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I was wondering if you could give me a quick summary of how this campaign is being managed. Some of the battles seem, well, HUGE. Has this thing been played over the past year? Or are you talking about the first "52 turns" of the campaign.

The first year was the first campaign year, 50 weeks (to make it easier on accountants). The game has been running two turns per week since the mid-20s-turn. Before that I was running three per week.

Some of the battles ARE huge. Third St Genevieve involved almost 2000 major warships and 10000 fighters. Several computer programs (that are being perfected as I go along) help. The fact that most fleets are composed of only a few discreet TYPES of units helps also. In general, an engagement between squadron type A and type B will turn out just about the same for all instances of its occurence. Unfortunately, most of the players have not been too cooperative about allowing much of that:(

Thanx for any information, it sounds fascinating. Little bloody perhaps, but fascinating.

Actually, other than fighters, less than 100 ships have actually been destroyed. As you may be aware, I disallowed meson weaponry except as an object of a extensive R&D program. As a result, a ship with armour 4, which most ships meet or exceed, is nearly impossible to destroy in combat unless it is small enough for automatic crits due to size. Almost all ships come through battles with their outer surfaces shot up, but the men inside are fine, and four weeks in the yards renders the ships ready for combat again.

Of course, there was Amondiage's attacks on New Home and Neubayern. And almost New Home's attack on Sansterre. And almost Neubayern's attack on Amondiage. And a minute chance of a bombardment of Neubayern by Serendip Belt. And a set of orders delivered too late to matter (the fleet it was addressed to had all been captured/destroyed) that would have sterilized Topas if executed. And an increasing chance of bombardment of Neubayern by New Colchis.

I find it interesting to see what real people do about the situations presented in a game of this level. GDW had the Fifth Frontier War, and the Rebellion, and Hard Times. Even Hard Times and the Black War were not as destructive as this war actually played through by people who weren't reading a script. In the Hard Times campaign, the two subsectors described lost a couple of hundred million people in eight years of what was supposed to be really intensely destructive warfare. My two subsectors lost more than that in the space of six hours back in turn 12. I consider it possible that one or two planets will be sterilized during the next year, unless certain people calm down. I do NOT consider it likely (in two previous games, no civilain casualties were caused), but it is distinctly possible (especially with one player building a bunch a high megaton cobalt bombs).