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I threw together a quick minigame to test individual vision in a PvP Wargame situation. The rules were simple with mechanized infantry fast with a large vision and armor slow and tough. My goal essentially to see how individual vision worked and try to see what sort of PvP problems we would run into while working on a game like this. There were some major balance issues with the units that could easily be fixed and some great suggestions.

I basically ran up the center with my mech infantry trying to find him. I ran into him, he seemed to be winning but he let me onto a game flaw (Armor would always hit Infantry based on the dice rolls) that I used to tear him up. Combined with some lucky rolls I was able to surround and crush him. I hope to refine this a bit if people are interested, and could release the campaign file once I get some balance issues down.

MapTool suggestions / questions
Would it be possible to get the measure tool to reveal the Statsheet? And I think maybe right clicking units with the measure tool to access macros or properties might be cool too. I found I was often trying to measure range of a unit only to forget that unit's range when trying to plan out which to attack with. I kept having to switch between the arrow and the measure to "check the unit's range... okay... switch... see how far that is... check next unit's range..."

Blocky vision seems like it would work best in these types of situations where we've got a square grid. If so we could easily setup blocky vision as not only vision but range and blocky vision always filled ENTIRE squares it'd be easy in a game like this to give you a hit or miss. As it stands the grid + round vision was frustrating and blocky vision always revealed partial squares in a way I wasn't expecting.

Would it be possible to add COLOR to the vision dialog? I set it up such that some units had longer vision than range, but it would be neat to setup vision as one color and range as another - that way you could mouse over a unit and know exactly what it can see and what it can hit.

Also, I'd like to try and figure out how to streamline editing multiple token properties at once. As it stands we had to change all the tokens from PC to NPC (to enable auto numbering) and then as a GM it was a pain to give ownership to 15 tokens to Dorpond when he joined in by going in and editing each of these. Not sure the best way to handle this, but thought I'd throw it out.

Previously mentioned bug that you can see all player tokens even if you don't own them on the token tree. Double clicking them takes you to their location on the map.

We had some issues with unit targeting. We used the drawing tool to try and indicate which units we're shooting - it worked okay but involved a lot of tool switching between measure tool (to measure), drawing tool (to draw), switch to chat to indicate who's firing (A12 - I24) and pointer tool (to right click and use macro). I just thought of a cool idea though... have a macro that's Target that is "Attacking [target]" so it prompts!

Gameplay Future
-I need to streamline game states to indicate the disabled, dead, stuff. Maybe try and rework how the game health system works to make this less confusing.

-Need to CLEARLY define which squares are impassable. As it stood there were several confusing points on the map and many due to my slapdash approach to adding VBL

-Units need to be reworked completely in terms of attacks/defenses

-Roll for initiative each round? Maybe set it up so that each unit takes turns and is marked making the winner of initiative less important.

-Add artillery units - super slow, long range units with poor vision. When fires, there's a random drift roll and an AOE explosion. Would encourage players to send small units to find and disable!

Whew! It was interesting to try out. I'm eager to streamline a lot of things and get the rules written out in the campaign file. Honestly, I'm really running this as a proof-of-concept to the players of my PBEM-style macro ww2 war strategy game Conquest... hopefully we can use MT as our map tool. I can't wait to get them on board once they see the features we've got!

Dorpond was telling me today how much he enjoyed this activity.

I'm all for adding features to support wargaming. Specifically:

* True individualized views
* Measure tool integrated into the pointer tool via modifier key
* Turns
* Targetting

I totally forgot about turns! It wasn't so bad with 2 people, but I can see how it could get more complicated with more people.

I'm trying to figure out how to best rework the turn structure. I was doing the following

1) Player A moves all her pieces
2) Player B moves all his pieces
3) Player A fires all her pieces
4) Player B fires all his pieces

Positives are that it eliminates the "which piece do I move?" slowness and I think overall can speed up gameplay in some respects. Though in a large game or a game with multiple players it can causes a lot of downtime for the players who aren't playing. Once we have plotted movement I think doing the movement simultaneously would be neat. I resolved all combat results simultaneously at the end of the round (step 5 I guess) making the who shoots first not as big of a deal cause even units killed that round can fire.

I'd like to run a 4 player version. I'm going to tweak the units a bit and then maybe post and get something together soon. I also need to make sure I don't forget to prepare for my DS game this week! I was rear ended pretty bad so I had the last 2 days off - I'm alright just hurting and on pain meds. It's let me spend a lot of time thinking about RP tools. Maybe I should take another vicodin and go try and find that "Put me in the map" button trevor was talking about.

Question: Should units have visions greater than their range? Ranges greater than their units?

I'm going to start with 4 base units (I'm using a more WW2 style):

Infantry - small somewhat slow, small range / vision
Mech Infantry - faster, better
Armor - slower, heavy punch, hard to destroy
Artillery - ultra slow, low vision, easy to take out, super high range

What about the vision/range relationships above should we look at? It's odd cause no other game has really used them and the whole recon element is interesting.

Soon it won't matter because they will see as far as their VBL will let them

Measure/Pointer tool question:

How about when you have token(s) selected and hold down the M key you get a measure line and angle to the mouse pointer?

Would that be too much clutter?

Would a 'snap to grid' preference be needed?

It would need to be a modifier key (shift, control, alt).

What I'm thinking is:

click-drag => normal movement
shift-click-drag => pick up token to new location, no pathing
ctrl-click-drag => don't move the token, just show the path and distance

Would CTRL+CLICK work on not tokens? Like say if I just wanted to know how many feet a particular object on the map is?

Also is there a keyboard shortcut to switch from pointer to drawing? Might be useful when indicating who's firing where to have a photoshop style switch. Maybe that's a little complex of a feature to add in to have people accidentally switching to the tool and not understanding.

Does holding CTRL while drawing VBL snap to grid like it does when drawing? Is there a way to snap to grid with VBL? (Edit: Answer, yes it does!)

if you go with the click-click-drag I would prefer some on screen visual to let me know what mode I'm in since laptop touch pads can be a bit odd for stuff like this.

The reason I like the alt/shift/control key method is that it works better for high (low?) zoom levels and lets you measure a bunch of stuff at once.

That said, whatever is easiest to code works for me

That doesn't work correctly because those pop-ups don't accept strings. I tried ( ) and " " but none work. It verifies it's a number before it adds it. I did discover something interesting... apparently the " trims letters. So if I put in "String" I get <<Target> String = trin>>. I suppose if the token numbers are all unique it could be useful to use the numbers. Maybe do like they do in the NFL and reserve 1-10 for tanks, 20-40 for mech infantry, 50-90 for infantry and 90+ for artillery?