Disruption

On the plus side, I included a nice disruption system. When units fought, they suffered both permanent losses (dead and wounded) and disruption of the unit's cohesion, which had the short-term effect of lowering the unit's combat effectiveness. All units slowly recovered from disruption effects. If you pulled a unit out of combat and let it rest for a few minutes, it would come back up to full strength.

The real value of this design feature lay in its effect on strategy in the game. Units could not be left in combat for long periods of time; they had to be pulled out to rest and recover. This in turn required that other units be ready to take the place of the retreating unit, all of which required careful planning. Better still, the disruption rules sharpened combat. Your own units were not the only ones suffering from disruption; so too were the enemy's. When a unit was badly disrupted, one more big attack could finish it off before it had a chance to recover. This encouraged a kind of desperately offensive play that was loads of fun. No matter how bad the situation was, there was one best way to handle it Attack!

I will happily deny authorship of the concept; the credit for that goes to Simulations Publications, Inc., and probably Jim Dunnigan. Their Thirty Years War game system had introduced this approach to disruption in the early 1970s. I did nothing more than carry it over to the computer and make it work in a real-time environment.

This, by the way, illustrates an important rule of good game design: You need a strong background in games to be a good designer. And when I say games, I mean all games, not just computer and videogames. All through the 1980s, and even today, a small group of old-time board wargamers have made a disproportionate contribution to the evolution of game design, largely because of all the good ideas they stole from other fields of game design.