These are from notes I’ve got scribbled on pads and cut-and-pasted from online conversations, so it’s a combination of bullets and more complete thoughts. It’s NOT anywhere near finalized and just the first draft of the ideas. That said, I do want the comments that you’ve got so please feel free to discuss liberally and at length below.
Units will be a mix of echelons as needed to describe the events going on. If a discreet 12-man SF ODA can have an effect on the battlefield, there’s no reason not to model it alongside the 600-man infantry battalion, or even (potentially) the 3000-man motorized brigade.
The way to scope the abilities of the participants is through the Area of Effects, which acts as a ‘sort-of’ range factor for how far units can project their influence.
Units need to be rated on a variety of factors
Kinetic factors:
- Attack: ability to go kill stuff
- Defense: ability to not get killed
- Support: ability to help someone else kill stuff
- Reaction: How quickly can you project over your area of influence? Think of this + Area of Effects = movement + range, but not quite exactly.
Non-kinetic factors:
Need some sort of multi-faceted system that is more detailed that DIME, though that’s not a bad base to start with. For game purposes, I would like to simplify it to some form of “rock-paper-scissors” mechanic, with a rough cut perhaps being:
local influence/tolerance -> economic/security support -> information ops -> local influence/tolerance
This is a key mechanic and will take some time to get right, but needs to be addressed, so that units can be rated on (and operate along) both kinetic and non-kinetic axes.
Support factors
- Deployability: when talking about power projection from some home station or strategic mobility, there will need to be some rating of how quickly someone can move their Area of Effects.
- Logistical Support: at the strategic/operational level, what does it take to keep that unit in the field. One mechanic I do want to experiment with is potentially tying this to current news-tracking polls showing support for varying operations/policies so that as national support for something goes down, the ability to sustain long/large deployments also goes down, and can change scenarios from week to week.
Now, that’s a lot to cram onto some counters, so here are some mockups and let’s see what you think.
By: Brant
Damn, I wrote something here yesterday and it never showed up - anyway, it was about modes. A counter has two sides, perhaps one could be "concentrated" for kinetic ops (less area influence but higher firepower/lethality) and one for dispersed ops (greater but dilute influence, and less lethality but better intelligence gathering, something like that).
ReplyDeleteNot a bad idea. We can kick it around. The original idea was a step-loss mechanic, but this might work also.
ReplyDeleteThe counter mock-ups were just ideas to see what we could do with it.
Thanks for the feedback! Feel free to point a few others this way for their opinions, too :)