Wargaming for newbies

[faded glory]

only drawback with the pacgen download is the installation which is confusing and in .Rar format. If you need help just ask. It took me about 6 hours to finally figure it out.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Grumbold
That is a curse that all games which rely on dice or odds can have. Sooner or later someone just keeps rolling the lucky number.

Hmm, it largely depends. In Risk, you can lose 10 armies when attacking a lone defender with 30 armies. Most wargames have combat resolution tables that take these kinds of odds into consideration.

Granted, you don't get 30:1 odds in most wargames, but a 5:1 gives you a very good shot at winning. At worst, you don't lose any: maybe a DR (defender retreat) or NE (no effect).

[Grumbold]

Yes thats true, but in those sorts of wargames you only get one shot per unit per turn, so if you bounce a handful of consecutive 5:1 wins that's your entire turn's offensive ruined just the same. The combat in Risk has some very basic odds built in to determine if you get 1, 2 or 3 dice, so its not just pure luck even though it only goes as far as having odds for 1:1, 2:1, 3:1 and 3:2 and unlimited attacks. There are strategic objectives to shoot for like owning a whole continent and strategic choke points that are sensible to defend at.

To my mind that makes it a very very simple wargame but I can see why anyone might disagree. Now if you threw a dice to see how many spaces you could move before attacking or something I would relegate it to the category of family boardgame.

[Urban Ranger]

In Risk, the best you can get is 3 dice versus 1, but that's not even 3:1 odds because you lose on equal numbers.

I'd say Campaign starts to fall in the wargame genre.