From board game to online

[Tisifoni]

Translating a board game to online probably works best where a player can complete a full move with little or no intervention by their opponent.

My, very limited, experience of playing Unconditional Surrender online has been of a game where there are a lot of interactive phases within a move that slows it down.

I want to transport an army from Britain to an already liberated part of France. I indicate the move, I allocate the convoy protection, or don't, then it stops, my opponent chooses whether to intercept or not, breaking my move. If I move through more than one sea zone, then it can be broken more than once. The same can be true of every naval operation and every bombing operation.

Could the game experience be provided with different mechanics ?
Allocate naval units to sea zones with the option to change deployment each move.
Allocate convoys to supply routes with again the option to change deployment.
Allocate air units either to tactical offence, strategic defence or strategic offence.
In your move planning the use of naval and air assets during your opponents move, speeding up interactions.

[MarkDey]

I agree, and think that would be an ideal implementation for a piece of software that was custom made for Unconditional Surrender. BGA is not set up to allow that sort of streamlining of the process, although some time-saving enhancements have been incorporated into the interface (automatic supply line tracing, checkboxes for interception skipping, etc.) I think that the best solution at this point is to work with your opponent to find ways to speed up the process.

[Andrew Davidson]

You have a point. Because BGA will not allow changes to the mechanics, we're stuck with the current micromanagement but that's the main interest of the game as the strategic options are quite limited. For a different experience, we must hope for other games to be implemented. There are some quite elegant games which simulate WW2 in Europe at a high level without lots of fiddly detail. These include Quartermaster General, Blitzkrieg! ("World War Two in 20 Minutes") and Hilter's War (spelling changed per Monty Python to please the censors)

[Dren608]

One of the things I offer my opponent especially the as the Allies, is to "escort" each supply/naval move. IF they are pretty sure the Axis won't intercept an escorted naval move, they can say stop interceptions for phase and I escort anyway to get the Sortie count right (as if the threat of an interception was there for each such move) It helps a bit, but I found when you are going to do a bunch of intercept-able stuff to set a time for both of you to be "at table" and just go through the mechanics