Actual play if you want to call soloing AP. The conceptual basis of this game is fantastic. It's right up my alley.
I get a weird ASL-ish feel sometimes, as the rules treat individual cases. Each type of mission works in a slightly different way, forcing me to resolve questions by paging through the rulebook. I guess what I'm saying is that it isn't intuitive. But what can you expect for a game that goes against the grain of a fifty-year gaming tradition which is the echo of stacks of western doctrine piled up on accounts of Eastern Front warfare in WWII and the Arab-Israeli wars?
It seems easy to come up with intuitive combat systems. Modeling intelligence operations is a damn sight more complex. How, for example, to model logistics' impact on intelligence collection? Much easier to figure out relative combat strengths. After all, the latter are written down in the manuals. Brain's game is illuminating because he understands that operations is not just a move-and-shoot affair.
I'm in my second solo play and it is going easier as I learn the routines. I still have the feeling that there are far too many charts. (Part of the problem is the way Firey Dragon chose to publish: there are no charts in the interior of the rulebook and each chart is published on a separate card, resulting in a hell of a lot of page turning and confusion).
While Brian's system seems scalable to smaller AOs than entire countries, I think the point of departure for our designs is different. The smallest unit in Algeria is a company. I'm thinking of a batallion-level simulation where the maneuver elements are platoons, squads, and teams.
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Thank you for your kind comments about Algeria.
I take your point about the unit scale of the game: I am waiting to have a further iteration of the Algeria system published, this time on the Greek Civil War. Unit scale is battalion to division so as to cover the entire country, but I also want to work smaller.
One of my perennial design projects is one on the British fight against EOKA in Cyprus 1955-60: the British had a lot of troops deployed, but few could go out and beat the bushes, so the maneuver elements would definitely be smaller than a battalion.
This is an interesting conflict and if your Vichy experiment works, perhaps we could collaborate?
I would love to collaborate. Vichy is on hold for the moment as my teaching load is heavy. But yes. I'd be more than glad to!
Right now I'm awaiting critical comment on a Poland 1939 design that is supposed to be coming out from Lock n' Load (as soon as it completes the P500, that is).
Meanwhile, I want to see about digitizing my Virtualia game (which I think I've told you about before), to get someone in the US community to look at before Chavez falls for real. I suppose VASSAL might work, but I have never tried it or any other PBEM software.
And I have to write three main articles for Decision Games on the Spanish Civil War, Sino-Japanese War, and Greek Civil War (the Greek Civil War game will be published in Marchorso 2009).
And I have to move house in the spring, after 11 years in this place (thankfully, it will be to bigger digs).
Then there's Cyprus...I wish I could just forego sleep and body maintenance, as a so-called hobby this is rather demanding...
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