Wartime

=Wartime=

Wartime is an ongoing effort to create the perfect wargame engine, to model any given situation whatsoever with the most strategic action possible. Scalable from tiny battles to massive interplanetary battles, and versatile to fit any genre from super advanced sci-fi to recent historical battles to old medieval skirmishes to fantastic wars of magic and sorcery.

Primary Goals

 * 1) Strategy
 * The first concern of Wartime is to make this a game for generals. Specifically, Wartime is not for fluffbunnies.  You know who you are.  Go away.  Nobody loves you.


 * The second most important point is to maximize the intensive strategy while minimizing the upkeep required to do so. Anybody who has played wargames knows the problems they have- countless pieces, countless scraps of paper, etc. etc.  Slash it all and get to the battle of minds, nobody needs that tedium and headache.


 * Also, the strategy should stem naturally from simplicity, like complex strategies surfacing in the simple game of Go, or lifeforms in Conway's Game of Life. The creators should not instill it with artificial, and therefore limited, strategy.  Strategy should be grown and discovered.  Sides should have realistic limitations, and units should be disproportionately cheap or expensive as they would be realistically.  Balance can be found in systems that appear categorically askew.


 * 1) Rules
 * Another major concern is elegance and simplicity. Wargames tend to have very complex rulebooks.  Wartime should instead use very clever tricks and intuitive methods to let players avoid arguments- games should be played on merit of imaginative strategy, not technicalities and certainly not by using the rules as a tool to win.


 * Wartime is a living entity. Always.  Anybody who wants to can propose revisions to the rules to make them more elegant and better written.  But more than that, anyone can propose to change even the basic functioning parts of it to streamline and improve it.  With this flexibility, players need to loosen up a little bit.  The actual rules as written aren't really the most important thing, and they shouldn't be.


 * 1) Creativity
 * Players of wargames need to be able to exercise their imaginations, not just repetitive strategies for pre-made sides. The sides themselves will evolve rapidly, developing new technologies to fight one another, and to deal with brilliant new inventions brought against them.  Fundamental doctrinal change probably won't happen very often, but is a definite possibility.  Feel free to create as you will.


 * 1) Balance
 * Part of the elegance and simplicity of the design needs to compensate for the fact that new material will be added. Simply by virtue of the rules, nothing you can create should possibly be able to be unbalanced, like heavy objects falling at the same speed as lighter ones.  This seems absurd, but that's just because of the limited vision of the wargames that have existed in the past.  Wartime will get there.


 * Part of this idea is a greater philosophical balance. Individual elements will not be balanced, but when viewed as a whole the sides must eventually become balanced.  If every side does their level best to destroy the others, and each is given equal play within the rules, it must.  For any tactic used by one side, there exists a counter, even if the victim isn't sure quite what it is at the time.  Eventually, someone will hit on it and make the once overpowered strategy obsolete.  Add to this mix that there will exist at any given time some undiscovered super strategy based on the current state of affairs, to capitalize on it.  And there will be multiple strategies competing at once for this position of dominance.

The Nature of the Page
This page is the focus of the Wartime effort. Though I have created my own set of rules in the past, I set that aside here knowing that the combined efforts of everyone in pursuit of this wargame will quickly outstrip what I have written. Feel free to create a side as well. Put it on the sides list, and make it. Though Wartime is meant to encompass all imaginable styles of wargames, let's begin with a futuristic one of interstellar war. Allow me to reiterate myself. NO FLUFFBUNNIES. You know who you are. Go away. Nobody loves you.


 * Created January 1, 2007, by Thom Caster