Napoleonic Wargame Club (NWC)

I've been around the club for many many years as well, and the posts I always enjoyed reading were as follows:

1. Posts on actual battle reports
2. Posts on strategies & tactics
3. Trash talk & role playing
4. Funny Pierre's Tavern bar stories
5. Discussions on various scenarios
6. Discussions on gaming & graphics mods
7. Etc etc

These have been notably absent of late.

They are there on this page we are all looking at, the problem is they get passed over for the hot button issues or someone starts bringing politics into them.....

I will admit, I feel like the Club hasn't been a whole load of fun in over a year. There have been fun moments and even weeks/months, but the larger issues have created a large burden at the same time....

Oh and believe me when I say people have tried for a very long time to keep these issues away from the general membership.......really tried hard......

That's what I want too. We could even start a bar fight about optional rules? That would be more fun than what I have been participating to lately.

_________________
Général David Guegan

3ème Régiment de Grenadiers - Bataillon d'élite du 3ème Légère
2ème Brigade
Grenadiers de la Réserve
Réserve
La Grande Armée
--------------------------
"From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step."
Napoléon Bonaparte

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Groucho Marx

"Hey, now that does sound fun", says the Hanoverian Guardsmen as he rolls up his sleeves.

"There's nothing like a good tussle with Frenchies to clear one's head. Which one of you Frenchies would like to throw the first punch? After all.........ladies first.

Ladies first? Let ask those Scottish who fight with a skirt...

_________________
Général David Guegan

3ème Régiment de Grenadiers - Bataillon d'élite du 3ème Légère
2ème Brigade
Grenadiers de la Réserve
Réserve
La Grande Armée
--------------------------
"From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step."
Napoléon Bonaparte

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Groucho Marx

Somehow I lost a somewhat long response I tried to post in this thread. I have worked for years with voluntary organizations and I support the idea of election for volunteer leadership. This type of organization relies on volunteers and those volunteers come to feel a sense of ownership/responsibility which is often earned but also often non or antidemocratic. But therein lies the problem---lots of people gripe and vote but do not do work. Why volunteer tons of time if you do not feel appreciated, do not feel a sense of ownership of your work, and do not get to see your vision played out?

My experience as a community organizer and in the non-profit world has taught me a few lessons about possible courses volunteer organizations can take to make decisions, make rules, have accountability and responsibility have a healthy relationship, and get greater member participation.

I am likely to vote NO for many sections of the rules, for reasons outlined by my esteemed opponent David G in other threads. However, it is at least 90% ok and I think most of us feel that way. Regardless of the outcome of the vote, I think that the cabinet should facilitate a working group of member to look at possible friendly amendments if the vote passes and to look at the comments and create a 2nd draft if the vote is NO. In this way, some of the points of conflict can be cleared up, sensible changes made, and more club members can feel ownership of the process and take some burden off the candidate without committing tons of time....

regards!
Jim

_________________

Hey Mark... wanna have a real fight on the field of Leipzig... mano-a-mano? Banana versus banana?

And speaking about Optional Rules, how about: 1. PBEM No File Save, 2. All Melees to be conducted after all moving and firing is completed.

Very well said Jim! I agree 100%.....

I can't Tim. I have five games in play right now, and a ton of club stuff to tend, not to mention work and real life. I know we would have a good game of it, as you are certainly a worthy opponent.

Completely off-topic here (but maybe that is a good thing), but is there a way to prevent file saves in games or is that just a gentleman's agreement? And is there a way to detect if a player does that?

I use file saves in some bigger games from time to time, but only if I am walking away from the computer. Don't want to take the chance that the power goes out, my dog decides to take a hand at wargaming while I am away from the keyboard, one of the kids go running around the house and trip over the power cord, or Windows 8 decides it is randomly going to shutdown and run an update without asking me first.

PBEM No File Save

is the only way I know... it is not that risky (i.e. what are the odds that one of the situations you describe happens)... sure I've lost an hour through my laptop battery running out... but big deal just have to do the thing over again.

I like it, as I have had some bad experiences in the past. It also encourages quicker file returns, and discourages unrealistic over-analysis... in my opinion.

Let me know if you are interested in giving it a go with me.

