Page: Guide.ModelingDesign41 - Last Modified : Sat, 18 Oct 14 - 1377 Visits

Let Start Shall we. I decided to take the data from both PTO games as a base of data. There are things that will not be used, but I included it here on purpose to show you what I decided to clean. For let's first list the information available in PTO 1 and 2 regarding fleets and ships. I'll add commanders because in our game it will be closely related to fleets.

The way I will work, I'll be talking about it in details about each object but the final choice of data will be listed at the end of the page. I'll add to be defined notice when something needs to be designed. It's a reminder for me to work on those subject later.

Fleets

Fleet (PTO1)	Fleet (PTO2)
Weather	Position
Morale	Duty
Fatigue	Target
Position	Fuel
Fuel	Speed
Speed	Transport 1 & 2
	Command Points

I intend to split the fleet information on multiple components. There will be a dash board and a fleet formation board to hold the ships. Most of the info should be there.

Weather: It's more related to the map and encounter. I'll add a note for the encounters en transfer it there.

Morale and Fatigue: I first thought of combining them together, but there are 2 different aspects which has some relations. I though that fatigue had some milestone that could make morale drop at a certain point. Fatigue would drop after each demanding action like battles, while morale would raise or drop after successfully sining ship and capturing bases or by losing ships. I would probably use a track from 1 to 10 to record those values, so if morale and fatigue each have a different token on the same track is does not take me more space. For now, I'll use a 1-10 track, but I am not quite sure yet how morale and fatigue will influence the game, I could use a track from 1-6 if for example it's related to dice rolls.

Position: Define where the fleet is located on the map. A board game can easily keep track of this with a pawn on the map.

Fuel: OK, fuel is a bit touchy, but necessary to the game. First ships has fuel and tankers/freighters as fuels. In PTO 2 they use regular transport for fuel. Now, I could just use the sum of everything. The problem is during battle. If a freighter get sunk, it will hinder the fleet because it will drop the fuel, but it a war ship get sunk, yes it loses it's fuel, but it does not hinder the fleet. Second, you must consider consumption. I was thinking a fuel track from 1-10, but that won't be enough domination if each move action cost 1 fuel for example. Finally certain fleet types like submarine fleet won't have freighter, because there are no underwater freighters ... even if it would have been cool.

Since I want to make a solitaire game, I don't mind managing more details. I think fuel is a very important thing to manage, so I decided to have a fuel track from 1-10 that would represent fuel on warship. When you move, you lose that fuel. The track could be more than 10 if necessary. So if you lose a ship, you don't need to update fuel. While freighter will have either fuel tokens on them for be flipable ships. When a freighter is used, it will replenish your fuel bar, which means you have actively refueled your ship. Again, losing freighter will not require to update the fuel bar. Now the only thing left to fix is that refueling 3 ship or 12 ship with the same quantity of fuel will not increase the fuel track by the same quantity. So probably each fuel token or freighter will be worth let say 50 units of fuel, you divide by the number of ships and this is the amount your fuel track increases (ex: 3 ship (50/3) = 16 fuel, 12 ships (50/12) = 4 fuel.

It looks a bit complicated, but not only it is fair and logical, it could be interesting to manage from a game point of view.

Speed: In the original video game, each ship had a speed, and they took the speed of the lowest ship in your fleet to get your fleet speed. I don't intend to have many ship speed since fleet will move on the map a certain number of space, so move 1-3 space seems like the maximum range. But it's hard to have large difference in speed since you use the lowest ship speed. Since most fleet has transport and freighters, you are somewhat limited. So my Idea so far was to use the following chart:

• Submarine Fleet: Speed 1: If you have a fleet only of submarine, you have a low speed.
• Fleet with Transports: Speed 2: If you have a fleet with transports and freighter, you are limited by their speed which will be 2.
• Strike fleet without Transport: Speed 3: If you have no transport and freighter, your move is 3, but you have no way to refuel at sea, so I'll have to play the game to see if it is playable, or if there is any reason to do so. Of course, if all your transports get sunk or if you decide to abandon them, you could get faster speed.

