Cabido
Posts: 243
Joined: 12/11/2017 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: HPT KUNZ Greetings all, A question of design philosophy. How to handle a one-sided battle? Are you interested in a game or a lesson in history? Take, for example, Destruction of Army Group Center, 1944. Historically total defeat for the Germans. But historically the Soviets ran out of gas, figuratively and literally, and came up short of taking their planned objectives. The accompanying front line at the scenario's end in mid-August in shown in the maps in the accompanying Documentation. The victory points are assigned along this front line. So each side has a reasonable chance of victory... This is a perfect criteria. Setting the victory points at the historical final frontline or at points based on historical schedule. If you do better than historical results, you have a victory, if worst, you have a defeat. That way, there is no one-sided battle in game terms. This is a game, afterall. We can learn about history, can try to simulate historical lines of advance, but at the end of the day, it is a game. And the most exciting aspect is that, even when fighting battles that were unbalanced in real life, we can reset balance with the above criteria, so that victory doesn't correspond to what would be considered victory in real life, but is just doing better than was done in real life, with all the handicaps considered. Yet, for this to work well, the scenario must have been playtested and the victory conditions well designed. Toaw has hundreds of scenarios by different designers. Some are good, some are bad and some are good, but with unbalanced victory conditions. Those could be made more exciting by players results references. Not for competition, but there is a puzzle like aspect in trying to make better than the better result reported from which a scenario can benefit if the preset victory conditions are too difficult or too easy.
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