World War One Air combat rules

In my last post I was waxing nostalgic for the "beer and pretzels" games of yesteryear. I suppose I should come at least partially clean, when it comes to some types of war game, simple rules are all I can manage to write.  I spent a couple of mind melting days attempting to come to grips with formulas to allow me to calculate snap turn rates and sustained turn rates from basic aircraft statistics.  It tuns out that Mrs E's oft made comment "your not as smart as you like to think you are" is more true than I like to accept because I had to give up.  I fell back on the stats one of the other members of Hull University's war gaming society came up with back in 1975.  I will try to see if I can find an easy set of correlations between the real world stats and the game stats from those and extrapolate the results for the airplanes I don't have game stats for.


My favourite WW1 flying ace.  The late great Charles M Scultz's Snoopy from Peanuts.


The rules are pretty much done and I just need to wrote them up.  The original rules Jim Dunnigan wrote for SPI's board game Flying Circus all those years ago didn't really need much adding to them.  I have simply added  energy gain in dives and loss in subsequent turns to allow "Boom and Zoom" combat to be a little more doable.  The game handles "Turn and Burn" pretty well I only needed to penalise sustained moves in tight turns with some altitude loss to make it more accurate.  The dive rules were the biggest issue but as part of the energy gain/loss rule I think I have something that will work.  Lastly I have added structural failure rules both to the combat result tables and the over speed diving rules.

All I need to do now is finish creating the game statistics for the 60 or 70 airplanes my obsessive mind set says I need to have.  Then its on to creating a game map and some height adjustable flight stands.  Then its off for a few games.  Mind you I expect it to end like this!

 

I hope they walked away from this one!

Nostalgia News

I was painting some figures a few days ago and a friend of mine came around and spotted some 1/300th biplanes in the lead pile. He was far more interested in them than any of the other figures.  That got me thinking about World War 1 dogfighting rules.  Now I know they say nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but I started thinking about some old air combat games that might have stood the test of time.

The game that came to mind was the SPI board game Flying Circus.  It was published way back in 1972.  By modern standards it wasn't a complex game and the flight mechanics are very basic but when I was at University it was a firm favourite because it was easy to teach to new players and they could get right into the action.

Back then Flying Circus was our Sunday evening group game.  It was something all the club members could join in with without too much trouble.  We put an extended map together to make a bigger playing area and created statistics for additional aircraft.  Sometimes there are unexpected benefits to having mathematicians in a wargames club.  He also created some additional rules for combat results to add some granularity to the game.  We ran a campaign where the calendar moved forward a month each week.  This gave us a way to introduce new aircraft as they became historically available.  we also had a campaign rule that meant the current highest scoring pilot on each side got first refusal on new planes.  This gave us a motivation to get stuck into the action.

A bit of digging in my archive (OK its a big cardboard box in the spare bedroom) and I found a copy of the original rules.  I ran a copy of them off back in the day so I had all the statistics for the planes that came in the game.  It still holds up as a basic starting point for a game with 1/300th models.  So its time to draw up some additional rules to create a game using models.

So now I'm into nostalgia gaming and  I think I want to play Starforce Alpha Centauri again.  Time for a trip down to the archives.

Where have I been of late?

No posts in four months what a disgrace!  Apologies are due from yours truly but in my defence things have been manic at work and Mrs E and myself have been house hunting.  Not that we wanted to move house but it was forced on us as our landlord decided that they wanted to sell the house we rent here in Northampton.  If they had waited a few months we would have sold up in Yorkshire and been in a better position.  The real problem was finding somewhere that allowed us to have dogs in the property.  We have now succeeded in our quest and will be moving to Corby in a few weeks.  All I need to do is find a wargaming club or some local players.in the area.

In other news I have played through a refight of the Battle of Whalley and I just need to get the pictures posted onto my PC so I can include them in the next blog post.

New tables on the Danube and probably a failed New Years resolution!

I'm hoping to write more on this blog in 2016, but as its already late January and I haven't posted until now, whether that will be achievable remains to be seem!  The reason for my silence is in part a new (well to me anyway) set of rules - Sam Mustafa's Blucher.

Now in over 40 years of war gaming I have pretty much avoided the Napoleonic period.  I had a brief flirtation back in the 1970's when Airfix figures for the period first came out and I tried again about 10 years ago with a free set called Republique.  In part this was because I had enough in the way of other periods to keep me busy and also because I couldn't find a set of rules which really caught my interest.  Blucher seems to cover the period at the right operational level and doesn't need thousands of figures.  At the moment I'm playing using the free paper templates to get a feel for the rules and I'm finding them nice and straight forwards although that might be because I'm missing some of the rules as I haven't fully come to grips with them yet.

I'm working through the free introductory scenario on my new tables (more about that below) and finding that although the rules are straight forwards the application of them to achieve my tactical master plan is a touch more difficult!  This is partly because I just don't know the period as well as I do the ECW or Ancients so my deployments are causing me some problems.  This is compounded by Sam's activation mechanism.  Its a variation on PIPS as found in DBA and its cousins.  It means that on a poor activation roll a player cannot do all he needs to and attacks can end up going in piece meal.   In my case the French have problems on both flanks as I'm concentrating on getting the centre into contact.  The Austrians are doing a Wellington and letting the French come at them in the hopes of being able to use artillery to weaken enough French brigades to make the close in volley and melee easier.  I'll let you know how it turns out.

Which brings me to my only criticism of the rules I can't decide if it is a good game with Napoleonic overtones or actually a good Napoleonic game.  Do I enjoy playing it?  Resoundingly yes, as it is a very good game overall but I really don't know the period well enough to decide if it does justice to the period or just the mechanisms.  Still I'm enjoying it enough to start creating unit templates for Peninsula War forces using the free downloadable unit templates as a starting point.  The Adler 6mm catalogue (I can't get a link to work to their site!) is currently open at my elbow and my wallet is making whimpering noises as I plan how many 6mm figures I will need for each 3.5 inch by 2.5 inch base.  Sally 4th (Link to their site) may be the recipient of some of my cash too as they do some excellent looking MDF bases for Blucher.  I made my own measuring sticks from a length of pine molding strip cut to length and marked in 3 inch increments.  I made two one for artillery ranges and one for small arms ranges.  I will probably make up a couple more for movement distances.  All that cost me was £3.78 for the molding.  Segments marked with a Sharpie I already had and some super glue to stick a short length of the molding on as a handle.

Home made measuring stick - the handle helps me pick them up!

As for the tables I decided that the dining room table was no longer viable as my main gaming space.  Also Mrs E wanted to eat at it from time to time!  So I ordered two 180cm x 75cm folding tables from Folding tables UK on Amazon. At the time I bought them they were just over £20 each with postage of about £9 each which I was happy with.  The service was excellent they arrived faster than was stated and are good solid robust bits of kit.  The two of them together will be fine as a gaming space for most uses.  If I want a bigger area my plans continue to build a modular table top to sit over the two tables.

New Year, new tables

As you will see from the photo's the only problem is that I need a second cloth so next time I'm in East Yorkshire there will be a trip to Boyes' excellent fabric counter for more green felt and then to their equally worth while hobby section for spray paint.