NATO Commander

Some words by Sid Meier (found here):

"I played a lot of those kinds of games when I was a kid - the hexes and counters games - and I wanted to do one on the computer. I did NATO Commander. I probably learned that that was not a real fruitful direction to go. I think that style of game is OK on the computer but you lose almost as much as you gain by putting it on the computer. You lose the scope of the map, the ability to take in everything at once. It's fun to have an opponent there all the time that the computer gives you but I'm not sure those games are dramatically more fun on a computer than they are on paper. Whereas Pirates!, F-15 or Civilization are games that really are only as much fun as they are on the computer.

So the lessons from NATO Commander are probably more negative ones than positive. I thought it was a cool game, but it wasn't a direction where there was a lot more for me to do there."