"CY6 without pre-plotting?" Topic

I'm curious if anyone reading this has tried to play Check Your 6! without pre-plotting the maneuvers. I have an inkling this could speed up the game, but it also introduces a few problems. I'd be happy to hear how others may have sorted this out before I spend much of my own time on it.

Some arbitrary initial thoughts:

Removing pre-plotting negates the B3.3.2 Pilot Reaction rules. This might be a non-issue, but in case it isn't, I'm thinking it might be reasonable compensation to require that pilots pass a crew test to successfully execute an Extreme Turn; failure would convert the maneuver to the most extreme Turn. I think this roll should include both pilot skill and plane Agility as DRMs, since pilots fail crew tests too often to be believable. I might also just mandate that Veteran and Ace pilots don't have to check at all, but I'm not sure yet. This would also nicely give a slight boost to more maneuverable planes, and make less agile planes feel just a bit more wallowing.

Removing plotting also removes the relevance of rule B1.1.2 Revealing Tailing Information. This is probably sufficiently compensated by moving the Tailing plane's move into the group right after the Tailed plane.

- Ix

I played Red Baron, a WW I aerial combat game, which requires pre-plotting for every airplane, every game turn, as well. I struggled with the idea of eliminating pre-plotting, too. I gave up on it. Too hard, too easy for pilots to miraculously maneuver.

I flew a zeppelin, in one game. It could hover… I realized I could not outrun the fighters swarming like locusts on me, but I could stop, and they could not! The fighters let me move my model first, as it was H-U-G-E. Then they moved their small fighters. They were stunned when I moved 2", and stopped.

"Aren't you going to finish your move?"

___"I did. I'm done. I'm stopping."___

"You're what?!?!"

___"I can hover, so that is what I am doing."___

Two of the fighters, assuming I would move my full 6" maximum speed (they could move 12"-14", and they typically moved their maximum speed, making several passes to blow up the air ship), had plotted accordingly -- they crashed into my massive tail section, dying in fireballs of exploding fuel, ammunition, and burning wreckage.

I lost a little bit of steering, but I had little maneuverability to begin with. I was the only person in the group, to ever fly the zeppelin across the 10-foot long table (at a maximum rate of 6" per turn…), the first to ever have it survive transiting the table… I have the only "veteran" crew for the zeppelin, having seen them bloodied, and surviving. I wear that badge with honor, and pride.

Without pre-plotting, the collisions would never have happened, and the zeppelin would have gone down, in flames, like it always had. The game would have been the same old thing, once again. B-o-r-i-n-g… I anticipated my enemies would expect me to run, full throttle, until I burst into flames. I threw them an unexpected tactic. It worked beautifully for me; it was a tragic end, for two enemy pilots, and their planes.

My expectation was that they would simply fly past my air ship. I never imagined they would crash into me. It was a happy blunder -- for me! That game lives on in every group member's mind. The one time, the zeppelin captain beat them, against all odds, against all expectations. It put them on edge: they had aces (not easy to develop in RB), who could have easily perished in their attacks on such a juicy, vulnerable target. They were very cautious, and careful, the rest of that night's game. They flew much more conservatively around the zeppelin. They realized they were vulnerable in ways they never imagined.

The pre-plotting simulates the speed, the unknown movement of your enemies, suddenly turning a direction you never anticipated. It is, to me, an accurate representation of aerial combat's unknown variables. Yes, pilots do make mistakes, and suffer mid-air collisions -- and they are usually fatal, just like with the zeppelin…

It may sound gamey, but it was a glorious experience, even for those who lost valued pilots in the crashes. That made it worth our while. It is truly memorable.

I wish you luck in your endeavor to eliminate pre-plotting. Please, share your ideas, if you come up with any that work out. I don't see a means to that end, but it may exist. Cheers!

Its part of the charm of the game. Trying to outguess the other guy is half the challenge.

