Hey everyone,
Currently I’m attempting to create an international community/UN type simulation that I hope to market to various teachers across the country at some point. However, I’ve sorta hit a stumbling block with the military portion of the simulation. I’ve taken the actual military figures of the countries in the simulation and converted them down to division strength. So for example I’ve converted China’s army down to about 110 divisions whereas Australia’s army sits at about one division. Air Force units are done the same way, although I’ve kept the number of warships in each country’s navy at their actual numbers. What I need is a way to quickly simulate battles with numbers of these sizes and thought that I could simply use frood to do it. However, if this is something I’m selling wouldn’t I be violating copyright laws somewhere by doing this?
If I would be, does anyone have any suggestions on how I could do this without somehow copying Axis and Allies method of combat? Thanks for all your help and insight.
What I need is a way to quickly simulate battles with numbers of these sizes and thought that I could simply use frood to do it.
Could you clarify what a frood is?
[edit] Just found the answer to my question – it’s the frood.net A&A dice-roll simulator, right?
I would use a much DIFFERENT simulation… or simple speculation.
Are you making a game? for fun?
I agree with Gargantua that a dice-roll simulator designed for a WWII board game doesn’t sound like a realistic mechanism to handle the military aspects of a modern international-relations simulator.
It’s hard to offer advice on what your best option would be without more information on what you mean by “the military portion of the simulation”. What types of military actions are you planning to model? Peacekeeping / peace-making operations? Small local battles? Full-scale wars between just two countries? A general conventional war between multi-country alliances (along the lines of NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact)? An all-out nuclear war? These different scenarios would require vastly different simulation methods.
Keep in mind that, as a general rule of thumb, games / simulations which put the players in high-level roles (like the political and military command authorities of entire countries) tend to have highly abstracted battle systems in which engagements are fought between entire armies or army groups and in which combat is sometimes resolved simply by comparing the gross ratios of the forces involved. If that’s the level at which your simulation will operate, you may not want to bother with a detailed model that takes into account the tactical-level niceties of what unit fired at what other unit.
Please keep in mind that the military potion of this simulation is not intended to be incredibly detailed. It is meant to be resolved quickly. The military aspect of this simulation is just one small component to a much wider type of game that involves economic, political, and diplomatic components so that students can receive insight into those aspects of a nation as well. The military portion of the simulation is mostly concerned with conventional battles between nations. If one student wants to declare war on another, they would announce it and then their respective militaries would engage each other (the nation declaring war is considered the attacker). Every unit the country has in their possession would all be engaged at the same time. The time and scope of this simulation does not allow it to go beyond this.
Again, frood would serve my purposes, that is something I have already determined. My only hesitation is that I could potentially be breaking the law if I choose to market this item to fellow teachers.
Since realism and detail don’t seem to be a consideration for the purposes of your project, and since avoiding potential legal problems is a good idea, your best option would probably be to create your own combat-resolution system – something very simple that wouldn’t take much effort to program into your simulation. It could be based on an arbitrary formula that takes into account just a few simple variables (whichever ones you decide are important). That should be more than enough to fulfill what you describe as being the very limited objectives of the military component of your simulation.
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