Fog of War

[Colonel Sam]

Howdy all;

Ever since Andrew's very enjoyable Shipwreck battle (No! No more Harpoons! Please!!!) I've been thinking of running my own PBEM.

I've done a lot of driving the past month so had lots of time to think about what I want in a game and the idea I've sketched in my head is for a game with limited intelligence and what I call "collapsible" time. The idea being you'll give orders to your units and the game will progress on autopilot until either a) a pre-determined point is reached or b) something happens.

Allow me to illustrate...you might give your unit an order to go down a road to a junction. As a player the next email back you would receive would be either an email that says "You reached the junction" or if something happens before the unit reaches the junction you'd get an email saying, for instances, "Lead element takes fire from ambush.".

As you might suspect this means there would be no turns, but the game would be run on a minute-by-minute sequence which should be invisible to the players. It also might seem like a huge amount of work for the GM, but I think I have a good tracking system that should make things fairly simple. I hope.

Because of the minute-by-minute aspect, I'm going to be tying into it another twist. In most wargames you just shove the counter the way you want to go and it happens...in reality quick actions without preparation are usually haphazard affairs...so I have drafted a little system which would reward planning or boldness depending on the individual player and situation. In it, every action would require a certain amount of time to prepare for...and the more time spent (to a point) the better the chance of the action succeeding. There would of course be modifiers for unit fatigue, weather, terrain, morale & etc.

Again, though, this will be mostly invisible to the player, although the player would have a cheat sheet that would give "standard" times. In it they might see that, perhaps, to start a company moving would take 5 minutes. A unit with poor morale that was exhausted might take ten to get under way, an elite fresh unit might get going in one.

While this might seem cumbersome, if I do this right it would again be mostly invisible to the player through the magic of embedded spreadhseet formulaes. In my vision, you would order your company to start moving and the email would come back "under way after 7 minutes".

Okay, that's kind of a snapshot into my thought process and hopefully that appeals to someone. What I'm looking for now is a couple of playtesters for what I consider the hardest part of the game, the movement system. So for playtesters on Game 1 there really won't be any combat...it'll essentially be a friendly field maneuver to see if the movement system works.

I'm aiming this toward being World War II.

Anyone interested?

Best regards;

Sam