03 October 2012

GameTalk - Staffs


At the operational level and above, your subordinate units have HQs that include a significant number of staff officers. How do/should those staff actions get modeled at subordinate levels? What should we expect to see from them? How do you introduce an appropriate amount of variability in their capabilities without bolting on chrome for its own sake?

By: Brant

1 comment:

Brian said...

I guess that depends on what you want to emphasize in your design. In a Napoleonic game, staff officers would be important for writing and transmitting orders, to the point where they would actually ride out and deliver them. In a modern game, with telephone and radio systems, the emphasis might be on the quality of staff planning and how rapidly they could develop or react to a situation.
Joe Miranda's "Staff Card" system that he used in Bulge 20 is an interesting and simple way to model staff actions and a lot of other things besides. I've used variants of it in two games myself (Scheldt Campaign, Next Lebanon War) and it works well.