Pocus wrote:somehow planned, after a WW2 game. Air power, Aeromobile units and paradrops can't be done before the whole Air War is coded, so it need WW2 before. As for all things related to guerilla warfare, I would say we have already a strong base in BOA.
You're probably right, Vietnam without audio and graphics for choppers and jets might be a hard sell, especially given the computer generation's still unsatiated taste for graphics and cool effects. But if the game were to have seasonal turns, area-based movement, and a strategic/operational focus, I don't think those units would be all that necessary.
Granted, for WWII and/or WWIII you would have to deal with that second level of the game, but I think that's necessary because the air conflict is symmetrical.
Because the Vietnamese player has no way of countering American air assets, it seems that the air "war" would not actually be a particularly important facet of the game: no more important, and probably not that much more complicated to code than the naval war. Pace to devotees of Lee Brimmicombe-Wood's Downtown, there just isn't much of an inter"player" game there. Thinking back to the best boardgame on the subject, air and airmobile assets got abstracted to points committed to operations, or, secondarily, to points commited against North Vietnamese recruitment.
We'd love to see the graphics, I'm sure, but choppers and airplanes in South Vietnam were just expensive discretionary firepower; significant, but not something that requires that much independent simulation.
Rolling Thunder and the bombings of the North or the trail might be different matters, but I'd suspect they could be partially abstracted, as, I assume, you'll partially abstract the blockade-runner and privateer war in the Civil War.
In general, I think the challenge for a Vietnam situation is not "downward" toward tactics and unit operations, but upward, toward geostrategy: what are the "games" and decisions involved with increased or decreased commitment -- questions of international politics, national will, and access to manpower. These seem to be routines that the Civil War engine will be better able to handle.