Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

We played a couple of “Team Amateur Night” events this past weekend. We used 4 stock Killer Karts on each team at Southtown Arena in Indiana. These were pretty complicated games running about three hours long each (but only hitting at about 15 seconds of game time.) We played mostly by Compendium 2e rules, though we agreed to simply reset handling tracks at the end of each turn and also to use a modified speed/range chart. The chart was basically pulled from GURPS 4e, but I converted mph to yards per second and CAR WARS “inches” to yards. Taking the GURPS modifier and adding 6 to it results in something pretty close to the classic CAR WARS modifiers but with (at medium-short range) maybe a -1 or -2 penalty for high speeds added onto it.  The cool thing about it is that speed mods have no effect at long range… and a lot of effect at close range.

On our first event, we entered the arena on opposite sides. My opponent entered the central area immediately, but I pulled my vehicles toward each other so that they could enter the central area from a middle opening instead of one of the diagonals. As we entered the central area in two groups of two, my opponents 4 vehicles were converging on them. My opponent had much better targeting mods due to the set-up. I was suddenly very afraid– I was sure that he could get his group to tailgate mine and pick us apart one by one with little chance of return fire. I accelerated and split up, hoping that one group could somehow cover the other.

Things got ugly for my first group. All four opposing vehicles converged on them and they took heavy fire as they continued to accelerate attempting to leave the central section of the arena. My other vehicles circled back to come to their defense. One of the opposing vehicles made an extreme maneuver in order to get a shot in. He failed his control roll and he turned sideways and began to roll. The mob of vehicles continued to converge and one slipped around the rolling vehicle and then made a sharp turn to get another shot off. He failed his control roll as well and began a spin out. My cars turned to exit the central area and one of them failed a control roll, skidded, and then rammed a barrier.

My other two cars slowed down and concentrated fire on the spun out vehicle while the other vehicles attempted to pull around back into the action. The now stationary target could do nothing to prevent us from shooting up the driver. This left us with 3 cars on my team versus two on the other. In the final face off, I used one of my damaged cars to ram one of my opponent’s fresh cars. I had a pair of other vehicles slow down and combine fire against the other, taking out its driver from the rear.

On our second game, we agreed that the 4-on-4 “in formation” game was maybe not optimal. Off the cuff, we agreed to have vehicles from each side enter in pairs in each of the four gates. We rolled 1d6 to determine how fast each group was going and agreed to abide by the “tag team” rule of no fire unless we had no more than 2 vehicles in each section. The idea was the break things up a bit and make things a little less predictable. We also worked up some rules to make the speed modifiers come out a little more sensibly. (See the rules for “Head-on”, “Crossing the T”, and “Tailgating” below.)

The faster pairs entered the central region directly. In one pair, my opponent slowed down faster than me by just 5 or 10 mph or so. He was able to shoot up my car and sideswipe me multiple times and killed my vehicle in two seconds. In a similar situation on the opposite side, I had a similar advantage, but was not able to capitalize on it due to missed to-hit rolls, low damage rolls, and also to my not realizing that the sideswipe was a viable tactic.

In another corner, I slowed down to 5 mph while my opponent accelerated away. As soon as I could fire, I began shooting at his rear and quickly killed his driver. On the other side, our two vehicles fanned out, heading toward opposite corners. My opponent turned on a dime and got a lucky shot through my side before I could react. I turned back to face him down, taking more fire to that side. I turned into the central area, but miscalculated my turn. Another speeding opponent on the inside was able to take me out with a shot that just barely could hit that weakened side…. That was a mistake that easily cost me the game– especially when combined with the bad luck in another of the pairings.

One of my surviving vehicles ended up chasing one of the opposing team. I’d occasionally get a shot off, but the penalties were generally pretty bad and the walls in the arena were effective in eliminating the continuous fire bonus. In the chaos, I was reduced to a single vehicle. I ran it out of the central section just as two opposing vehicles were rounding the corner. As I’d lost my MG to an opponent the aggressively targeted fronts in spite of the extra penalty, I was hoping for a T-bone at 35 mph in order to save face. Things didn’t work out– the t-bone turned out to be a head-on, and the extra damage was enough to kill my driver permanently.

