If I had a monitor the size of my game table so that I could take in the entire picture of the game at once, that would go a great distance in helping me feel more connected to PC games as I do board games. Yes, you can zoom out but then everything is near microscopic and you can't tell what is what aside from red and blue dots. With the boardgame, you lean back in your chair and you take in the entire breadth of the battle.
Also, with a boardgame, nothing gets done unless you do it so you have to intimately know the game's mechanics and thus you know exactly the outcome of battles and who is in supply and who isn't and what reinforcements are due and where they'll be coming from. With a PC game, I lose focus and concentration because all that I want to do is click to engage in battle. I don't bother with the odds, the supply status, or anything. I see that I'm a "9" and the enemy next to me is a "6" so I attack. I then see my "9" go to an "7" and the enemies "6" to a "3" and it moves back a hex. I don't what the odds of the attack were nor do I really care even though if I click enough buttons I can probably get a full battle report. With a boardgame, I have 2:1 odds and I roll a 5 and I see the results and I apply it. I know how and why it came out the way that it did and I feel like I am in the game.
And sorry, that was a bit of a PC vs boardgame rant that has little to do with Ron's game. I played his earlier games and it was closer than a lot of other games as far as feeling somewhat like a boardgame but frankly, I even feel disconnected in VASSAL games now because of all the scrolling that needs to be done and when things get screwy with the log files; such as what I'm experiencing in a pbem game now. We missed a step and now we have to figure out what log to go back to in order to unsort it all and I just lose interest. Maybe it's just old age and a failing attention span.
