Any truth to the rumor Ace of Aces may get reprinted?

[sightreader]

Hello again! Thanks so much for your interest... I can't tell you how encouraging that is in a world where most people roll their eyes at my efforts!

Originally Posted by castiglione

How is energy handled in your rules?

Look carefully at the picture above. You'll see that the maneuver cards are offset from each other. You must choose maneuvers that are within the reach of the enemy card.

Thus, if you find yourself too low and slow, there will be few if any moves you can do that will keep you in range. You therefore give your attacker the option of re-engaging your aircraft at any altitude difference he sees fit or taking half a kill for leaving you low, slow and running home (thus leaving you horribly open to diving predators and Archie).

Originally Posted by castiglione

It was pretty simple; if you conducted a maneuver, you would look up the maneuver on the schedule and it would tell you what maneuvers you could NOT do next turn.

Yes... the "red" edition had that as well. I take the opposite approach - I list what you can do. Each move you make may adjust (i.e. "slide") your card differently relative to the enemy card.

Originally Posted by castiglione

for example, if you did a certain maneuver and you ended up shooting at someone, the amount of damage you could do could be adversely or positively affected by the maneuver

Yes, I've brainstormed quite a shooting system that uses both your maneuver and the enemy maneuver to determine damage, but this is a very low priority for me: a fancy shooting system is simply not worth developing if your Camel doesn't "fly" like a Camel!

More importantly, I strongly feel any changes I make must not sacrifice the game's "grade school" playability (i.e. playable by children as young as 8). So, until I get a maneuver system working, I intend to stick to the default 4/2/1 shooting system for simplicity.

If I can solve the problem of injecting historical performance without losing playability, I anticipate it will be easy to add in the relatively sophisticated gunnery model I have in mind. To summarize the basic idea, you do not "shoot" between turns, but rather during your turn - the quality of the shot depends on how well your maneuver tracks the enemy as measured by reducing the relative motion of the two aircraft.

[Angiolillo]

Originally Posted by sightreader

you do not "shoot" between turns, but rather during your turn - the quality of the shot depends on how well your maneuver tracks the enemy

Not to steal the discussion, but that's what I tried with Wings of War. The difference with Blue Max, just to make an example with a well kown system, is that you do not choose a maneuvre and shoot at the end of it, but you build a maneuvre with three elemetary bits and you can shoot during the turn, after each of these bits. In the ends, if your Camel is tracking a Dr.I, it can deliver him from 1 to 6 cards of damage in the turn depending on how good you are at tracking the DrI during the turn, not only at the end.

Side effect: if a plane get in your firing field during a turn of Blue Max and not at the end of it, you can not shoot at it (you even have difficulties at beig certani that it happened); in WoW you can fire at him.

[sightreader]

Originally Posted by Angiolillo

you do not choose a maneuvre and shoot at the end of it, but you build a maneuvre with three elemetary bits and you can shoot during the turn, after each of these bits.

Hmmm... haven't tried Blue Max yet.

I place the enemy plane on a grid cross referencing distance and o'clock. After the move, you place the new location of the plane, then add up the sectors along the targets path, with penalties for crossing certain lines and bonuses for going through "sweet spot" sectors.

This system is also capable of accounting for the orientation of the enemy plane (i.e. are the bullets coming from the front, the back, etc etc) but splitting things down to this level of detail is probably not necessary.

[Angiolillo]

You can play it at Play Cartagena boardgame online or challenge other players at different wargames. if you want to try it. It's a classic. Anyway I could have said Air Force, Dawn Patrol, Aces High or any traditional boardgame where you make a whole move and then you fire (even in Blue Max, Air Force and other games where yu plan secretly and execute at the same time make the comparison more interesting).
I agree that such systems can do withut rules fr relative angles and such, if you are happy of a simplified model. Usually the deflection rule (bonus if firer and target go in the same direction) in a game where you fire at the end of a turn is a correction to presume that target spent more time in the firing field of firer than if their paths make an angle. But if you already take it into account firing during the turn, and so giving the opportunity to better track the target during all the turn, the need for such a correction is far less.

[sightreader]

Originally Posted by Angiolillo

Usually the deflection rule (bonus if firer and target go in the same direction) in a game where you fire at the end of a turn is a correction to presume that target spent more time in the firing field of firer than if their paths make an angle. But if you already take it into account firing during the turn, and so giving the opportunity to better track the target during all the turn, the need for such a correction is far less.

Yes, that's what I realized eventually - the key to deflection wasn't so much the angle the bullets were hitting the plane, but more the relative movement of the aircraft to the bullet stream. So, this system was oriented completely towards reducing movement of the target relative to the bullet stream.