You know, one of the NICE things about a board game is that you can change how the game is played. Automating everything destroys that.
Lots of games started out as “house variants” of earlier games. IF I want full automation of things, I’ll just play something marketed as a computer game.
And, of course, the last thing I want while playing a board game is BUGGY automation. That’s even worse than zero automation.
Automation should be left to things like fog of war (has A spotted B’s hidden units?)
I do not agree that automation is generally a bad thing, though I agree that it is nice to have some flexibility in how you play a game.
What I’ve done for most of the modules I’ve done, is to make automation optional. That is, you can turn on or off automatic stuff like odds calculations, combat resolutions, reinforcements, and so on. See for example
In all these modules you can turn off automation from File→Preferences→Module-Name.
Something like line-of-sight and similar can be quite hard to implement in Vassal (I know VASL does something), because it requires a relatively complete knowledge of the game state, which Vassal doesn’t provide (at least not without a lot of custom code).
I find that some automation can be quite helpful in playing a game, in that it takes away the burden of some of the tedious book-keeping and other tasks, and I believe that makes a game much more accessible to beginners, for example. I also think that automation can free up some brain-power to focus on the game rather than the game-mechanics.
That said, I think users should have as much of a choice as possible.
Vassal is meant to PRESENT the state of a game, and to allow PLAYERS to manipulate the game’s state.
If you’re using VASSAL to implement the game mechanics, you’re doing it wrong.
For example, There’s a game with a rather huge map that has several weather zones. To remind players of what the local weather is, I made some automated weather markers that can be liberally sprinkled around the map, with each weather zone having its own set, which, when a player changes the master marker on a status panel, all of the local, on-board weather markers for the corresponding zone change to match that master weather marker.
I would not even THINK of trying to implement the weather rules, even though it’s trivial to do so, because VASSAL IS NOT MEANT TO RUN or even understand the game. The sole purpose of vassal is to PRESENT THE GAME, and optionally, assist in “book keeping” type functions. (like "clicking on “Elim” automatically moves the piece to a player-specific dead pile of pieces that can be returned to the game, where as clicking on “Surrender” automatically moves the piece to a “permanently removed” pile. I do NOT automate the combat results table. Why? Because now you’re introducing ALL of same problems of computer games – the computer has control, not the players. The beauty of tabletop wargaming is that the players can choose to implement whatever mechanics they like. Add house rules. Modify the game play. Develop a NEW game from an existing game. Try out new mechanics. NONE OF THAT is possible if you’re automating the entire game… then you’re just trying to make VASSAL as a (slow) video game.