A & A Winter Mailing (Non-UK)

This is to get you up to date on what is going on at our end.

Firstly, we are offering a flat rate discount of £2.00 per item on our range of rules if ordered direct from us before the end of January 2009. This will allow you to buy those Christmas presents or spend those pennies delivered by Santa.

This discount is in addition to the £1.00 per item discount available to members of NWS and/or SOTCW (this discount is only applied once chaps !)

Either order by email, or using the order form which can be downloaded from the website.

Remember you can now pay using Paypal if you so wish, and details about how to do that are shown on the website. Remember when ordering by this way that we still need your postal address !

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Now what are we working on for your future delight.

We are progressing, albeit rather slowly, with rules for large scale air battles, so that games with bomber streams and fighter interceptors will be a practical proposition. We would recommend 1/600th models for this. Aircraft formations would be represented by single models (or if pushed by counters, though the wargamer in us wants models on the table). Each formation will have up to 48 aircraft in it (that’s the plan at the moment anyway).

We have now got straight in our minds how the air combat will work and have got to the stage where we must start crunching those numbers for you.

Fighters will generally have the role of attackers and other aircraft will generally be defending. As appropriate aircraft will have an offensive shooting and/or a defensive shooting value. Formations with larger numbers of aircraft will get to shoot more than small formations.

More on this will appear on the website some time soon. In our development work it seems that it will be possible for the game to cover air warfare from 1916 onwards, with no irritating break in the time line. So far we have not come across any difficulty with this concept.

A parallel development which has been a bee in MY bonnet for a while is a new look at aircraft vs aircraft combat, Scramble has being a long time favourite, though its age is now showing. We have developed several new ideas in the last few years which would be usefully applied to a new set of air rules. As part of our large scale game calculations, it has become apparent that the numbers that come out for determining combat can also be applied, though in a different fashion, to a game with individual aircraft.

Scramble used a linear calculation for hit points, and this will be changed in the new system, which means that bombers will no longer seem invincible. The system will also allow for damage to specific parts of the aircraft, rather like the critical hits which we had, but with a bit more flavour, so the shape of the target aircraft and the angle at which you approach may play more of a role. Selective targeting, such as the engines, is also an aim.

A lot of research has been done about the actual effectiveness of various aircraft guns. This has been quite interesting, and there will be visible differences in effectiveness, even between guns of similar calibres.

That is all we can say on that for the moment.

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SMR Stuff

Well, I have at last made excellent progress on the ship data update (I have got to Russia 1906, so the end is in sight at long last that being USA 1945). The ship data is being expanded back to 1885 ish, so the RJW is a definite possibility. We have also prepared a suitable alternative shooting system for both guns and torpedoes, which follows the methods we used for aircraft in SMR3. The resulting system will be a bit more bloody because you will get more shots with larger numbers of guns. We still need to work on the method of Critical Hit generation.

There will be a new ship construction download PDF in the near future (this will combine the current separate WW1 and WW2 documents with updated and corrected examples).

The new ship data PDFs will be put on the website around Christmas (about a year later than I’d have liked). After THAT I would like to create an Excel spreadsheet with all the actual game data for the various ships and their variants. That will take some time to get programmed.

Finally, we would like to thank you for your continued support, and for the feedback and questions, which we do appreciate.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Finch and Alan Butler
Partners, A and A Games
Visit our website at www.aandagames.co.uk