Heya. Making my own module.

Hey guys,

Obviously, I’m new here. I just started looking around and I absolutely love the system. I’ve just started building my own module (star trek-based campaign) today.

I’m just starting to get my head around some things: double blind games, prototypes, etc. The more I get down into it the more fun this is getting.

I do have a couple questions if you’d indulge me for a moment:

  • Is there any sort of method of resource management? I have three or so resource units that I’d like the engine to keep track of. If not, I can do it by other means, but having Vassal do it would be much easier, and wouldn’t rely so much on the honour system.

  • Research trees. I know that this isn’t an actual game engine, but rather a tool to play a game. I am curious, however. You see, I’m playing a long-term campaign (each turn is going to be 6 months) and new technologies will be shifting the events of the campaign. Is there any sort of way to tell if different players have researched certain things?

  • Suppose during the events of a campaign, someone researches a more advanced phaser. Suppose, also, that every counter/ship has an attack rating. When someone researches that new phaser, ships for that players fleet should be able to get an increase in an attack rating… is that something I should do manually?

  • I’ve read the entries about Double-Blind games - for things like submarines and the like. This would reflect a Romulan cloaking device wonderfully (a cloaked ship could only be seen by the Romulan player or the GM). However, is it possible to have a certain Range-of-sight so that only vessels within a certain radius of each other can be seen? Setting all ships to invisible until they reach the sight-radius of another vessel would be a pain, but I’m willing to do it.

  • One last question. I’m thinking about adding something like “Characters” that would add bonuses to whatever ship they are stationed on. Is there a way to attach a counter to another counter and have bonuses conveyed to its host counter’s statistics?

Again, I’m just starting out, and I know I’m throwing a lot out there. I just want to know what sort of limitations I’m going to be dealing with when I get into deeper aspects of building my module.

Thanks for the help, guys. I really appreciate it.

Well, I have resources down. A counter/ship/station can “move” to mine metal or build research points. That is then added to the total Metal or Research pool for that race. certain operations done by counters will remove those points.

Points are being kept track of by a new map which basically sits at the top of the screen and contains two counters (its only two because I only have two resources, more can be added as I need). The two counters just have labels that reflect the current resource level of that race. The label on the metal counter goes up if I have a facility or ship Mine, it goes down if I were to “build” something.

I have a theory on how to do Research trees, but my god it’s going to be a pain. Basically it’ll work like this, it has another map for each player. Each research topic will have a counter. Each counter can be right-clicked and “researched” reducing the research resource, but enabling other right-click menus. Dependancies can be build much the same way. The problem is thats a LOT of events, and I’m not really sure how I want to impliment the effects of research, but at least I know it can be done, albeit very convoluted-like. In other words, I don’t know if it will be worth it.

Thus spake “Furyofaseraph”:

Could you describe this in a bit more detail? Are these just quanties which
you want to display? (E.g., Ore: 35, Gold: 16) Or something else?

I’ve seen this handled in cardboard games by having tokens or cards which
correspond to the technologies on the tree. You might have the tree as a
card, with spaces for tokens for technologies which have been achieved.

If you want this to be tracked automatically, you’d need to do it with
triggers.

What you can do w/r/t fog of war is pretty limited at the moment. Somebody
other than me would be better able to comment on this.

Probably you’d also do this with triggers.


J.


Messages mailing list
Messages@forums.vassalengine.org
forums.vassalengine.org/mailman/ … engine.org

Post generated using Mail2Forum (mail2forum.com)

Yeah, thats what I ended up thinking, as far as the triggers go. I appreciate you’re response :slight_smile:.

I do have a new question though. How does the Property Sheet expose its data? If I have a property sheet in a prototype, can I use dynamic properties in a Counter to alter the property sheet’s properties?

wouldn’t it be something like $Powersheet.Wrp$ where ‘powersheet’ is the name of the property sheet and ‘Wrp’ is the name of the property? or do I have to do $Powersheet$.$Wrp$

Thus spake “Furyofaseraph”:

I believe it’s the latter, but I’m not certain about that. I’ve never used
Property Sheets myself.


J.


Messages mailing list
Messages@forums.vassalengine.org
forums.vassalengine.org/mailman/ … engine.org

Post generated using Mail2Forum (mail2forum.com)

Hey guys,

Thought I’d just post a picture of some of the counters for my module, just for kicks.