I recently got Silent Hunter III for my birthday. I’ve always been interested in WWII navy-type stuff, and had a lot of fun puttering around in the North Sea looking for Merchant ships. The game itself is very realistic, and plotting intercept courses/firing solutions can be quite challenging initially. Going on the forums made me wonder if I had perhaps met some of the most hardcore players ever. These guys can use the hydrophone to determine ship speed just by listening to the propeller noise of the ship in question, pretty amazing. I was impressed/creeped out at how competent these players are at playing the game at 100% realism; makes me wonder how effective they’d be if they were an actual skipper of a WWII submarine…
If they’ve ever lost the game, even once, then they probably wouldn’t have made good WWII submarine captains at all.
You think so? What if you sank 75 ships before you got killed? Towards the end of the war the kill ration for u-boats wasn’t very good.
The very dedicated players have a rule that if they get sunk in career mode, they have to start over. Many of them have played through the entire career (1939-1945) several times over without getting sunk. Considering the air coverage and ASW capabilities the allies had near the close of the war, that is pretty impressive.
The game’s historical progression, btw, is nice for a game- in 1939 there are few warships to worry about and your sub has virtually free reign in the seas. By 1945, many players report the port being bombed while they are getting under way, and very seldom have opportunities to surface on patrol without getting gang-raped by aircraft and DD’s.
You get some pretty hardcore people in wargames. I used to hang out at the battlefront.com forums, publishers of the combat mission series, and most of the discussions were less esoteric and more interesting, there were plenty of discussions about which factories produced turrets with a 23 degree upper mantle slope vs which produced them with 19 degree slopes and such. Or finding old archived production reports to determine the quality of metallurgy for different armors at various points in the war as the supply situations changed. Some of the hardcore people there could probably out-hardcore everyone else.
Some of the flightsimmers are really, really hardcore. Full cockpit setups, dedicated machines, thousands of dollars invested. People will sit for hours and hours on a single flight for a ‘Virtual Airline’, doing a whole international flight in realtime as a simulation.
I’m a pilot and the idea of a long flight is hell to me… To do it for fun baffles me completely. I can’t see how that could be any fun at all.
I’d nominate mmorg players. Takes hardcore folks to play through a progessive storyline that requires multi-hour sessions from dozens of players–all of whom have previously taken their characters to max level and have completed numerous individual prerequisites to even attempt one of the numerous epic battles.
There are also internet networks of aspiring ATCs, and for that matter, hobbyists, who actually run the virtual skies this way, communicating over VOIP.
I don’t really see the appeal of recreationally simulating the job of being a commercial pilot in typical, boring scenarios. I’ve used Flight Sim as a tool to get used to navigation methods and such, and I’ve tinkered with the simulated 747s and such, but never a “sit there and look around for 3 hours while the autopilot flies me” scenario.
Advanced Squad Leader for hardcore. Tell me I’m wrong. 
The online flightsimmers at Aces High and Warbirds are crazy and obsessed with historical detail. In their community, you’d better know the difference between your Bf109F and G models, or why the cockpit canopy of the Spit XIV is missing a crucial few rivets in the graphic.
I’ll return to the sim when they fix the sound of the assymetrical slat deployment of the 109 series, otherwise it is just too offensive to my airplane enthusiast sensibilities. 
How does Advanced Squad Leader compare to the original? I’ve played several of the older scenarios–Guards Counterattack, Tractorworks, and a couple of others. The rules are complex, but once you get the hang of it it’s not so bad…
Advanced Squad Leader is basically Squad Leader. But remember all the supplements for Squad Leader? Each one added rules for some esoteric point…how to model smoke, paratroopers, cavalry, air support, boats, new terrain types, the entire Order of Battle of every AFV ever produced in WWII by any country, that sort of thing.
Now wrap all that up into one big rulebook, with supplements for every country.
Is there a large ASL playerbase still in existance? I’d have thought computer and online games would have eroded tabletop games significantly. Maybe I’ll try unloading all my games on eBay…
I know there are at least 2, maybe 3, ASL players at the games store I visit. Just playing the dang thing after so many years sort of proves they’re hardcore
Myself, I’ve never played it, but I wouldnt mind for small scenarios. I prefer more streamlined stuff for majorer ( 
) engagements, though I haven’t seen the full rules.
