"Wings at War - Using a grid?" Topic

The Boy Henry and I have had a few games over the blazing sands of the Sinai now and we're thoroughly enjoying the WAW system. The one thing we've found, though, is that when in a dogfight with bases overlapping the whole thing gets very fiddly, being impossible to move aircraft without knocking others.

I wondered if anyone out there had tried using some form of grid, either squares or hexes, to speed up the manoeuvring and make the game easier to play?

I'm considering using a square grid. The minimum turn for a hex grid is 60 degrees, so a fast turn would be 120 degrees, which is far too much – on a square grid three squares of lateral movement is the same as 2 squares on the diagonal, so I think I can make it work, but just wondered if anyone had tried it.

Btw, I'm talking about Wings AT War, NOT Wings OF War (aka Wings of Glory)

Nick

With a hex grid you can do 30 degree increment turns.

You're limited to 45 degree ones on a square grid.

Given that you can make a 22.5 degree turn with each forward move I think moving to a square grid would cause the game to lose a lot of maneuverability. I do agree that the overlapping bases thing can be annoying though. To be honest though, that every aerial game. Until we can have electromagnetically stabilized floating bases, this may be what we're stuck with. I do really like the Wings at War rules though.

I have used 1/4" thick squares of steel, about 2" square. One corner is threaded for an antenna the top of which is my system for holding a 1/300 aircraft. I can go from vertical up to vertical down and roll in any position.

Yes there is issues with overlapping. I have also seen a system by Irishserb where he uses a dowel and the altitude is represented by sliding a mechanism very similar to mine up and down the dowel attached to a clothes pin. The dowel is marked for altitudes. I just thought of antennae and based on only a few planes at a time the heights were relative not representative. For example I am higher then you who are higher than the third guy. With about 5 segments this worked OK.

In Clouds of Glory uses lengths of carbon dowel and a simple wire and heat shrink tube mechanism to hold the models to the tube which allow you to raise or lower their heights. I use brass wire mounted to the rear of my planes (since I mostly game(d) modern they were inserted into the afterburners) which attached to my mechanism. ICoG is WWI, they insert the wire into the nose of the planes. The system is suitable for lighter models as they use, and produce, 1/300 scale 3D printed planes. I feel this would also work with scratch built plastic and balsa models (which I have also done in the past). ICoG sharpens one end of the carbon rod and pushes it into the "game board" which is the entire table surface, a layer of foam. I think they use styrofoam with detailed, but reduced scale, terrain. There is another plastic foam, expanded polypropylene EPP which was popular for RC planes and I think is also used for archery targets, which would be a great surface to "punch" into as it is very self healing. I don't think it would be suitable for detailing though. I asked the ICoG guys and was told after years of use they hadn't had to replace their foam surface.

If interested here is their site, everything is free to download;

icog.dk

OK, I didn't answer the original question. In my case I gamed Air Superiority converted to minis. I printed out enlarged game maps (I think the hexes were something like 2 3/4" across) and we played on them. AS used small (8.5" x 11" sheet size maps) which just butted against each other. I sized my maps to be the same size, numbers of hexes wise, and each sheet fit on a sheet of mat board. AS used 30 degree facings. JD hasn't supported modern air gaming since he had a hard drive crash which apparently wiped out years of updates and upgrades which was going to take THE SPEED OF HEAT update to AS to the present day. Instead he has concentrated on his WWII game. There is a similar WWI game called Canvas Falcons which at one time was going to be released by Clash of Arms as it used much of JD's movement and physics game system. It is privately published as Warbirds which can be found by googling Warbirds and Canvas Falcons.

Thanks gents, much appreciated.

We tried it at the weekend, and it worked really well. Here are some notes on it:

1) You do lose some of the nuance of the 22.5 degree turn, but a standard turn of 45 degrees and a fast turn of 90 degrees (i.e. turning before and after movement) still gave a reason to risk tight turns

2) The problem with squares is that diagonal movement is about 1/3 greater than lateral movement. I solved this by each 'action' being either 2 squares movement diagonally or 3 squares laterally, this covering almost exactly the same distance.

3) As some of the 'fine tuning' of the 22.5 degree turn is lost and it's possible not to be able to get in line with one's opponent (like having bishops on the black and white squares in chess) I introduced a new 'side-slip' action. This allows players to move forward, then 'slip' sideways at a cost of losing one energy.

In summary:

Negatives – loss of the 22.5 degree turn, meaning planes can turn quicker, though this didn't seem to be much of an issue

Positives – Far, far quicker to play, meaning we got two games in, both of which were challenging due to the energy management mechanic in the game. The definition of the square means that movement was simple (with 5cm actions and 22.5 degree turns a carefully measured move can easily be undone by an unintentional knock in the normal game).

We both really enjoyed it and, I must admit, I can't see us going back to using movement templates.

Nick