I don't use plotting because dogfights weren't about if you could 'out guess' the other guy but about if you could out fly them.

Using plotting and guessing destroys the flow of a tail chase and slows the game down.

I use the same turn sequence but players must execute a move when it's their turn. Give them a time limit as well and if they don't move within that time then just move them forward their last turns' speed. Keeps them focused on the game.

And CY6 has rules for collisions. Don't think it has rules for Zeppellins?

Try it without plotting and see if you like it.

B

Well air games aren't like piloting planes in combat – of human beings physically dealing with Gs, or stalling moments reached at the extremes of their aircraft's flight envelope.

So for the venerable CY6 and Blue Max games, they have proven themselves some of the best of their genre, but not for 'flight dynamics', but for gaming dynamics. So plotting turns, and then outwitting an opponent's plotting, that's a large component of their design, and this offset/augmented by things like tailing option mechanics.

Timing player moves should have to accommodate these types of game mechanisms, and the larger the furballs, the more [careful] determinations required?, and so things aren't overlooked in the heat of a game.

In my area, we don't play air games as frequently as we used to, and we're often re-briefing a rules system all over again when playing, so rushing the guys along is a no-go. I'm sure that might work better for more Experten gamers though.

To some of the OPs original thinking – Angels 20 had die rolls for some flight extremes, and/or aircraft maneuvers. I didn't mind this, but many of the guys thought this created too much randomness.

Thing I hate about the plotting is he plots turn left, you plot turn right. Makes it about as much fun as guessing a coin toss.

Whereas in a dogfight you'd see instantly where he was going and try and stay with him.

In a cardboard world that means can your piece of cardboard move in a similar sequence of hexes to his piece of cardboard. If the hex sequence is drawn out in front of you on one piece of paper it's not rocket science picking one of the sequences.

Yeah, but that L-R thing becomes more predictable with a tailing option mechanic.

I once designed a WWI air combat rule-set that had players manipulating the attitude of their aircraft miniature by rolling, and pitching it on their stand's gimble mount, and which required a player to transition from say banked-left to roll-right, by traversing through "level" first – this all being visible to players, and so opposition players would see certain aircraft couldn't be turning right from left (because they hadn't rotated "level" first).

My experienced gaming buds made so many mistakes understanding these "stick" (plotting moves), that I gave up on the effort (read below) -

My disconnect with air combat gaming is that it mostly details horizontal maneuvering – as if seen by spectators viewing from below, or as gamers by seeing and playing from above. Air fighting dynamics can't be separated from the vertical plane – and that is perhaps the most important facet of the whole aspect of it.

Turn and Burn is the fare of most dogfight gaming.

I haven't been interested in trying Warlord's Blood Red Skies, but lately have been getting more interested, as I think it might better handle the vertical regime of aerial engagement, and literally, from a different "direction" than we're looking at from our traditional air combat gaming from – that is watching miniatures [or counters] doing circles on the tabletop.

Sorry for diverting the thread here from the OP (just opening up the noggin a bit, and blah-blah'ing some bit out loud) -

All of the observations about the pros & cons of plotting above are valid, but I'm coming at this issue from a different direction, so I suppose I could give some background to my thinking here.

My goal is not to make a "better CY6" – I'm not opposed to the plotting mechanism in CY6, I've played the game hundreds of times and I enjoy it as written. Rather, I'm looking for a faster-playing game for resolving air missions in a campaign context that involve a lot of bombing and strafing, with casual players who are not necessarily avid dogfight gamers.

The movement plotting in CY6 makes it a somewhat poor solution for this; the time and energy put into plotting give the game a natural ceiling of 2-3 planes per player, focuses players on dogfighting, and (combined with other game mechanisms) makes bombers no fun. Plotting also acts as a filter to keep out some players who don't like accounting-heavy games. I'd like to refocus the game on the bombers, make the fighters into a co-equal or even subsidiary arm, and appeal to gamers who want more activity and less record keeping. I'd also like to finish larger games in less than 4 hours.

