Battle for Fallujah

[John Anderson]

I think the colours work...

Cool. Clarity is all for something like this.

...Its off topic but I'm a little uneasy with the closeness of the history to reality. It still seems too significant to become a game to me...

Yep, it has only been 5 years and I did go into the design aware that there would be quite a few people who were directly involved in the battle still around. It's something we (the class) discussed at length and out of 8 students, we have 1 x war of Afghanistan, 1 x mogadishu and 1 x lebanon, all of which have the same time issue. The rest of the class are doing sims which predate WW2.

I think as long as it is handled with respect and honour and abstracted to a certain degree (there's no blowing up mosques for example and I refrained from using actual marine's names) I like to think that it can be approached with sensitivity. Also, from here in Blighty there is also a certain detachment to that particular battle.

Would I have done a consim of the British pacification of Basra or the current British involvement in the fighting for Helmand Province? Not sure, never thought of it. Also, this was never designed for public consumption, rather as an exercise in researching and designing a conflict simulation from the ground up. But, yes I do understand your concerns and hopefully those concerns have informed the way the game has been designed.

...Objectively, I like the work...The building density and layout is very good. Did you pull that from city maps? What source did you use?

Thanks The buildings were created via CC3 (specifically City Designer) and simply layered over the top of the google maps image. I think there are about a thousand individual buildings rendered, and you can imagine what that does to my little PC. The CD buildings were from the Middle East range.

I think the counters are fantastic, but I'm not sure what the definition would look like when they're printed to scale. I guess that's why wargame counters usually go for very simple symbols - then again, they didn't have photoshop and illustrator then . Still, if they don't work to scale you might want to go for something simple and traditional like the illo below.

The counters will be printed at 3/4 inch and I'm lucky to have a photo printer where I can get the resolution very high. It will cost me a small fortune in ink however. These counters are, effectively, version 2 of my games images and the playtest versions were a lot simpler. I've included some images of my first counters for comparison.

With the map, if what you want is clarity, then you have it. But for atmosphere, I'd try (just to see what it looks like) more muted earth colours for the hex overlays....more gritty and atmospheric. Do main roads have any significance in the sim?

I would love to make more of the overlay colours, however they have to be clearly defined as the four colours have definite meaning. The Green hexes signify open terrain, the yellow is urban, the blue is industrial and the red is very dense urban. I think that if I brought them too close together on a colour range they would be a bit confusing. However, I shall have a play and see how they look.

No, the roads have no significance in the game and are purely decorative.

John