Anyone play the game by themselves? Did you make any changes? Normally I would just play both sides the best I could. Today I think I will try something a little different. Winner of initiative will go first unless it is obvious that he shouldn’t, but instead of picking what units should be activated, it will be random. Either shuffled or I will have some kind of drawing mechanism.

Just curious what if anything others are doing.

i dont really play games solo .....or solo games ........it takes away from crushing my enemies , seeing them driven before me and listening to the lamentations of their women .

ahhhhh lamenting women , the memories it brings back to my younger days of wargaming , when i was only a few million years old .

Don't play solo, I have friends

As you can't really play tactical against yourself, how about shuffling up the cards into axis and allies piles and then drawing one at a time to determine play order?

Only do it for play testing purposes.

Major Mishap said:

Thought of shuffling but I was worried about the dry eraser and I also didnt want to have to dig through the pile to mark damage.

Dcal12 said:

1) so go to the $.99 store and buy a deck of playing cards and a marker .

2) seperate the cards into suits .

3) choose 1 red suit to rep you , one black to rep an opponent .

4) seperate out the aces and jokers .

5) take thecards 2-X according to the number of units in each force . keep them in their seperate suit piles and shuffle them in those 2 suit piles without combinding them . place the unit stat cards out so that they correspond to the numbers on the cards .

6) now shuffle the aces and jokers together .

7) draw a card from the ace/joker pile . if its a red ace you win iniative and can choose who goes first . if its a black ace or joker , the opposing play automaticlay goes first .

8) now draw a card from the appropriate suit pile to see which unit can be activated . finish its actions , then draw a card from the other pile , keep repeating untill all units have gone .

when activating an opposing unit , you must choose actions that would cause YOU the most logical/probable damage .

repeat 5-8 each turn .

if you draw a card from a suit pile that represents a unit that has been eliminated , draw again .

theoreticaly this suitably handicaps the player to equalize the AI's lack of cohesive long term planning , aswell as their lack of enthusiasim to win .

Dcal12 said:

Good point. Could scan/print smaller copies of the cards like normal plaing cards and use them to draw from.

Today, I am gonna give the deck of cards a try. Excellent idea. Thanks Kris.

But, I really like the scan the cards smaller, slide them in sleeves and then just draw like that.

Either way, I like that I can just place the card on the unit card to show they activated.

Either one of you guys gonna be at GenCon this year?

sadly , no , way too broke .

even if i could afford to go , i dont have anyone that can take care of my cat that she trusts . she wont eat or drink if i leave for more than about 12 hours , and gets seriously stressed out because before i got her , she was abused and neglected for about 2 years .

GrandInquisitorKris said:

Sorry to hear that about GenCon and your cat. I have a dog that would really stress if I or my roommate was not home. So it really helps that I live in Indianapolis. Of course the money I save from having to travel to GenCon I just spend on games at GenCon.

... and I'm in the UK, so won't be there unless my lottery numbers come up.

Having played AT43 solo for a while i can say it worked best when randomly shuffling the cards and writing down as many pre-play objectives as possible. Doing so at different times helps as the plans written do sometimes get forgotten in the confusion of busy work days. Then when your ready to play you can try to execute each plan as best as possible. Using missions can be good to as the objectives being pre-set helps to avoid remembering what was written on a previous nights work.

Another thing to do that was interesting was use random dice roles to determine what units you can move. This Ill admit was the most interesting at it truely kept the game flow open and unpredictable. You just had to adjust the dice used when squads got eliminated

so did you try it out ?

Yep it was interesting and frustrating at the same time. When you know the smart move is to move or fire with BBQ but you dont draw the card for BBQ you draw it for another unit. It certainly doesnt replace an opponent, but when you are off on Friday and everyone else is working, Dust Tactics just keeps calling to me.....

so how about this : follow thw above suggestion , but you only draw for the first HALF of your force rounding up , so if you have 7 units on YOUR side you follow the above suggestion , but afte you have gotten to the point where 4 of your 7 units have activated by card draw , you get to cose activations for the remaining 3 units as normal .

so you are still handicapped a bit , but can clean up the round and prepare for the next .