With all that in mind, I started a search for alternative rules, but I started to notice that everything has rules mechanisms I consider unsatisfactory, many of which CY6 has already solved in a fashion I find elegant and admirable. My epiphany last week was that CY6 gets so many things right, I might be best off just trying to fix the few things I consider ill-suited to the style of game I want to play.

With that in mind, I concluded that the CY6 mechanisms I want to streamline include:

1. Move plotting, for the reasons stated above
   
2. Bomber formation defensive fire and AA; shooting each gun position individually is insanely slow and cumbersome
   
3. Surface attacks; the rules in the book are okay for a dogfight game, but could use a little more magic to make bombing and strafing an interesting game focus

I already have ideas to enhance all of these, but the move plotting is the hardest nut to crack, since it's such an integral part of the game. Thus this thread. I'm most keen to hear what problems other people may have encountered in trying to do away with move plotting, and how they solved them. So far, I only have BattlerBritain's glowingly optimistic opinion that the rules work fine without any plotting at all. He might be right. I intend to find out.

- Ix

FlyXwire said:

To some of the OPs original thinking – Angels 20 had die rolls for some flight extremes, and/or aircraft maneuvers. I didn't mind this, but many of the guys thought this created too much randomness.

This is a valuable observation, thanks.

I personally dislike mechanics that let Lady Luck interfere much with player decisions, and I also hesitate to add more steps to the game sequence, so I'll start by limiting Extreme Turn tests to Green pilots, and see if that's even worth the extra effort.

- Ix

Regarding vertical vs. horizontal maneuvering: I agree with FlyXwire that vertical tactics are not as well-supported by dogfight rules as horizontal tactics.

However, I think that a lot of this comes down to the slow pace of dogfight gaming. It takes many turns to execute a proper zoom and boom, but each twist and turn is only a move or two away. In a dogfight game that only lasts 1-2 dozen turns, you can get in 2-3 zooms, maybe 4 if you're lucky, but a twisting fight carries on from the first close encounter to the end.

Back when I played computer flight sims, zoom and boom tactics made a lot more sense. Turning and burning was much more exciting, but diving/climbing passes through the combat zone were much more survivable (just like real life), and flight sims were fast-paced enough that the wait between passes was only measured in minutes. Using miniatures rules, the time to set up a zooming pass can be dozens of minutes, or even an hour or more. Miniature dogfight games suffer from a seriously backwards time scale ratio.

It's possible that a faster-playing game with more focus on the bombing mission might remedy this somewhat. If the fighters are only a part of the action, each player has 2 or more elements in his control, and the end result of the mission directly affects a future naval or ground game, vertical energy-based tactics might start to seem more appealing.

CY6 has a particular problem with "parking zones" around bomber formations where fighters loiter around taking pot shots at little or no risk, but I haven't found a good solution to this yet. I have toyed with a few mechanics to encourage zooming tactics (vs. either fighters and bombers), but I remain ambivalent about them. I reserve the right to try again.

- Ix

Yellow Admiral, perhaps something like Blood Red Skies is the means to your higher, game-scale wants?

I have to admit, I know very little about that game (yet), other than I believe its scale merges somewhere between flight ops and the dogfight.

As an example (maybe a bad one), when a skirmish-level rule set such as Bolt Action came out, it was natural that gamers tried to make it do more – so they added in more infantry platoons, more tanks, and all that to their scenarios…..but it was never designed for more than a couple infantry platoons on a side, with a tank or two in support, and a decent artillery strike could basically end these skirmish scale actions on the tabletop if the barrages ever hit on target (so more just broke the game).

So the recommendation for those looking to do larger scale WW2 engagements was to seek the tools for doing that level of action.

Luckily, there's plenty of Bn.-level and/or grand-tactical WW2 rule sets for making the transition to larger, combined-arms actions, but as you're indicating, not as many air combat systems suitable for such wants!?