Now to give an advantage to move faster without freighters, is that you'll spend the same fuel for more speed. Now this value is somewhat fixed for the whole expedition since you need to change your fleet composition to change speed. Unless you lose all your transports, there is no way to change your speed. I also wanted to have fleet types: Task Force or Merchant Fleet. This will impact the encounter phase as Japanese will attack task force, but not merchant fleet. So maybe integrating the speed to the fleet type could be nice. So the following types would be:

Name	Hostile to Japan	Speed	Conditions
Submarine Pack	Yes	1 (or 2)	Have only submarines in the fleet
Task Force	Yes	2	No restriction, this is the default type is none is possible
Merchant Fleet	No	2	Requires half ships in the fleet to be transport and freighters at departure, can only have DD, CL and CVE as ships
Strike Fleet	Yes	3 (or 4)	No transports and CVE

So this add new components and information. I am not sure if I am going to place it on a large token or on a card with some reference information.

Duty and Target: These field will simply be removed. In PTO 2 you can delegate command of fleet and other unit. So you could say, go do some anti-sub patrolling near Manilla. Duty and target field are there to record that.

Transport 1 & 2: You can have 2 transport group that can either hold marines or fuel. Those field will be removed in my game. Transports and freighter will appear in the fleet formation as individual token. Cargo on those ships will be handled with cargo tokens.

Command Points Another field that will be removed. Originally used to keep track of movement and actions a fleet could do in a day. In my game, you'll probably have 1 action per day. There will probably be a specific list of actions that you could do while moving (ex: changing fleet formation).

I don't have any fields to add.

Ships

Ships (PTO1)	Ships (PTO2)
Position	Position in formation
Anti-Ship	Armor: 4 sides
Anti-Air	Torpedo (Ammo)
Fortitude	Speed
Speed	Material (Fuel)
Load	vsFleet
Fighter	vsAir
Bomber	Planes (Cargo)
Scout	Experience
Soldier	Equipment
Arms	Weaponry
Ship	Production Time
Fly	Production Cost
Luck	Type
Radar	Class
Seek
Note
Historical Data:
Length
Beam
Draft
Displacement
Speed
Primary Guns
Secondary Guns
Armor
Hanger
Complement
Type

For ship, there are much more stuff going on. But there is a lot of historical information in the list above that will not be used here.

Type: This is the kind of ship design, like Battleship or light carrier. It will determine the kind of weaponry available and impact some rules.

Class: This is the name of a ship model. Most of the time, the first ship to be built give it's name to the whole class. I am not sure if I am going to use this. But I'll add it for now.

Position: This is the position of the ship in the fleet. This will e used for formations. I have been thinking about it , so far there will be a board for formation which has 4 areas, the front the back, the interior and the exterior. You will position your ships on this sheet which will impact battles differently.

Anti-Ship, VSFleet, Anti-Air, VSAir: This is the weapon strength of the ship's Man Cannon and Anti-Aircraft Gun. I will use the same combat system as I designed for another ww2 game in development. Weapon strength will range from 0 to 10, value will be summed up and divided by 5 to know the number of dice you roll. This allow having various ship design with different values than rolling 1 die per ship for example.

Fortitude, Armor: This is the defense level of the hull. Or if you prefer the HP of the ship. In PTO 2, there is an HP value for each side, giving 4 value. Max HP is fixed, but damaged received is variable. So I cannot keep track of 4 hull variables. Instead, I'll use damage tokens with unique hit location and special damage. If the same hull side get hit twice, the ship sinks automatically. So I'll use only 1 value that will be the max hull. I first thought of flipping ship to keep track of damages, but it would be more interesting if ships could get more hit especially specials damage that the player needs to deal with.

Speed: Sure each ship haas a various speed, bu like explained above, I the each ship in the same broad group will have the same speed. So this is why speed has been indirectly moved with the type of fleet. The final composition of the fleet will determine the final speed. So no need to keep track of individual ship speed.

Load, Cargo, fighter, bomber, scout, soldier, planes: This determine the number of planes, infantry or fuel tokens a transport, freighter or carrier could carry.Carrier can only carry planes and freighter can only transport fuel. While for transports, they can carry troops but probably other things like goods. Cargo is simply managed by adding tokens over, or under the ship.

