Re: Re: [GZG] John's Shipbuilding
From: "Eric Foley" <stiltman@t...>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 23:24:31 -0800
Subject: Re: Re: [GZG] John's Shipbuilding
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@gmail.com>
> What I would prefer would be victory conditions that value withdrawal
> of damaged units, to give the players a motive to act like historical
> admirals.
My Full Thrust games usually encouraged this sort of thing although we
never
put a real point value on it. Total shipping destroyed and/or captured
and
surrendered was as big a factor in the process of who wins as whether or
not
you've got control of the table when the game's over. There were a few
games where I'd trade my fighter complement for most of the opposing
force
but had to withdraw after losing a smaller fraction of mine and,
although
he'd control the board, I could still claim a certain amount of victory
in
the fact that I'd inflicted a far more expensive rate of exchange than
I'd
eaten. Certainly I preferred these sorts of questionable victories over
controlling the table when I've only got a single destroyer that's
spaceworthy out of an entire task force.
And this lent itself to things that happen in real battles: what
constitutes an actual victory? Jutland saw the Germans inflict more
damage
and yet they withdrew. Same with the Coral Sea for the Japanese for the
most part. Pearl Harbor was militarily a complete success on the level
of
tactical planning and damage inflicted but strategically it is easily
one of
the greatest blunders of all time for bringing the US into the war
without
crippling the USN's effectiveness nearly as badly as it could have. And
so
on. Not all naval battles are as obvious in their outcome as Midway.
E
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