Btw, if you've ever played Rise Of Flight, that was one of the flight sims I helped develop.

Ix,

At Historicon last year, I played in a game by the designer of "Fireball Forward" where each stand was a pair of fighters or a vic of bombers. One mission would last 15 – 30 minutes. The whole 4 mission campaign lasted about 2 – 2.5 hours. Each person controlled maybe a squadron (6 stands) and we had 2 players per side – not counting bombers (6 – 9 stands).

-Hal

At Historicon last year, I played in a game by the designer of "Fireball Forward" where each stand was a pair of fighters or a vic of bombers. One mission would last 15 – 30 minutes. The whole 4 mission campaign lasted about 2 – 2.5 hours. Each person controlled maybe a squadron (6 stands) and we had 2 players per side – not counting bombers (6 – 9 stands).

Cool! I'd love to hear more about it.

Kevin Smyth and Dave Schueler in the PNW have been running AirWar 1940 games for a couple years now, another unreleased new game. It's a WWII adaptation of the AirWar C.21 rules for jet combat. Their games look awesome, so I'm hoping to see the rules soon and try it out.

- Ix

I've been playing a lot of Lee Brimmicom-Woods Downtown and Elusive Victory games lately. They're for jets but there's a version out for WW1 called Bloody April that is pretty much identical.

They're all great for putting large numbers of aircraft flights together on missions. The combat is simple but I have actually been resolving combat using, wait for it, CY6.

When the planes of opposing sides get near each that's the starting positions for a CY6 game. Play the CY6 game and feed it back into the bigger game.

Scale of Downtown/EV is 1 minute to a turn, 4km to a hex and flights move -4 to 5 hexes a turn. I estimate CY6JA to use roughly 15sec turns and 500m hexes for jets, so 1MP to a CY6JA turn in Downtown.

For WW2 adjust big scale slightly but can still use CY6 to play out the dogfights.

Fighting Wings rules by J D Webster also used different scale parts to the game to setup engageents at the dogfight level.

Oh and I also use a much simplified version of Fighting Wings charts for plane movement including horizontal and vertical flight points to get better turning and vertical movement. A bit like Air Force/ Dauntless. The key part is tracking how much speed a plane loses when it pitches up/ turns.
CY6 turn charts just don't give a good enough representation of vertical movement on a 2D surface for me, or reflect just how much a plane can turn.

And yes I like Simulators. I trained as a Simulator Technician in the RAF many years ago and spent a few years as an Avionics Engineer on Flight Trials.

Hole this helps, B

It sounds like you like the CY6 movement, but not the plotting. If that is the situation, then you might look at creating an initiative system (something like the old AH Flight Leader game where Speed and altitude give you the advantage, and add in pilot quality). Then have players move their aircraft in the initiative order using he CY6 maneuvers. Tailing aircraft would be determined at the start of the turn and could move directly after the plane they are tailing.

I haven't played CY6 for a while, so I would have to go back to see if that would really work. But seems like it might keep things rolling.

Dave

Unless of course (and I do hesitate to mention this) they share the fate of the Perry Prussian Reserves in plastic.

They had huge conversion potential. We saw the 3ups….some investment went into them. One day Christies or Sothebys of London will sell the originals for millions.

But we never saw them

Thomas, the apostle, did not believe until…you know the rest. JC said "Blessed are those that have not seen, yet still believe".

This text was all typed by DeadHead in the Napoleonic Product Reviews thread New Perry Plastics, and due to one of the TMP simul-posting bugs, replaced and obliterated my own comment.

I pulled my actual post out of my browser history and will post it below.

- Ix

I have a growing collection of the Blood Red Skies planes, but I've had so little interest in the game I've been giving away the other components. There are some good concepts in there, but overall it seemed not to be what I'm looking for. I suppose I should take a closer look, as long as I'm considering modifying a game.

