Differences in ground scale and map application influence game play?
I’m not suggesting here that one title is better or more accurate than the other, this is just noteworthy.
- COA La Batts maps are 85-115m per hex.
- Sound of Drums – Napoleons Battles are 150m.
- Hexasim’s Rising Eagles is 250m’s a hex.
Its interesting that this has an impact on where units end up in a turn, subject to time scale. With La Battaille running 20 minute turns and the usual infantry unit has 5,6,7 MP per turn.
Where as both RE and NB’s have 4 mp for the turn. Though they both may end up allowing more than one move in a turn.
To put this into perspective.
From Frasnes to Gemincourt:
- RE 12 hexes or 3000m !
- LB 14 hexes or 1610m
- NB: 12 hexes or 1800m
From Gemincourt bridge to 1st hex of the village/town of Quatre Bras its:
- 6 hexes in RE,
- 9 hexes in La Batt,
- and 11 in NB.
1500m,1035m, and 1650m resepctively.
Each game has an outlier.
IF we start measuring East West it gets worse as far as differentials go.
I assume much of the difference is down to ‘design for effect’ ?
Those tactical games really do require exact placement for features on a map. There are even company sized units in the La Battaille series. Operational games are a bit different. The terrain needs to work so that history could be repeated. It is important that it doesn’t have to be a repeat, just that it is possible.
A challenge is to make it interesting.
And:
SF 3
LA 7
At the heart of almost all military considerations throughout the centuries whether at the tactical, operational or strategical level are the two key factors; time and space. Simplified and dramticised by Nathan Bedford Forrest’s “getting there the fastest with the mostest” or more likely “the first with most men”.
The point is though, that time and space and their interrelationship are at the alpha and omega of war. Winners get them right, losers don’t. Therefore if they are not at the heart of wargames design then we can delete the word war from the title. In the end what is produced are still good games but they don’t reflect war and the art of the possible in the time period they are set in.