Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Alikchi

For a while now I've been thinking about creating a scenario that offers more for big gun battleship enthusiasts.

My first thought was to simply import the WPO data into AE. War Plan Orange is the obvious and best background for a battleship-centered scenario in the WitP engine. Unfortunately, AE's editor will only allow you to create scenarios that begin on December 7, 1941. Also, so far as I can tell, there's no way to automate the scenario creation process in any way - the WPO and AE data files are of an entirely different format.

So: it's entirely possible to recreate WPO in the AE editor, but it would be an excessive amount of work, and players would be forced to "pretend" that the date was 192X, rather than 194X. It also would likely be legally blocked on copyright/distribution grounds.

Option two would be some kind of semi-plausible alternate history scenario. I was thinking a "Germany Wins WWI" thing, but the inflexibility of AE when it comes to nationalities and sides nixed that idea. Any AE scenario has to be Japan (& puppets) versus Everyone Else. We're essentially "stuck" with the nations and their alignments as per history - we can't have, for instance, a Red-Orange (US vs Japan + Britain) scenario, or feature an independent Thailand, or independent German bases/forces.

Also, any scenario that is decently plausible, or has a historical "point of departure" within the 20th century, will have aircraft roughly as effective as you'd expect in 1941. That defeats the purpose of a "battleship-centric scenario".

I'm therefore considering a third option - a totally original alternate history scenario with no pretentions of plausibility [beyond the constraints of technology and physics]. This scenario would also have to conform with the basic alliance structure of AE (and WW2 in the Pacific, of course). How do we do that?

Well, we can still do a lot with the engine if we're willing to decouple ourselves from reality. For instance, British forces may still be "British", but what sort of Britain will they serve? Maybe not one flying the Union Jack. Also: in an alt-hist scenario like this, one could argue that aircraft technology has been slower to develop, explaining why 1920-style aircraft are flying in 1941.

I'm still thinking about exactly how such a scenario would look. A Japanese Shogunate launching a surprise attack against the Commonwealth of Britain, the Dutch Federation, the French Empire and the Republic of California? With China neutral to keep the focus on the naval war. Something zany but balanced and enjoyable, with lots of big guns.

More updates here as I work it all out and test things. Kind of a big project! Any thoughts?

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

Much as I love battleships and cruisers and DDs, to make a surface combat flavoured game you would have to remove the CVs and possibly bork the LBA as well, n'est-ce pas? To me that would change the flavour of the challenge too much for a campaign game but a short series of naval clashes would be an interesting possibility. Maybe an invasion/relief of Wake Island scenario with both sides deploying their surface fleets and subs in support?