I am afraid that I will not be following through with what I said last time about today's topic. I had said that I was going to do a post about making scenarios for Warhammer 40k, but since the new rulebook is only a few days old now, I thought I should probably wait until I have had a good look at it before doing that post. Instead I am going to write about my progress with Warzone, partly to generate a bit of interest in it, but also to let you know how it is going.
As I said in a previous post, Warzone is a massive project. I am sure it will take me AT LEAST until the end of the year, and that is assuming I don't find something shiny along the way and get distracted. Yesterday I celebrated the completion of the second weapons company for Warzone; Peterson & Clarke Small Arms Co. In Warzone, rather than choosing weapons as options or upgrades to your units, you have to go to the supplier and choose which weapon you want. Most of the time this is more or less straight forward; you might take five hundred of those, six hundred of those and twelve tanks. Now the thing with Warzone that I am at least trying to do is to, as best I can, recreate the realism and challenge in this. Unless you are playing a really small game or resupplying only a few troops you would be much more likely to order weapons by the hundreds of thousands, ammunition by the millions, tanks by the hundreds and battleships by the dozens. Warzone is not just a game of one off battles, it is a game where, during the course of a single day, you will play the equivalent of dozens if not hundreds of battles, each involving thousands of men.
For example, if you were to see the Battle for Normandy played out along a Warzone table, you would be figting on a roughly 2m by 1m board with dozens of regiments and it would take roughly 300 turns, about 6 hours. Now don't think that Warzone takes a long time, remember that the invasion of Normandy is the biggest military operation ever undertaken, so I would expect a day of gaming to last about three hours. Yes it is a tad on the long side, but that just means you have fun for longer.
Now when it comes to making the weapons companies for Warzone and the rules and stats for the weapons I am certainly putting in the hard yards. While Warzone is set in the future, you basically play as a poverty stricken civilisation, so the weapons are little better than what we have today in most regards. Each weapon comes with all the fluff statistics for it (things like muzzle velocity and rate of fire). Then, using those stats, I have made sets of rules to reflect the effectiveness of those weapons. Thirdly, each weapon has a cost, upkeep per day and things like that. In the final printed version, I intend to keep these parts slightly separate so you can easily jump to the bit you need without having to go though all the jargon every time.
As far as the stats for each weapon goes, each weapon has an attack and defence stat, a number to represent how effective it is. Now this is actually fairly hard to do, because everything from Pistols to Orbital Bombardment has to be taken into account. Each stat though is effected by everything you could think of, like weight, rate of fire and effective range. So for example, if a .30cal weapon had a rate of fire of 60rpm it would perform better than one that is exactly the same in all else but fires at 55rpm. At first glance, this may make many of the weapons look very close together as far as stats, but if you take everything into account, like the range at which you are fighting and the special rules that accompany each weapon, I think that the rules are quite balanced overall. Of course it is still early days yet, but we will see how it all pans out in the end.
Okay, well that is about all I have to say for today, thanks for reading and I shall see you next time.
Ant
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