Feedback requested on Kickstarter Project

[jskiff]

Greetings All:

I am writing to request feedback on my Kickstarter project for old-school style, hex and grid wargames.  The project can be found here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bulletsandboots/fight-the-battles-that-shaped-the-world

I am the designer/coder/janitor/web guru/bottle washer and marketing guy.  I have been working on this for a long time, albeit as a low priority in the lulls of my life.  The skeleton and look/feel of the games are representative of what's in the videos.  I launched the project to learn if there's even a desire for these sorts of games-- because, as I have looked here and other places, I'm just not sure that there is....

Obviously, the project hasn't latched, and I'm not looking to sell it here.  Instead, what I'd like is to learn where potential clients think it falls short:

1.  Is it the look and feel of the game?  Are we 'over' counters drawn on screen?  Would sprites be better?  Or does the whole thing need to be 3d with shading?
2.  Is it the subject?  Are these battles no longer interesting?
3.  Is the Graphic User Interface (GUI), which is admittedly simplistic and needs to be rehashed, a blocker?
4.  Is the project too immature for people to be making a decision?
5.  Am I asking the wrong questions?

I really appreciate any help you can give me with this... I have plenty of projects on my plate, with my wife always willing to add more.  Before I decide what to do with this one, I'd like some external perspectives.

Please provide any feedback either here, or via email at info@bulletsandboots.com, however you prefer.

Thank you.

John Skiffington
Bullets and Boots,
Hammond, LA

[LongBlade]

First of all, it's great you're posting here. We've got a Kickstarter column on our front page and the guys who work on it I'm sure would love to chat with you.

Give me some time to look this over and I'll see if I can get you some feedback.

[Staggerwing]

I checked out the videos and noticed some have 4 minutes of 'dead air' at the end. I'd try and edit that out just for appearence.

The games look nice and basic, reminding me a little of the look of early HPS games. Obviously the river hexes have programmed movement penalties but are you planning to do the same for roads, forest, swamp, etc? What about supply and ZOC? Fatigue, routing, fortifying, lagering? I'd definitly work on a slight bit of eye candy after you have most of your core mechanics down but I don't think you need actual 3d. Maybe just beveled edges on the counters and shadows accenting buildings and forest edges.  For a game mechanic you might want to add a random event simulating lost and intercepted orders, perhaps with an enemy unit's movement appearing on the map briefly with a slight bit of variability as to the exact hex. The unit slowly fades away (and may in fact have moved already from that spot) until actually encountered.

Keep it up! I'd love to see the next stages.

[jskiff]

Hi Staggering.

Thanks much for taking the time to leave me some feedback on my project. 

I have no idea how 'dead air' came to be in my videos, but I'll certainly take that out.

Nice and basic is the goal, especially for the first few that we make.  We do have movement penalties/bonuses incorporated for all hexes (not just river, but roads, woods, walls, etc). 
We do utilize ZOC, because I don't see how you can 'not' have that in a hex game.

We do not have any concept of supply in the "Cross the Delaware" game, because it was a short battle, and Washington had his troops carry extra rounds and food.  For Gettysburg and QuatreBras, we have implemented a basic 'ammo limit' concept-- a unit can only fire 'n' number of times / day --  which will be tweaked as needed during play testing.  We do not yet have fatigue. 

"Routing", if you mean do we have waypoints for movement? then the answer is yes.  If you mean, can a unit be 'routed', as in reduced to such a state that it flees the field, we have that as well, in the larger two games. 

Fortifying, not yet, but it is part of the plan for the larger two games.

Lagering -- I'm not familiar with the term.  If this is akin to 'skirmishing', or some other light infantry tactic, then no, we don't, but we probably should, at least in Quatre Bras.  If this is more along the lines of making lager, then, well, we're more of a "Crown Royal" kind of outfit.  Please explain this?

Beveled edges for counters and forest edges -- great idea, simple to implement, we'll add that to the list of updates we are making.

Random events simulating lost or intercepted orders...  we have random events around river crossings in Cross the Delaware, as well as random events that might lead to Washington's early discovery by the Hessians do to better recon.  We haven't done anything like this in the other two games, yet, but it is such an important concept that it is part of the first release.

We also think we take an interesting approach to command and control.  Commanders can give orders to units as far as path routing and attack commands at the start of battle, but once they are some distance away from those units, they 'go dark', and aren't visible to the commander any longer until some outcome of their actions would make them visible.   Most software designers, even in board games, implement fog of war for the enemy.  We do it for the home team as well.

Thanks again for your feedback, and please keep it coming. 

-John

[Staggerwing]

Re: lagering, I meant that troops are settled in somewhere in a town or city and need time to form up such as was the case with the Hessians. In retrospect this is probably less of a concern at the scale of your game but could come into play if a unit has not moved in a while and is not is sighting range of an enemy unit it could suffer a slight penalty when combat starts suddenly (first sighting and combat happen in the same enemy move- surprise attack).

[jskiff]

Ah. 

Yep, we model this behavior now  as part of our command and control paradigms.  Any unit that doesn't have LOS to an enemy and hasn't received any orders in 3 hours automatically 'disperses'.  While dispersed, a unit cannot attack, receives a penalty while defending, and suffers command lag of an hour if new orders are received - this is because a dispersed unit needs time to reform before any order can be executed.  The 3 hour mark is arbitrary and based totally on gut feel, and may be adjusted during play testing.  The one hour mark to reform is strictly tied to the length of one game turn, which in all games is currently 1 hour.  That timing is something else that may need tweaking, which would require changes to movement factors for units... but is not overly difficult.

Thanks for the education on the term -- it is good to learn new things.

-John

[Staggerwing]

In retrospect, 'Lager' may not have been the best term used to describe what I intended. A little more research indicates that it is actually spelled 'Laager' and refers to a fortified camp as opposed to the act of 'quartering' troops in town. Something I previously came across somehow made me think they were similar terms.