new to operational games

[Wolfgang]

I'm new to operational level wargaming and had a few things i was curious about:

How many turns are your average pbem games?

I hear some of the largest campaigns are over a hundred turns... this sounds like a lotta fun. Do the grand campaigns get played out in pbem matches much?

Is anyone playing kharkov '43?

[Mr Grumpy]

I would say it is impossible to know the average length of PBEM games, but my guess is about 15-40 turns.

Many campaigns are 300+ turns and yes many are played but often not to their conclusion as one player often surrenders when their situation becomes hopeless.

Yup people are PBEM Kh43 on this ladder. ;)

[Strela]

Hi Ironwulf,

We did a number of campaign PBEM's while play testing Kharkov '43 pre release. The longest was Operation Star which is a full 149 turns. It took us 6 months (3 players) running from May 2010 to November 2010 (a Soviet minor victory - just). We are currently PBEM Stemming the Flow (69 turns) with 4 players and are up to turn 25 after a month - so roughly a turn a day. From this particular PBEM we will be doing a few fixes to the scenario for the first Kharkov '43 patch.

We, the designers of Kharkov '43 actually prefer campaigns and spent a lot of time on them. Most of the shorter scenarios are just subsets of the larger campaign games. So we were actually really focused on these longer games as they were the ones we liked ourselves - this game was originally a mod done in the style we liked.

Finally, I hope someone is playing Kharkov - JT told me it was their best selling release for the year - which is not bad when you think it was published with less than a month to go...

David

[Wolfgang]

The idea of playing an entire grand pbem campaign with over a hundred turns sounds really good to me...^^
I may have to try that.
I wasn't aware you could pbem a campaign with more than 2 players. Intriguing.
It must be challenging to play test pbem campaign scenarios.

[Mr Grumpy]

I wasn't aware you could pbem a campaign with more than 2 players. Intriguing.

Yes the file is passed between the team players each playing their part of the battle, the last player to receive the file finish's the turn and sends it back.

In this way a huge campaign can be cut down into bite size pieces, however the games do take longer to finish and you always have the possible problem that team members may fall out, but other than that it is a great idea and a lot of fun!