Talk soon,
Tim

Well sonofabitch. I never even noticed the setting. Lol. I knew campaign games did not allow it. Never understood why it wasn't the default setting on normal games as well. I just had to boot up a game to see it. Learn something new every day.



You have not met my dog.

Obviously, my comments were in jest. I rarely have used the file save option outside of multiplayer games, but I did it a few times when I was not able to complete a turn that I thought I could get done before running out the door and was not expecting to be back home for a few hours.

I run a business online, and often when I leave I have different software applications running on my desktop that are resource hogs. I usually cannot leave a HPS/JTS game open while they are running or I risk the computer freezing while one of the programs are in the middle of a 3-4 hour job and will need to start over from the beginning.

So I just save the game and open it back up to finish when I return.

I have often thought it was something that players could exploit though if they chose to. By the way, if any of my opponents are reading this, I'm not accusing any of you of anything. Outside of one game with someone I found on The Blitz, my opponents have been great gaming partners.



I can imagine. It's one of those things you can never prove, but it is pretty easy to recognize when it is possibly going on.



As much as I would enjoy the game, and Leipzig is a battle I have not tackled yet, I'm not sure I have the time for a one-on-one of a battle that big. My area was hit by an ice storm last week. We lost electricity for 4 days (see it does happen ). Put my work way behind. I am going to be digging myself out from under the piles of work I have for quite a bit.

Perhaps another time, unless you have a smaller battle you were looking for an opponent in.

Funny enough... I many times have an open HPS/Tiller game open on my work laptop (and during work hours!), because I haven't been able to quite complete the turn... so, I just keep the game open on my laptop so that I don't have to restart from scratch.

You can imagine the look on the other person's face when we're working through something together on my computer and I accidently toggle on to the game screen... WHOOPS! Now I just minimize it in the corner of my screen, so that even if I click it on accidentally no one can really tell.

The PBEM no file save feature is great for short scenarios. My problem is that there often aren't enough small scenarios that I want to play, and, more to the point, I'm a sucker for big scenarios.

I came face to face with this issue during an e-mail game of France 1914. Wonderful game, but if you're interested in, for example, the battle of the Marne, you're going to be looking at some pretty big battles (so big that the designer split it into five pieces, but that's another story).

If you've got to make a couple of hundred little decisions just to get out a turn, if you can't pause somewhere along the way it's a real pain. And even if you do pause you'd better have a system that you stick to for moving your pieces, because forgetting to move a whole division can be really easy, even if you're careful about clicking on the next unmoved unit button. You forget to order artillery bombardments, or, even worse, forget that you've ordered one and end up trashing your own people. Friendly fire isn't.

Anyway, I remember getting a very cold reception at a gaming club when I suggested that what needed to be added to the program was a third saving option. Instead of no file save, the game should save at the latest point you played to, and there would/could be no going back. This would allow you to play a full-sized scenario of the battle of the Marne while preparing a dinner party for eight with lots of interruptions. All you would have to do is exit, and the game would save to wherever you had gotten to. That way there would be no point in replaying a turn for better results because you wouldn't be able to do it without actively making a back-up, and that would be overt cheating. And I imagine that this would help team play if you had to save a file before passing it to the next command.

This is the kind of thing that would require a series of e-mails to John Tiller from lots of different people to get him at all interested in writing the code for it.

Another thing along those lines that I've always fantasized about is having fog-of-war in force not according to your side in a battle, but according to who's in your command. The idea is that you would be limited to seeing only what your own command could see, and if the adjacent commander was getting overrun, you probably wouldn't know about it unless he remembered to tell you. And at that point you're one step away from needing rules for ADC's. It might get to be even more fun if the only hexes visible to skirmishers and out of command officers were the ones immediately adjacent to them, and if the dreaded AI were to automatically take over any force that missed its command die roll. Or something like that.

The engine that we've got is pretty good at representing what is going on tactically, but needs a bit of reworking (marching columns?) to make it work at the operational level. But what a series of games this would be if those changes were made (but they won't).

On a less pessimistic note, Tiller seems to like to expand features from one series to another, when time and inclination permit. Wouldn't it be nice to have a variation on the ACW unified melee phase in the Napoleonic games. Think of all the house rules that would go out the window!

_________________
Every generation gets the Greeks and Romans it deserves.

History is a bad joke played by the living on the dead.