No in PTO 1, other ships could have small load to carry like 2-5 scouts that could then be used to carry rocket. Apparently scout were hydroplanes and could be loaded on non-carrier ships to take off directly off the water. I am not sure yet for now, but I don't think I will manage scouts in my game to be defined.

Or maybe scout will be the sum of space on all ships and you could have a scout track. But the impact on the number of scout is minimal in the game. Sure some scout could be shutdown, but I don't think they actually sent more scout and get better detection because they had more on hand. Also in the late war, people had radar so they used scouts even less now.

Arms, Weaponry, Radar, Seek, Equipment: This was used to record which equipment was available on that ship. That equipment was generally available with technology upgrade like VTfuse and Rockets. Now I assume that all ww2 upgrades are available for all parties because the game starts in 1945. So all ships should have all upgrades unless it is something mutually exclusive. For example torpedoes and rockets. Destroyers can equip rockets, but doing so make them lose their torpedos. So players will have a choice to equip one or the other. I am currently thinking about flipping the ship tokens to see the new stats on the back of the token. Another idea I got is to place rocket as a cargo token on the ship. One the rocket are used, they are flipped, and resupplied on the next port call. This is if I want rockets to be shot once.

Historical Data: All historical data is ignored, there is little use to it since there is no gameplay impact.

Luck: You know what, I like the idea behind that stat, but have no idea how to use it. Maybe it could dodge hit, allow rerolls. I'll add it for now. I have been thinking about this, I think a special damage token will be a lucky shot token. If you get a lucky shot damage token is does not count as damage As long as the number of lucky shot you get is lower than your luck. Once your ship is repaired, lucky shots are removed.

Experience: There is no need to keep track of individual ship experience. I will use a track for the whole fleet. If new ships get added to the fleet, I'll have some way to reduce EXP level each time a new ships gets added.

Production Cost: Each ship will have a cost in favor points required to be granted the ship by the owning country. Ship are too expensive and long to make to actually pay for them. Or maybe only larger ships cannot be bought.

Production Time: Well, I dont' think people will be able to build their own ship Unless I remove some aspects of realism. So I was thinking to create a market from a random pool of ships. So I'll wait and not put that variable yet.

Commander

Commander (PTO 1)	Commander (PTO 2)	My Variables
Sea	Sea Experience	Special Skills
Air	Air Experience	Nationality
War	Rank
Bravery
Duty
Experience

The commander is actually you. So it is somewhat important, but there are various options to use them. I could use predefined characters with stats or I could allow players to design their own character which could also be interesting. Since commanders does not directly do the "stuff" but rather command others to do it, they will basically give bonus to everybody. Commander should be one of the replay value parameter that makes each game played differently.

Sea/Air Experience: In PTO 2 the commander gain experience using ships or planes. Now I already talked about the crew experience that will be recorded in the fleet object. So I don't want to keep track of 2 experience level. So the field will simply be removed.

Rank: Used to record the military rank of the commander. But since you are not part of a nation and are an independent fleet, there is no rank to gain, unless I decide later that countries could give you ranks like rewards, but that would asuume that they are support you which would be bad in my fictional history. So I removed it fro now.

Duty: Simply indicated to which fleet the commander was assigned. Since there is only 1 fleet, there is no point to keep track of this. But I could keep track of which ship the commander is located, also called the Flag Ship. If the flag ship sinks, the commander dies, or almost dies. So I might add a flag ship variable to the ship object.

Sea, Air, War, Bravery, Special Skills: It defined how good you were at managing planes, ship, etc. I am not sure if those values increase with time like it was the case for see and air experience. In my game, commanders will do much more than fighting battles, they will be smuggling merchandise, infiltrating bases, negotiating prices, etc. So I will treat those values more like special abilities each commander can have. Maybe a few more used or important "Skill" could be a stat instead of a skill.

Now considering I want to have as little text ability as possible, each skill will be a keyword and maybe a value that will affect a specific rule space. I was thinking that all random rolls was actually affected by commander skills if available. For example, if your commander is good as smuggling good, he could have the skill "Smuggling", where normally, anybody would succeed and inspeaction check at +4 or 5+ to be defined on a D6, but if you have the "Smuggling" Skill, you succeed at 2+ or 3+. So each commander will simply have a different list of skills which should create different gameplay.

Nationality: This determines what kind of fleet the player will start with and where the player starts in the pacific.

