Scenarios, Campaigns and Pilots

The current scenario selector

I am currently using scenarios for game set up. The scenario sets the number of players, the choice of planes and size of the game board – simplifying the decisions required to start a game. The cost of this simplicity is flexibility – planes can only be flown in combinations for which a scenario exists.

A free form system – a system that more closely follows the board game – would be to set  date for the game and then let the players choose any plane that was available at the time. The game creator would still nominate who was invited to the game, setting the number of players, and there would also be enforced restriction that there must be at least one plane from each faction. This would allow the creation of games with odd numbers of planes and unbalanced forces.

Hopefully this will not require too much reworking of what is already coded. There should be no change to the code that runs the turns once the game starts. All the change will be in the setup turn of the game.

Campaigns and Pilots

I also have in the back of my mind to implement campaign rules. This is a bit farther out in the future.

Pilots are the core of a campaign. A pilot is different from a player – a player is the person playing the game, a pilot is the personality controlling the plane. As pilots gain experience they can gain new skills. They can also be killed when their plane is shot down.

Campaigns follow the careers of a group of pilots, gaining experience with each completed mission and going from novice to ace.  With that advancement comes the opportunity to acquire skills. Novices start out unable to tail or do restricted maneuvers. As they advance they gain those skills as well as others that may increase their accuracy, damage and possible maneuvers.

Campaigns also advance with the WW1 timeline. Typically each mission accounts for one week or month of the war. As time advances new planes come into service.

I am still mulling over how this will be done. I think each campaign will start with pool of players and then they organise the games themselves. Each player will get a pilot and there will be a step between each game where they can use experience to gain skills (or start a new pilot if they lost the last one).

The campaign time line would be divided into periods, probably two to an in-game month. In each period each pilot can be involved in one game and they much finish one (alive) before starting another. There may be several concurrent games in a period to allow for all the players.