[Mobhack]

Team Yankee back in the DOS days was almost there. You could order your platoons to go into vee formation, advance slow, go for point X,Y and so on and so forth. and they would happily do that.

However - the only time they would fire at an enemy was if you "jumped into" a tank and used the fancy gunner screen commands to engage it. Meanwhile all your other stuff that saw enemy happily ignored them. (The AI tanks of course, fired all by themselves...).

So your unresponsive team-mates got creamed by the AI horde without firing back. In other words a totally unplayable mess of a game. But 100% A-Ok for moving your platoons about in formations. That part of the UI was intuitive and simple to use!.

I've tried flight sims where your wingmen were semi-intelligent, but that did not work too well either - they would tend to fly off into the cloud of enemy and get themselves shot down. or fixate on a bomber and always approach from the rear where the gunners had them bang to rights - no way to tell them to do a head-on pass or a deflection shot. (Maybe flight sims are better nowadays, haven't bothered since before 2000).

I have also tried pausable real time - and that really does not work too well, either. But it is miles better than the "real time strategy" no-stopping type of game where unless you take control of things directly in a furious click-fest (or pause--stop-go-pause repeat loop if it allows that) then it all goes pear-shaped as the unit individual AI is simply pants.

About the only type of "simulation" that might conceivably work is one where each tank or rifle section had a human in charge on a multi-player type game. However having looked at these sorts of games, the problem seems to be the calibre of 11-year olds (or those that regress to that state when playing!) that turn up. IF there was one of these where one of your club "hosted" the server so all the guys were your known club members, with no stupid unknown dweebs from the Internet turning up, that might be a playable system. but those MMORP type games are hosted on company servers, open to all the flotsam hanging round out there.

IF everyone could (as in a normal wargames club!) - turn up for the appointed time. PBEM decouples players from the need for player A (In Japan say) to be up and awake at the same time as Player B in the UK say. It also solves problems like having to answer the doorbell or a call of nature!.

But the whole point of turn-based really is to get back to the look and feel of real wargaming. Real wargaming is done with 1/300 or 15mm or 1/72 models on a tabletop laid out with model terrain. Just rendered on a computer screen so you dont have to lug 10 pounds of carefully boxed lead figures, rule book, a zillion dice, 3 army list books etc, etc along to the club!.

This game is a classic style tabletop wargame, not a "simulation". Especially, its not an "RTS" type clickfest.