Checkpoint restart

[Andrew Davidson]

I'm playing the Main Event as the Western Allies (#247751046). It's Jan 1941 and my focus is on the Mediterranean strongpoints -- Gibraltar and Tobruk. Managing the sorties on my air/naval units seems vital so I was unhappy when I exited from the upgrade phase too soon, so that I didn't get to replenish as planned. I'm not sure what misclick caused this but so it goes.

Snafus like this can wreck a game, I suppose. As a long campaign is quite an investment in time, it would be good to have an option to restart the game at an earlier date. I suppose that the log file would allow the game to be wound back so perhaps there's already a function for this? Of course, all the players would have to agree.

Another similar option which I'd like would be to copy or clone a game. Ideally, I'd like to be able to copy the position and switch it to solitare mode so I could rehearse a big deal operation like an invasion. In the current campaign, I wanted to invade Tobruk but wasn't sure of the mechanics and so played the Med scenario in solitaire mode a few times to test it out. That worked out well but I've still got "finger trouble".

Andrew

[RobertBr]

If you go the Menu button below the map on the left you will find options for saving games and loading games. You can create a table by saving then open a new game and load that saved state into the game. That functionality does 90% of what you want.

If you've seen my video on endgames https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZMeRu6qdMI&t=1s I use exactly this function to replay several times the same position to test out the results of different hypothetical results.

On the mistakes thing, you are basically out of luck. The BGA philosophy is that you should just suck up your mistakes (big as they are no single mistake will ever completely cost a game). USE, thanks to Lunalol's extensive efforts, already has much more undo capacity than is normal for the site in general.

[Andrew Davidson]

Ok. This is my first game and it took me a while to discover the menu button which I have mainly been using to zoom the map. Initially I didn't even know how to zoom and so had to scroll a lot. I now see that the red menu has save/load game buttons. I tried making a save and it has downloaded a file. But I'm still fuzzy on what the load function does. Can it over-write the state of an existing table?

More generally, I don't much mind losing and so often jump into the deep end of a game that I don't know how to play. BGA is good for this as it knows the rules and so helps you learn a game. The main issue is finding the hotspots for your current options can be tricky sometimes.

For this game, I started with the campaign despite the warnings because I'm very familiar with such WW2 strategy games and the grand strategy is the main point. But the game is proving to be quite slow to play because of all the detailed interaction like supply routes and individual battles. So, I can see that it might be a shame if some big deal battle or event that decided the war were to be spoilt by a misclick. Playing the rest of the game out over months might then be little fun.

In history, the real participants didn't have the advantage of hindsight or a rulebook. And so they had to find out the hard way how the "game" worked. But they sometimes deliberately experimented -- the Dieppe raid, for example. I like the role-playing feel of uncertainty when you're not quite sure how things work...

[Andrew Davidson]

One more point is the annoyance of losing PPs if you don't spend them. As the Western Allies, I initially got used to having lots of PPs that I couldn't do much with. This seemed weird because, in other games, you can invest in building units or doing research. But now I'm doing more fighting and discovering how expensive the logistics are, I don't like wasting any PPs. And it hurts that you can't save PPs from turn to turn. It reminds me of the Squander Bug!

[RobertBr]

To load create a new game and do the load there, the load will overwrite the existing position at the table.