Avalon Hill Games Recreated in Sc2

[Edwin P.]

It appears that it should be easy to recreate old Avalon Hill classics such as:

1. D-Day - where the allies have a choice of varied landing areas and the arrival of Axis and Allied units is preset and according to a fixed time schedule.

2. Blitzkrieg

3. Anzio

4. France 1940

etc.

[Retributar]

I used to have that Anzio game...

[AZGungHo]

I had them all. YOu could pretty much do the Russian Campaign, etc as well. Lots of fun for the mod makers out there!

[jon_j_rambo]

@Eddie --- Dude, you know any A.H. games that have been made into computer games which are actually good?

[Edwin P.]

@Rambo - No I don't.

Though I think that D-Day would make for a good game with SC2. Why?

Both sides have a limited number of units and deploy not knowing where the Allies will land or which areas the Germans are guarding.

The terrain suits SC2 as it has no railroad hexes and is largely clear except for rivers and cities.

Both sides receive units at predetermined intervals.

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One feature I liked in AH's old 1776 game was the tactical cards.

When it came time to battle you and your opponent would both select a tactical card, and consult a matrix that would affect the odds of battle.

Example: Entrench, Withdraw, Frontal Attack, Refuse the Left, Refuse the Rigft, Flank Right, Flank Left...etc.

Example:

Frontal Attack vs Entrench = -2

Frontal Attack vs Refuse the Right = +1

Flank Left vs Refuse the Right = -1

Flank Left vs Entrench = +1

Flank Left vs Withdraw = +0

Such options would be great for a lower level SC scenario of the Civil War or earlier.

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Or for a game of the scale of SC2 I would like to see the option cards that are so popular these days. Each player would start the game with a random selection of 4 cards out of 20 and they could only use 1 or 2 per game.

[ June 13, 2005, 08:48 PM: Message edited by: Edwin P. ]

[Shaka of Carthage]

While they may be "classics", compared to todays boardgames, they are no longer worth playing.

So why bother?

[pzgndr]

One thing those old games are good for is they provide a decent OOB and victory conditions. In some cases, the maps may translate well to SC2-style resources. However, as Shaka points out, they are in most cases not worth playing -- as is. SC2, however, introduces FOW, weather effects, HQs, diplomacy and lots of other features that go beyond those old games. So players need to be creative to a certain degree.

I've got a decent adaptation of the old Tactics II game about ready for SC2. I'm waiting to see how some features play out. And being a very simple test case of RED vs BLUE with nearly equal resources for each side, it should prove useful for playtesting the generic AI and seeing how that goes.

[Edwin P.]

I agree those old games do provide a good OOB and with the new features of SC2 they can be made even more interesting.

The one feature that SC2 will not offer is the presence of roads, those hexsides that reduce the cost of movement by 50% and make the control of towns and cities where these intersect very valuable.

[J P Wagner]

I'm wondering how much of a pain, if at all, it will be to transfer a hex grid boardgame map to a tile based one. I am not trying to rekindle the hex v. tile debate here, but it would have been simple to do a direct copy of the hex grid board onto the map editor, one hex at a time. With the need to port a six sided hex, with all of the border, river, coast configurations that accompany it, to a four sided tile, well, I just do not know if this presents any problems or not.

Bill?

[pzgndr]

JP, like I said players need to be "creative." The 2-D isomorphic map in SC2 creates a nice visual but it requires some modest effort to take a normal image, make size adjustments to fit the scale of your game, shrink the vertical by 50%, overlay a tile grid pattern, and then painstakingly transfer all that into the SC2 editor tile by tile. I would recommend using these old games as a guide only, and use the new features of SC2 to start fresh.

Btw, we do plan to offer a map-making tutorial and sample tile grid overlay for folks to use. It's not rocket science, but not trivial either.

[jon_j_rambo]

The best thing about computer games is FOW, ability to save games, & easier to find opponents.

[kozmeister]

Then what would hex-grid paper and pencils be good for? You don't mean it's tough to find someone who likes to stay up all night penciling in their carrier group's movments in classics such as Flat Top?

KOZMEISTER