Looking for game for Punic Wars and Gallic Warfare

[TJD]

Seems to me the other forum you mentioned appears pretty dead as it only had 9 new threads in Jan & two in Feb thus far. Could it be a measure of the popularity of the game, or lack of?

"Dead" is relative. The threads at the Wargamer have been reasonably active in terms of number of posts. Certainly there is much more overall activity there than at the Blitz. A typical post at Wargamer will get 100 views in a day. You'll get only a few here.

I thought that Punic Wars was excellent as it represented Roman organization as it existed at the time (maniples). Unfortunately, the game platform did not allow for restructuring of unit strengths to historical organization in other periods. In Caesar's time, the smallest "tactical unit" on the battlefield in the Roman army was the cohort of some 300 to 500 men. The maniple existed only "on paper" and maniples were not separate unit command designations (contrary to one of it's advocates by the name of Al).

The game allows you to combine maniples into larger untis but once done, the frontage is totally skewed because of the ground scale of the hexes (20 yards or 20 meters to the hex IIRC).

A game design that puts the cohort as the smallest tactical unit will no longer be truly a tactical level game. It's certainly true that it's not reasonable on the game's scale to suppose that a cohort can be reduced to one hex. If you want a game on a fine scale like this, you have to be willing to break down the cohort. It's a fundamental design decision. If you feel that it violates the history of Roman military organization intolerably, fine, but you're essentially missing the point.

One other item that was being addressed when I was involved was the 3D zoom out view. I don't know if Paul & Dean ever got that done. As it was, the only "battlefield" view was zoom out in 2D, at which point all one had was a "boardgame". The 3D that was in the game was great, but was only available on a very tactical level.

This hasn't been fixed but it's not clear that it's a flaw. Personally, I can't play in 3D but the recent survey we did revealed that the 3D even as it currently exists is really popular and even vital to players.

Perhaps the biggest issue IMHO that needed to be addressed was the turn sequencing that required multiple emails back and forth for the resolution of a single turn. I felt that this needed to be revised so that a complete player turn be made in a single player iteration.

Again, this was a fundamental design decision. It goes ultimately to whether you like the games or not. You can't change the turn sequence without producing a fundamentally different game. So, if you don't like it, you have to decide whether you can live with it. It certainly took me quite a while to adjust to it and there's no question it put a lot of people off. And that's too bad. IMO it works quite well.

Paul has the basis of an excellent game system but IMHO, there were significant issues that needed to be addressed on the game platform before additional titles were produced and released, and that simply did not happen.

I don't think that's true. These games are a work in progress. Paul in my experience has been very responsive to useful criticism and has made very significant improvements and bug fixes. The progress has not been as fast any of us would like but you have to remember that Paul is working essentially alone, without any programming support. IMO it's remarkable that he has brought this series along as far as he has done, solo.

Tim