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Dune 2 as a wargame.


Falconius

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I've slowly started to buy the required miniatures, assemble and paint them. In terms of the game I intend to use a moddified version of the Seeds of War rules. I still need to re-create the various structures. So far I only have the 2 turret types.

Here are 2 based Atreides trikes as seen from above:

atreidestrikes-1.jpg

They have their 2 wheels at the front and the single big wheel at the back, in stead of the oter way around as in Dune 2. But there was no other miniatures that fit the bill.

I've used a AA battery for scale.

In the next picture you can see the infantry and a quad, 2 launchers and a combat tank:

atreides1-1.jpg

Sorry about the bad photo, taking photos at this scale is not my strong point.

For the Atreides I decided to use a khaki colour scheme instead of blue.

For the Harkonnens I used red:

harkgroup.jpg

harkgroup2.jpg

harktrikes.jpg

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  • 7 months later...
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My sincere appology for not replying to this topic. i guess the fact that i only got one reply in 6 months caused me to think there was little interest. Also i'm a slow poster if you take the fact that i've not yet managed to post 150 times on this site even though i've been here for more than 12 years.

 

Status wise i've finished the Harkonnen and Atreides armies in the beginning of 2012 and would have posted images then,  but i thought there wasn't any interest. I've taken a good hard look at all the rules systems on the market today and realised that there was a few things missing. So i've written my own set of rules and i've tested them with infantry, light armor, tanks and artillery and i'm pleased to say the game play is as deep as i had hoped. I've bought a complete set of various buildings from Spartan Games so i can do nice looking bases. i've also started building a table based on an old EBFD map that i did when the map editor was first released -> Rocky Throne. This is very hard work, but it can look incredible if you do it right. Just look at this example.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I used some artistic lisence when painting the armies. I didn't want to paint the Harkonnen for example a bright red that basicly shout "Agent in distress! I'm over here!".

tankspainted_zps5e55f70f.jpg

 

What I can tell you about the game rules are that they are truly unique and unlike any other rules that are currently available. I have read through thousands of wargame rules for the past 8 years and I've combined ideas from some of them (like Battle Fleet Gothic, Epic 40k and Anticamente) with my own experiences from real life paintball games and leading virtual fire teams in OFP Resistance.

One of the biggest challenges that wargame rules writers would dearly love to solve is the fact that players see the full battlefield at all times, and this makes scouting obsolete and is extremely unrealistic.

There is a simple solution that no one else seems to have found yet.

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Stratego and Battleship both give idea's. But have there limitations as well.

And what can be applied to units, can also be applied to the terrain.

But a third party as referee is needed if you are building up during the game. Unless every unit costs the same. You have squads, so that can be applied for you.

If it's a last man standing game with the maximum of units at the beginning, then there is no need for a referee.

 

But your terrain is the table and your units stand on top of it. So I wonder :). And the Seeds of War rules don't really add up to this.

 

Here is a link to some example's.

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Thanks for the link, I remember reading through it very long ago. Don't be too quick to dismiss Seeds of War: yes, you can see what the position and strength of the opforce is, but the hidden order mechanic means that you have to predict their moves and actions.

The element my rules adds to this is summarised in a simple question: who sees the other guy first?

I guess the reason why no one else has thought of this yet is mostly due to the fact that we as wargamers are so used to having an omnipresent view of the battlefield that no one in the past 200 years of modern wargaming (started in 1812) has ever thought of the critical important advantage your troops have if they see the enemy well before the enemy sees them.

The normal steps followed by a player during his turn in most wargames is to just move a group/unit, pick a target and check with a dice and weapon vs armour plus cover table to see if you've hit and what damage has been inflicted.

And this system will work fine for almost all wargaming periods, but war has changed and will continue to do so. I predict that one of the most important changes in warfare will be this: being seen by the enemy will be followed by death in short order.

So the new steps are thus: a player still picks a unit during his turn (revealing its order as in Seeds of War), moves depending on orders, and then the player and also the owner of the closest enemy unit must each roll a die for the random factor and add this to terrain plus range plus unit order factors to find out who saw the other guy first. The winner of this can choose to shoot first and inflict kills that are applied immediately, or he can call support fire, or he can give his unit the "hold fire and remain hidden" order that stops the fight from happening this turn. Scouts are good at this.

