Subtopic	Posts		Updated
	Archive through August 02, 2003	25		08/02 10:47pm
	Archive through August 10, 2003	25		08/10 11:42am

To disengage the combat instead of having a pool of stay behinds or rules for cripples etc just do this maybe:

Disengaging from combat;
Mutual agreement; both sides agree to cease the round. Both disengage without further combat, attacker withdraws if the battle was at a fixed target.

One sided; either attacker or defender wishes to break off the combat without the consent of the other. The disengaging side suffers hits/pool shifts first and attacks at +1 to all attacks after shifting combat damage.

By Douglass E. Howard (Doug_Howard) on Sunday, August 10, 2003 - 12:16 pm: Edit

When shifted down off the 1 pool a Unit would be gone immediately and not get to attack.

By Douglass E. Howard (Doug_Howard) on Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - 12:45 pm: Edit

How about... scaling it to be more like an A&A thing as well? It would get away from a lot of the F&E complexity level to have a counter represent a CV group and maybe other fleet types like a DN = DN+ escorts, and have the rest as three ship squadron equivalents. Could be simliar to A+A Pacific in concept for unit size where they have sub, destroyer, bb and cv+fighters perhaps it could have ff, dd, cc, dn and cv+fighters along with freighters and gcus and bats etc.

By Andy Palmer (Andypalmer) on Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - 02:36 pm: Edit

Doug. That's exactly what I'm proposing. 1 FF = 1 FF Squadron, etc.

By Douglass E. Howard (Doug_Howard) on Wednesday, August 13, 2003 - 03:04 pm: Edit

Yep, I saw that. Just forgot about it today.

By Andrew Wynberg (Awynberg) on Thursday, August 21, 2003 - 06:51 am: Edit

(apologies for cross-posting similar emails to different topics)

Hmmm...as a long time player of "strategic level simple quick games" I'm not sure if the ideas I've seen discussed here will make the cut.

Just want to float the idea that SFB/F&E players might be a little too attached to playing with individual ships or small piles of ships. I'd call this the naval game concept (sorry if I have lifted this concept without the correct attribution).

Why not switch the central design concept for a "strategic level simple game" to fleets? i.e. each player represents the supreme military command and moves "large scale aggregate units" around the map. (Land genre games call these divisions, corps and armies. For some reason land genre games haven't produced games where you keep track of every single tank the USSR produced in WW2, which is what F&E reminds me of.)

You could have different types of fleets: "attrition/pinning" "defence" and "strike" Adopt the quaint concept of a Combat Results Table to resolve combats with a single die roll (throw in some die roll modifiers if you really must have your chrome, like EW and maulers).

For a radical game idea (well radical for F&E players), why not adopt the game system found in several GMT games designs, like Paths of Glory, Barbarossa to Berlin, and For the People ie a card-driven design. Sure, the abstraction levels in these games can be somewhat annoying, but they are selling like hotcakes.

By Douglass E. Howard (Doug_Howard) on Friday, August 22, 2003 - 09:00 pm: Edit

I concur.

By Chris Young (Caychris) on Friday, August 22, 2003 - 11:23 pm: Edit

This has made the rounds every year or so. The result is that there are just too many differing opinons as to what elements are the most important. I would like to see and A&A level game but it would lack many of the specialized units.

Im not trying to be the nay-sayer here I just think that if someone wants to put together the rules and can get 10 people together to agree on playtesting and the ruleset then by all means do it. The exercise will be worth it if for nothing else but for the experience in game design.

For any good game to come about someone has to just have enough determination to pound out their vision.

Id be willing to playtest any said game free of any bias to how it should be. However I will have opinions about what I like or dislike about how it plays.

Just my unsolicited 2 cents.

By Glenn Hoepfner (Ikabar) on Saturday, August 23, 2003 - 04:59 pm: Edit

Chris is correct. An example of what he is talking about is that through the course of the years, our group (battlegroup Tucson) has played several campaigns. We would agree that a particular person in our group would design it. After several weeks from suggestions from the other players, the campaign designer (with the final say) prints out the rules and we play it out. The campaigns of the past (and present) were enjoyable, though one was too detailed, one was too simple (and lacked the ability to maintain interest). Even still, the one we are playing is good (but due to RL issues is going agonizingly slow right now).

Matching Chris' 2 cents

By Andrew Wynberg (Awynberg) on Tuesday, August 26, 2003 - 06:32 am: Edit

I think that is interesting that there are apparently so many opinions about what is considered the most important factors. I agree that designing, developing and playtesting such a game would at least be an interesting exercise in game design. Maybe the games could be submitted to a desk-top publishing company for publication? (Suitably altered for intellectual property and copyright issues)

By Douglass E. Howard (Doug_Howard) on Monday, January 05, 2004 - 09:44 pm: Edit

Here's a thought for the abstraction process... Why not just say that unit at "X" level equals a taskforce of so many economic points? The specialized units beyond that are all just bpv... part of the whole idea of this, IMO, is to get away from the tracking of every single ship/variant/possible factor and create something simple and fun to play. Something that might be taught in 10-15 minutes with a minimum of extra layers, maybe on the level of A&A Pacific. Dice rolls don't need 20 different factors to include scouts and ew levels etc. All things considered it was a mistake on my part to consider breaking it down to the individual piece equals a unit level because then that takes it back towards F&E.