@Brooski was Lee Brimmicombe-Wood working on a NATO-WP game using the Downtown system at one point? I thought I remember seeing something on his site at one point, but there is no mention of it now.
I’ve been reading:
That’s quite a memory you have! Yes, he did have a game like that mentioned, but it seems he has cleaned up his website since he started on the Wing Leader series. I would LOVE to see the kind of game you’re talking about, and that your book describes, done in the Downtown style.
Conflict of Heroes looks awesome. Is it awesome?
Meh, the demo didn’t compel me to play more.
And it’s a bit pricey. I was expecting a bundle deal when it reached Steam.
Nice that it’s on Steam but new it ain’t. Matrix has had it in the catalog fir 5 or 6 years now.
Thanks for this. I have been on again off again working on a cold war strategic airwargame. I have never seen this book before! Very useful!
@Brooski are the Shenandoah PC conversions worth picking up? IIRC there have been some issues.
Also this was posted in the flight sim thread:
http://www.thelordzgamesstudio.com/site/2016/10/bloody-april-1917-coming-to-the-digital-arena/
Another GMT game getting a digital conversion, and one of the air games to boot.
From a merely technical standpoint, if your intent is to play it on a laptop, Battle of the Bulge got the infamous Unity uncapped framerate in 2D issue that will make sure it overheats. They never bothered to correct it. That one is a showstopper here.
I’ve been playing with a free open-source game engine called Godot of late, and along with some reading like The Conquering Tide and Shattered Sword, it’s yielded a certain kind of inspiration.
We’ll see if this actually goes anywhere, but I had a great time chit-chatting about simple design rules on my podcast last month, and I don’t think it’s an insurmountable amount of work…
which podcast would that be, if you don’t mind?
This one. The short version is that my co-host (caution, crusty as a career noncom) and I think we can adequately represent any carrier of approximately WW2 vintage with thirteen traits, some yes/no and some three-step. (I may have to add a fourteenth for aircraft handling aboard.)
For example, here’s our Yorktown:
- Packed Hangars: we Yanks are well-known for fitting a tremendous number of aircraft on carriers.
- Deck Park: also leaving aircraft on the deck to fit more aboard, on the theory that it’s much better if they catch fire there than inside anyway.
- Radar: a massive advantage for the Americans at midway.
- Open Hangar: American carrier hangars could be opened to the air by means of large rolling doors, an advantage for firefighting and aircraft handling (since aircraft could be warmed up in the hangar.)
- Good radios: American electronics were great.
- Good fighter direction: because of the quality of their radios and radars, the Americans had developed solid doctrine for controlling the CAP from the carriers.
And Kaga:
- Coordinated Strikes: the Japanese were highly practiced at quickly launching strikes from multiple flight decks, so if our Kaga is in a task force with other carriers with the Coordinated Strikes trait, they’ll have a much higher chance of launching a single strike across all ships.
- Large size: Kaga was a converted battleship hull, and one of the bigger carriers of the early war.
- Good pilot skill: early in the war, at least, Japanese pilots had an edge over their American counterparts.
- Poor speed: being a battleship, she was also slow enough so that her lack of speed sometimes affected her air operations.
- Bad radios, fighter direction: essentially, between bad radios on the Zeroes and nonexistent doctrine, the Japanese had no system of organized CAP direction.
- Bad AAA: the Japanese AA guns and directors early in the war were terrible.
- Bad damage control: Kaga’s firefighting setup was poorly considered, and Japanese doctrine made damage control generally and firefighting specifically an engineering specialty, rather than something the whole crew knew how to do.
Much as I like complicated wargames, I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by presenting a super-complicated design system to end users. I’m hoping to avoid getting bogged down.
The link didn’t work. I think you need to specify http://, e.g. Godot.
Is it just the two of you working on it? How far along with it are you?
Thanks for the heads up on the link. It’s fixed in the original post now too.
As far as development goes, it’s just me so far. My friend has more reference material than me, so when I need figures, that’s his job.
Since I started on this yesterday, I’m not that far in. I have data objects for carriers and aircraft done, and I should have escorts in soon. (Surface combat is currently out of scope, so that makes escorts dead easy. :P) Air wings are also a pretty critical part. After that, I want to get the design pages done next so I can start on balancing point costs, which is pretty fundamental to the random carrier battles alluded to in the title.
I also have a lot to think about as far as representing the game state in actual scenarios. The fundamental essence of WW2 carrier warfare is limited information: very few carrier strikes during the part of the war in which the navies were rough competitors where the launching carriers had a solid idea of where the enemy was, and where they would be in a few hours. Radio quality and the danger of direction finding and interception conspired to keep the strike planes, especially Japanese, to radio silence. The Japanese accounts of Midway are full of moments where Nagumo had no idea how a strike was faring until the leader radioed that he was attacking, then no idea how the strike had went until it returned to the carriers.
Godot is a scene graph engine, which naturally lends itself to games of perfect information: one entity on screen is one entity in the game world. I’ll have to do some sort of scenario manager to maintain the full picture, while pushing properly limited information to the player. That’s a much bigger topic, though, and something I want to put off until I’m more comfortable with the engine.
This is turning into more of a thing: here’s a very large (> Essex) British-style carrier with armored flight deck and about 80% of Essex’s capacity.
[quote=“vyshka, post:2971, topic:44002, full:true”]
@Brooski are the Shenandoah PC conversions worth picking up? IIRC there have been some issues.[/quote]
I think they have been going for the port-on-the-cheap (consistent with Slitherine business model) and it does yield some problems. I was very unimpressed with the Bulge port but they fixed some of the problems. I actually haven’t played Moscow yet, but with Moscow being unplayable for me via Gamecenter, I may have to pick it up just to play it m/p.
Nightfighter Digital has been on the P500 list forever - I guess they decided to do something slightly more interactive and historically familiar.
This is looking great, p[lease keep posting updates!
Certainly!
USS Independence is the first design made with a functional editor. Of note are the new derived stats, which use Savage Worlds-style dice because they’re super-easy, both from a behind-the-scenes perspective, and from a not-confusing-for-the-user perspective.
Independence makes use of a deck park, which is an easy way to bump the capacity of your air group, but which can get you into firefighting trouble if you aren’t careful. Kaga, by comparison, has a fire risk of d8 and a firefighting skill of d2, focusing instead on strike cohesion and task force coordination (d10 and d12 to Yorktown’s d8 and d4).
I do plan to do some more complicated/interesting math behind the scenes for things like spotting, battle damage, radar detection, and so on, but as far as the design system goes, I like simplicity.
Next on my list is implementing the aircraft design pane, then building an air group editor, at which point I can finish the carrier design pane. (I have some bonuses/penalties in mind for overloading or underloading your carrier.) Then point-buy costs, then tooltips, then I think I’ll figure out packaging and make a little release for people to play with while I figure out how to start on the actual hard parts.
Fishbreath, what game is?