Above the Trenches
Design Essays

What You're Playing With

My old prototype included just two pieces of information:

• the type of formation (fighter, reconnaissance, bomber, zeppelin), and
• the generation of the design.

I distinguished five generations each of fighters and reconnaissance planes, and three generations of bombers & zeppelins:

Distributing that amount of technical advancement over the 12-turn design limit seems about right, so I plan on keeping this scheme in my redesign.

However, I never really came up with a satisfactory way to resolve combat, although several distinct methods were tested with the old prototype. My first attempt represented the units with cards instead of counters and then used a time-consuming deployment subsystem which had its interest but didn't scale well to multiple areas repeated over a dozen turns.

I then switched to counters for the units and a one card per area draw from a combat deck to resolve all the combat, but the results were too granular and the system was difficult to explain.

So now I'm switching to something a little more straightforward, namely a roll-to-hit system. This will add two numbers to the counters:

1. a hit number: roll >= this on a d10 to inflict damage
2. a damage number: how much damage the unit can inflict (on attack) and absorb (on defense)

My initial pass at coming up with numbers for the fighter generations looks like this:

You roll a die for each unit in combat. So if you've got an F3, you need to roll an 8, 9, or 10 to hit. And if you succeed, you'll inflict 3 damage points.

To resolve damage, the enemy must remove units with total D#s as close to the damage points as possible, without going over. These units aren't eliminated, just placed to the side for the rest of the turn.

"But this is a wargame," you say. "Surely airplanes get shot down sometime." I agree. So let's make a natural 10 roll inflict kill points instead of damage points. Kill points differ from damage points in that they force you to eliminate units (not just place them aside) with D# totalling at least that amount. So if your enemy is a single F3 (D#=3), you have to inflict at least 3 damage points to drive it off, but even a single kill point is enough to eliminate it.

There's an additional twist that I want to throw in. In the real war, the British were much more willing to take casualties to get the job done than the Germans or the French. I like the idea of turning this into some decision-making on the players' part. So when resolving damage, you can choose to eliminate a unit instead of placing it aside; doing so doubles the D# of the unit removed. So if you've got two F2 units (each D#=2) and sustain four damage points, you can have both units driven off, or eliminate one unit entirely and have the other unit remain.

Now, why it might be important to keep a unit around is the subject for the next essay. But there are still some loose ends on this topic, namely the reconnaissance planes and bombers. Here are their proposed values:

Parentheses around Hit # values show unit types that are ineligible to score kill points -- for them, a roll of 10 inflicts damage points instead.

Parentheses around Damage # values indicate that the unit takes losses normally, but when it scores a hit it only inflicts half the indicated D#. So an R1 unit inflicts only ½ damage point when it hits.

I haven't mentioned zeppelins much, but they will be treated as bombers with reduced D#s.

Obviously all these numbers are tentative until ironed out in playtesting, but we have to start somewhere.

So now we know what happens when you shoot. But when do you actually get to do that? Glad you asked. That's the subject for the next essay.