[WarInEur] Re: Attrition (Design History?)

[sgminfo]

One of the major problems I forsaw with any updatingof the game...

was...

Updating it...
(exactly!!)

The posited position was...
Recreate the game
*in a windows environment.*

Which means...leaving it *exactly* as it was.

The issue being, fundamentally:-

The board game was not dead.
Any update HAD to be capable of either:-

1.Recreating the board game
0r
2.Allowing the boardgame to be retro-fitted to match up to the computer 
variant.

Eventually...and with some reluctance, I realised that certain aspects 
of the simulation could be handled more simply and elegantly simply by 
the computer model.

Thence came the realisation...and very slowly...that the whole 
attraction of War in Europe was its ease of play, and apparent simplicity.

Taken back to basics,
we could improve the game (a subjective call) by reducing the amount of 
work that the player had to physically do.
Setups
Combat odds calculation etc etc.

In other words recreating the game was one thing  (cyberboard was going 
down this route),  but did we need to do this when the technology could 
give us the laser pointer, thescreen projector and the interactive white 
board?

The computerised variant could take most of the donky work away, whilst 
still giving the pure elements of the game, the bits we looked back on 
and remembered through rose tinted spectacles.

Then comes next stage,

beginnning downthe slippery slope of adding detail and complexity 
(simply because we could), butstriving to hide it away from theplayer 
who continued to be only bothered by the fundamental essentials.

Thus was born the idea of an intervening additional layer, where the 
calculations and all the computerised elements seem to lie, whilst 
preserving the 'illusion' of what we experienced and played before.

Within that layer all that wasnew or an unfinished proposal, could be 
switched on and off at will. What yousaw on the surface, would look the 
same, but could be pure board war in europe, or, the more sophisticated 
computerised war in europe simulation, with the look and trapping of the 
original, but playing up the experience and feel of something more subtle.

The trick was to short circuit any criticism of that new look game. The 
option allowed us to square the circle.

If you wanted to push counters the old way,
the options layer could be selectively switched off,
and youd be left pushing the game exactly as it was.

This backwards compatibility...allowed us to get away from one crippling 
unanswerable problem, how to allow the computer game to still be 
playable in a published board game, by  , gently ducking the issue.


Possibly  thiswas where the technology has been 'played with, 
disingenuously,to get away with things.

Karl is quite correct in what he says about the proposals he was/is 
proposing. They can have the desired effect.

Where he ran into trouble, and effectively it was unanswerable at the 
time, adding that extra line on the crt meant breaking the game in the 
board format...

I.E. in the next board format you would need two sets of crts, Karl's 
and the standard ones if you wanted to implement both, or an 'either or' 
format so that the original game was preserved.

This in turn either straight jackets you in the design, or breaks the 
link with previous games and crucifies us with the customer who can 
claim he is NOT buying what he ordered, classic BWIE.

The computer allowed us to have our cake and at the same time, eat it.


The trick with such things as attrition, looking at where I am going in 
the design, is that I am really hovering on the edge of an 'object 
orientated counter game'.

The next incarnation is to move further down the road to a truly object 
orientated model. The counters become self documenting, and take care 
of  much of the representational work presenting the resulting model to 
the player.

We no longer worry about supply effects and rivers and weather. The 
counters directly take care of those features, and present the numerical 
evaluation of themselves in the same stylised and simplistic way, but 
the real game engine below does things in a much more detailed and 
sophisticated way, which does ot concern the commander, only the effects 
that he has to work with.

'Attrition' modelling here shows a faint impression of all of that side 
of things in the future, when you look at the counter stacks you see the 
actual SPI counters as you look at them, but the summary figuers in 
ghosted white at the side of the counters at the same time show where 
things are actually moving to,


You see the game 'as it was' but at the same time are trained to handle 
the units 'as there now are'.

Thus you create the illusion of the old, whilst underpinning it with the 
model of the new.

And by making these things optional, you can choose how much of the 
'future' you really want to imbibe.


Don, forexample, has taken on the concepts of the attrition option, and 
incorporated these into his thinking and appraisal of what he is trying 
to do.

Old SPI stalwarts such as  'Combined Arms' and 'Tank' worked along these 
lines (so there is really nothing new under the sun). Where they were 
less than successful was usually due to the fact that the player was 
forced to carry too much information in his head to read into the 
interpretation of the situation in the board area, almost blank generic 
counters that he had to mentally clothe with numbers and capability.


But as a design exercise, this begins to open many doors to the old 
boardgame format, allowing it to transition into the electronic format 
taking advantage of the new, without losing the flavour of the old, at 
least in an impressionistic way.

Consider what it might mean in DNO where a squadron of 109Es begin to 
accept the new F model on squadron establishment.

A nightmare of counter exchanges etc etc in the original, now just  
numbers and capabilities slowly and smoothly changing on the counters...


-|steve|-





Karl Gaarsoe wrote:
> Long ago, I suggested adding a "7" Result to the CRT;  The principle 
> intended effect (This was during the SPI/Neil K. Hall BWiEphase) was 
> to add an "Ex" at the top of the 3:1 column on CRT #1;  This 
> suggestion went nowhere, several people I coresponded with admited it 
> had merit, but AFAIK, no one tried it;  Certainly no one reported 
> results back to me. 
>  
> The Attrition rules in CWiE seem to reach the same effect in a more 
> dynamic (And invisible to the players) fashion. 
>  
> On "Air Attrition", about the same time I suggested a similar rule;  
> No more free ride for flying unoposed, let's count the Sortie rate and 
> roll for casualties (A very modest 1/6 per ten
> sorties), therby inflicting losses even when you are flying unopposed. . 
>  
> INSTEAD, NKH et al. came up with the current system, which has the 
> exact opposite effect of what I intended, and extends the Air 
> Dominance of the German Maximization players.  Duh.....
>  
> Which is an example of why I am so dismissive at times of their 
> chnages.  Their errata and map corrections are OK, but their (NKH) 
> modifications were based on a very specific play style and concept of 
> game outcome.
>  
> Karl Gaarsoe
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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> WarInEur at mailman.halisp.net
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>   

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