Russian Civil War PBEM ends From: A.Poulter@lut.ac.uk (Alan Poulter) Date: Fri, 29 Jul 1994 20:21:45 +0000 A 6-player PBEM of the old SPI game 'Russian Civil War' has just ended. The Reds triumphed and the winner was Dirk Jan Out with 80 VPs. Second was Dan Raspler with 70 VPs. As GM I started the game back in March. I thought it would finish at the end of May, as units are not replaced after Turn 5 and I was planning on a fortnight a turn (allowing time for holidays). But it went into Turn 9... The reason was that the Victory Conditions of the FTF game, which also applied in the official SPI rules for PBM, which we used for PBEM, simply did not work. Bascially, in the FTF game, either the Reds or the Whites have to wipe out the other side. But using the PBM simove system (the FTF game has sequential player turns) meant that players never knew where other player's forces were going to end up. One player compared the experience to 'playing Midway'. The first 4 turns were spent wiping out non-player forces that could not move, but saw very little combat between players. So I changed the victory conditions to exclusive possession, by either the Red or Whites, of 4 crucial areas. This concentrated player forces in these areas and ended the game. The players approved of this change. Another problem occured at the beginning. The initial allocation of Leaders and units is done randomly. I did this (and all die rolls) using the dice server. Through no fault of the dice server this initial distribution was extremely skewed, with some players getting all the good Leaders and combat units, and other players getting low-rated Leaders. Low-rated Leaders, in the PBM rules, cannot easily pick up combat units later on, so some players never really got a chance in the game. In hindsight the initial distribution should have been smoothed by splitting it into 3 'pots' - all Leaders rated 2 and above, all 1 rated Leaders, all other pieces. Players would draw sequentially from each pot. This would have spread equally the good Leaders. All in all the experience put off most of the players from PBEM Russian Civil War. If anyone is brave enough to want to try it for themselves, I have put the rules errata this game generated, along with an opening set up and die roll server templates, in my personal FTP archive:- ftp://suna.lut.ac.uk/public/lsap/rcw (IP=158.125.102.100) If you do not have access to FTP please email me asking for copies. Put 'RCW' in the subject of your email. Note that you need the game to make use of these materials to PBEM 'Russian Civil War'. -- | Alan Poulter, Lecturer Email: | | Dept of Information and Lib Studies a.poulter@lut.ac.uk | | Loughborough University apoulter@nyx.cs.du.edu | | LE11 3TU, UK oriole@world.std.com | Up