What part of historical miniatures gaming do you enjoy most?
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I'll try and explain.jb wrote:EH??BattlerBritain wrote:l . . . 'better to be Red than Dead' . ..
There was so much hype going on at the time about the strength of the Soviet threat that it was deemed almost inevitable that NATO couldn't stop the Soviet hordes. So certain factions deemed that it was better to become a Communist than die trying to stop the onslaught.
I think that was wrong on both counts. You didn't need to become a Communist or die trying to stop them.
This is not meant to be a 'Political' post either - but just trying to shed light on the context.
Back onto the GHQ topic:
I love collecting the figures, painting them (although eyes no longer as capable as they were) and seeing a battle in action. It makes all the preparation effort worthwhile.
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After 42 years of intensive tabletop gaming (along with lots of board gaming and, in the last 25 years, computer gaming) There have been a lot of different things I've enjoyed at different times. At the top of the list over a long period of time comes the enjoyment of creating rulesets.
The very first game I created (in 1964) used a big map of Surrey BC (where I grew up) and was shamelessly based on a 1962 Life Magazine board game of the Civil War. At university, I played the very basic land and naval rules that were available then.
After university, with a group of friends, I started doing more research on WW2 naval combat. It was a table of hits versus shells fired by calibre in the Sea Battles in Close Up book on the Graf Spee action that first led me into investigating danger spaces and working out tables that varied the rate of hitting by range for different calibres. More information was available in the many books on WW2 ships and battles that Naval Institute published through the '70s and early '80s.
As someone who has always enjoyed a*n*a*lyzing data and creating models, it was a lot of fun to create tables of effects related to shell hits and torpedo hits that were distilled into special damage and torpedo damage charts for our naval rules.
In addition to the a*n*a*lytical side, there was the creative side of developing game aids that could simply present a large amount of detailed data, specifically the hit and penetration chart that combined different hit percentages for different types of guns and different vertical and horizontal armour penetration at different ranges into a single table where additional effects of speed, size, turning and initial fire could be easily applied.
I still vividly remember the afternoon where John and I were mulling over how to put all this information together, and how many different tables we would need, when the single table structure we ended up with flashed into my mind in one of those Eureka moments.
After the WW2 rules were finalized in 1980 (though it took another 25 years before we finally published them as Supremacy at Sea) I started on equivalent rules for WW1 battles. A long period of research convinced me that even though I could use much of the same structure of tables, there were significantly different factors that had to be modelled for the WW1 period. In addition, I wanted to more exactly represent the effect of each hit.
By 1984 I had created an initial version of those rules, which we played for several years then dropped. The '90s were just too busy with work to do much game development but around 2003 (when I returned from an overseas assignment) I dug out the old version of the WW1 rules and started to polish them up.
Many very detailed books on the WW1 period had been published, and lots more articles on the development of fire control systems were available. This was one major area that I wanted to more accurately represent. By WW2, the optical fire control systems of the major navies were pretty similar in performance, but in the period from 1905 to the end of WW1 fire control went through several major revolutions with systems of vastly different capabilities.
I could also do a lot more research online. This made information available that I could only have dreamed of before. At archive.org, I found a 1917 book on searchlights that provided the detailed performance information I needed to develop realistic searchlight rules for the different types of searchlights used on warships. Military related websites that archived Masters and PhD theses provided detailed facts on mine warfare.
As ever, putting all this together into simple to use tables and datasheets has been the creative challenge. Once the rules are generated and put into this form, the next enjoyment comes in creating scenarios to test out various aspects of the rules in more extreme situations to see if unrealistic results occur.
I am very fortunate to have a large group of naval gaming enthusiasts as my friends. These people have been willing over many years to try out the unusual scenarios I put forward. Some are exciting and closely fought battles, while others turn out to be dreadfully one-sided because they were meant to test rules, not create a balanced game. My friends put up with all this in a generally good-humoured manner.
Overall, it is the research, a*n*a*lysis and creative effort to produce rulesets for a topic (naval warfare) that I find fascinating that has been the greatest enjoyment in gaming.
The very first game I created (in 1964) used a big map of Surrey BC (where I grew up) and was shamelessly based on a 1962 Life Magazine board game of the Civil War. At university, I played the very basic land and naval rules that were available then.
After university, with a group of friends, I started doing more research on WW2 naval combat. It was a table of hits versus shells fired by calibre in the Sea Battles in Close Up book on the Graf Spee action that first led me into investigating danger spaces and working out tables that varied the rate of hitting by range for different calibres. More information was available in the many books on WW2 ships and battles that Naval Institute published through the '70s and early '80s.
As someone who has always enjoyed a*n*a*lyzing data and creating models, it was a lot of fun to create tables of effects related to shell hits and torpedo hits that were distilled into special damage and torpedo damage charts for our naval rules.
In addition to the a*n*a*lytical side, there was the creative side of developing game aids that could simply present a large amount of detailed data, specifically the hit and penetration chart that combined different hit percentages for different types of guns and different vertical and horizontal armour penetration at different ranges into a single table where additional effects of speed, size, turning and initial fire could be easily applied.
I still vividly remember the afternoon where John and I were mulling over how to put all this information together, and how many different tables we would need, when the single table structure we ended up with flashed into my mind in one of those Eureka moments.
After the WW2 rules were finalized in 1980 (though it took another 25 years before we finally published them as Supremacy at Sea) I started on equivalent rules for WW1 battles. A long period of research convinced me that even though I could use much of the same structure of tables, there were significantly different factors that had to be modelled for the WW1 period. In addition, I wanted to more exactly represent the effect of each hit.
By 1984 I had created an initial version of those rules, which we played for several years then dropped. The '90s were just too busy with work to do much game development but around 2003 (when I returned from an overseas assignment) I dug out the old version of the WW1 rules and started to polish them up.
Many very detailed books on the WW1 period had been published, and lots more articles on the development of fire control systems were available. This was one major area that I wanted to more accurately represent. By WW2, the optical fire control systems of the major navies were pretty similar in performance, but in the period from 1905 to the end of WW1 fire control went through several major revolutions with systems of vastly different capabilities.
I could also do a lot more research online. This made information available that I could only have dreamed of before. At archive.org, I found a 1917 book on searchlights that provided the detailed performance information I needed to develop realistic searchlight rules for the different types of searchlights used on warships. Military related websites that archived Masters and PhD theses provided detailed facts on mine warfare.
As ever, putting all this together into simple to use tables and datasheets has been the creative challenge. Once the rules are generated and put into this form, the next enjoyment comes in creating scenarios to test out various aspects of the rules in more extreme situations to see if unrealistic results occur.
I am very fortunate to have a large group of naval gaming enthusiasts as my friends. These people have been willing over many years to try out the unusual scenarios I put forward. Some are exciting and closely fought battles, while others turn out to be dreadfully one-sided because they were meant to test rules, not create a balanced game. My friends put up with all this in a generally good-humoured manner.
Overall, it is the research, a*n*a*lysis and creative effort to produce rulesets for a topic (naval warfare) that I find fascinating that has been the greatest enjoyment in gaming.