So we ended up each with a single victory and some continuing characters. We drove a lot more conservatively in the second game after all of the wipe outs in the first round. With to-hit targets running in the 9 to 11 range, we quickly discovered the importance of rams in the second game. I’m considering shifting the to-hit bonus for translating the GURPS targeting mods from +6 to +7– that would encourage a little more shooting and a little less ramming, hopefully– but I wouldn’t want that change to negatively impact other events beyond the amateur night scene.  Here’s my current proposed chart:

We had discussed using these house rules to eliminate handling status tracking, but I was concerned about its effects on a series of small D1 maneuvers and hazards that got more dangerous. After seeing these two games run with almost excessive use of d6 maneuvers being used in the dog fights, I’d almost consider using both systems. Any Bootlegger, T-stop, d4, d5, or d6 maneuver should require a driver skill roll as described in those house rules– on top of any control rolls required by the handling status. Of course, that adds complexity to an already complex system… which kinda defeats the purpose of the house rules…. It’s just a thought, though.

One thing was sure, we didn’t want to do all of our amateur night duels in the same arena. The next time we duel, it will be at the Amex Proving Grounds. We’ll have pairs of vehicles enter each of the four gates and then swerve off into their respective corner pockets– forcing hopefully a fairer initial duel than what we got with our last game. I’d almost recommend not giving the contestants complementary body armor like we did just to make sure things end quicker. Making to-hit rolls slightly easier and punishing hard core maneuvers a bit should create some more interesting games, I think….

After a two hour discussion deep in the night (and a few follow up emails and phone calls), Earlburt and I have come up with a campaign approach that addresses the deficiencies of our previous attempts. The first major constraint is that they’re only two participants in the campaign. Usually that means there’s no referee for arena dueling events– and in role-playing adventures, one person generally gets stuck refereeing and never gets to play. Our basic idea is to move toward each player taking on several individual characters or groups of characters and following their movements around the country during 2029 or so. We’ll take turns refereeing for each character and alternate playing the ruffians and cycle gangs that populate the highways. As much as is feasible, we’ll have the “NPC’s” of one session be the continuing character groups of the other (refereeing) player.

In our first “corporate Car Wars” campaign, we experimented with a large variety of massive duels meant to tour all the various flavors of dueling scenarios. Because we failed to create a fleshed out arena schedule, this soon devolved into “rules negotiations” wars– before each session we’d both carefully debate each nuance of the game to favor our current roster and pet tactics. Also, games that required large amounts of vehicle design put Earlburt at a disadvantage while games that required understanding the implications of the rules in an unusual setting put him in an advantaged position. Whoever could successfully lobby for a game that favored their strengths would usually win.

In our follow-up role-playing campaign set in the years 2033 and 2034, we discovered that the usual $80,000 pay-offs left little room for development. Sure, we could move to a big-rig or helicopter oriented game, but that’s not really where we wanted the focus to be. Another thing was that the character advancement rules were pretty broken– you gain skill levels pretty fast just by playing scenarios against cyclists. What we want to do now is focus in on the amateur duelist that’s just getting his start and is slowly scraping together the funds to patch together a decent dueling machine: the classic rags to riches campaign, but set in a grittier, poorer world. It’s no accident that Car Wars characters begin the game dead broke.

The first phase of the campaign will be a series of 4-on-4 arena duels. Characters begin with no wealth, no prestige, base level in driver, gunner, and handgunner, and a killer-kart. The first several scenarios will consist of arena combats featuring four killer-karts versus four killer-karts and fought by a total of 64 duelists. The survivors may salvage their kills. We’ll be playing Team Amateur night, which is a little different than the usual free-for-all. In a 4 on 4 match, there may be more than one surviving car on the winning team. They will each get to salvage their own kills and gain additional prestige for being winners of the event. People that score a kill but lose their car will still get some salvage– but they have to live to do it. (I don’t think I want to add incentive to actually murder people, so I wouldn’t allow duelists to pick up the salvage of people they kill.) That gives three outcomes for a person surviving a duel: keep a car and salvage his kills, “killed” and salvage kills, and “killed” with no kills to salvage.

Note that some variants of the Amateur Night rules have a winner-take-all component. If you lose three events or if you win, you can no longer enter anymore amateur night events. In the preliminary round of a Team Amateur Night game, two teams of 16 duellists each will play. They will be broken up into four 4-on-4 Killer Kart events. The four duellists from each team that have the highest amount of prestige (using the dollar amount of their salvage to break ties) move on to a special 4-on-4 “Stinger” event.

