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  • #113587
    Avatar photoDan Kennedy
    Participant

    I come here looking for people’s thoughts on a conversation I had recently…

    I was involved in a large multi-player game of 2nd Fleet, in which I controlled the NATO air forces. It was a lot of fun, as anyone who’s played the Fleet series games probably knows, and afterwards myself and the Soviet air controller got to talking about the air battle. We both really enjoyed it, and we wondered if it would be possible to make a game using just the air rules, involving only air units.

    Now I really like the idea of this – a game where you control the operational/strategic level of the air battle across a large geographical area – but we hit on one major snag. Namely, any air warfare game which involves anything air-to-ground needs to have those forces on the ground represented, because otherwise the whole game makes no sense. But as a commander of purely air forces, you would have no control over the movement and combat of anything on the ground, and so how would one represent them in a game? You would presumably need some kind of ‘bot’ system to move and fight those forces, but is that feasible?

    If your targets are all stationary, such as bridges, airfields, POL facilities and the like, then it’s fine. But that won’t be the case; the mobile armies and divisions of each side will need to be shown on the map, but I don’t know how you do that without forcing the player to wear ‘two hats’ as it were, and the fun in that game of 2nd Fleet came from the fact that I was concerned first and foremost with what my aircraft could do and how I could best protect them/use them. The referee had introduced a simple house rule covering munitions logistics, so I found myself having to think carefully about payloads and fuel, when best to use recce and so forth. The whole thing was a really fun day, and I’d like to do it as a game in itself – the actual rules are very sound and need little adulteration – but for the life of me I can’t figure out how you fight an air battle at that level whilst somehow separating out the ground aspects yet still including them. I know it would be solved by using a referee, and I’m not averse to it, but I’d like to figure out a way to do it without one.

    If anyone has any brilliant ideas I can steal, I’d be very grateful.

    #113610
    Avatar photoDarkest Star Games
    Participant

    I’d say the easiest way would probably to assign some sort of command skill to each ground unit, then make up a random table for ground unit movement.  If a ground unit passes it’s command skill then it can move/attack towards nearest enemy/objective, if not then it stays in place/defends/reorganizes.  Then you have another chart for sorting out ground combat abstractly with some of the results being retrograde movement.  This way you don’t have to control the ground units at all, just roll for them and off they go while you concentrate on bombing the crap out of them.

    Are you specifically going to do NATO vs Sovs?  Or more of an ImagiNation sort of thing?

    "I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

    #113621
    Avatar photoDeleted User
    Member

    I’ve never played the Fleet series but have thought of doing strategic air games.
    My approach would be very abstract. The game map would be divided into fronts, each front would get a dice to represent how far it advance (hex or inch) each campaign turn. The person who has initiative gets the dice, but fronts act independently of eachother and a player could have initiative in one front but not others.

    The dice get rolled after all air ops are done for some level of uncertainty. Successful recon missions could force a roll before air ops next turn.
    Targets need a value assigned to it how many are destroyed will +/- the dice roll depending on attacking or defending.
    If the attacker’s advance gets reduced to 0 or negative (get pushed back) the defender get the dice for that front next turn.

    #113631
    Avatar photoDan Kennedy
    Participant

    I’d say the easiest way would probably to assign some sort of command skill to each ground unit, then make up a random table for ground unit movement. If a ground unit passes it’s command skill then it can move/attack towards nearest enemy/objective, if not then it stays in place/defends/reorganizes. Then you have another chart for sorting out ground combat abstractly with some of the results being retrograde movement. This way you don’t have to control the ground units at all, just roll for them and off they go while you concentrate on bombing the crap out of them. Are you specifically going to do NATO vs Sovs? Or more of an ImagiNation sort of thing?

    That’s a good idea, a pretty smooth way of doing it. Thank you.

    I sort of want to do both NATO/Sovs and Imagination, in that I want to use the aircraft of the Cold War simply because we have a lot of information on them – modern stuff (Typhoon, F-35, Su-35, J-20 etc) is still mostly hypothetical in capability (or classified up the wazoo). Plus I’m a child of the Cold War and theres a certain amount of nostalgia there. However, I want to use fictional terrain.

    #113633
    Avatar photoDeleted User
    Member

    Please post you games, I also prefer cold war era aircraft, Mig-21, mirage V, etc and imagination.

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