"aerial warfare, the old 'up and down'" Topic

Hello all,

My WW1 air rules develop apace, but, I'd like to pick your brains, if I may, about something that may be a really stupid question.

How important, in a gaming sense, is using the 3rd dimension? ie height? in Wings of War/Glory, l believe differing heights are optional? I feel daft asking, to be honest, as it seems obvious it should be represented, but, a lot of my gaming mates, who have been helping me play-test these rules, admitted after games that they never even noticed the complete lack of differing heights.

So, a little brain-storming? what are your thoughts? should I incorporate differing altitudes? how important was height in WW1 air combat?

I've crossposted this to the WW2 air board aswell, as the air remains the same! let me off, just this once!

Thanks for any help you may be able to give.

John

Pretty important, I suspect, though for a simple "game" it's really not necessary.

We played a WWI campaign at the local club a while back, with different battles every month, and limited spotting and reaction abilities for aircraft flying at different heights. We used the Canvas Eagles rules.

It's pretty fun having the 3rd dimension added in again, since it adds a bit of interest and tactical nuances not seen in 2-D games, e.g. low level bombing and strafing attacks, high level bombing and fighter interception, balloon busting, swirling dogfights, etc., etc..

They contain rules for climbing, diving, and bombing from different altitudes.

We used a hexmat, and the Dogfight 3-D Flight Stands with 1/144th scale aircraft.

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The ability to have the aircraft minis dive, climb, bank, and barrel roll on the tabletop adds a bit more interest and drama to games as well, instead of just having them fly straight and level, which is not only very dangerous for your pilots' health, but boring too.

Not a WWI pic, but this'll give you an idea of what a dogfight can look like:

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The old dogfighting adage "He who has the height, controls the battle" wasn't written to just use up ink. Height equals energy in an environment in which gravity has an explicit effect on speed and manoeuvre.

I won't touch a set of air combat rules that ignore the third dimension. One may as well play X-Wing. Even when height is abstracted, as in Axis and Allies – Angels 20, it is better for it to be there as an abstraction, rather than not at all.

Having said that, it would be unfair to demand that its importance applies equally across all eras of air combat; as speeds increased, vertical movement became more consequential, and thus, it was less important in 1917 than it was in 1944.

Even if your rules merely use a system to provide an initiative advantage to aircraft that are at higher altitudes, that would be a good start.

Height gives you a tremendous advantage. You can always trade height for speed and energy. Also aircraft behave differently at different altitudes, that's why the P-40 was a failure as a fighter in Europe, its Allison engine just didn't have enough oomph at the higher altitudes. Likewise the P-38 behaved much better in the medium altitude and warmer air of the. PTO than it did at the higher altitude colder air over Germany. Any rule set that doesn't take altitude into consideration isn't simulating aerial combat.

Without altitude in your airplane game, you're just running armed speedboats. I don't think you have to physically represent altitude differences by mechanical means, although that can look cool. I usually use fixed flight stands myself, and represent altitude via dials or dice or some other visible note. But changing altitude, trading speed for height/height for speed, and dodging in the vertical dimension are essential to an air war game, for me.

I've never played any aerial combat games but would have to agree with the previous posters' comments. What makes air combat different than land or naval combat is the height dimension, otherwise called altitude. And I would guess it was just as important back in WWI as it is to today's aircraft, just as important as maneuvering to your opponent's six o'clock position while not letting the same happen to you. Best way to enter combat is with max energy of speed and height. Think back to high school physics; total energy is sum of potential energy (height) and kinetic energy (speed).

Yup, height is mandatory. I'm fine with a few "bands" from 0 to 5 or whatever.

Same applies to space games for me, which explains why I don't play space games….

Height is absolutely crucial. And as advised above, I also reckon you are genuinely better off playing a good space combat game like X-Wing (where altitude doesn't matter)in preference to a WW1/WW2 air combat game that doesn't have altitude.

In fact, if you are going to play WW1/WW2 in two dimensions, pick altitude over lateral movement, as in Mike Spick's "Air Battles in Miniature" link

There is nothing you cannot simulate in 2D that occurs in 3D.

Air War C21 and Air War 1918 is a suitable tool for the air novice.

Agree that you need to model the height aspects in a game, just that most players I know object to the 'forest of sticks' that can result with long wire stands.

We've found that using shorter 'sticks', or clear rods in our case, with just a short distance for a height band, eg 1 or 2 inches, usually imparts the required visual effect.

This is all great stuff, I'm liking the idea of a few 'bands' for altitude, and have a few ideas about modeling the actual gaming aspect of height advantage. Please keep your views coming!

Thank you all.

John

We use 3 different altitude sticks Low, Medium & High. On a base numbered 1 thru 6. So we go up to 18 altitude bands, from Low1 through High6, only changing the sticks up to 3 times
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Peter

Thing about WWI is there are certain height bands that some a/c can't reach. Later it becomes more of a case of how performance was affected by height (as well as energy considerations), but in the early period some a/c had hard ceilings.

My WW1 rules can accommodate 66 bands of height with the aircraft model being on a fixed height stand.

Each aircraft has a D20, red for low level, white for medium and blue for high so Red 1 is as low as you can get and Blue 20 is highest. For the very few aircraft that can go higher than Blue 20 I use a simple D6.

Aircraft have fixed performance factors which tend to deteriorate as you go up a colour band so an aircraft may be maximum speed 9 in the Red band but speed 8 in white and 7 in blue.

