One thing I noticed is all of the play-by-forum games were delted. Perhaps its a self-cleaning system where old posts are deleted, but that content was gold in showing how to play-by-forum w/ minis.
But then how with the A&A Minis crowd make it to Foruminis?
They ended the Avalon Hill forums. I’d guess that sent the crowd looking for a new place. I’m just throwing stuff out there. I have no idea really. :-)
Thats exactly what happened. when word got out the wizards was going to shut down there forums, some one started a new website and encouraged folks to join. I was one of them myself. Also it is alot easier to play a minis game online then a whole A&A board game.
Also i feel that the Moderators over there are more open to new ideas and and listen to what their foruminians want from their web site. They hold contests fairly often and tournaments and of course the forumini Olympics every 1.5 years or so.
The olympics is a great Idea, they have artistic compititions(mini painting), Land Minis tournaments, Sea Mini Tournaments, New unit contests.
Unfortunatly this web site mostly revolves around the Board games so it only appeals to the Board game Fans. If All I played was War at Sea, i would have no reason to come to this site at all. It offers nothing really for the mini market.
Another reason was that the Forumini was in close support with Rich Baker the Head designer of the mini games, he listened to what the game fans had to say and you could see that in the new sets as they come out. the players felt that if something was unbalanced or needed the creators listened to their pleas and the new sets reflected those thoughts.
Another great thing about the forumini is their Marketplace or traders forum. It is well maintained and the bad traders are kept careful watch. I feel no threat of not getting a trade completed. It is a very close knit community with many moderators and 4-5 Admins. I know I asked to be a Mod here a long while ago and was told to wait for everything to calm down (aa40 and aap40 were releasing soon) and I have yet to hear anything. Even Imp. sent me a note telling me about it. But Nothing ever happened. I am currently trying to manipulate the triplea game engine so i can use it on the forums to make War at Sea games easy to play in a forum. Java code sucks :wink:
I feel that the AxisandalliesforuMINI is a more open un biased website and everyone is listened to. They take New Players under their wings and Teach them how to play by forum either land or Sea mini games, and soon the New Air mini game. Are you even set up to start that? Hell they have people that will make a cool signature for you. You took away sigs here. they have there little cliques like the IJNCVLF, Club Med. etc…
In short, this website, which i love, focuses to much on just the board games.
Their is alot more to the A&A franchise then just Revised. (imho sucks)
Thats is very interesting feedback.
I used to stop by Foruminis way back when, while all three sites (this one, WotC, and Foruminis) were alive an active with minins. At the time it didn’t feel as professional or polished. I had thought the play-by-forum support was a bit rough around the edges, requiring one to capture jpegs and post them, where as here the website accommodated posting .mvf game files and lots of games were being played (though you can’t tell now because they all got deleted). I can’t comment on what Foruminis is like now, it might be different.
I still feel it was mostly the target audience was different, which you stated kind of was well. I personally started with A&A, then played minis, and returned here to post about it. But those starting at the WotC forum playing other games probably went to Foruminis because this site, and the board game, were not familiar.
By the way, are you all using tools yet for your play-by-post or still just doing jpeg dumps? MapView works great for PBEM and PBF plugplug* :-D
I have not played in a while, but yeah, they were using a comunity photo bucket account for maps and just typing in unit names into the squares. Not the mosteasy way to do it, but made the game easily understandable, since you only had to make a new map after each players sea movement or movement during land games. Then used the built in die roller to do combat. Once you made 1 map and played on it, susiquient maps were easier to make. I also made a bunch of Generic (big+small) maps to use for online play. They were used to great effect in pick up games and in League play. which was pretty successful
Does Map View only work on Windows?
By the way, are you all using tools yet for your play-by-post or still just doing jpeg dumps? MapView works great for PBEM and PBF plugplug* :-D
Yes it is a Windows based application.
Note that the attached screen shot is 199KB, while the attached game file which has every single turn, 5 phases per turn, is only 41 KB.
I’m on a Mac and the marketshare for Mac is only growing and should match PCs fairly soon.
