Re: SG:AC discussions (was: Official - More re GZG news update - NEW RELEASES!)

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>On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Roger Bell_West <roger@firedrake.org>
>wrote:
>
>>  On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 10:25:29AM -0500, Patrick Connaughton wrote:
>>  >
>>  >There have been comments above inconclusive games. These happen
>>  >(sadly) all too often when you're using point based, matchup games.
>>  >It becomes the challenge of the presenter to build a good scenario
>>  >that provides victory conditions or success criteria that challenge
>>  >the players to do more than body count.
>>
>>  Yes, I think that some sort of objective, even if it's just "get
your
>>  guys off the other edge of the map", almost always improves things.
>>
>
>Ambush Alley had or used to have available a very short (4-page; 3 of
which
>were the rules, one was the rules cover :-D ) set of WWII 'patrol'
campaign
>rules which each side would roll secretly for their force's
game/scenario
>objective. A friend and I adopted it to do a short (9-game) TW campaign
a
>couple years ago, and it worked really well. One of the objectives was
to
>exit the other end of the table with half your force or more. There
were
>six objectives that you would roll for on each side, with each side
keeping
>their rolled objective a secret from the other. Made for some
interesting
>battles. (and a couple of potentially boring ones when both of our
>objectives were to withdraw; but that happened far less often than the
>other combination of objectives).
>
>Mk

That is similar in some ways to the classic "Seastrike" random 
objective method - each player draws an unmarked envelope from a 
stack of a dozen or so, and a card in the envelope tells them (a) the 
budget for their force, (b) any specific restrictions on their force 
composition and (c) the objective they must try to achieve, with an 
alternative secondary objective (which is usually, but not always, to 
prevent the enemy from achieving their own objective) that the player 
may fall back on if the main objective becomes impossible.

Having drawn and read your objective card, you then "buy" your ships, 
aircraft, land bases etc from the pool of counters (each has a price 
in millions of pounds/dollars) up to the allowed budget on the card, 
and then the game deployment starts.

The objectives range from a relatively small budget and a mission to 
render just one enemy surface vessel inoperative (to "make a point" 
to a  sabre-rattling enemy), to a huge budget that allows you to buy 
almost your entire counter mix but with a mission requiring you to 
completely neutralise all enemy forces.

As Indy mentions, it is possible to get some odd matchups - though 
having the blind envelope draw rather than a die roll does mean that 
both sides will never get the same objective. The classic very short 
game is a small-budget objective to simply destroy the enemy's 
(land-based) command post - unless the enemy has heavily invested in 
SAM sites, then you just spend almost all your budget on strike 
aircraft and wallop the hell out of him in the first turn....

This system has been "borrowed" many times over the years, most 
notably by Brilliant Lances (the Traveller starship game), because it 
works! I certainly borrowed some of the Seastrike system icon ideas 
for FT, as many of you may have noted long ago, but I've not actually 
applied the objective card system to a game - though it would lend 
itself very well to FT games, and I'm sure it could be made to work 
for ground based games too.

[I've kind of assumed that most here know what Seastrike is - for 
those that don't, it's a hybrid board/tabletop game of mid-to-late 
20th Century (post-WW2) naval combat between two smallish states set 
in an island archipelago, with surface units varying from missile 
boats through frigates and destroyers up to a single cruiser (rather 
vulnerable and seldom used, in my experience!) available to each 
fleet, plus strike and interceptor aircraft and land bases such as 
SAM and radar sites to place on the islands. Play occurs on a 
tabletop rather than a board, with card islands placed at random as 
"terrain". All combat is very simply driven by a clever special card 
deck.]

Jon (GZG)