I was also a little peeved at his insistence that the way I have wargamed for 40 years is Not Practical even though I have played on kitchen tables as well as big ones and continued to wargame even when pennyless. I confess that I was annoyed that the army lists do not allow any 'army' to have all arms present, not ever, even if it was not unusual for say a Napoleonic force to have horse, foot, guns and skirmishers but that was easily amended for those who desire that as an option (eg for 6 units one can roll twice on the 3 unit list instead etc etc). I don't really disagree with anything you have written and have found the stripped down scenarios very useful to get interesting games going when time and/or energy was short. I had also resolved to (finally) actually try the OHW rules and I felt that playing the scenario would help me get a feel for it, so why not use the rules that were intended for it? Two birds with one stone, and all that.Īn interesting review. Grant took a broader approach and thus had to keep his programming at a strategic level.) I liked the scenarios in OHW, so it made sense to use one of them, hence my last blog post's project of creating a gameboard for scenario #8. I am still working through the idea, but the core of the solution was to try and scope to programmed opponent to a specific side or a specific scenario using a specific set of rules.
You can read about my thoughts and experiments on that idea in the links below. It was while I was skimming over my library that I saw an old title by Charles Stewart Grant entitled Programmed Wargames Scenarios that I decided to revive an old project: trying to develop a programmed opponent that I could write down, send to another player, and they could use that program to game solo. So I passed judgment without actually playing the rules, skipped to the back and read the scenarios, and consoled myself that at least that provided enough value for money. I mean, I understand Neil Thomas' passion for stripping down rules, getting rid of complexity, and emphasizing the need to get to a decision in a reasonable amount of time, but this seemed like a bit much.
I have to admit, when I first read the rules, that was my thought.
0 kommentar(er)