The tendency toward gigantism is a common theme among miniatures gamers, and one I try to avoid. I limit my CY6 games to 2-3 fighters per player and scale convention scenarios up or down based on how many players participate. The CY6 veterans of my local CY6 group can handle 4 planes per player with reasonable speed, but none of us like to.

Some of the reasons I am leaning so heavily toward CY6 so far:

• The damage model is nicely abstracted and basically paperless (with my set of black/white/gray/firey smoke trails)
  
• The hex-based movement system of selectable maneuvers is simple to teach and use and double-check, yet still provides as much subtlety as a more mechanically complex if/then/else/but/otherwise/except/also decision tree with rulers, angle guides and arithmetic.
  
• The system produces a lot of differentiation between aircraft without a lot of complex rules or slow mechanics.
  
• I already have a full set of markers, stands and telescoping rods to make the game 3D and easy to survey at a glance.

My only real objection to CY6 is that the shooting system has too many steps – roll to hit, roll for damage, roll to save, roll for lucky hits, maybe roll to resolve the lucky hit, roll and roll and roll again…. This is especially irksome for flak and bomber defensive fire, which deserve to be more abstracted. That said, it's easy to understand and instantly familiar to gamers, so I leave it alone, except maybe to tweak it for special cases (which is also easy to do).

I can already play a largish CY6 game with about 3 dozen planes on the table in 3-4 hours at a convention with 6-8 players. I'd just like to be able to double that. Since the movement plotting takes up most of the game time, I fixed on that as the aiming point for my first surgical strike.

- Ix

I just played a CY6 game (without pre-plotting) at the CY6 Game Day in Dayton OH, yesterday. We did a scenario with about 14 planes to a side and 8 players. About a flight each. There was an ingenious system of picking chits, for each flight. The flights with leaders of +1, +2, and +3 ratings had a corresponding number of chits. For example a +2 flight leader could defer on the first or second chit pulled but had to move on the 3rd. All +0 had to move when their chit was pulled. We used formations until within range. You simply chose a maneuver and moved for each plane when it was your turn. When a flight broke formation the leaders could still defer. I wasn't sure how this would work at first, but it sped things up quite a bit. It helps to have experienced players, but I think new players could catch on with a little coaching. It played about twice as fast. I would consider it for larger battles.

I played in the same game as Dances with Clydesdales. It was a fun, fast game. The only real drawback that I could see is that there was no advantage for tailing. I suppose we could have determined tailing situations at the start of each turn, then allow tailing aircraft to defer movement until the tailed aircraft moved. However, this would have slowed gameplay somewhat.

Randomizing the movement order with weighted chit pulls is an interesting way to keep skilled pilots from utterly dominating the game, which is an issue I haven't considered deeply enough. That's good food for thought, and I appreciate your telling me about it. Do you remember the name of the GM?

A couple cons I can think of off the top of my head: a lot of planes on the table could make it very fiddly (lots and lots of chits to pull…), and it could lead to occasional oddities like Green pilots moving late (or even last…?), Veterans and Aces getting jumped by inferior pilots, etc.

I don't *think* tailing would be that hard to adapt to chit pulls, but I have to think about this for a bit. Tailing might have been left out because it's too easy to do too perfectly without plotting.

- Ix

I swiped an idea from X-wing. Have each plane roll 2d6 for order of movement. +1 for height. Green pilots -1 to roll. Veteran pilots +1, Ace +2 Galland +3. Movement is done in ascending order. Of course you need rules for tailing ect. A flight or element just rolls for their leader. Of course I play Bag the Hun but should work for CY6.

Joe

Yeah, doesn't Bag the Hun already handle most of this? I know it has tailing mechanics.

Yes but order of movement is card draw. I like the x wing way better with my modifiers it takes into account skill level but occasionally the rookie catches the ace asleep
Joe

I think the easy way to model that with a card draw is to put more cards in the deck for more skilled pilots. You can still only activate once per turn, but more cards in the deck means a higher chance of going first (or last, if that's your preference).