86 lines
5.8 KiB
Plaintext
86 lines
5.8 KiB
Plaintext
Saganami Island Tactical Simulator
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<p>I like SF. I like wargames. I like naval adventure fiction.<br />
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These tastes put me square in the middle of the target audience for<br />
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David Weber’s <cite>Honor Harrington</cite> novels. And yes, I do<br />
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enjoy them; Weber may be a hack, but he’s a very competent hack who<br />
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delivers good entertainment value for my money. So I was pleasantly<br />
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surprised to learn, this weekend at the annual Philadelphia Science<br />
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Fiction Convention (Philcon), that there is now an Honor Harrington<br />
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wargame — Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (SITS).</p>
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<p><span id="more-241"></span></p>
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<p>Weber started out as a game designer writing novel-length<br />
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game tie-ins before launching the Honor Harrington books in the early<br />
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1990s. In retrospect, it’s a little surprising that an Honorverse<br />
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wargame didn’t get produced ten years ago. There has long been a<br />
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flourishing genre of wargames that simulate 3D space combat;<br />
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<cite>Star Fleet Battles</cite>, set in the Star Trek universe, is<br />
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perhaps the best known of these. A tie-in to the Honorverse should<br />
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have been a natural.</p>
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<p>On the other hand…most tactical space wargames are junk. As much<br />
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as I enjoy SF and wargaming, I can’t stomach a game that (as so many<br />
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do) just blithely handwaves away the actual physics of space combat.<br />
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Another deeply annoying flaw of most space wargames is that, though<br />
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space is a 3D maneuvering environment, they tend to have at best<br />
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rather poor support for modeling 3D movement and tactics. You end up<br />
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with games that are essentially 2D naval maneuvering with a thin and<br />
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patchy SFnal veneer.</p>
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<p>If all I’m going to get is 2D maneuver with funny-shaped ships, I’d<br />
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really rather play a Napoleonic-era naval wargame like <cite>Wooden<br />
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Ships and Iron Men</cite> or <cite>Close Action</cite> — one<br />
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that sweats the details, that tries to get cannon ranges and<br />
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wind-driven movement right. And in fact I have a lot of experience<br />
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with such games. In general, I find they reduce space wargames to the<br />
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status of unsatisfying shams by contrast.</p>
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<p>So I am pleasantly astonished to report that SITS (or rather, the<br />
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earlier <cite>Attack Vector Tactical</cite> game it’s based on) is a<br />
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true breakthrough in 3D game design. By use of an ingenious bit of<br />
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shaped plastic called a <q>tilt block</q>, SITS ship miniatures can be<br />
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placed with an 0, 30, 45, or 60-degree increment of roll or pitch with<br />
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respect to the game table. The movement and firing rules use charts<br />
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that hide a lot of 3D-geometry and spherical trigonometry under an<br />
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easy-to-use interface.</p>
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<p>Thus, you can really do 3D maneuvering in this system — and I<br />
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did, in fact, in a demo game that pitted two Havenite<br />
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<cite>Sultan</cite>-class battlecruisers against a Manticorn<br />
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<cite>Star Knight</cite>-class heavy cruiser. The system reproduces<br />
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the feel of Honorverse battles from the books extremely well, even to<br />
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the point where it models the attrition of missile salvos by several<br />
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layers of defenses from countermissiles down to sidewall. We even had<br />
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one of those explosion-wreaks-havoc-on-the-Manticoran-bridge scenes<br />
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Weber likes so much happen quite naturally.</p>
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<p>Unlike most Peep division commanders in the books, I knew how to<br />
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use my tonnage advantage effectively — in this case, “Never mind<br />
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maneuvers, just go at ‘em”. And the Manties didn’t have Honor<br />
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Harrington on the bridge pulling miracles out of her butt. So this<br />
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time, the good guys lost.</p>
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<p>It’s a sign of good design that I was able to apply the tactics<br />
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that are supposed to work in the Honorverse books and get the<br />
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notionally correct result. I was also impressed by the fact that the<br />
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designer, Ken Burnside, modeled physics so carefully in his ruleset<br />
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that there are explanatory sections describing the heat-dissipation<br />
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equations he used.</p>
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<p>Yes, there is a certain amount of handwavium and unobtainium in the<br />
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game system — the Weber books are space operas, after all. But Ken<br />
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(who I met and got to talk with) keeps the McGuffins to the bare minimum<br />
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necessary to capture the feel of the Honorverse. For me, this painstaking<br />
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effort at verismilitude makes the whole system far more enjoyable.</p>
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<p>The only criticism of this game I have is that it is too<br />
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complicated to be accessible to most casual or social gamers. While<br />
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Ken Burnside’s components do a tremendously clever job of simplifying<br />
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your tactical information management, the game domain is irreducibly<br />
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complex and it shows. Personally, I relish that as a challenge, but<br />
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undeniably this game is not going to be a hit with the<br />
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beer-and-pretzels crowd. Only serious gamers need apply.</p>
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<p>For those serious gamers, the rewards will be large. SITS aims<br />
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both to break new ground in realistic tactical space wargaming and to<br />
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capture the drama and feel of the Honor Harrington novels. It<br />
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succeeds at both these objectives, combining them with a panache I<br />
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would have thought impossible until I saw it. Kudos to Ken Burnside<br />
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and Ad Astra games for a truly superb design, which I hope and believe<br />
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will permanently raise the bar in space wargaming.</p>
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<p>(Note: when I told Ken Burnside I was likely to plug SITS on my<br />
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blog, he asked me if I did so to add the caveat that <cite>Attack<br />
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Vector Tactical</cite> is temporarily unavailable due to production<br />
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constraints. I gather they’re having to work hard just to keep up<br />
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with the demand for SITS.)</p>
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