Using game software to review battles?

What do you mean by 'show'? The WW2 COD games have had Battles of Bastogne.

I know the History Channel used to use the Total War games to show historical battles of antiquity, but its much easier to 'control' those large scale types while showing the terrain, formations, etc.

 

So like a Google Earth view of a place?

 

That would be pretty cool...but a pretty challenging task to setup!

 

The trouble with using games to model historic battles is that there is a conflict between these. A game has to be fun to play and a many of the most historic battles don't make good games. One of the early releases of Call of Duty ( I?or was it medal of Honor?) had a Pegasus Bridge scenario, supposedly based on the "real terrain." The real action was over in about 30 seconds, but that doesn't make for a good level in a game like COD.

It is very difficult to get game designers to build terrain to support historic modelling rather than player levels. I have tried. You can stage aerial campaigns using mass online flight simulators. I used to run a weekly and monthly programme of historic refights for the Warbirds community. We had a 2/3 scale Europe from Bristol to Berlin and did stage some quite big campaigns. Limited life to encourage cautious action. I think you can learn quite a lot about air warfare from this kind of game,. We have enough data to compare say five or six refights of the battle of Midway or Battle of Britian with the historic results.

In theory mass multi player game WW2 Online could be used to model historic land battles. But it doesn't work well because no one wants to spend their leisure time sitting watching an arc where nothing happens. All the action becomes pantball for slobs die respawn rinse and repeat.