Your suggestions on optimal scenario player count

As i bought some books recently about Korean War (im a somewhat big history buff), i was thinking about making scenario based on facts presented in them. And as i figured most of the basic outline parts: what campaign of the Korean War should mark scenario's beginning (as starting from the beginning of the war raises a lot of boring and risky difficulties like making north korea significantly overpowered compared to south in the beginning, which in turn should change to south korea's favor by eventual entrance of nato/un troops and back again to nk's favor with entrance of chinese and ussr troops before it gets equalized midgame), map, cities, unit stats, etc. But one thing i failed to decide is the amount of players a scenario should have.

Here's the logic. Scenario should have around 300-350 cities in game, which will be distributed to each nation proportional to their overall army size so that beginning conditions provide each nation it's historic army capacity. And here's where i encountered a problem.

The beginning idea was to have 7 nations: South Korea, North Korea, China, USSR, NATO, British Empire and the UN. But the division like this leaves USSR and British empire with 3 and 4 cities respectively (the largest ones-base 8 units) and the UN with only 2 cities (base 8 units). And i was wondering whether that would make Britain and the UN not at all fun to play because of that. But dismantling British Empire and unifying, say British and Canadian troops under NATO and the rest of British Dominions under UN would mean smaller player count, therefor smaller unit and gameplay diversity. Not to mention that going with that logic i could just make a 1v1 scenario with virtually no unit diversity. So i'm struggling to strike a right balance between gameplay diversity and involveness of some players. Other way around, i could go up to 10 players, since having 350 cities allows me to incorporate nations that had more than 0,14285% participation in terms of the total troops in the korean war by giving them one (base 8 unit) city.

So here are some ideas (feel free to add ones yourselves):

1. South Korea (81 cities), North Korea (36 cities), China (181 cities), USSR (3 cities), NATO (44 cities), British Empire (4 cities), UN (2 cities)
2. South Korea (81 cities), North Korea (36 cities), China (181 cities), USSR (3 cities), NATO (47 cities), UN (2 cities)
3. South Korea (81 cities), North Korea (36 cities), China (181 cities), USSR (3 cities), NATO (2 cities), US (44 cities), Canada (1 city), Turkey (1 city), UN (2 cities), British Dominions (1 city)
4. Communists (220 cities), UN (130 cities)
5. Anything in between

Thanks in advance!

Nice name

Написао Death1942, 30.03.2018 at 05:58

How a map is made, is based on how a map maker wants it. Also click bait title.

Написао Asylan, 30.03.2018 at 11:41

Написао Death1942, 30.03.2018 at 05:58

How a map is made, is based on how a map maker wants it. Also click bait title.

Click bait? I just wanted opinions, sorry, I didn't have slightest intention on making it so. Please suggest me the other title and i would be more than happy to change it.

Also, the logic is very wrong since it implies that 'map maker' should be devoided from any external opinion, even if he explicitly asks otherwise. There isn't some cosmic rule to which one must obide to, not for map maker, and not that i am aware of. All such ideas that pose themselves as rules are made up by individuals hence hold no authority over anyone.

The difficulty you will encounter with smaller countries being involved is the mechanism that tries to even out the troop counts first turn, by this I mean that your intentionally smaller player may become very powerful and concentrated, whereas your main scenario players will have up to 2x troop count but be more spread out.I think the starting units will go to the average number across players but may be wrong.

A good scenario to look at for this is WW2 where places like Manchuria get a decent unit count as a result of this natural game balance, to counter it the creator split the power nations (Japan Germany USA UK etc) into smaller groups (2 US, 2 Japan) which seems to work quite well in countering the unit count being too condensed.

It may be worth for your scenario considering the above and making the larger nations split. It may hinder your historical accuracy but improve the play ability.