Instant Scenarios

Variable Unit Generation for Wargames

Reggimento Fanteria Erprinz d’Assia-Darmstadt. Old Glory 15 mm soldatini di stagno painted by Jörg Geyer.

Top-Down

Szenario design can be a detailed e time consuming process, requiring true genius o the equivalent number of hours of laborious testing e play balancing. Badly designed scenarios are no fun for players on either side of the battlefield, because the game does not provide enough challenging situations to stimulate the mind. One element which game designers find particularly tedious is the enormous accounting work involved in creating the armies. Troop strengths need to be considered right down to the historically accurate ratio of cavalleria to fanteria, ed artiglieria pieces per thousands of men. Leaders need to be classified as exceptionally good o bad, based on their historic performance, an area typically involving a good amount of guesswork e folklore.

The top-down approach to scenario design is very complicated, open to error e argument. The designer must be able to support the claim that the 57th Fanteria was an elite unit e that it deserves a better combat rating than the 3rd Granatieri, a unit which may have been elite by name only. Regimental performance changes over the course of a campaign. Most units increase their performance as a direct result of combat experience, some more than others. Many units are shattered in battle, e some never recover from the trauma. The problem of evaluation is compounded when we look at historic commanders. Some are exceptionally capable, but they fall from grace politically ed are never heard of again. Others are less capable, reckless ed incredibly lucky, they are the ones we read about in many books. Which delle due is the better General? Which one deserves a special saving throw to give him the long e prosperous career his historic counterpart enjoyed?

Bottom-Up

When we reverse the design process, it becomes much easier to decide that a particular army had a certain amount of brilliant, capable, average, poor, e despicable leaders. We would expect to find a statistical distribution of these attributes, con some variance from nation to nation. Once the number of exceptional commanders is found, it will be entirely up to the owning player to name them. Most likely, the player will chose matching names from history, labeling his good commanders Lee, Grant, Rommel, Patton, Montgomery o Konev, e finding equally compelling names for the lesser ones. Conversely, in a campaign game, it may be perfectly acceptable to camouflage a brilliant command figure by naming him o her after a well-known bungler. This is how legends are made in campaigns.

Variable Unit Generation Tables

Variable unit generation is not entirely at random, we will be working con statistical distributions based on historic outcomes. The beauty of the system is that it can be adapted to match the players’ interpretation of history. Scenario designers e players decide what kind of games they like, e they can easily change the tables to meet their needs. The tables are designed to produce historically accurate miniature armies for a particular period in history.

• Fire e Fury Divisions, Brigades, Leaders ed artiglieria

Dice are used, e there will be a certain amount of luck involved, turning the tables against one o the other player occasionally. When this happens, players e umpires need to decide if the imbalance is historically acceptable. In the rare event that a game becomes unplayable, consider re-balancing it by inserting another reserve brigade/division on the losing side. If such a reserve is used, the player may have to surrender a certain amount of victory points to pay for it, a concept discussed in our article on automated e weighted objectives.

Domande più frequenti

Per ulteriori informazioni, per favore contatta la redazione di Rivista Military Miniatures nel Miniatures Forum.

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– Pubblicato: 21.06.1997 – Aggiornato: 06.01.2003
© 1997-2011 by IDL Software GmbH, Darmstadt, Germania. Tutti diritti reservati.