knows about Iran is current history. While Desert Shield/Storm/Sabre are still fresh in the memories.

The biggest issues I have with the lore as written in the 4th Edition is the logic games to get us from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the invasion of the Baltic states and the use of nuclear weapons because the Soviets invade Poland while the US invades Sweden with a carrier force that doesn't exist in real life until 1998 and couldn't even get into the Baltic with said carriers due to simple physics. I am not even going to try and wrap my head around the mid-east setup, it sounds very much like some bad fever dream of Z grade pulp fiction writer of action adventure novels. There are just too many plot holes in the post 1998 time line that makes sense. There are massive nuclear strikes on the US, but somehow at surviving port facilities a convoy of thousands of ships is assembled and sent to Europe with men. Wait...what? How does that even work? Similarly after the nuclear strikes, there are protests in major cities throughout the US? Wait...what? Did we have the infamous "thanksgiving day" massacre or did it not happen? The plot holes here are so huge that again a Z grade pulp fiction writer would have problems hand waving them away, let alone feel bad for creating them.

The number of plot holes in the new lore is troubling and makes it difficult to fit the older modules into the new game, let alone explain what is or isn't canon. That isn't even going to touch on the fact that they took a MacGuffin in the form of a V1 module about Operation Reset. Moved the whole operation that is the reason for the 5th ID to be destroyed and call that Operation Reset. Which completely invalidates said module as well as prevents you from using said module (and its related Polish modules) for anything since you rip the heart of the module out by eliminating the MacGuffin.