Supporting Car Wars: Foundations for Growth and Development Part IV

Building a Comprehensive Vehicle Design Canon in the Face of Evolving Rules

Steve Jackson came out with Uncle Albert’s Catalogue From Hell… why didn’t he ever come out with the AADA Vehicle Guide From Hell? And why in the 5th edition did he just scrap all of those perfectly good designs?

Well… there are many reasons behind the decision, but there’s actually a technical reason that quickly puts the brakes on any such proposal.

If you go through all of the old car designs… and if you rebuild them from scratch according to the Compendium Second Edition Rules… you will find that as often as not, the totals for cost, weight, and top speed end up not matching.

There are numerous reasons for this: some equipment was either changed or left out of Compendium second edition, rules for top speed changed a couple of times, and then there are the typos and errors…. Sometimes it’s clear what the mistake is from the context, sometimes not. Sometimes old designs that came out at exactly $15,000 cannot be made to do the same under consistent and revised rules no matter how much fiddling you do.

In other words, it’s a major headache to go over all of this stuff– and the numerous errata that were published don’t always settle the issue!

How do we keep the new game from ending up this way?

Actually, Scott Haring has this by the tail:

“In the course of testing the new Vehicle Design System, we ran every design already published for the new edition of Car Wars to make the sure the new system didn’t make any designs invalid.”

Every time you alter the design system… you have to go back to the entire canon of vehicle designs… and make sure that you haven’t broken anything.

That’s a lot of work. (By the way, that’s the same principle behind Unit Testing Frameworks that we use in software development.) The process can be automated, though, so there’s no reason not to do it.

The development of the old Car Wars game was so dynamic and so… uh… bold… that a set of canonical designs never got established. The available gadgets changed so fast that no one would ever use a design more than a year old.

Because of the way the new system is marketed, Steve Jackson cannot afford to ever invalidate the current 5th edition designs. It is one of the things that I like best about 5th edition: that there is a set of standard designs available. Of course, by buying half of the currently available material (my pal bought the other half), I have quite a bit of cash sunk into 12 glossy colorful laminated vehicle record sheets.

Steve… Scott…. Please don’t break the new canon of Vehicle Designs. And once the new design rules are released, please don’t break them either. You guys seem to be onto this allready– please don’t compromise it!

I don’t regret what happened in the good old days…. There was a lot of stuff that needed to experimented with and tinkered with back then. It’s all part of the development process. With the 5th edition, you all have demonstrated that you learned a great deal during the past 20 years… and going forward with the new system, we just can’t afford to alienate those that have allready bought in.

Of course… breaking the game can be tolerated a little easier if you offer killer economical “Compendium” type releases later on…. But there are other alternatives that should be considered first… especially if they don’t involve me throwing out my glossy laminated vehicle record sheets! (They are pretty. Much better than SFB and Battletech!)