Rolls: 3@2; Total Hits: 23@2: (2, 2, 4)
Just moved in my two gamerman01 games, so this game here will be next.
I am noticing that it can become pretty confusing who controls which land mine and where they are placed if you have a lot of land mines. The comments in the comment log don’t help as much. I find the way the module currently handles mines is annoying to work with and could therefore scare off new players.
For now, I recommend to use the following way to keep track of land mines. First state the territory, then list the border territories in which the mines in that territory are dug in. This way it is clear 1) in which territory the land mine in question is in 2) who controls the land mine.
If you just list the number of land mines, it isn’t clear WHICH land mines are inside the territory. For example, Bir Hacheim has three land mines in it but the module shows five mines adjacent to Bir Hacheim and then it is very easy to lose the overview.
So for our game it would look like this:
Benghazi: BEN-TOB
Tobruk: BEN-TOB
Mersa Brega: BIR-BRE
Bir Hacheim: BEN-BIR, BIR-JAL, BIR-SIW
Mersa Matruh: BIR-MAT
Cairo: 4x CAI-MAT
I am bringing this up because I was debating whether to move into Bir Hacheim this turn, and this decision depends on the number of land mines I will capture by doing this. However, with five land mines bordering Bir Hacheim, some in Bir Hacheim and others from other territories, I got really confused and had to look through the history.
I think it’s best if both sides keep track of this in a text file and send that along with the turn, and update it whenever mines get placed or detonated. Or players could keep track of it independently of each other. A text file works better than the comment log because as far as I know, you cannot edit or delete messages in the comment log and then you would have a lot of outdated information there.
This new method helps a bit, however it doesn’t completely solve the problem. Players still have to look carefully at the txt. file and go back and forth between it and the game to understand the distribution of the mines. It would be best if you could extract all of this information just by looking at the board (as you would in an OOB game).
That’s why I think the idea of splitting all border territories into two would be best. If you have mines in one territory, they are placed in the first border territory. If they are placed in the other, they are placed in the other border territory. Now all information is immediately clear, and with some imagination you can even imagine the mine sitting along the border of the territory.
The drawback is that this isn’t a quick thing to implement. It will take a decent amount of time. Also due to some trickery, I was able to make the map look nice again (no “ghost” borders in El Agheila or JAL-SIW) but if there are changes made to every single border territory, the same problem would appear there as well and I would have to apply this “trickery” also to every border territory and that will take a massive amount of time. Or I need to figure out how Black_Elk made the reliefTiles for our game. Then it wouldn’t be too bad. Sadly he doesn’t respond to my messages and all my attempts of creating reliefTiles myself failed miserably.
Just let me know what you would like. I think to make the module completely perfect, the mine issue has to be solved, or at least mitigated enough. However that will take some time unfortunately.
