Zarquon

IIRC, in CM the Print key alone does it.

That was you in sector 228, back in 2003? Hehe. I *almost* kicked your ass in those fights...

Just one more point: almost all players who joined the Onion Wars campaign over the years were interested in playing tactical battles, very few were willing to put in some extra time, learn the system and do the planning, bookkeeping etc. If one of those players drops out, your campaign can be finished. Keep that in mind when writing the rules. If in doubt, why not start small and simple? Describe what kind of campaign you have in mind, then see how many players you can find. And only then discuss adding more complex rules. Begin with a simple system, a small map, few forces and a campaign that lasts only five turns. If your players stay with you, try something bigger.

At Onion Wars, we've been campaigning for 7 1/2 years now. The first turns took about 6 weeks each, now it's more like 6 months. There was some rule creep, but that didn't make much of a difference. We had perhaps over a hundred players involved over the years, but the ones still playing are mostly veterans of the early years. If tactical players drop out, they're easier to replace. Finding new GMs is what can make or break the campaign. And yes, the most important bottleneck is GM time. As you said, it needs to be simple, or it'll never get off the ground, or worse, you'll invest a lot of time and then it dies after the first turn. Repair shops and comm nets? That's the opposite of KISS. I'd advise against any sort of logistics, except a rule saying for cut-off troops. That's because a) they don't matter much in terms of fun and one of the most crucial factors eating up GM time is communication. At first you might think it's fun to engage in endless debates with players about how a repair shop should be able to repair 8 trucks a turn instead of 4 tanks (unfortunately you forgot to include a detailed repair shop rule). But that discussion alone can take up a substantial amount of time. Hours become days. Keep it as simple as possible, then drop half of what you have and take it from there.

Hi everybody! Ten months later, the campaign is seven and a half years old, Turn 27 is almost finished, and we're still playing! (If you don't know about the OW campaign, please read the first posts in this thread) But we've run into a problem lately: out of four GM's, three have been unable to contribute much in the past months. Illness in the family, too much work in the office, not enough time to run a fictional war. That's life. But after all this time and literally hundreds of battles, we're not ready to give up. That's why we're looking for GM's who'd like to help running this campaign. There's a lot to do - evaluating team orders, writing espionage reports, figuring out which forces run into each other, setting up a battle, creating a scenario, watching the players fight it out, writing the after-action reports, answering idiotic team questions, answering some more idiotic team questions, you name it. But we have separate theaters and every GM is in charge of only one of them. We're not one of those campaigns where the senior adjutant to the chief of supply operations submits a draft of next turn's weather report to his superior officer every month, according to rule §131, article 4, subsection B. Actually, the supply rules take up about two paragraphs in the rulebook, and I couldn't even name them. That's probably why we are still in business. That doesn't mean we're unsophisticated hacks, we just try to avoid bookkeeping paralysis and rule creep. In the end, it's all about strategy and good CM play. If you've ever been involved with running a campaign and long for a little more than a series of unrelated fights, come and have a look. We're in the process of easing GM work by streamlining some more and making player teams shoulder more of the work, e.g. map making and most of the bean counting. And some of us have been doing this for seven and a half years (did I mention that?), so it's not like you'd be left on your own if you join. You might even meet some of the old-timers of this board there. If you have an IQ of less than room temperature, don't worry, that's just what we expect from our GM's. There are no health benefits or retirement bonuses, just some good old-fashioned strategy wargaming at a leisurely pace. If that's your cup of tea, jump over to http://www.onionwars.net/phpbb/index.php and have a look, and we'll throw you in the deep water, I mean, take you by the hand. Show you the ropes. Well, you get the idea. Still not convinced? Check out the Salmon Nurse Calendar: http://www.onionwars.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1816 Personally, I have a thing for Miss September 1942, but that's only me.

I'm participating in an ongoing campaign (Onion Wars) and I did some light statistics a while ago: Counting only committed and lost squads of the Green side in 101 battles, a total of 1886 squads were committed and 480 of these were lost (sometimes the GMs combined casualties in different squads). Average battle size was 19 squads, some had only 5, a few saw 50 or 60, even 90. Most scenarios lasted 30 turns, some 40, a few 50. That's a loss rate of 25%, with most battles ranging between 15% and 40%. Although the casualty rate ranged from 0% to 100%, the overall average of 25% was remarkably consistent.

Does anyone know about engine longevity, then?

The pause button affects movement, not fire.

One tidbit I read about aircraft engines somewhere is that the Me 109 fighter had something like a 700 hp engine in 1939, and a 1800 hp one when the war ended. Unfortunately, the maxed-out late-war engine lasted only about 10-12 hours in flight before it was worn out, but considering that most likely the fighter wouldn't last that long anyway, it made sense. Not sure if it's true, though.

You just want a national holiday and get the day off, that's all. Not that there's anything wrong with that. National Beach Holiday! Honour somebody else's dead great-grandfather by not spending a day in the office! Just like in France! Hooray!

Thanks! It seems that the question is even trickier than I thought. Full-write offs can not be calculated, even when comparing month-to-month strengths, because a large number of weapons is in the shop at any given time. BTW, what's meant by "transfers and evacuations"? Sent back to a higher-level depot?

I know it's a silly question, but is there a way to tell roughly how much infantry weaponry was lost in combat in a WW2 division after a long month of fighting? I suppose there can't be any precise or even remotely scientific answer to a question like that, but I'm playing in an ongoing CMBB campaign and that got me wondering about replacement rates. People become casualties, but equipment could last much longer than the men crewing it, or couldn't it? Suppose a vanilla infantry division took part in some serious fighting for a month and held the field after each fight, so nothing is lost to the enemy. Let's say they began the month with 100 HMGs - would they need one replacement gun or twenty, excluding those that just needed spare parts or simple repairs? How long does your average mortar last before an unlucky hit destroys it or it simply falls off the proverbial truck? If there were any statistics on that, the numbers would probably be all over the place, but does anyone have an informed gut feeling on this?

For a good laugh: http://www.oism.org/ "OISM also markets a home-schooling kit for 'parents concerned about socialism in the public schools' and publishes books on how to survive nuclear war." When you've stopped laughing, google The Wall Steet's (and other US media) coverage of the annual climate skeptic's conference in NY. "The keynote speakers for the three-day conference are: • Arthur Robinson, Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Among many other duties, Dr. Robinson directs the “Petition Project” that has obtained the signatures of more than 31,000 scientists, including over 9,000 with Ph.D.s, explicitly opposing the hypothesis of “human-caused global warming.”

Thanks! I'd have to install CMAK again to try out the scenario, but I might do that. Don't you think the LMG increases firepower at range to an unrealistic level? What force ratio would a "typical" battle involve? 2:1 in infantry seems too low, but massed arty for the attacker should balance that to some degree. Wouldn't the defender have at least some reactive artillery, registered at no-man's-land?

(I know it's been discussed here before, but my search-fu is getting rusty...) This is not meant to be ultra-realistic, I'm just playing around with my favourite game again. If the result comes within a lightyear of a WW1 battle, it's fine. First, selecting all-rifle platoons should be obvious. There the trouble begins - I can find early Romanians for the Axis, but no rifle-only units in the Russian OOB. Wire is simple, but I'd need trenches and I guess that CM trenches don't really represent WW1 fortifications. Especially infantry behaviour in trenches is a problem - they rout out of them. Still, it's better than nothing and there's nothing one can do to improve that. Mines were around, but were AP minefields a common fixture on WW1 battlefields? Arty should be 75mm+, liberal quantities, preplanned only. Or shouldn't it? Any tips on that?