Re: [FT] Operational game

>>Are you shooting for a strategic campaign, or a tactical operation?
>
>"Operational level", between "strategic" and "tactical"
>

Ok, ala the V for Victory games from years gone by.

>>A true FT operational game would probably encompass the battle for a
solar
>system, or perhaps a cluster of solar systems.  A FT strategic game
would
>encompass the battle between whole star nations.
>
>Kind of depends on how many planets you have there--eg the Unofficial
>GZGverse has a lot of "Three Star Empires".  FWIW, an analogy would be
the
>Guadalcanal Campaign, or Hughes v Suffren in the Indian Ocean campaign.
>

You'll pardon me if my knowledge of these wet navy campaigns is less
than
par.  My interest lays on the land with the Gropos and the treadheads.

>>Assuming you want a true operational game, I would make each
operational
>turn a day, or perhaps half a day.
>
>That's a bit short for what I have in mind--I'd call that "grand
tactical",
>I think.

I don't know how long a FT turn is PSB'ed to be, but even if it's 15
minutes a half-day turn would be 48 turns long, which is about 40 turns
longer than a normal game.  Bear in mind you don't HAVE to have
something
happen every turn.  The V4V series games that I mentioned earlier are
IMO
the best Op-level games I've ever played and their time scale was 4 hour
blocks. I think anything longer than a day is going to move the
granularity
up too much and task force movements are going to feel too much on the
strategic level.

>
>>Remember, in an actual conflict sides are NEVER equal, so if you try
to
>generate "even" battles through a higher level game, you'll probably be
>disappointed.
>
>Well, yes and no.  If I have a 10K fleet on one side and 1K on the
other,
>there's no point in setting up the table.  Thus, in order to have a
more
>interesting tactical battle, the question is "what factors would cause
an
>admiral to be unable to apply his full strength to a battle?"	It could
be
>as simple as having more ships than he can effectively control, but how
do
>you implement that?  The battle need not be even odds, but I want to
have
a
>mechanism that makes larger fleets more unwieldy

Actually I disagree with this.	If one side commits 10K points worth of
ships to an action, and he encounters only 1K of ships he then has to
worry
about what the other 9K of missing enemy ships is doing.  They could be
in
4 2500 point parcels cutting off the big fleets supply line. Meanwhile
the
1K could be "sucking in" the big fleet into a running battle to
attenuate
the supply line even further.  It all depends on what else is happening.

Supply is the one thing I think is ABSOLUTELY essential to model in an
ops
game.  A force becomes combat ineffective very quickly if it's
logistical
tail is cut and it's in a combat situation.  Supply and logistics isn't
cool and nifty, but it's a make or break part of any actual fighting
force.
If I may reference a pertinent real-world example, it doesn't matter how
"determined" Saddam's Republican Guard is, if they can't get any
resupply
of fuel or ammo, they're just so many men with clubs in big metal
pillboxes.  A situation I think is likely to occur sometime in the next
6
months.

Perhaps a way to model this is give ships or task forces "combat
endurance"
ala fighters.  Cut the supply line and their endurance is reduced
dramatically.  The larger the force, the lower the combat endurance when
out of supply.

If an uber-fleet has a very vulnerable logistics tail, they are going to
be
very interested in protecting it.

Bill