Now that the last month of games are in the process of starting I thought we might as well start working out what worked well and what didn't.......

So any constructive criticism is welcome.....

The idea was quite ambitious, new-ish for online blue max, and I got a lot of feedback from players right up until the beginning of it, which meant the rules kept changing until the start. I tried to keep it simple and knew it would be a lot of work, but it turned out to be even more work than I expected

These are some of my own thoughts:

1) Casualties

The casualty system didn't work at all. At first it seemed that the 40% replacements each squadron received were too high........so this was cut down to 20%.....and even this was too high. It was also too difficult to keep track of casualties in order to affect the combat readyness for the next month.......

I think it's important to simulate casualties in one way or another, even if it's done simply. This will need sorting for next time.....even if it's a case of just deducting one campaign point for each aircraft lost.


2) Missions

There may have been some issues with the balance of missions.....it might have been better to do some "playtesting" before the campaign started. An example is the balloon busting missions. Was one a lot harder than the other? I really don't know. Were there too many mission types? It would be easier if there were less, that's for sure......

3) Results/Admin

There was quite a lot of demand for more detailed results. The complexity of sorting the admin side of it meant I simply couldn't provide what people wanted. In the end I thought that the % of control graphs/data was most effective and easier to produce. How results are gathered and maintained will need thinking about in detail next time - it may even work best to have someone else simply to compile the results and allow someone/me to concentrate on running the campaign. When this one is over, I WILL produce some more detailed results and analysis - but it was impossible to do this during the campaign.

I was also caught under an avalanche of e-mails from people with questions and as I work full time, doing shifts, I couldn't answer them all....



4) Ideas for next time

I would be open to radically changing the whole system next time........even having some squadrons operating single types of aircraft eg. one squadron flying SE5s, one squadron Bristol F2bs etc. That way you could have two squadrons flying on the same side in one mission - eg. 2 players from Squadron A escorting bombers flown by players from Squadron B. Although it would be great, it'd be a little complex......

5) Summary

The system was still too complex and needs to be simplified further, in my opinion. I'd be very reluctant to do another campaign for a long time unless it was simplified - the work was too much....

......although it was a completely different way of playing Blue max and was fun........