I have the impression that the initiative have an enormous importance in the game, maybe even a too big importance, and I wonder if the Fighting Wings games were ever tested with simultaneous planes movement plotting as there was in the Air Force / Dauntless system ?
I think that the Fighting Wings System is **vastly** superior to the Air Force system, but I still have the impression that a simultaneous movement plotting is more realistic as to simulating air to air combat. But this might be a biais I have from my long years of Air Force / Dauntless playing.
I'm interested to read opinions, both from players and also from JD who designed the Fighting Wings series.
You will never see simultaneous moves or impulse phased movement in this game system. I deliberately designed it to avoid both of those mechanics. To be honest I don't like either.
Simo-moves do not properly model the dogfight - I call these guess and go game systems (AF/DL, Blue Max, Wings, Check your six, etc...). I find them all flawed in modeling the thought processes a pilot goes through in middle of a fight.
Impulse and phased moves, slow games down to a complete crawl. I don't like having a player have to move 2 points, wait, move another, wait, etc. The more planes in a fight the more agonizingly slow I think the game will move.
FW was deliberately designed around situational awareness and OODA loop processes. The scale was deliberately set so that a plane moving a full move will typically not be able to turn more than 90 degrees (some biplanes will double this). The scale allows sequential moves to be used allowing faster play and turn completion.
JD
(http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Fighting_Wings_Games/conversations/messages/12006) 18/09/2010
I've answered this question in the past, I'll post my comments again.
A player questioned the game design mechanics. He thought he should be able to do more in a single game turn, specifically he wanted to roll inverted before declaring his transition, all in the same move.
I wrote:
My answer above is pretty simple - you have to follow the sequence of play - that's all.
He then asked.
>
> How long is a turn in this game? I was under the impression that it was six seconds, plenty of time to roll sixty degrees and then pull the elevator back to generate a max-performance turn over another sixty degrees. I utterly do not understand what my original bank has to do with the transition. I know it's your game, but this makes zero sense to me. <<<
[I side-tracked slightly before setting up my OODA loop point. ]
Let me say this - you are looking at the map, you know exactly where you are, where the enemy is - you have god like situational awareness as the gamer, right down to knowing the all of the enemies' exact speeds and energy states and altitudes to the nearest 100 feet.
What you say is perfectly logical given you have minutes, hours, days even... to decide what you want to do and how to do it. But what about your sweaty, confused cardboard entity inhabiting the plane on the map with very limited visibility, noise, g-forces and whizzing enemy planes rapidly changing flight paths all about him.... etc. etc...
What would or should his situational awareness be in this model?
Built into the game system is a certain amount of fog of war. One mechanic to generate and model situational awareness or the lack thereof is the initiative system which alters the order of moves so you don't perfectly know all the time what the enemy is going to do from one 4 second period of time to the next.
The second mechanic is that you have to make decisions based on what you have in hand at the beginning of the turn and not what you know you are going to have a second or two later. This is also done on a game turn to game turn basis, once every four seconds.
Four seconds, BTW is a very deliberate design decision as this is a normal pilots OODA loop cycle. OODA stands for "Orient, Observe, Decide, ACT". It takes a person about two seconds to comprehend what his eyes, ears and touch senses are feeding his brain, another to decide what to do about what you comprehend and the last second to move the controls.
Your pilot in your plane would not have anything near the same level of orientation as you the gamer have.
>> I continued putting the conversation in the context of the game moves in question.
The way I see it, Zeke 1 moved after you did last turn, flashing down and below before your pilot realized he would need to be rolling inverted to follow him.
He sees that at the start of this turn but cannot act fast enough to take full advantage of the situation, so, to follow, he's going to have take the time to roll inverted and start the nose around. A built in fog-of-war limit that sometimes inhibits the perfect moves you think should have.
I've been pretty happy by this logical approach and application of what the limits in the game rules are doing to me (its a fog of war, situational awareness limit).
BTW You aren't the only pilot playing this game and having fun.
Comments like yours come up now and again with every new batch of players. When explained this way - they either accept it and play the game within its rules limits (still having fun I hope) or the wander off, usually back to their computer games.
Hope this makes sense.
J.D.
(http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Fighting_Wings_Games/conversations/messages/12007) 18/09/2010