Re: Time beats phases-and-points

Bron Campbell Nelson (bron@bronze.mti.sgi.com)
Mon, 26 Sep 94 09:25:01 -0700

> I chose this model to make the game easier to play, believing that
> a straight grid or hex map with line-of-sight rules would be too
> fine-grained to work with in a PBEM format with a week turnaround.

I agree. I play plenty of wargames with hex grids and have no problem
with them, but I I definately agree that the plain old rectangular
grid is simpler, esp. for those who don't play such games.

HOWEVER, I do wish you;d allow diagonal movement, and make it cost
say 1.5 times as much as an orthogonal move. It's a decent approximation,
and makes moving faster so you can do more stuff in a month, and
is more realistic to boot. Is there some reason why this is not done?

> Some of you figured that I must have been beaten down by hordes of
> naive newbies whining about cascading order failures, and was ready
> to chuck Olympia time. It's true that I am always trying to think
> of ways to minimize player errors, but I wasn't considering removing
> time from Olympia. Thanks for your concern and nice comments, however.

There is one thing you could do which would vastly cut down on player
errors, although it would be very hard for you to do: namely, provide a
move simulator to which we could submit a move, and see what would
happen. Such a tool would of course have to be strictly limited to
information provided in the submitted move (e.g. the submited move would
somehow have to encode all the terrain information, location of units
etc.). And of course you'd have to be able to submit orders to the
simulator for units that were not yours (to see if you are correctly
coordinating with your allies). And you'd want the simulator to be
compiled from the same source base as the real thing so the two wouldn't
get out of sync. And so on. Such a tool would be invaluable; certainly
the majority of *my* turns include one or more silly little errors that
frequently botch the rest of the month for that noble.

--
Bron Campbell Nelson      bron@sgi.com  or possibly  uunet!sgi.com!bron
These statements are my own, not those of Silicon Graphics.


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