What interesting problems can I investigate?
I have been listening to Prit Buttar's books on the Eastern Front -- currently The Reckoning. This has left me wondering how the loss of men and equipment affect how units are used, and how home production is fed into front units. While board wargames can portray some parts of this with techniques like step reduction, I don't think that they do well at how units are rotated out of the line or rebuilt. That's not a horrible flaw as far as the games go, but if I want to look at what happens to combat effectiveness in detail I will need are quite fine grained model. Doubly so if I wish to look at production factors.
The Map
The problems are:
(1) The map, especially Eriador, is virtually empty. That makes sense for the Third Age, but by the time industrialization has bee accounted for and human populations backfilled it is all enormously different. That's both a lot of work and obliterates the feel of ME.
(2) The strategic problem boils down to control of the Gap of Rohan. No matter who is fighting whom, the small number of choke points is frankly frustrating.
The only things I lose from abandoning Middle Earth are a cool campaign name and the idea of the Numenorians with their racist backstory being the Nazis.
Instead, I have decided to use a game map from the 1960s, heavily modified half a century later, called Blitzkrieg.
This was my first wargame, giving it a sentimental attachment. The fan upgrade has far better art and better granularity. I won't be using the rules, but the map itself is a good starting point. It has enough details at a sufficient granularity to direct action, while at the same time leaving space open for imagination.
So it's no longer Panzers on the Anduin. Name to follow, I suppose, alone with a lot of systems design work to tie make a usable game.
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