After two preliminaries are run (each with two separate teams totalling 32 duellists on a side), the top ranking duellists from the two Stinger rounds advance to a special 4-on-4 “Joseph Special” round. Meanwhile, the duelists that failed to advance into the Stinger round compete in a second-chance “Outlander” round. (If there’s ever not enough survivors to make a 4-on-4, downsize the event to a 3-on-3 or 2-on-2.) The highest ranked duelists from the both “Outlander” round and also the ones that failed to advance to the “Joseph Special” round come back for a last-chance “Stinger-RR” round. Finally the top ranking duellists from the “Joseph Special” and “Stinger-RR” rounds return for a final “Hot Shot” round.

The Amateur Night events are run in this order: 4 4-on-4 Killer Kart events, 1 4-on-4 Stinger event, 4 Killer Kart events, 1 Stinger event, 1 Outlander event, 1 Stinger-RR event, 1 Joseph Special event, and the final Hot Shot event. This is (in effect) a loose form of a double elimination tournament. Final team and duelist rankings are based on prestige scores and the salvage value of the kills. Comparing this to Allston’s rules, each Amateur Night contestant can play in up to four events– but the the salvage money will be spread around a little more. Duellists that score low prestige might not get invited back if the death rate is low enough. Everyone has a small chance of getting a Hot Shot, though.

         +- KK --+
     + --+       +
     +   +- KK --+
     +           +--> S --+
     +   +- KK --+    |   +
     + --+       +    |   +
     +   +- KK --+    |   +
O <--+                |   +--> JS --+
|    +   +- KK --+    |   +         +
|    + --+       +    |   +         +
|    +   +- KK --+    |   +         +
|    +           +--> S --+         +--> HS
|    +   +- KK --+    |             +
|    + --+       +    |             +
|        +- KK --+    |             +
|                     |             +
+---------------------+------> S2 --+

64 total duelists are entering. One-fourth of those will continue to the “Stinger” round– and half of those will go on to the “Joseph Special” round. One eighth of the original duelists will go to the “Outlander” round. This means that less than half of the initial duellists will progress past the first round. One-third of the Stinger and Outlander contestants will go to the Stinger-RR round. Half of the Joseph Special and Stinger-RR contestants will go on to the Hot Shot round. All of the surviving “Stinger” duelists will at least play a third round of some type… and the very best of the “Outlander” round will get a chance to take on the worst of the “Stinger” round.

(What if one team completely wipes out the other team in the “Joseph Special” and “Stinger-RR” rounds– and literally kills all of the opposing duellists?? In that case, dig back into the duelist rankings of the other team. Some of the guys that didn’t advance from the “Killer Kart” rounds might get tapped to come into the “Hot Shot” event!)

After the 14 Amateur night events are run, each player takes stock of his surving duelists. Those with vehicles and/or enough salvage money to become professional duellists may move on to compete in AADA sanctioned events. (Many arenas on the L’Outrance circuit offer off-beat “tag team” and “cat and mouse” events that would be highly suitable for the continuing campaign.) Those that have next-to-nothing may join pedestrian defence forces of a small or medium sized town. Duellists that fall into neither group may become bandits or join cycle gangs.

One idea of the campaign is to play all of the classic scenarios with continuing characters instead of building custom vehicles from scratch for each game. Hopefully, each player will end up a small cycle gang. If two duellists (with roughly equal vehicle values) are traveling to an arena to compete, then each gang can bid for the right to attack one of the duellists. The lower bidding gang may then pack-attack the other player’s duellist with cycles and cars that total in value no more than the bid amount. If one player can amass a large enough cycle gang, then he can play a Midville scenario against the other player’s pedestrian force and duelist characters. Also, players can pit their duellists against their opponent’s pedestrian forces in a Wheels versus Walkers scenario. Players that travel to regions where the classic GURPS scenarios were set from the Survival Guide supplements may opt to play those as well.

If players are feeling particularly competitive or if they want additional duelist characters and gang members, they can agree to play another series of 14 amateur night event games to bring in some new blood. Otherwise, the primary goal of the campaign is to create a believable continuity for scenarios and to also create balanced background information for characters before they become fully fleshed out for more “serious” role playing sessions. Just as Traveller characters are built with a series of die rolls to generate their background, we’ll do the same: but instead of die rolls and table look-ups, we’ll use Car Wars scenarios. (In a similar vein, the 64 character and 14 event Amateur Night games will produce enough data to develop “realistic” simulations for randomly generating Amateur Night graduates….)

