More FOTS Grand Tactical

I haven't written anything for the blog in awhile as I've been busy at work (I do tech writing for a manufacturing company in Tulsa, OK) and publishing a new ezine for Fire On The Suns titled "Firepower! The Journal of the Fire On The Suns Universe". Our next issue is going to be over 15 thousand words for just $0.99 and will be available via Smashwords hopefully by Thanksgiving. Anyway, as my last post had to do with FOTS Tactical Command and the grand strategic scale, I thought I'd offer up a little teaser for doing vector-based movement the FOTS way. I know it's not entirely a hundred percent accurate physically, but this map was easily done using Excel.

You could just as easily plot the same thing out on a sheet of graph paper or even a hex map (I really like the old Starfire system hex maps as you can have a really huge playing area). This plot, btw, is the last phase of the ending battle in my novel Fire On The Suns and was a lot of fun to plot out. The nice thing about using Excel is that you can easily copy and paste the current map to another page in the workbook and keep every turn together in the same workbook. The standard number of worksheets allowed in a workbook is 255, but you can continue adding additional sheets until you run out of system resources. That is an awful lot of worksheets potentially (heck, even 255 worksheets, each representing a single turn of a game, is an awful lot of game potential). This means that a GM for a game like Starfire, for example, could pass a workbook back and forth between players, possibly rolling for who has the initiative each turn in an IGO-UGO fashion. And, since the FOTS system scales from light hours down to whatever scale you want it's easy to see how this could work for grand tactical maneuvering right down to close-in combat passes. There will be additional information included in the coming issue of Firepower! as well as upcoming issues as they get published. Have fun playing around with this if you've a mind to. Thanks, Greg