Games that takes to much time to make[2/2]

It seems to me the depth of detail in the objectives would largely depend on how "historical" you want the "simulation" to be. If you're going after a more general wargame, I think you're better off designing an area with a number of achievable objectives, and allow players the opportunity to fight for position within that context.

A way-off-genre example is The Journeys of Paul, a board game which is played through a card mechanic. The core gameplay is simple, each player must build a certain number of churches, as the apostle Paul did in the first century, and then be the first person to reach Rome to win. There are also City cards which give players a bonus for building churches in a particular city.

Now, there are two sets of rules, a simple version where each player is given certain city cards spaced out roughly equally, to give them all a similar bonus if they target the cities they were given by default, and an advanced version where City cards are dealt out at random. But the open-ended nature of the gameplay allows countless variations. You can mirror Paul's missionary journeys. You can build alphabetically. You can play a solitaire version, you versus the Event cards. You can set up the objectives basically any way you want.

The point here, and I don't know, maybe it won't cross over, is that by keeping the movement terrain and gameplay function somewhat open, it allows the players to be creative in setting their objectives, giving a lot of replayability to what otherwise might be a game to be played three times and collect dust in your closet.

Perhaps if the game is designed with a more general layout and allow players more freedom to conjure scenarios? You would still have to test for balance but you would be doing it based on the board layout and a pool of pre-conceived objectives, rather than testing each scenario individually.

Some people will like it and some not. Personally, I really like this idea, as long as the scenario setup is interesting in and of itself. In which case, you have something that I have always been interested in creating - a game which has distinct phases, played sequentially where the results of the first phase influence outcomes of successive phases.

I think the key to making this work is to make the scenario setup as competitive as actually playing out the mission. If you can have some way by which players vie with one another to get the terrain then want deployed where they want it, and the right troops recruited, and resources placed in the right areas, then this could be really fun. If it was balanced right, each player would start with some basic objectives and perhaps a few initial resources in the way of cards/units etc, but the final setup[ of the scenario would be a mixture of each players ideal setup, which would then make for a very interesting resolution phase, in which players must adopt their initial plans to cope with the problems that their opponents play during the first phase has caused them.

Yopu could also use this initial phases for players to plan ambushes, traps and clever strategems, so that there is an element of hidden info in the first phase which could generate some real tension.

This idea also has the advantage that two reasonably matched players will balance the scenario themselves, and as long as there is some sligth randomness in assignment of inital objectives and resources, there will be an infinite number of interesting scenario possibilities.