I called the editor of CWIN the other day. And I thought I was a Car Wars addict– this guy is obsessed with violent vehicle material in all of its manifestations…. It amazes me every time I talk to him.  It’s crazy talking to someone that knows about every single supplement… and remembers every single letter to Backfire….

One thing he mentioned… there do exist original Australian versions of Mad Max and Mad Max II. It always bothered me that they dubbed over Mel Gibson lines, but it never crossed my mind that I could get the real thing…. We both agreed that Tanks was ultimately disappointing even though it was the first thing we wanted in 1984. We both lamented the drop off in role-playing content that occurred with the departure of Scott Haring. The increased focus on arena dueling hurt the game– and the dilution of the Uncle Alberts catalogues with boat equipment was a real bad move. The move to making the Vehicle Guides just a bunch of designs instead of a representative selection of what you could expect to find on the roads was a real downer. The Road Atlases were incredible, though. But Autoduel Champions poisoned the game with some pointlessly silly equipment that became “official” and spawned more stupidity. I always loved the choice of granularity in the rules, but the game’s inability to handle “Chassis and Crossbow” well was a problem. Messing with the simplicity of the game is tricky, though: at some point you just might as well get some real military miniatures rules and go at it if that’s what you want.

As it stands, the game is great for adventuring through a deadly future inhabited by many demented folks that are ready to engage in random acts of violence. While our tongues were never far from our cheeks, we were still serious about our fun. There’s only so much “realism” or silliness that you can add to the game, though….

We played the infamous Badlands Run adventure from ADQ 2/2 last night.  It was 5 hours of nonstop autodueling action.  We played more in line with the original 3rd edition pocket box rules, so there were lots of cars crashing and burning.  It didn’t take a lot of space as we only needed a few road sections to run the game.  Phased movement was unnecessary and we didn’t even need to use our turning keys, so things went quickly.

My player played his characters from last year’s 2033 campaign.  In those sessions, we played Convoy from ADQ 1/1, Road Duel and Pack Attack scenarios from the original pocket box, a weird role-playing session that culminated into a freaky Truck Stop variation of Pack Attack (with “magic” rules thrown in), and a slightly modified version of the classic Sunday Drivers game.  That would make this the seventh session for the campaign– with no shortage of Car Wars material in sight!!

My player took his Moose that he’d won from the Road Duel and also the two luxury sized vehicles that he’d designed for the Convoy scenario. He made no modifications to them in spite of all the new equipment that had come out in Uncle Albert’s in “recent” months.

One question that came up in the game was how long it would take to get armor repairs if you were in a hurry.  I played that the PC’s could generally get 5 mechanics to work on a car even if it was Sunday morning– but the players would have to pay double the standard rate for patching armor whether a mechanic was successful or not.  I played they were skill level 2 and could each successfully repair armor on  roll of 5 or better.  Hiring 5 mechanics for an hour by PC’s in a hurry costs $1500– but this trick only works in fortress towns.

Don’t read any further if you intend to play this scenario!!!

***

The insane tire wear rules from Convoy were dropped by the designers of Badlands Run. The scenario retains a similar rumors set-up. The final stretch of road forks just as in Convoy– with really bad things occurring if you try to take the short way. My player could see that coming from a mile away even without the hints in the rumors….

The “Gang of Thieves” were complete wimps. Like stock Vigilantes could do anything to $80,000 worth of PC firepower?! Rusty Pinkerton was a much tougher opponent. His tactics were very sound relative to the salvage gang… but by the time (2 seconds!) he realized things were going against him, his powerplant was on fire due to a shot from a laser! Still, the car he’d targeted had lost just about all of its side armor– both left and right! In the encounter that required the special counters from the mailing cover, it was all worth it just to see the look on my player’s face. The scenario was fairly harmless, though, except for to the guy in the station wagon!!

The rock throwing encounter was devastating. The Moose was completely demolished in that encounter and there was nothing the players could do. Also, the final ambush from the Hussar and the Iron Horse was unstoppable. Point blank shots from a pair of MG’s, a pair of HR’s, and an RR will send even the toughest car into a flaming roll. Fortunately the van carrying the VIP was equipped with a fire extinguisher– the players could still get him to San Francisco with only moments to spare. (Point blank tire shots were not very good for the ambushers….)

This was a very tough adventure with little room for miscalculation on the player’s part. I’d hate to see this game played with the helicopter coming out at the end!