In practice games so far we have had many fights where two units had the same score after the dice and other factors were added, and as such they see and shoot and apply hits simultaneously. I guess this is a minor glitch and not too unrealistic.

I didn't claim that I had found the ultimate solution for "fog of war" in wargames. I have taken a completely different approach.

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So the terrain and range have influence on vision. Sounds familiar :), there are other games that have this. But they indeed use it differently or simply have given it another name like reduced chance of hitting.

 

Have you also thought of the movement of the units? The direction they are heading in watches in a 90 (focussed), 135 or 180 (blurry) degree vision. You could even add a factor to this :). Then it starts to be like the game Commando's.

 

I suspect both players set orders first without knowing of each other? Thus the other "fog of war". Do you have order cards? And how do you apply these? You put them on the units before hand? (I sense a Starcraft board game influence)

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So the terrain and range have influence on vision. Sounds familiar :), there are other games that have this. But they indeed use it differently or simply have given it another name like reduced chance of hitting.

Yes other games include vision considerations as a factor of determining effect of fire, but they all without exception ignore the question of who sees the enemy first.

 

 

 

 

Have you also thought of the movement of the units? The direction they are heading in watches in a 90 (focussed), 135 or 180 (blurry) degree vision. You could even add a factor to this :). Then it starts to be like the game Commando's.

In my rules I've borrowed the "cross fire" idea from Epic Armageddon. You get a huge fire bonus if you manage to achieve a "flank" position on enemy units. But no other rules was written to simulate directionality of unit observations. I have given it the highest priority that the rules must be easy to summarize on a single A4 sheet, so I've kept things as simple as possible.

 

 

I suspect both players set orders first without knowing of each other? Thus the other "fog of war". Do you have order cards? And how do you apply these? You put them on the units before hand? (I sense a Starcraft board game influence)

This comes straight from Seeds of war, go and check it out. It is quite clever and uses little cardboard chits, not cards. Starcraft is a fantasyflight boardgame and like most of their games the mechanics are borrowed from other more creative designers. But I do apreciate how they have picked up the boardgames industry. There used to be a time when people thought PC and console games was going to make the board game industry die a slow death.

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Actually, board games are easier for people to be adjusted. For every person out there that is good with pc, there are still 10 times more that like to play with paper or other material. You can also combine board games. And the game rules can easily be adjusted. So board games have these 3 over the pc games.

 

Are you going to implement bases?

Or natural (sandworm) occurrences?

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  • 1 month later...

Cool, reminds me of the days when I used to paint little Warhammer figurines :)

 

On a vaguely related note; the term RTS is too broad imo. I'm aware that it's already a sub-genre (of Strategy), but it should have a sub-SUB-genre of it's own for RTS's like Dune II, C&Cs and SCs called RTSCW... Real Time Strategical Computerized Wargame.

 

:p

 

(actually I'm kinda serious)

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Actually, it is my understanding that the term "wargame" specifically refers to games where there is tactical combat but the economy part (building your base, harvesting resources) is absent.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame_%28video_games%29'>Wikipedia:

Wargames are a subgenre of strategy video games that emphasize strategic or tactical warfare on a map, as well as historical (or near-historical) accuracy.

The primary gameplay mode in a wargame is usually tactical: fighting battles. Wargames sometimes have a strategic mode where players may plan their battle or choose an area to conquer, but players typically spend much less time in this mode and more time actually fighting. Because it is difficult to provide an intelligent way to delegate tasks to a subordinate, war games typically keep the number of units down to hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands.

Also, I think most computer wargames are turn-based and not real-time.

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  • 1 month later...

@X3M

IMAG0572_zps38dfc0c6.jpg

I've mentioned I have buildings earlier, but I guess a picture is worth.. There are Atreides troops in the front for scale.

No sand worms or sand storms at this time. I don't want to scare off my only opponent: my wife.

 

But playing wargames have taken a back seat to studying, the new work and my little baby girl. I have an exam coming up in April, so I'm sorry for being so scarse.

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