Some aircraft can climb/dive more levels than others and also some aircraft turn at different rates.

These rules have been playtested over several decades and work surprisingly well.

link

I don't think you have to physically represent altitude differences by mechanical means, although that can look cool.
– zippyfusenet

That's the main reason we still play Triplane after more than forty years. I've seen arguments about "better" systems, but for me it's all about the feel, and despite my aging and aching knees I still love the "view from the cockpit."

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In Jump or Burn I used 20 height bands marked with the face of a D20.

However, I wrote those rules a long time ago. The 'dog fight' games I'm playing at the moment are X-Wing games. These are played in two dimensions and, for all round fun, they don't suffer for it.

I suppose it depends what you want to get out of a dog fight game. I play them simply as no set up time fillers.

"Dogfight", the original Milton Bradley board game, was totally flat. It suited for years, until I started thinking of "improvements" to make it more satisfying.

Altitude was the first change. I used 1/16" piano wire and made three higher altitude stands, or "bands" if I were to resort to the nomenclature suggested above. The rule was simple: each "band" of higher altitude allowed an extra movement square if you dived to a lower "band".

There were a lot of bottom altitude stands (each game came with two per side, and we had THREE copies of the game laid side by side for an extended "Western Front" look: picture whole "armadas" of stacked up airplanes heading toward enemy lines, the opening game always looked glorious). Iirc, there were/are four second "band" stands, two third "band" stands, and one "lone wolf" top altitude stand. You'd put your best ace up there, so he could swoop down and get three extra movement squares to pounce on the lowest altitude enemies.

My next rule involving altitude was to allow a "zoom climb" back up to a maximum of one level below the one the "swooping" plane had dived from. But of course this had to be done in the next turn after the diving attack, or else the option to "zoom climb" was lost. You could opt to "zoom climb" to less than your allowed recovery to altitude, but that too would terminate any further "zoom climb".

Climbing was allowed at one "band" per turn by cutting your total forward movement in half (odd movement rounded down; so if you rolled snake-eyes for movement you'd move one square and climb one "band"; if you rolled a three you'd also move one square and climb one "band"). Later, we started to carve different aircraft out of balsa. And I converted one Fokker Dvii into a Triplane (the resulting look was qualified at best). So we had "special" rules for these different aircraft.

The whole approach was in embryonic development when RL intervened and the whole project, in any case, was overtaken by the game that Sailor Steve pictured above. "Triplane" is everything that I wanted "Dogfight"/modified to be, and a whole lot more. Except for one thing: the game only plays satisfyingly smooth and quick with a handful of players. If you have over a half dozen the game starts to really bog down, especially if you have new players attacking the learning curve. The worst example of this bogging down trait of "Triplane", or, "Mustangs and Messerschmitts", that I experienced was back in the mid 80s at a con held in the LAX Hilton. The game started in the morning, and by closing time late that night I had moved c. fifteen feet and performed MAYBE five turns. I never shot at anyone. Of course, there were over FORTY players in that game; they just kept showing up, asking "what is THIS?", and joining in. Yes, collectively, "we" had that much equipment, and more, to allow for each person who asked to join the ongoing game. And it got slower, and slower, and slooowwerrrr, until it ground to a virtual halt. Miserable scenario from hell. Man!

This is all great stuff, as usual, cheers, fellas!
I'm thinking adding the 3rd dimension is now a must, but, i dont want to bog the game down too much, it's WW1, it has to be, to my mind, (fairly) fast, furious, somewhat unpredicable, i.e diving too fast can, if your very unlucky, lose you a top wing, conversely, too steep a climb, and you can stall, and be a sitting duck, soooooo,
I think I'm going to go with 3 altitude bands, as above, with maybe another, occasional, lower, trench straffing band. The higher altitude pilots moving/shooting first.
I have rules for Anti-aircraft, so the Archie effectiveness can tail off the higher you are.
I'm scratchbuilding some barrage balloons at the moment, in 1/72, out of foam, an old T-shirt, and thin string(!) so I'll load up some piccies when complete.
Each aircraft has a number of manouvres avaliable to it, so limiting climbs, and the movements needed should be easy enough. As to which planes can fly the highest altitude, I may just let them all use all bands. It's not a very complex set, just mid-speed, and furious!
Thanks again, please add anymore thoughts on height, and the tactics used?

John

It sounds like your game design is ultra simple, striving for satisfying feel at the expense of specific aircraft differences. So you would be right in letting all aircraft enter all altitude bands. Getting into really fundamental differences in aircraft would produce the "dogfighters", the "streak fighters" and the "sitting ducks". A handful of two-seaters would be "streak fighters", i.e. fast, while an even smaller number would be "dogfighters", e.g. Halberstadt and Brisfit.

Dogfighters would have the full gamut of available maneuvers. Streak fighters would be limited to "combat turns" only, no fancy "pilot stuff", relying on speed to get in and out fast. Arguably you could make the line of demarcation between these two classes between the Spad xiii and SE5/Albatros; does the Spad qualify as a "dogfighter" or not? The SE and Albatros were definitely more nimble, but possibly not as fast (except McCudden's souped up Wolseley Viper powered, LVG spinner accoutered monster plane, his pet, his baby, that was the fastest pursuit plane on the Western Front during its brief life).

Diving weaknesses: again, a few aircraft had no trouble, most had some, and a few had real issues with breaking up if pushed too hard. Separate aircraft into "in trouble if -", and "no trouble at all".