I’ve always liked the extra skills that were introduced for Car Wars in ADQ issues 4/2, 7/1, and in the Compendium 2e.  The thing was, though, that we never bought very many of them for our characters.  If you knew you were going to be dueling very much, you maxed out your character points on Driver and Gunner skills– and that was it!  Previously, I suggested using “General” skill point awards from duels and adventures to improve non-combat skills, but after playing Traveller I see there’s a less heavy handed approach to accomplishing the same thing– at least in the case of former Boy Scout Commandoes.

Not everyone can claim to have been a Boy Scout Commando– this is only at the referee’s discretion.  Players using these character generation rules have to use them in sight of their fellow players if they intend to use their characters in a game: you can’t just roll up a hundred characters until you get what you want.  (Go play GURPS if you already know exactly what type of character you want to play!)

To determine your character’s background, first roll up the standard Traveller attributes for your character.  These consist of 6 2d6 rolls applied consecutively to Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social.  Don’t worry if you don’t know when, where, and how to adapt these values to your adventures: a consensus has never really emerged even among Traveller fans.  You could even throw them out altogether when you start playing your character: in a high tech future, skills are going to be a lot more important than attributes.  If they do impact a skill roll, they should never improve a roll 2d6 skill check by more than +1 or +2.

Scouts begin the character generation process at age 12.  Each year they will make rolls to determine if they survive, advance, and if they persevere.  The survival roll is required because like in the corps is dangerous: that really cool character with nifty skills and attributes is likely to improve each year he stays in the corps… but you just might lose him.  Not everyone advances and not everyone stays involved with their troop; rolls for both of those are required each time as well.

To become a scout, roll your Soc attribute or less on 2d6.

To Survive, roll 6 or more on 2D6.  (Add one to your roll if your Dex is 8 or higher.  Add two to your roll if your End is 10 or higher.)

To Advance, roll 9 or more on 2D6.  (Add one to your roll if your Int is 7 or higher.  Add two to your roll if your Edu is 9 or higher.)

To Perservere, roll 7 or more on 2D6.  (Add one if your Str is 9 or higher.)

Each time you advance, you gain a new skill at base level.  When you advance to Tenderfoot, you gain the Handgunner skill.  First Class scouts receive Paramedic skill.  Star scouts gain Driver skill… and Death scouts pick up Gunner skill.  If a scout fails his survival roll, he’s dead.  When you finally get a character to survive the process, you can use the dead ones as fellow scouts from your character’s patrol that all died on a particularly gruesome mission.  If you fail a perseverance roll, then your character quit scouting for some reason and the process ends there; you do pick up your skills for that year, however.

Each year your character remains in scouting, he gets to roll on a skill table.  If he doesn’t have the skill he rolls, then he receives it at base level.  If he already has the skill, then he gains a level in it.  Low ranking scouts roll on the Skill Awards Table.  Star and Death scouts roll on the Merit Badges Table.  Scouts gain these skills in addition to the ones they pick up for advancement.

Skill Awards
1) Survival
2) Stealth
3) Scrounging
4) Handgunner
5) Runner
6) Climber

Merit Badges
1) Driver
2) Gunner
3) Mechanic
4) Explosives
5) Paramedic
6) Martial Arts

The only new skill in the above list is Scrounging– use that to help determine if your character can find supplies, ammo, and/or spare parts for jury-rigging equipment.

Once you survive your 6th year of scouting, fail a perseverance roll, or drop out, add up your character’s total skill levels in Driver and Gunner (including your base levels.)  If you have less than 3 total skill levels there, then round out your character by adding the difference in new skills or skill levels.  For instance, if your character was Driver-1, you could pick up Gunner-0 at this point.  If your character had no skill levels at all in Driver or Gunner, you might pick Mechanic-2 or even Politics-2.

The first character I rolled up with these rules had 9,9,5,7,10, and 3 for attributes and was Handgunner-1, Stealth-0, Scrounging-0, Paramedic-1, Driver-1, Gunner-0, Mechanic-0.  (Yeah, he actually did make his Soc roll to join the troop!)

Note that Car Wars skills are much more effective than their Traveller “level zero” counterparts.  But these rules can be used in either game, because most of the additional skills the Car Wars character receives will be in non-combat disciplines.  In Traveller, adding a few level zero skills to a character will probably not imbalance the game– in fact many referees do so already– but referees should be aware that this system can yield level 1 skills or even level 2 skills as well.  While characters should technically be able to join a standard military service after 4-6 years in the BSC, referees might want to limit this generation process to only those characters that are from a violent post-apocalyptic world– a world whose citizens might not have access to the usual Imperial careers!

