Roy K. Bartoo - 09:34pm Apr 25, 2001 PST (#6317 of 6325) As to actual gaming, two of us tried Moments in History's "White Ensign, Rising Sun" the other day. Not sure if we were making mistakes, or not approaching the game the way the designer (Jack Greene) intended, or what, but something wasn't right and it was a less than thrilling experience. For those who don't know, WERS is a naval/air game about the Japanese incursion into the Indian Ocean in Aprl 1942. The game is in a ziplock, has two identical full-sized maps (one for each player) with large hexes (about 1" across), a sheet of 5/8" counters (each aircraft type from each carrier or land airfield gets its own counter, as do all capital ships down to light cruiser, with destroyers in flotillas but able to have a few split off). The game is double-blind, in that you only see on your map your own units, so have little idea where the enemy is, putting an emphasis on searching. Game turns are 8 hours, so each day (of which there are nominally 10 in the game) has two daylight and 1 night turn - no aerial searching during night turns. The rules are fairly short (something like 12 pages, with a Rodger MacGowan cover) and mostly clear, although the setup is garbled. Each side draws a chit to see which of three different setups they will use (and the Japanese draw an additional chit to see which of several different victory conditions they will pursue), but the rules don;t say "Chit 1, Allies set up XYZ", instead it is "Force A, ships such and such, Chit 1 anywhere, chit 2 in such and such, chit 3 on their own half of the map; Force B so and so but with Chit 3 remove this plane and that ship". Etc. Even with the errata we are still unsure about Allied setup. For the main Allied Task Force, one Allied chit says anywhere on the map, one says anywhere on their side of the map (without defining what "their side of the map" means) and one says on/east of hexrow 2500 - hexrow 2500 is the EAST edge of Ceylon, east of there means in Japanese waters ... Anyway, the problem we had was a near-complete inability to find anything. Recall that the time scale is 8 hours per turn, so most ships have movement of 4-6 hexes per turn, and search aircraft have a range of up to 14 hexes. BUT. Each aircraft or ship counter can only search the hex it ends the turn in. So for example, a Japanese search aircraft with a range of 14 hexes takes off, teleports to its chosen search hex, blithely unaware of anything between its takeoff and destination. It appears to be immune to getting shot in the search hex, so then it teleports back. For the Japanese player, you'll have AT MOST about 8-10 searches wth air and subs (unless you break up your task force and search with ships). You can also have your fighters and bombers search, but that is counterproductive - even if you find something, with your strike aircraft seraching they cannot launch a strike mission, and next turn you can bet the target will vanish into the ocean with a range of 4-6 hexes per turn movement. In the unlikely event that it finds something, you'd better scramble everything to hit that target, even if it is only a destroyer, because next turn it will have moved up to 5-6 hexes away and you'll never find it again. This blind search was mildly amusing to me as the Japanese player, for two reasons. First, the chit that I'd drawn meant that my Task Force didn't even enter the map for the first two days, so my opponent was frantically searching an ocean that was truly empty. Second, my victory conditions chit meant that I was to raid the coastal waters of Ceylon/Inda, and I KNEW where they were. Which brings up another wierdness of the game (or possibly we missed something in reading the rules) - when raiding around Ceylon, I happily sent my carrier aircraft flying right across the island. One would think that, with three airfields on the island, some one of the Allied airmen would have noticed something a bit odd. And since when searching you don;t (apparently) have to say what it is that is doing the search, my opponent had no way of knowing that my long-range aircraft has indeed flown across the island, so he assumed my Task Force was on the western side of Ceylon, when it was actually lurking off the southeastern end. Which reminds me of yet another thing we weren't sure about. The rules say that when a player moves ships through the coast of enemy territory, they are spotted. But there are a couple of tiny islands south of Blair/Port Blair, it isn't clear whether moving through their hex means Allied ships are spotted. And as for Blair/Port Blair .. the rules say only three aircraft counters may be at any base except three - but the Japanese start with three labelled "Blair" and two labelled "Port Blair", and only one airfield named Blair ... Anyways, I'm not sure if we were doing something wrong with the searching, or if the designer intended it to be that way. But IF we play it again (unlikely, as my opponent resigned and said he had wasted his money on the game), we're going to have to make some changes to the search system. Having a plane search the entire path of its flight would be excessive; we talked of having it roll a die on the trip out to see if it saw anything, but that is mucho die rolling AND will give away whether it is an airplane or a ship doing the searching. another possibility would be to allow a search of not just the hex the counter occupies, but the six adjacent hexes as well. But this also might well make searching TOO effective. I tried to recall how the old AH Bismarck handled searching, I think it was also that you only searched the hex you were in, but with a turn representing much less time (I think), once you found something unless the weather (which isn't considered in WERS) went terrible you could probably find it again as ships were moving only 1-2 spaces per turn. Sigh, I wish it had been a more positive experience. Anyone played this game or have any thoughts on ways to patch the search system? Roy Markus Stumptner - 09:42pm Apr 25, 2001 PST (#6318 of 6325) Computerized games don't allow the players to tinker with the mechanics, or discover exactly how the simulation works. -J.F.Dunnigan Roy, you need to buy the latest Perfidious Albion, or look at it on Magweb. :-) Your remarks as well as your fix are spot on but still too conservative. In a nutshell, you need to multiply search capacity by a factor of about 20. The easy way out is to let a plane search not the one hex it is in, but two "center" hexes and the six hexes around each of them. That gives you a fourteenfold increase, a bit on the conservative side, but as you say, one wouldn't want to make search too easy. It should provide a more reasonable experience although the search patterns will still be weird. To keep them in control at least a bit you should place more restrictions on them. Sad to say that game was obviously (and I mean really obviously) never adequately playtested, and more ironically, none of the reviews I've read caught on to the problems you mentioned. (FWIW, the factor of 20 is not just a wild-assed guess, but you'll have to look at the PA article to learn why.)