Comments on The Game A Day Project: Branching Out A Little

P.S. My dream Warhammer army was always Empire wit...

2006-01-03T13:18:00.000-05:00

P.S. My dream Warhammer army was always Empire with Orcish auxillaries -- it's what the Romans and Chinese did with their border barbarians, after all.

"some countries/kingdoms/whatever have majority-et...

2006-01-03T12:32:00.000-05:00

"some countries/kingdoms/whatever have majority-ethnic populations, others are totally mixed, most fall somewhere on the spectrum."

AMEN! I study military history a lot, and the idea that political allegiance = culture = fixed menu of army units (or spells, or architectural motifs, or whatever) is just stupidly unrealistic, owing more to 19th century nationalist fantasy than real history. The son of the Serbian leader killed by the Turks at Kosovo Polje ended up leading a vassal contingent of Serbian soldiers in the Turkish army; El Cid worked for the Moors sometimes; King David, before he was King, spent a while as a mercenary fighting FOR the Phillistines -- check out 1st Samuel, Chapters 27-29.

And the "institutional lifepath" idea is very, very cool.

As for eliminating battles of, well, elimination, some suggestions:
- make choosing terrain a big part of the game, so outmatched forces can choose to fight on terrain that gives them barriers and a way to escape (historically common)
- instead of just giving points for how many enemies you slaughter, also give points for how many of your own guys you preserve. Maybe victory is based on how the friendly:enemy strength ratio changes from the beginning of the game to the end: e.g., if my army is worth three times as many points as yours when the battle starts, and then I drive you into headlong retreat but my surviving force is only worth twice as much as yours, I just lost bigtime.
- campaigns, of course. If you have to fight another battle with the same "character" (i.e. your army), you're going to be a lot more interested in preserving it.

I dunno if it applies. I mean, there's not a share...

2005-12-27T15:29:00.000-05:00

I dunno if it applies. I mean, there's not a shared imagined space in mini games, its a shared physical space. So the constructive denial would have to be something on the tabletop.

I agree about tweaking the win conditions (though, it is still a wargame. So there is necessary fighting). I think it owuld be worth checking out actual stats from historical battles and seeing what kinds of casualties the majority of those would take. I mean, "decimate" literally means that 1 in 10 people die.

There would be something for determining whether a casualty from battle actually dies (removed forever), injured (can come back down the road), just taken out for the battle, whatever. So, you'd keep track of casulties in this way.

Again, it would be set up in a such a way that you could create an army, and keep track of it, regardless of those you play against, over the life of the army. So yes, iteratively. I think a combination of non-opponent-required win conditions and low casualty rates would keep the "crushing the opposition" thing from happening.

How's "Constructive Denial" work into your Simmy w...

2005-12-26T14:51:00.000-05:00

How's "Constructive Denial" work into your Simmy wargame?

I think, in order to get away from Gamist play, you'll need to change the win conditions of the actual playing part. Don't pit the armies against each other in such a way that utter dominance is necessarily a winning strategy. Something like non-exclusive goals for both sides, so that I want to reach the tree line while you want to escort Special Unit X to the high road. If both sides have a number of goals in each engagement, and each goal is worth victory points, whoever gets to 20 victory points first wins the game, something like that?

Do you intend for this to be played iteratively? Most wargames I've seen result in the utter destruction of the losing side -- a slaughter. How can you fiddle with things so that a win does not remove the losing side from existence (or is that something that you do want?)