Above the Trenches
Design Essays

Retooling the Counters

First, we'll boost the effectiveness in general, and allow "partial" casualties, as opposed to the all-or-nothing system used last round. Here are the new combat results based on the counter type and generation, indexed with a die-roll:

The bold numbers are reminders are Kill Points; the other values are Casualty Points. Counters are worth a number of Damage Points equal to the value under the 10 column. It's unfortunate that we'll now require a CRT, but I can't think of any way around that, and (unlike Wings for the Baron) realism has to trump playability.

Alert readers may have noticed that my initial outline of the counters used R1-R5, while the last several essays have been referring to "R0" counters. That's because my original prototype used the R0-R4 range. I had thought at the time of that essay to rationalize the recon planes to match the fighters (so R1-R5); the number then represents the "generation number" no matter which counter type. But it was so long between essays that I forgot that I made that change!

I'm going to make a virtue of the references to R0s and reinstate the 0-level for prewar designs, like the BE2.

Since it's now easier to score just one or two CPs, the taking damage rule needs to change from "remove at least the number of damage points" to "remove up to but not over the number of damage points".

And to somewhat compensate for that, an attacker can consider KPs as CPs. In other words, a 2/2 result can, at the attacker's option, be treated as 3/1, or even 0/4. The rule prevents the attacker from being penalized for rolling a 10. (If firing still seems too effective this rule will be first on the chopping block.)

So now we repeat our Bloody April matchup -- how does it work out?

For the sake of this example, I'm converting the B0 mentioned on the previous page into an R0, and although I'm willing to reconsider my aeroplane ratings (perhaps bumping an R0 to an R1), I haven't done that yet.

So the three British fighter wings sweep across the lines into the waiting arms of the German Jastas. They need to score at least 3 points to have any effect, so the probabilities look like this:

Last time the Brits got a positive result about half the time, now it's a third, so the despite the increased effectiveness of individual wings the "up to but not over" rule is helping out the technologically advanced Germans.

Assuming both Germans survive, they return fire, with results like this:

About 50% of the time they'll kill at least one wing, and they'll drive away a wing nearly two thirds of the time.

Considering that a third of the time the Germans will be firing with only one unit, not two, their effectivenes may still need a little goosing. But it feels like the results here are reasonable enough to continue.