Matt Barton has written up a comprehensive account of the development of Computer Role Playing Games.  Autoduel stands firmly in the Golden Age and is noted there for being one of the first “open ended” games.  The only other game like that at the time would have been Firebird’s Elite, which was a sort of computerized Traveller.  (Thanks to The Vintage Gamer for bringing parts I and II of the series to my attention.)

I saw a demo of Ultima I while in elementary school and was blown away.  I played pirated copies of Ultima II and III until the disks wore out.  When I finally could spend money on these things I was sorely disappointed.  A copy of Amber Star refused to run on my Atari ST… and my version of Temple of Apshai Trilogy would crash randomly.  I got completely stuck very early on in a later “martian” themed Ultima game written for the IBM.  I played a free text game on the ST called Hack compulsively and thought a graphical over the counter version would be even better… but the one I payed money for just plain stunk.

The idea of CRPG’s has always fascinated me, but I’ve honestly never really had that good of an experience with them.

Are you a Munchkin afficionado?

Wil Wheaton is.  While Ogre didn’t make his off the cuff list of “will always play” games, he has mentioned it before in an interview.  (Oh, and his fans did make the photoshopped cigar magazine covers that he asked for, too.  Heh heh.)

I just can’t get the hang of the game– probably because I end up playing it just with two players.  The fun of Munchkin comes from the mind games that emerge in the group dynamic– who will merit the smiting of the “whoop cards?”  With two players, that dynamic is gone because there’s only one place for the hurt to fall.

The thing I can’t stand about it is how everyone has, just as in Chez Geek, all of these randomly powered cards in front of them.  Not only do they interact in weird ways, but unless you’ve memorized the abilities, it’s very difficult to “read” the current situation.  This makes it a pain to plan any coherent tactics….

Anyways, its pretty cool to see that CAR WARS is still high up on Wheaton’s list.  I knew he played it way back, but I didn’t know it was something that he’d still play.

One of the things that surprised me about post-ADQ Car Wars fandom was the attachment to the whole armed vehicle genre.  CWIN, for instance, covered news of post-apocalyptic armed autos in all of their manifestations: board games, computer games, card games, and probably even books and movies.  I guess the genre of the game was never that important to me– oh, Boy Scout Commandoes and dangerous pizza delivery runs fired my imagination as much as anyone.  It was highly accessible fantasy to be sure, but the endeavor of playing Car Wars was something much more than all of that. 

Other critics have labeled Car Wars as merely being a “design-a-thing” game, but I don’t think that’s the best category to describe what its all about either.  Car Wars has its feet firmly planted in two contradictory worlds: it’s is part of a family mini-games– inexpensive and relatively easy to learn games that utilize the trappings of older wargames– and at the same time Car Wars is part of a family of monster games… mini-games that raged out of control in a series of contradictory expansions and errata culminating into comprehensive “Compendiums” and “Doomsday” editions.  In other words, the true family of games that Car Wars belongs to includes Battletech and Star Fleet Battles– and genre and even the fact that it uses a design system is secondary to its categorization.

Comfirmation of my approach to “gaming cladistics” can be found in the excellent article, An Introduction to Elegance.  He classifies them as “quasi-RPG wargames” and uses them to epitomize the lack of elegant design in American games.  He then sets up the German games invasion as being infinitely superior in the gaming elegance department… and he uses an example from computer programming to support his argument.

But I don’t think it’s entirely fair to compare an abstract game to a simulation.  While “Quasi-RPG wargames” can of course benefit from techniques developed by the German designers, they are not inherently inelegant.  It’s more fitting to view Settlers of Catan as a more elegant version of the Monopoly and M.U.L.E. tradition of game.  In this discussion, it is important to understand the design differences forced upon a game by its choice of scope and granularity. 

The Car Wars design system is extremely elegant when judged from the correct vantage point.  The equipment list if finite and colorful… and the exact combination of speed, maneuverability, defense, and offense capability can be chosen at the whim and style the designer.  Complex equations are necessary only when calculating speed and range… simple addition tallies and percentage increases are sufficient everywhere else.  Most importantly, cost is an accurate balancing factor: Battletech and Star Fleet Battles both had to develop kludgy “Battle Value” and “Base Point Value” systems to accomplish the same thing.  Finally, the statistical values developed in the design process impact all of the various rules subsystems in clearly defined and significantly game-impacting ways.

