Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005 From: Honolulu, Hawaii Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Jimm quote:
ORIGINAL: brian brian I find most optionals to be pro-attacker or pro-defender; since each side roughly spends half the game attacking or defending a lot of them balance out across the whole game, but that's just my opinion; many folks have definite ideas on which are pro-Axis or Allied. One of my favorite innovations in WiF has been fractional odds, so I'll repeat myself here: I'm not sure if it was invented in the WiF community but it is a great way to play wargames. I'll probably never go back to playing without it. You are rewarded for throwing in whatever you can into an important attack; the days of time-consumingly and quite unrealistically re-arranging your entire army to get just enough factors to make the next odds level are over. In WiF it wipes out a lot of extraneous fighter-bomber missions for that one or two extra points. It also improves most anyone's play as they realize the implications, resulting in faster play and more focus on the big picture that the designer is trying to paint for you. There is some resistance to the idea; some people only want to use it to go to half-odds levels like 3.5:1 in conjunction with the 2d10 and you are back to factor counting; others want to throw out all rounding of anything and just keep adding up factors and die roll modifiers with no rounding at all and let the calculator generate the final plus on the 3d10, which I kind of like to eliminate a bit of cheese, slow down the attacker a little bit and try and lower the land unit density, which can get a bit ridiculously high late in a game of WiF, but not rounding things is hard to recall after playing WiF for a long time. The third die in a fractional odds + 2d10 also makes for great wargaming tragedy and comedy ... if it wasn't for that darn 1 on the fractional I would've stayed at a 13 - / - result, now I am at 'Magic' 14. ARRRRGHHHHH! The flip side comes when you take Gibraltar via the third die getting the result up to the coveted "S" result. Try it, you'll like it. Fair comment, you are quite evangelical! I feel myself becoming converted. I am still interested to see how this side the game is covered in Mwif- my expectation was that the dice rolling was pretty much "invisible" and the results just get churned out- the players wouldnt need to worry about combat tables etc. Or maybe not? I do not want to create some elaborate system (e.g., calculating the probability of an attack being successful). But showing the current odds is reasonable. As for the dice, there is a player interface option to 'see' the dice rolls - or not.
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Steve Perfection is an elusive goal.
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