“SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” It was 40 years ago today, on June 3, 1983, when “War Games” was released in the US, giving us all a taste then of the dangers of giving full control to #AI systems. Watching the trailer now, it’s fun to hear all the modem sounds and everything else:
In the year 2246, a small group of Earth Alliance ships are trying to escape the clutches of the Minbari. We had a game of Babylon 5 Wars, a particularly crunchy set of space combat wargame rules.
Thinking about fleet warfare in the Traveller universe again. An admiral wants to be certain they can defeat any defenses in a system they attack. A defending fleet is all fueled up and can choose to jump away if an overwhelming force jumps in. The attacking fleet takes at least a week to refuel and jump away, so unless they can fend off the attacker and secure fuel, they are stuck.
Are there any free rules systems for fantasy or medieval wargames that have players controlling hundreds of soldiers each and that has rules for scouting, sieges, and supplying your troops throughout a whole campaign?
Working through Jeremy Gibson Bond's excellent "Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development (Third Edition)".
Chapter 20, Variable and Components, gives a useful overview of Unity GameObjects and their components.
It also enumerates several of the bizarre gotchas in Unity, including:
The constants in the Color class (like Color.red) don't follow the usual capitalization convention for constants (SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE).
"Mesh Colliders can only collide with other Mesh Colliders if both of them have Convex set to true."
"For the position of a Collider component to move with its GameObject, the GameObject must have a RigidBody. Otherwise ... the Collider will not move ...the GameObject will appear to move across the screen, but ... the location of the Collider component will not be updated, and therefore the physical presence of the GameObject will remain in the same location."
The Inspector changes the spacing and capitalization of class and variable names when it displays them, so (e.g.) damageState is displayed as Damage State.
This reminds me of heavy historical wargames that have all kinds of special rules like, "You can have up to three armor units in a city hex, except for hex 2334, which is limited to two armor units until the June 1943 turn (when, historically, the sewage plant exploded)."
Hoy empieza en Madrid una nueva edición de las jornadas lúdicas #LudoErgoSum, por lo que he pensado en compartir 3 juegos de código abierto en vez de uno como otros viernes: 1 RPG, 1 tipo juego de mesa y algo similar a los #Wargames
A semi-sentient AI that, based on simulations and predictions of a biased training set and goal functions, almost destroys the world because humans (in particular the US military complex) fall for its faked output hallucinations over reality.
Miniature war gamers! I'm on the lookout for games with interesting or at least unusual mechanics. Give me your weird activation or initiative procedures, odd unit organization, strange interactions during other player's turns, gonzo movement types, and bonkers harm rules, you name it! #miniatures#wargames#wargaming
Played a game of People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1981-1986 by #gmtgames. The final campaign became a close contest between my Reformers and the Government. If the final Election card had turned over 1 card sooner victory would've been mine. Or if I had picked my different Act of Desperation. Early heavy fighting in the cities of Zamboanga and Davao. At the end the focus shifted to Manila. VP: GOV 3, REF 1, NPA -6
Forgive me I'm not a BGG power user, but did someone really give this person $420 for their stupid comment in the Charles S. Roberts Awards thread? #Wargames#BoardGames#Wargaming#HexAndCounter
Going on vacation to Italy tomorrow, with the De Bellis Antiquitates rulebook, Tony Bath's Setting up a Wargames Campaign, and the full compilation of Hyboria - The Campaign That Grew in my bag.
“the war game was constantly improved and elaborated, until from a few hours ‘war’ took weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic monopolized half our thoughts.”
—from “Stevenson at Play”, by Lloyd Osbourne. Scribner’s Magazine, December 1898
Finished up the scatter stuff for my zombie game and packaged it. Also nice to "finish" a set that had been hanging around for a while. Have many ideas for a volume 2.
Mark has terminal cancer, and has made a ton of #wargaming videos you should know about. Let's get him to at least 1000 subscribers, and push him past that milestone. It isn't much compared to a lot of #wargame content creators, but he deserves it. Go watch his videos, enjoy the #wargames he plays and talks about and go subscribe. #HexesForever
Today, March 18, in 1982, Seattle high schooler David Lightman teaches his friend Jennifer Mack about war dialing, hacking, phreaking, and the importance of infosec (WarGames, 1983)