Hostile Tactical A.I. Review on Solo Battles

I have part 1 of the review of Hostile Tactical A.I. over on my Solo Battles blog. I was torn over whether to post the article here, consolidating all of my wargaming articles (especially product reviews), but because Hostile Tactical A.I. (HTAI) is purely solo gaming, it seemed to make sense to put it there, unless I were going to delete that blog and move all the articles over here. Too much work at the moment.

HTAI is an interesting product in that it is not a complete rule set for gaming skirmish wargames, but rather a solo game mechanism that you should be able to strap on to any skirmish wargaming rules. HTAI essentially addresses two questions that solo gamers need to answer when playing wargames solo: which unit/model acts next; and what does the unit/model do when it is time to act.

Many solo gamers simply answers these questions by essentially spinning the board around and playing that side to the best of their ability. As I have discussed many a time on my Solo Battles blog and on solo wargaming forum threads, I think that many players can easily develop a bias for one side or the other, skewing those decisions. Further, I think solo wargaming allows me to leisure to take longer turns – although that may be a function of me having a wargaming space where I can keep things set up as long as I want – and thus to apply more mechanics for determining the answer to these two questions in some procedural way.

Because HTAI is not a complete rule set for skirmish wargaming, you have to integrate its mechanics into your skirmish wargaming rules of choice. In my case I am running them with One-Hour Skirmish Wargames and part 1 discusses how I integrate the two. Part 2 will be a test game using the two systems with HTAI driving the decision for one side. I hope to post part 2 on Solo Battles by the end of the weekend.