Results

Fleet

Dashboard: A large card board tile with various tracks

Field	Type	Constant	View
Morale	Number	Variable	Use a token on a 1-10 track located on the dashboard.
Fatigue	Number	Variable	Use a token on a 1-10 track located on the dashboard.
Fuel	Number	Variable	Use a token on a track probably from 1-30, depends on the size of freighter fuel

Fleet Type Card/Token: A card or token setup at the fleet departure to determine it's type and

Field	Type	Constant	View
Name	Text	Fixed	String of text at the top of the card
Hostility	Text/Chart	Fixed	Probably a chart that explain what happens with each type of encounter
Speed	Number	Fixed	Value from 1-3
Condition	Text	Fixed	Some text explaining the requirements for that type of feet.

Other Components

Field	Type	Constant	View
Position	Location	Variable	Use a pawn on the map

Rules

• To be defined Need to define how morale and fatigue affect the game play and each other.
• Fuel track is replenish at port or using freighter. Divide nb of unit of freighter fuel by nb of ships when refueling. Maybe Fuel track replenished for free but fuel must be bought for freighters
• Fleet type is selected at departure according to fleet composition. It could change during gameplay.
• Fleet move a number of hex equal to it's speed probably for the cost of 1 fuel.
• Encounter type will have various results according to fleet type.
• to be defined How does exp drop when new ship is added to the fleet.

Notes

• to be defined Not sure yes if keep track of day and night travel, or if 1 movement action equal a full day of travel.

Ships

Ship Token: A rectangular token containing the ship information.

Field	Type	Constant	View
Type	Enumeration	Fixed	Indicates the type of ship with a 2-3 letter code (ex: DD=destroyer)
Class	Text	Fixed	The name of the ship class. Could include real ship name if they are unique.
Position	Location	Variable	The ship token can be placed in various area of the fleet board
Cargo/Hangar	Number	Fixed	Number of token it can hold. Cargo content will use cargo tokens.
Cannon Strength	Number	Fixed	A number from 0 to 10 representing cannon strength.
AA Gun Strength	Number	Fixed	A number from 0 to 10 representing AA gun strength.
Hull	Number	Fixed	Max number of damage a ship can take before sinking
Weaponry	Enumeration	Variable	Use the back side of the token to equip the ship with different weaponry (ex: Torpedo or Rockets). New idea: Use as a cargo token, indicates ammo is depleted.
Luck	Number or Boolean	Fixed	Value between 0 and 2. Allow avoiding damage from lucky shots.
Cost	Number	Fixed	Price to buy the ship with favor and maybe money
Flag Ship	Boolean	Variable	Use a token under the ship to indicate which ship is the flag ship. Or it could be a larger token where the ship can fit inside.
Gun Range	Number	Fixed	I decided to add this for combat resolution. Determine at which range can the ship gun be fired (1, 2 or 3 space away)

Cargo Token: A simple token from fuel to commodity. Marines and Planes will also be used as cargo tokens but they will be units that has much more detailed values.

Field	Type	Constant	View
Type	Enumeration	Fixed	Cargo tokens will be placed above (or under) the ship. Tokens could be double sided (ex: fuel token).

Damage Token: A small token placed of ship to keep track of damages. They are all worth 1 point of damage.

Field	Type	Constant	View
Special Damage	Enumeration	Fixed	Determine the type of special damage received

Rules

• Damage tokens are have special effects when applied to a ship. From damaged gun, to deck fire, to damaged hull. If the same side of the hull is damaged twice, the ship sinks immediately.

Note

• to be defined Need to define freighter fuel quantity and if fuel tokens are used or if ships are flipped to mark depletion. Depends if ship can take damage.
• To be defined Will there be scouts on non-carrier ships. Will I keep track of scouts. More scout could give better detection. If scout get shutdown, get less chance to detect the ennemy first ?

Commander

Commander Card: For now a card containing a portrait and all the commander's information and list of skills.

Field	Type	Constant	View
Skills	Enumeration	Fixed, Repeatable	A list of keyword defining commander skills
Nationality	Enumeration	Fixed	Determines from which country the commander is from

Note

• To be defined: I might need to add a value or stat to counter balance number of skills a commander have.

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