Made some good progress over the past few days – the turn structure is sorted, and the detection, attack and casualty rules are nearing completion. I’ve managed to distill my ideas down to their simplest form (hopefully), and thanks to Stephen’s suggestions above, I’ve made good progress on the stance rules.
Stephen’s suggestions were along the lines of limiting how far a unit could move without provoking attacks, and I did something along the same lines in Cornered Wolf, where my MO was not to use any markers or tokens at all for the entire game. I had to get creative with the suppression rules for that game, and representing stance without markers also calls for simple creative solutions.
And so my solution was to have “Opportunity” attacks and detection if a unit moves while within line of sight of an enemy. Depending on how far they move, they could provoke opportunity detection attempts, or opportunity fire, or both. This is also tied into the Awareness of units – unit that aren’t aware won’t have the same options for opportunity fire.
The essence of my plan is broken down as follows:
The real core of this game is the detection, attack and casualty rules, with the movement rules tied into these, so now that I’ve made some good progress on this core, the rest of the rules I’ve already written will fall into place. I’m not planning to re-write the entire ruleset – just this core in order to simplify and clarify the core rules.
The main thing remaining of this ‘core’ is how casualties are tracked and when units will start to roll to “Scatter” (which essentially removes them from the game). I’m hoping to make these decisions tomorrow and maybe do some small scale playtests to see if they feel right.
After finishing this ‘core’, the next step will be to slightly re-word the Support section (Where you used to be able to call in air strikes, request artillery, reinforcements, extraction, etc.) in order to line up with the way Assets are used. I still want players to be adjusting artillery and calling in support, but it will be based on what is available via the Asset cards, rather than choosing any support and rolling each turn to see if it is available.
Tom Jensen - http://ostfrontpublishing.com/
