RogerBW's Blog

And for that matter returning to wargaming, which I rather drifted away from before the pandemic began.

Some of that is because the vast majority of the wargaming hobby seems to be focused on painted miniature figures (and, where appropriate, terrain). Obviously I don't say that this is wrong, but it has some problems for me specifically:

• it's expensive
• it takes up lots of space for storage and play
• I'm a lousy painter
• having figures biases one towards fighting with those specific units (and sometimes to playing that specific game to which they're relevant), and I tend to be more of a dilettante.

So instead I have tended to play online by various means. My default, which I've used here, tends to be to use images from various sources and assemble them in Inkscape, which has some advantages over a conventional bitmap editor:

• each object is a distinct entity, so I can drag them over and under each other without damaging them. (In Photoshop terms, each thing I import or draw forms its own mini-layer.)
• transformations are non-destructive. When I render the SVG into a bitmap for uploading somewhere, any transformation that I've done is based on the original image, so there isn't any progressive degradation (e.g. through scaling and rotation of a pixel image).

A game that is particularly well-suited to this is Talon, by Jim Krohn, published in 2016 by GMT Games. Krohn's objective was to write a playable fleet-scale space war game, cinematic rather than realistic, and I feel he has largely succeeded. I do in fact have a physical copy, found in a convention Bring and Buy in about 2021, though I haven't managed to get hold of the 2018 expansion Talon 1000; however, the rules are freely available on BoardGameGeek and on the GMT site, and the ship counter images can be extracted from the Tabletop Simulator mod.

That's quite important, because uniquely among space war games I've played there is no separate ship control sheet (traditionally with lots of tiny boxes one ticks off as damage is taken). Instead, each (large) counter has a dry-erase coating, and one adds and removes markings to show weapon status, shields, damage. etc.

Also this game is played on a straightforward two-dimensional hex grid, which removes questions of measurement error (and works against the "fist of death", stacking all one's ships into the same place so that they all come into range at the same time, to which many space war games are prone since the distances over which combat is conducted are vastly greater than the sizes of the ships).

There is one problem for me, though, which is that it can be a little tricky to see the full details of a ship's status in a bitmap:

so sometimes I've posted a zoomed-in version to make things clear. I am, inevitably, working on software to automate plotting and movement and other such things. The first thing I did was to generate an impulse chart, as ship speeds vary, and their available power goes up as their movement speed goes down. For example:

Ship	Curve	A	B	C	D	E	F
Justice	1-4-3	move		move	move		AP, move
Unity	1-4-2	move		move	move		AP, move
Napoleon	2-2-1			AP, move			AP, move
Zhukov	3-3-2		AP, move		AP, move		AP, move

(The first number under "Curve" is the amount of available power i.e. number of "AP", second is speed i.e. number of one-hex moves, and third is turning radius.)

But why is Talon especially suited to PBF? Because there's no simultaneous choice: I take a turn, doing various things which may involve rolling dice and having effects on you, and then you take a turn, doing similarly with your own forces. There is never a need for each side to lock in orders and then reveal at the same time, and thus no need for a referee. (There is also no hidden information, except briefly and manageably during setup.) All one needs is a dice roller, which the forum I'm using already has.

As I write I've played one full game over at tekeli.li and I'm in the midst of another, and I'm having a great time with it. Definitely recommended, even if it doesn't have a ship design system (I don't think I loved such systems only because they are often easily exploited, but it's definitely a problem).