Any chance we can get an open source project going to port this to Java?
While I’m not adverse to that idea, other than contributing a bit on the open source TripleA project on a Mac ocean display issue, I don’t have any experience doing open source work.
Oh, and at what point do you think Macs will overtake PCs? I think that is wishful thinking :)
Tablets are actually likely to overtake PCs first. I’ll look for the infographic.
Now that I can see though I doubt they replace PCs (or Macs) but rather supplement, as my phone is doing now. You don’t throw out the computer when you get the gadget. It just gets used less. I still sit down at a computer to work or do my taxes.
But anyway, we digress :)
But you also have to think about the global market. Smartphones and tablets are much more accessible to citizens of poorer countries.
Found it. So I was thinking iPads not Macs. In that case, maybe we should work on an HTML5 version of MapView.
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/01/19/asymco_blogger_charts_rise_and_fall_of_the_personal_computer/
A key premise of MapView is the ability to play while disconnected. While HTML5 is supposed to better deal with offline and local storage, I’m not familair enough with it to know if it would address that design objective.
I’m actually in a transition period right now professionally in that I need to shift my skill set into Andriod, iOS, and/or HTML5 if I want to keep employed where I am since my current product line is ending. If my learning coincides with a direction for MapView then it serves double-duty.
On another note, when we did have an active community of A&A mini players going back in the beginning (I probably played 40 games PBF of it myself, and I have the game files still), we were racing to add all the units to the mdoules to keep the game vibrant. I think a few people even put togther a WAS module or two (modules are just an XML file and images, no code needed). If anyone wants to pick up that task and continue to extend the modules to cover the new units I’d be more than happy to assist. But it’s one of those self-fulfilling prophecy kind of things though, if no one is using it then I don’t want to dump lots of time into working on it, and if it doesn’t get updated, no one will use them.
I don’t think it is a bad thing, and if its any consolation, “org” appears before “com”. Both are better alternatives to the official site, which is neglected.
As a member of almost all the A&A forums, I might be able to shed some light on this question.
1st off, Dead head has got the main idea, it started back when the old wizards forum went under, and all the A&A minis players went there. Instead of a cramped wizards forum, they had a community driven program where the players ran the forum.
When I started playing A&A, I came here and fond some of the cool maps and other cool things. Then, when I got into A&A Minis, I came back and… the forum for AAM was dead! I looked for info on the newest set (Eastern Front), and instead found info on D-DAY!!! That was 4 sets ago! :o Well, not surprisingly, I kept on looking, I found the wizards forum, but it was basically dead, since posts only appeared like once a day. The my friend showed me the Forumini, I got the newest HHR, all the maps I could ever use, an easy mapmaking doc, al sorts of stuff. Let’s just say I stayed! :D Not only did it have AAm, but it has even more WAS stuff, tones of online games and 1000’s of pages of info. I don’t play WAS, but now that AAAF came out, I play that, and it’s got a good start! (I played the first ever AAAF online game)
Now there is the seasablaze WAS forum, the Underground, and I think there are quite a few Spanish/german forums around. All good forums, but the ForuMini is the largest, and has the most creativity.
Just saying! :D
-Rebel
A&AM Map maker
As a member of the forum mini there is alot of content over there and its the largest community. There is dozens of posts each day for the miniature games while over here there is maybe 1 a day probably less the WAS board hasnt had a new post in a month…
Each sites have their niche forum mini for the miniatures and this one for the board games.
There forum has a lot more support for minis then A&A.org does, and more activity as a result. Whereas A&A.org has one (forum? whatever you call one line in the index) for AAM original  and one for W@S they have an entire(sub index?) for each and one for angels twenty. the Play by Post section there is functional and lively, as opposed to the either dead or shutdown section here, its impossible to tell, and the people are very friendly and helpful (Thanks Rebel :) ) as a whole, I’m not saying they aren’t here but it is very noticable there.
You’re welcome! I just try to spread the AAM cheer on any forum I am on! ;)
