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Again, going back to my standards (Striker/Striker II/Command Decision for WWII - Sci-Fi, and Hoplon for Ancients/Medievals/Fantasy):

for the former (WWII - Sci-Fi) you have a combination of Written Orders, and IGOUGO with Reaction.

But because of the written orders, the players are highly constrained in their actions.

With Hoplon you have a combination of Alternative Actions, combined with Initiative, with the option for an Interrupt.

AND. . . the actions themselves are split into a variety of categories (Charge/Routs, Regular Movement, Break-off).

So, each player, by order of Initiative (I will come back to that) declares Charges. If a player declares a charge with a Unit in a command, then that command has "Seized the Initiative" and must then perform all other actions (Regular Movement, and Break-offs) by order of their initiative.

However, a player with a higher initiative can offer to surrender that initiative, until another player has moved, and if another player moves, they can then "Seize the Initiative" and interrupt that player's moves to perform their own.

This occurs with each action phase for movement.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Paradigm wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

Also, how does the setting/time period of the game fundamentally alter the type of Turn Sequence you decide to use? Is there a correlation?

In general, I think that the more modern/futuristic a setting is, the more it benefits from quick switching between players, reactions, interrupts ect simply as units tend to be smaller, more autonomous and generally freer in movement. You can easily see how a squad of a dozen men in a firefight could react quickly to the battle just on sight and/or instant commands via radio ect, thus lending itself to faster turns. Meanwhile manoeuvring a Fantasy/historical army is far less instant; you'd need a great deal of flag waving, bugle blowing, order yelling and such to get a block of 60 men to reform, hence the connection to longer turns, perhaps requiring more foresight as more can happen between now and your next go.


Of course, those aren't prescriptive. Scale also comes into it (skirmishes will naturally suit faster swaps, while mass battles even in a futuristic setting suit longer turns), and I think the further the player is supposed to 'be' up the Command structure, the longer/more spaced out turns should be. For example, in Infinity 'you' represent the strike team leader, giving orders and reacting on an action-by-action basis, whereas in something like Epic where you're essentially the overall commander leading from a base or even orbit, you're concerned more with large scale ebb and flow, and events are going to unfold more slowly, both in 'reality' and in the game.

For just 60 men (6 lines of ten men, or roughly ten yards by four yards - roughly the size of a medium apartment), you only need one guy saying "March" or "Turn Left" to get them moving.

Most Ancient Units were units of hundreds or thousands of men. For instance, the Cohort of the Later Republican, and Early Imperial Roman Army was 600 - 1000 men, and this was the field maneuver unit for the army (They then broke down into 6 - 10 centuries of 100 men each).

And, when you look further back in time, at the Hoplite Greeks, the Taxeis or Moros was roughly 1000 Hoplites or Phalangites. And for Ancient Persia or India, you saw "Units" that were 10,000 men strong.

During the Dark Ages, we saw a reduction of Set-Piece Battles, and thus in the sizes of units.

But 60 men would not be large enough to be a unit of Heavy Infantry on their own. Even if the individual soldiers were heavily armored, they would fight as Skirmishers, for the most part, using mobility as a primary defense.

You would need at least 4x that number of men before you could effectively use a "Unit formation" of Heavy or Medium Infantry (where the mass maneuver of the unit was a question - and keeping in formation was important).

If you look at the development of Ancients War-games rules by people who actually made the study of ancient warfare their business, then you can see these discussions over the issue of the basic maneuver unit of an army existing as far back as the 1980s on Usenet (with the number 200 - 400 men being agreed upon as the smallest number for which formation maintenance would be an issue).

MB

leopard wrote:
You can also have an interlaced 'impulse' system ala Star Fleet Battles, here you have a list of the order things occur, and a method for determining what acts in what order when the same action is attempted.

Crude example, if two units are moving the slower will be moved before the faster - regardless of which player is controlling it.

SFB split the turn into 32 'impulses', with a strict turn sequence (seriously it was several pages long but covered everything in the exact order - if you wanted to know if firing a probe as a weapon came before or after firing one for information it would be in there somewhere.

net effect was for most units you could elect to fire in any of the 32 impulses, but would have a delay before that weapon was ready again, but were unlikely to move in every impulse, and when your set speed came up you had to move.


To convert to 40k for example, in the pre turn section, in secret, you note how far all your units will move, in inches. the units are then moved, inch by inch - with a firing chance after each inch of movement - but fire too early and the enemy has time to get closer before they fire from a better position, leave it too late and they may be out of sight.

Worked very well, and actually pretty fast.

No need for 'reaction fire' or overwatch as mechanics, the rules in effect simulated the passage of time by breaking movement down to the smallest atomic unit the game had (a single hex in that case.

Also with movement not being optional, if you moved at speed 'x' when the chart said you moved, you moved - and in that impulse the slower units overall moved first - a bonus to faster and more nimble units.

The game has a level of pre-plotting, determining which weapons to power, how fast to pump the engines and so on, then allows these choices to be acted out over the full turn.

Have often wondered on something similar for a ground combat game, note specifically you don't need the overwatch stuff, and troops can no longer run from cover to cover never being shot at - but if you fire at the first one you see, you don't get the chance to fire that weapon at the second one, and if you hold fire the second one may never move - all without needing a slew of rules to cover it - think 40k, except units move 1" max a turn, but not every turn - and weapons fire every 'x' turns, so a laser cannon may take 5 turns to recharge, firing on the 6th, an assault cannon maybe firing a single round every turn, but over the six turns firing six shots.

I Almost brought up Star Fleet Battles. I was one of the original Playtesters for everything that came after the main rules (working with Michael Thompson to produce the X-Ships Supplement, Fighters and Pseudofighters, and we even developed the game that Steve Cole completely stole from us - ours was called Star Fleet Admiral - to produce a fleet-action game. I ran it at Gencon in 1985/86/87, with crowds of players amazed that they could easily control fleets of dozens, to hundreds of ships relatively easily. . . And Steve Cole then ordered us to never show it to another person again - he has ego problems).

But the turn sequence in Star Fleet Battles came from the days before Abstraction was a "thing" (obviously abstraction existed, but it was not something you promoted, but rather hid, trying instead to claim as close to "Accurate Simulation" as possible), and other games like Squad Leader tended toward similar complex and detailed turn sequences.

MB

We used to play a variant of the Micronauts game with a guy in Dallas, TX who was an Admiral in the Naval Reserve (Chuck Dalafield).

He was HUGE into WWII era Naval Warfare (He was a WWII Veteran), and we used the same movement system for other games as well (Half-Whole-Half).

It works surprisingly well.

for SFB, one of the systems we used as an interlaced recorded Impulse movement system.

You have 32 Impulses during the game.

So, you divide that up into four periods of 8 impulses.

The Player with Initiative would choose to either plot 4 or 8 impulses to begin with.

Then, the other player would plot either 8 or 4 (depending upon whether he will move first or second).

Then both players move four impulses, and the player who only plotted 4 would plot an additional 8.

Then you move another four impulses. And plot another 8, etc.

This carried on for the remainder of the game, with no breaks (save to re-allocate power).

It was mainly used for the Star Fleet Admiral game, where we would have a dozen to a hundred ships or so on the table.

The only real "Turn sequence" that was involved was in dealing with the power-allocation, and with certain special actions.

But, otherwise, once the impulses began counting, the interlaced system of plotted movement continued, so that whichever player only plotted four impulses of movement to begin with would wind up having to plot four impulses into the next turn before that turn had actually arrived.

It made for reactive (action-reaction) gaming pretty easy.

MB