Reply To: Why don’t we already have the perfect wargame?

[limburger 21704xp 0]

The dice we use aren’t guaranteed to be fair … there is no system in place to ensure perfectly distributed results.
I don’t know if casinos have special dice, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

It isn’t *that* difficult to cheat with dice either … and it is pretty hard to ensure you get a good roll (or throw?) without things like dice towers.

It would be interesting to know if there is any science behind dice throwing and which tower works best …

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We don’t have the ‘ultimate’ wargame for the same reason we don’t have the ‘ultimate’ videogame or the ‘ultimate meal’.
People’s tastes and priorities are too different for that to work.

I also believe that there are two types of people in the world :
– the makers : build anything and evertthing from scratch whenever possible as the ‘creation’ aspect is an integral part of the hobby
– the consumers : prefer the convenience of someone else doing the heavy lifting and focus on playing/collecting

@sundancer to paraphrase : games … games never change
We get prettier things and tools to make them even prettier, but the core concepts haven’t changed that much.

@scribbs I think it all depends on how abstract the core ruleset is and what the essential changes are.

The key question that needs answering is this :
do all players in a single game/match play at the same technology level and strategic level ?

Keep everyone at the same technology level (like world war 2 or dark ages) makes things easier.
It should be a given that when one player fields a warband then the other player is not planning a grand strategy game by pushing pieces on a hexmap.

The idea would be to increase the level of detail as you zoom into the battle from the upper strategic levels down to the individual units.

So you’re not going to worry about ammo types when pushing fleets of ships, but you will worry about every single strike and parry when playing a 1 vs 1 duel set inside the throne room of a death star.

Forget dice vs cards..

what about activations ?
Do we play ‘I go / You go’ where one player executes all the actions of all of his units ?
Or do we ‘action / reaction’ where one player only executes a limited set of instructions and a secondary mechanic decides who gets to go next ?
Is there any reason why ‘I go / You go’ still exists ?

@sundancer if you use an order-based system like Legion and Bolt-action do then you still have the ‘random’ factor that can mess up your plans while keeping the ‘predictability’ that cards would provide.