Overall, a good event. So here's my rating.
Turnout was a concern from the start.
When the anticipated turnout is small, even a small deviation from balance can be bad. It can be overcome, as Frame 2 showed us, a -4 on the Axis side led to a +11 point win, but that was so marginal that a single pilot could have greatly increased that gap or reversed it entirely, and the -8 on each side was clearly a problem. But, turnout is the teams problem to solve. Balance is the designers. Walkons, toss em evenly, Scenarios are supposed to be about team building, using resources, overcoming obstacles, and getting players to rally to your banner. Scenarios are supposed to be difficult, supposed to have an equal chance of winning, not fair and balanced, but an even shot. Speed over Quantity, Alt over Stealth, advantages and disadvantages to both overcome and exploit. Balanced is an equal chance of winning or losing, not an absolute equal match up.
With limited lives, and a small turnout, it's simply too easy to wipe out a significant enough amount of people to dominate the event. Frame 3 had the Axis down by 8, and by the second half of the event we had absolute and total control over the airspace and literally bombed at will, wherever we wanted, when ever we wanted. The only thing slowing us down was the rebuild rate.
If those unfilled planes could have been used, it would at least kept lost players in the air to mount a credible defense in the latter half of the frame.
Same on Frame 4, we lost pilots, we had some IL2s and P39s that we would have loved to get pilots into, and the players who died early could have done that, and again, mounted a better defense against those pesky F8s at the end. So the Finns walked out, it wouldn't have mattered, we'd just stuff the lost pilots into the planes we hadn't used and kept the fight going longer. I know for a fact the Axis would have had a far different outcome Frame 3 had they been able to keep their pilots in the air instead of planes sitting untouched in the hanger. Balance, just because we've always counted lives doesn't mean we always just count lives. 150 players per side? Lives.
Plane Counts have to be factored in if we are expecting low turnouts, as I asked for before we started, at least now you understand better why I asked for it that way, and why it needs to be included in lower turnout events or as a contingency for a shortage on a side. I would have gladly accepted counting lives on my side and allowing the Axis move lives in Frame 3, balance is far more than 4=4
Scenarios are also radically different than Snapshots, This Day In WW2 or even FSO. We planned for Frame 4 contingencies as early as the Practice frame. We communicated the next frame events after a debrief that followed on the day after, or no more than a couple of days later. We drafted orders, we engaged the Group Leaders, we had no command forum, we posted and discussed everything on our open forum. To start at Frame 1 asking us to move players 10 minutes before the frame started was an incredibly bad call. You simply cannot do that. The one single way to make absolutely sure that no one spends any time working up orders in advance is to tell them at the last minute that the effort wasn't worth a crap. I know, Brooke, you were trying to balance the frames, but you just cannot disrupt the planning. Your job is to be the CM, not run a snapshot, you impacted and disrupted the briefing and planning process at an actual unacceptable level. You can't do that in a scenario, ever. CO's cannot attract and recruit planners and tacticians if they start to feel like it will be a pointless endeavor. You have to leave it to the walkons, and the teams to generate their turnout and build their teams. Do not micromanage an event like that, you will drive off the leaders and I am telling you flat out, you were close, people were not taking that well.
If you want the event balanced, then design it for turnout with additional planes and lives if needed, but never, NEVER, screw up a team when there are minutes to launch. You design the board, and the game, then back out of it. That was the most disruptive element of the entire event, you even told us at one frame NOT to brief so you could move people back and forth. Not brief? With walkons, adjusting our weeks worth of work to account for turnout, and we can't brief until 10 minutes to launch? One last time, this is not a snapshot, please don't run a scenario like one.
One other sticking point is scenarios are timed, down to minutes as you well know. When you start the clock, I start clocks. I have a series of timers going off marking 15 minute increments, half time, end frame and more. Timers on missions, dedicated computer with nothing but a stack of digital stopwatches. At frame 1 near the end of the mission, I launched our bomber group at 2 minutes instead of 3 minutes, as the timing adjusted. It was that close. You called out time to end frame, I questioned it as my clock was about 6 minutes different than yours. Your reply was the frame ended when the CM ended it. No, the frame ends in 3 hours after launch. Had you ended the frame 2 minutes early because your hot pocket was done and cost me a bombing run timed 20 minutes earlier, it wouldn't have been pretty. Again, Scenario, not This Day or Snapshot. Please keep it tight.
That was the mechanics of the event.
Simply due to the team we had, and the team we fought,
+5
