Hi All!
As it's sort of quiet around here, I thought I'd share a few thoughts.
So you've got your new scenario all written up, but are lacking either a
regular gaming group or time before your gem needs to be perfected.
Playtest it yourself, using counters (blank wargame counters are readily and
cheaply available) and a small table using a small MU scale.
You can either roll all the dice yourself, or you can assume median damage for
each shot (i.e. 1 beam die does 0.8 points of damage against an unscreened
target). I like the median damage thing because
it evens out the "hot/cold dice" factor, and gives you what the
average player would achieve. Make a chart of various weapons at range and
keep it at hand!
Make sure to play both sides to the best of your ability - NO
FAVORITES. This can be really hard to do. Most people secretly want one side
to win. Avoid this at all costs. Remember, the closer you get to a tie, the
better balanced your scenario. If you have time, try STUPID things; if they
work, you need to rethink things (after all, this is how the GEV defense in
OGRE was born!).
Make sure to play more than once (more is better). Using the above techniques,
you can crank out a full game in no time flat. This allows to to try different
tactics, different forces, etc.
Toodles,
> At 09:52 PM 1/24/01 -0500, you wrote:
Take a look at this:
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/articles/another.html
for Steve Jackson's explanation.
> Um, what is the GEV defense???
When OGRE first came out, GEVs had a movement of 4/4 (it's currently
4/3). You could effectively kill an OGRE every time by moving in,
firing, and then moving out of Main Battery range. Sure the OGRE would kill
some, but the GEVs would win every time.
When Steve Jackson was asked about this, he said that all the playtesters
hadn't even thought of an all GEV defense because it would be "stupid," and
thus didn't try it.
On Wed, 24 Jan 2001 21:52:22 -0500, "Peter Mancini"
> <peter_mancini@email.msn.com> wrote:
> Um, what is the GEV defense???
In the early days of Metagaming's "Ogre" game (later produced by Steve Jackson
Games), GEVs had I think it was a 3/3 or 4/4 movement rate. That is,
they
could move 3 hexes before firing, and then move 3 after (or 4/4). The
important thing was that the GEV could move the same distance before and after
firing.
During Ogre's playtesting, hardly anyone tried what was called the "GEV
defense". The non-Ogre player purchased his forces. A "GEV defense"
required that the player use nothing but GEVs. Well, it was playtested once
and deemed a failure. After Ogre came out, some players determined that it was
possible for the GEVs to stay out of range of every weapon except the large
primaries on an Ogre. This was due to the fact that the GEVs could move stay
just outside of the primary gun range, run in, fire, and run back out. So,
players would take nothing but GEVs, then take out the primaries. Once the
primaries were gone, they couldn't be hurt. They would then take out the
treads. The GEVs would zip in, fire, and zip out of range. The Ogre would be
nibbled to death by nothing but GEVs. Ogre loses. Almost every time.
Metagaming fixed this in the second edition of the game (and that fix has
continued since) with GEVs having either 4/3 movement or 3/2 (again, I
don't have the rules at hand).
The moral of the story, as it is outlined in the old Steve Jackson book on
game design (a classic which I am also too lazy to dig out) is that you test
ALL the strategies, even the seemingly dumb ones. And you test them more than
once.