Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: JJMcBlaze

Hey all,

I was playing around with the scenario editor and the whole PO system, and stumbled upon a question I could not answer through RTFM (unless I'm blind as a bat), or on this forum.

Say that I want to create an alliance, but I want only one country in this alliance to be player controlled, and have the rest of the alliance run on PO with the basic idea being to simulate an allied army being controlled by their own staff, and you having to live with, and act upon their success/failures.

Could this be done with the vanilla game assets and rules?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay


There is no design feature that allows the designer to impose that. Players, however, are free to adopt such a rule voluntarily. So, the designer could make it a house rule. Then set all formations he doesn't want PO controlled to "Manual". Then players would be required to first invoke the PO to make all its moves. Only after that moving the stuff that didn't move by PO.

quote:

ORIGINAL: golden delicious

What I was thinking of was a sort of multiplayer strategic game. The players essentially the top layer of the military hierarchy, and have no responsibility for issuing orders to individual units. Instead, each turn the players have the option draft a set of changes to the Objective chains for the formations under their authority. One player for each force acts as the administrator and applies these changes, then sets the PO running for the whole turn.

Even more interesting would be if one force has to play this way and the other side is played directly by a human. There's your France 1940 simulation- especially if the French player's copy of the saved game is always a couple of days out of date.

quote:

ORIGINAL: JJMcBlaze



If I understand correctly, divide players into a planning, and an executing branch?

We (some old Close Combat clan) were playing around with this idea, but never found a way to make it work. Our idea for this game was to have Grand Strategists have their game on the strategic map. They would plan their offensives, move their troops, and this process would grow smaller in scope, right down to Arma FPS levels.

So the 'highest staff' would be playing ToaW, the second level would be playing something like Close Combat, and the last level would be playing an FPS. We thought that incorporating the human element would give every level purpose, and make outcomes much more interesting since they are no longer solely based on a dice roll.

I guess that by now, the obvious problems are quite apparent...

quote:

ORIGINAL: golden delicious



But actually what I had in mind here was to run a game purely in a single TOAW scenario, whereby a group of players on one or both sides wouldn't have direct access to the scenario, but would rather receive reports from a sort of scenario admin, and then input instructions back in the form of PO objectives. Actually moving and attacking by units would then be executed by the PO. This would give a sort of heavy fog of war and also subordinates who don't do what they're supposed to do.

To keep the thing moving, one could set a time each week when the turn will be executed. If any participant hasn't updated their orders by that time then it's too bad: their units will just carry on based on their old orders.

quote:

ORIGINAL: JJMcBlaze

Hearing you loud and clear. I've been searching for a game like this for ages. Not necessarily in ToaW, but the idea of a purely 'administrative' general staff game has always intrigued me. I guess that it'll take one hell of an AI to translate orders into movement on a map.

quote:

ORIGINAL: sPzAbt653

Have you tried using 'PO Assist'? I did and found it to be tedious, but I wasn't really interested in proving it to be viable. There are other settings that could be involved, so if a scenario was designed to be played this way it might take a little extra work. But overall I don't think I see a need for an 'administrator'. Maybe I am wrong.

I guess an opponent could cheat and switch the PO off to gain an advantage, but that would result in them getting cursed with the fleas of 1,000 camels.