Returning to the programming example… a nifty “elegant” abstraction is only relevant to a project if it can accomplish the same requirements as the “ugly” solution.  Sometimes it is the right decision to simplify things… but at some point the maxim “as simple as possible but no simpler” comes into play.  German games are fun… they are interesting toys… but they don’t even attempt to solve the same problems that we were trying to solve back in the eighties.  And I’m not sure that a “germanified” Car Wars game could come close to capturing the flavor of an effective dueling machine tossed into mortal combat at a funky arena.

Anyways, just a minor quibble with an otherwise solid post.  Check out the My Play blog for more interesting discussion and gaming analyis!

Now the Hot Shot was the example car used to demonstrate damage allocation in just about every edition of the game.  Of course, once you were armed with equipment from any of the Uncle Albert’s catalogues, you probably wouldn’t step near one of the things.  How on earth could anyone think that was a good design?  You might explain it away by conjecturing that the original run was intended for fighting against early chassis and crossbow style ruffians… but I think its actually listed in the AADA guide that these won AADA championships two years in a row.  And that was before the variant fire rules that made it possible for cars like the Hotshot to actually set things on fire!

This problem wasn’t fixed even with 5th edition Car Wars.  The Piranha got numerous improvements… with all three machine-guns moved to the front and loaded with incendiary ammo.  It was more than a match for the old same-old same-old Hotshot….

Anyways, here’s my version that I worked up during the early nineties– er, forties.  With a double dose of the minedropper option, incendiary mines and bullets, and extra armor, this version is a little more survivable.  Not by much, maybe, but it will set things on fire!

Hot Shot II— Luxury; Extra Heavy chassis; Heavy suspension; Large PP w/SCs; 4 Solid tires.  Driver w/Body Armor.  2xMachine Gun w/40xIncendiary; 2xMinedropper w/20xNapalm; 2xFlamethrower w/20xStandard.  4xLink; Fire Extinguisher; Targeting Computer; HD Brakes.  137 pts. Plastic (F: 40 R: 29 L: 29 B: 29 T: 5 U: 5); 1×10 pt., 2 spc. Plastic CA (Driver).  Cost: $19,990, Wgt: 6,520, HC: 3, Top Speed: 90, Accel: 5.

[This vehicle was designed with Compendium 2e rules using SPARK’s nifty design tool.]

Some vehicle designs are just meant to happen.  You pick what you want and it all falls into place: no fussing or tinkering.  The Boromir is one of those.  Its as close to a perfect design as any I’ve worked up.  I loved driving a Boromir… you might not win the event, but you could count on taking at least one person down!

The Boromir has the heavy hitting power of the APFSDS anti-tank gun.  Accuracy is improved with a single weapon computer.  The flame cloud streamer is great for nailing vehicles that have stalled… it’s one of the few dropped weapons that can really contribute to an arena fight.  Maneuverability is improved with spoiler, airdam, and heavy-duty brakes.  Tires are not skimped on: they’re solid with the usual guards and hubs, too.  There’s not one extraneous item on the thing.

(Division 20 seems like the optimal budget for an effective vehicle, to me.  If you throw too much more money at it, then you may as well get two vehicles if you have the drivers available.  Division 30 is just outright silly.)

Boromir — Pickup; Heavy chassis; Heavy suspension; Super PP; 4 Solid tires.  Driver w/Body Armor, Personal Fire Extinguisher.  Anti-Tank Gun w/10xAPFSDS; Flame Cloud Streamer w/2xFlame Cloud.  Single-Weapon Computer; HD Brakes; Spoiler; Airdam; Ramplate F.  169 pts. Plastic (F: 60 R: 34 L: 34 B: 29 T: 6 U: 6); 2×10 pt. Plastic Hubs F; 2×10 pt. Plastic Guards F.  Cost: $19,998, Wgt: 7,149, HC: 2 (3), Top Speed: 95, Accel: 5.

[This vehicle was designed with Compendium 2e rules using SPARK’s nifty design tool.  The output above is straight out of the spreadsheet and isn't quite the same format as the original material, but for a nice free tool... I can't complain.  Note that the designer seems to count the weight of personal equipment!]