A plea for multi-player specific features
Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2008 2:58 am
Wargamers love monster games. Wargamers buy monster games with dreams of actually playing the big, multi-year, entire war scenario. Who wants to play just the little scenarios. Climb Mount Everest or nothing!
Let's face it though, lots of people can't invest the time to actually play the monster scenarios. Rather than give up on those dreams, however, many wargamers find another way of making the monster scenarios manageable: team games. Instead of doing the whole thing yourself, divide up the work load by assigning different theaters/fronts to different players. Read throught the AARs and one sees a number of team games.
Sounds easy in principle. In practice it becomes much more difficult. Players keep stealing units from each other for their own operations. Or else some units become orphans with noone taking resposibility for them.
Why have no wargames actually built in functionality to make team games more manageable, then?
I would like to plead for team-game functionality to be built into the WitP engine. We need some mechanism whereby units are assigned to specific players by a designated CinC and only the player to which those units are assigned will be able to issue orders to them. This would seem to be rather easy to do and would greatly enhance the appeal of this huge game.
A further enhancement might be to also have players designated to certain operational areas or types of activities: the China theater; the Naval commander; the Air-force commander; etc. This idea would need to be further fleshed out, but it is also something worth looking at.
So please, please, please: Let's do something about WitP to make it more multi-player friendly.
Let's face it though, lots of people can't invest the time to actually play the monster scenarios. Rather than give up on those dreams, however, many wargamers find another way of making the monster scenarios manageable: team games. Instead of doing the whole thing yourself, divide up the work load by assigning different theaters/fronts to different players. Read throught the AARs and one sees a number of team games.
Sounds easy in principle. In practice it becomes much more difficult. Players keep stealing units from each other for their own operations. Or else some units become orphans with noone taking resposibility for them.
Why have no wargames actually built in functionality to make team games more manageable, then?
I would like to plead for team-game functionality to be built into the WitP engine. We need some mechanism whereby units are assigned to specific players by a designated CinC and only the player to which those units are assigned will be able to issue orders to them. This would seem to be rather easy to do and would greatly enhance the appeal of this huge game.
A further enhancement might be to also have players designated to certain operational areas or types of activities: the China theater; the Naval commander; the Air-force commander; etc. This idea would need to be further fleshed out, but it is also something worth looking at.
So please, please, please: Let's do something about WitP to make it more multi-player friendly.