I played lots of ASL and Europa back in the day, had the Strategy & Tactics subscription and everything.
When you play on a computer, cats, little brothers, and moms on cleaning binges don’t knock all of your thousands of careful prepared counter stacks off of the map.
10 second load time for Europa Universalis vs 72 hours of counter stacking for ASL pretty much killed tabletop gaming for me
Am I the only one who thought this thread was going to be a question of Nintendo fanboys vs. XBox fanboys vs. Sony fanboys vs. etc. etc. etc.?
(And I nominate “PlayStation 3 fanboys” for the prize. I can’t believe there are folks who can say “$600 is cheap for everything you’re getting!” with a straight face…)
ASL! heh.
I can’t help but recall the moment at which my hardcore blood-and-iron wargame geek career was interrupted by the first epiphany that there was such a thing as too much detail.
I’d eagerly purchased the first few supplements, ignoring vaguely growing trepidation and foot-dragging among our wargame crowd, and set about memorizing rules arcana.
There was a rule for tanks doing “overrun” attacks on infantry squads.
There was a rule for how to assess said tanks’ attack strength, even if some of the weapons were nonfunctional (jammed machine guns). This included a base attack factor for just the hull of an unarmed tank attacking infantry.
There was a rule for bicycle troops.
(Stay with me, it’s coming.)
There was a rule for splitting out an individual scout (one man) from a squad.
There was a proviso for doing the same to bicycles, so you could have a single man on a single bicycle.
There was a rule for what happened if a round deflected off the front of a tank’s hull – including a proviso for the driver being stunned while the tank was moving.
This led to a rule determining a one-hex (one space) random movement of a tank whose driver was stunned by a deflected round.
There were a very few cliff hexes on one or two of the map boards.
(and here we are!)
Thus, using the rules, it was possible to calculate and simulate the military effect of a driverless tank rolling OFF a cliff and performing a hull-only “overrun” attack on a single bicycle scout.
They had that covered, man. It’s in there.
After sharing that realization, I was ultimately never able to get my group’s other players to commit to actually playing, and the supplements still sit on a closet shelf somewhere, after all these years.
My money’s still on the tank.
Sailboat
Yeah, I used to play a lot of Squad Leader with my brother, lo, so many years ago. And…well, the best games were ones with just infantry and machine guns and maybe one or two tanks.
I have a few ASL modules…never used for actual games. I’ve played a handfull of SL games in the last 20 years, but none in the last 10, and no ASL. Never even punched out the counters.
The core of Squad Leader is a set of simple rules. But every addition of every special case and special modifier for every special condition just sucks the life out of the game. And when getting that +1 modifier can mean life or death for your Panzer, you’re gonna argue for that +1 modifier, plus I’m unbottoned, and you failed your PAFVAMC (pre-armored fighting vehicle attack morale check) last turn, so your unit was cowering. BUT WAIT! My brother argues that my Panzer just used over half of it’s movement allowance. And the weather is cloudy. Plus that unit just spent two turns motionless so it gets a concealment modifier…and on and on.
Keeping track of this sort of thing is exactly what computers were designed to do. Hmmm…gonna play Hearts of Iron II this weekend…only 3 more hours of work to go…
The Combat Nission games from battlefront.com were originally developed under license to be a computer port of ASL games. During the development, that changed somewhat and while it’s not a direct adaptation of the game, they share many elements. It’s extremely detailed, and while it has flaws, it tries (and mostly suceeds) to be very realistic. Easily the best tactical war game I’ve ever played, and I highly recommend any and all in the series (although the original is pretty dated by now, it’d still be fun)
Er, “Combat Mission” that was supposed to be. Yeah, most generic game name ever - but the game itself certainly isn’t.
I met that moment while looking through the rules for Campaign for North Africa when I realized that it had rules for fuel evaporation and spillage!
Of course I don’t think that anyone anywhere has ever successfully played a complete game. I used to leave it on my shelf though, just because of the sheer weight of the thing.