Harpoon
Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2022 4:18 pm
This has to be the mother of all naval combat games...
it doesn't look actually all that hard to play, though you wouldn't want to command more than a couple of units and it would benefit from team play. Some very clever mechanics a few other games could use to good effect, specifically:
- fixed ground scale (none of this floating scale stuff that causes all sort of issues around stuff bunching up)
- a variable length of turn but in fixed increments (combined with the above its easy to see how far stuff moves per turn)
- using that variable turn length when it matters, so you have 30 minute turns when things are hunting for each other, 3 minute turns as the action hots up down to 30 second turns as missiles home in on targets. The result is no need to abstract the action or have overly large turn counts where things don't move very much.
then there seems a determination to find anyone who wants to abstract stuff and beat them to death, its all in here but actually in a way thats not hard to do - e.g. once you have worked out the maximum range your ships radar can see a given target size you don't have to do it again, and a lot of the other modifiers don't change much either.
looks playable with two people, but looks like it would come into its own with a third player (or team) who are overseeing things so the two actual players, or teams, only see what their own systems tell them - e.g. "something with a type 123 radar is north of you"
it doesn't look actually all that hard to play, though you wouldn't want to command more than a couple of units and it would benefit from team play. Some very clever mechanics a few other games could use to good effect, specifically:
- fixed ground scale (none of this floating scale stuff that causes all sort of issues around stuff bunching up)
- a variable length of turn but in fixed increments (combined with the above its easy to see how far stuff moves per turn)
- using that variable turn length when it matters, so you have 30 minute turns when things are hunting for each other, 3 minute turns as the action hots up down to 30 second turns as missiles home in on targets. The result is no need to abstract the action or have overly large turn counts where things don't move very much.
then there seems a determination to find anyone who wants to abstract stuff and beat them to death, its all in here but actually in a way thats not hard to do - e.g. once you have worked out the maximum range your ships radar can see a given target size you don't have to do it again, and a lot of the other modifiers don't change much either.
looks playable with two people, but looks like it would come into its own with a third player (or team) who are overseeing things so the two actual players, or teams, only see what their own systems tell them - e.g. "something with a type 123 radar is north of you"