Re: [FT] Re: Curing the fighter blues and Warpwar(Metagaming)

>As a side note, on rec.games.board, someone commented on doing Warpwar
as a
>PBeM, and I mentioned thinking it might be good as a campaign setting
for
>FT. So far, no replies, but the idea I had was to take the diceless
combat
>table, make its cross-reference results be whether fleets would
actually
>meet in battle, based on the limited intel they'd have as they were
>approaching, possibly adjusting results based on comparative 'fleet
>speeds'. Any comments?

Funny, I was *just* e-talking with Noam 'Iceberg' Izenberg not even an
hour
ago about doing a potential campaign FT game based in WarpWar. I've been
mulling this over for about 2 years now, but never got off my butt
beyond
a very simple playtest run I did over the summer (which was left
unfinished
as I ended up taking off on a 5-week adventure :). My take on this, at
least
very initially, is to keep tech levels 'frozen', just to get a feel for
it.
I was thinking of abstracting the economics to the limit (eg, all econ
points
you collect in your empire are dumped into a pool at the end of each
turn
for you to use as you see fit; also, enemy navy cannot attack the
merchants
due to the level of abstraction, so the only way an empire could lose
their
econ points is to have the enemy take over the system(s) giving a given
empire
said resources). I wasn't going to do the WarpWar combat system, but
rather
use FT to resolve battles in a contested system. On the map all the
other
player sees is where you are moving your task forces/fleets (said fleets
can
be composed of whatever you want them to be, from 1 ship to many), and
if two
enemy fleets meet in a system, resort to FT to resolve the battle. This
will,
no doubt, lead to some lop-sided, uneven battles, which is what some
people
would like to see. These could then *easily* be converted into stand-up
scenarios.

Naturally, movement of the Fleet counters would be pre-plotted each
turn.

I would also abstract away ship construction and say once you have the
points
to buy a certain ship or ships, and spend the points, you have built it,
it
is ready, at your homeworld.

To keep things very simple, I was thinking that each capital world would
generate 10 econ/resource pts, and each colony world 5 pts. Per turn.
This
will tend to keep ship sizes also on the smallish end (you can play with
different numbers in this, too, if you want larger ships in your
forces).

I also decided to abstract out ground combat and presume that whomever
holds the system at the end of the FT combat phase controls the
econ/resource
points for that system next turn (this *is* supposed to be a very simple
campaign sort of thing, after all). I won't tell you what Noam thought
about the ground combat stuff; you can ask 'im yourself.  ;)  (you're
welcome, Iceberg! :)

Anyway, there you go, in a real brief nutshell, my thoughts on using
WarpWar
in an FT campaign game. I'm hoping that Iceberg Noam and I can get
together
here in the near future and put this to a test. After that, then expand
it
to have varying tech levels and stuff, maybe less abstract merchant
trains,
etc. The options are quite open; I just want to play with the initial
skeletal
idea first. The whole idea here is just for doing naval engagements
between
enemy forces. Other stuff can come or expand in it as one desires (and
time
allows).

If Iceberg and I ever get together and do this, we'll post a 'campaign
report'.
Right now I'm kinda leaning to using the Fifth Frontier War map instead
of the
WarpWar map. More systems, more options for attack, more fleets to play
with.

(actually this could make a good multi-player campaign for the GZG-ECC
weekend;
too bad I didn't think of this before! ah well, maybe next year...)

Mk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Daune: "How can you be asleep and getting ready at the same time?"

Indy: "I'm multi-tasking..."