Hey Allard...

[Mao]

How's the Western Front scenario coming? Just curious

[Allard HS]

Thanks for the interest

It's going nicely. I'm doing it all very slowly to improve the quality. I have finished placing and sizing all cities and infrastructure.
I did something very stupid that now costs me a lot of time; I suddenly thought to include a new terrain type, (and can't do it anymore in the mapeditor) so I now have to add a lot of forests by hand (shift-f8 etc., very tiring ). But as soon as that's done, the armies can be placed! That's the fun part!

I hoped to do a nice trick by importing the saved game into the map editor, hoping the format of saved game and map file would be the same, just like a scenario file is the same as save game with a different extension, but this trick did unfortunately not work.

But even after that's finished, it's still a long long way from being finished. All events (a lot) still to be created.. etc. Fortunately, all GIFs and the rules are mostly finished.

I'm going to build it to be tough. I think a scenario to be fun has two possibilities: either to be tough or to be easy. If it's easy, it will bring the player satisfaction, if it's tough, it will cost the player a lot of time -so also satisfaction, but in another way-.
Since being easy is not fun in ww1, so that leaves no choice but to make it tough.

As soon as I actually will be in the finetuning phase, I have a lot of questions to ask on this forum on what everybody likes best.

All in all, I think it will still take a few month before it's all finished.

[Mao]

OK Allard, thanks for the update. I was wondering because I've played MJ's Second Reich and it's pretty good. Also Red Front gives a good name to war scenarios.

[Allard HS]

I don't think that MJ's Second Reich is comparable. MJ skips more or less all that I include. MJ's scenario on the western Front starts as the situation turns out at September (1st battle of Marne, race to the sea, start of trench warfar). This is when my scenario ends. I like Second Reich, but the scenario is far from perfect. MJ chose to depict the whole war; whole of Europe, whole time.

As for Red Front. Yes, obviously, it serves as an example to me. A lot will be similar.

But I can't really say too much about it yet. After all, I hardly started the actual design, so everything can still change.

[Kull]

Allard: It sounds like you're preparing a Schlieffen Plan scenario! Wow. If you can pull THAT off, I'll really be impressed.

If you haven't read it yet, Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" is a must for this scenario. Extremely readable and full of interesting details.

[Mao]

Oh wait you're starting out with the initial German offensive? Cool. So it's kinda like a blitzkrieg I assume?

[Allard HS]

Kull, yes I read Barbara Tuchman. That was the book that inspired me to make the scenario in the first place. And all that is told in that book (also the same timespan) I am planning to add to my scen.

The scen will start with the Germans crossing the Belgian frontier and will end with the 1st Battle of the Marne. The map features Belgium, Luxemburg, part of Holland, France until Paris and Germany until the Ruhrgebiet.

I'm not sure if it can already be called a Blitzkrieg. It all went fast, that's for sure, but I think a Blitzkrieg has some more characteristics.

[Stefan Härtel]

"Blitzkrieg" was introduced by Hitler in WW2. The characteristics of a Blitzkrieg are that they're really fast (Blitz means Lightning) and most of these where at first going on the infrastructure of a country. For example, the first victims of the Polish blitzkrieg where the railroads of the country, so that the troops could not move fast anymore (that wouldn't have brought anything, because the Polish ran with Cavalrys against the German Panzers...). The Japanese also used the Blitzkrieg strategy, but they're well-known that they used mainly aircraft to achieve this. The Schlieffenplan was a simple invasion, in the style of the late 19th and very early 20th century (it was made in 1905 already, during the Morocco crisis which nearly took WWI a decade earlier. It ended in 1911).

Again to the Blitzkrieg: If any Military operation that goes quick would be called a Blitzkrieg, then: the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and 1998/99/00 (possibly), the Kosovo War (99) the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71), the Boxer Revolt in China (1900), the Persian Revolt of Cyrus (401/400 BC), and so many others would be Blitzkriegs. So...

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Follow the masses!
30,000 lemmings can't be wrong.

[Mao]

What's time-frame going to be? Is one turn still going to be one month? Then we'd have less that ten turns.

[Allard HS]

There's only one month time to play; to use months for the time standard would only allow one turn
No, it's one turn a day. I have experimented with more turns a day, but having 30 turns should be enough. Perhaps I'll make it two turns a day, if I find that 30 turns is not enough, but I think it will be ok.