Reply To: Continued Explorations of Normandy Wargaming

[jamesevans140Participant 2055xp 0]

Thanks for the great and openly honest reply @oriskany.

I think what you are trying to describe to me is what I know as the logic engine. If constructed correctly it can try to compensate irrational (something that logic and or maths cannot deal with) object. It can be assigned to a family tree and via inheritance take on characteristics from other objects in the tree. I think we get this from object orientated programming.  If this fails then fuzzy logic algorithms can be applied, but to be honest this has a way to go before I would use it in confidence.

Interesting thought about maths controlling the universe. My personal take is that maths (tries to) describes the universe in a predictable manner, but I think we are coming from the same direction.

The other issue is that just how complicated the rules would be or unnecessarily lengthening playing time. Although I am not part of it there is a trend for games being completed in under an hour, played in a lunch break. Although I admit a fondness for Steve Jackson’s Ogre.

So to me all wargame rule systems start out with the intent of real world simulation but by time of publication it has had to go through quite a number of compromises for the market, sadly.

I liked the hexes of the games of the late 60s and early 70s as most had roomy hexes. By the late 70s you had games like SPI’s Middle-Earth where stacking could be six high in the hex but the corners of the playing pieces stuck out past the hex boarder. On the Gondor-Mordor boarder you had a mountain of playing pieces that if bumped you spent the next hour sorting the mess out.

Yep I have over 300 ordinary 4″ hexes, overt 100 specialty hexes and about a dozen multiple hex prices. Under these are placed base boards with special pins that are 15″ x 12″ that are joined by clips placing the boards about 2″ apart. The hexes have the corners removed so that they plug into the pins. It comes with hexes that will raise a hex placed upon it by 1/2 an inch. You get foam hexes you can carve to make smooth contours. Out of the box you can layer up by three layers, but you can go high than this with a bit of extra modelling. The pins are designed so that rivers, trenches, roads and the like are actually sunken up to 1/4″. Most flat terrain hexes can be double sided. We are currently creating dessert on one side and Eastern Front winter on the other.

A bonus is that in FoW most movement rates and weapon ranges are evenly divisible by 4.

I will check out that link and subscribe to see what you have been working on later tonight.

I have WinterCon tomorrow and the day after so I am about to get even busier. A couple of the sellers are bringing some new toys for me to play with.

😀