The Perfect General

A turn-based tactical wargame in which you buy the force you fight with. Two commands draw a purse, requisition from the same catalogue, deploy on identical ground, and fight over objectives that pay their worth at the end of every half-turn. What you bought at the requisition board decides how the affair goes: armour that cannot be stopped by anything the other side owns, a gun line that cannot take ground, or something in between.

How to begin

Launch the game from the library. Pick a sector and the temper of the opposing commander, then open the requisition. Spend the purse on the arms you want; the stamp at the top right counts down what is left, and the bars underneath show the shape of the force you are building. When you are content, close the requisition, place every body in your own band of the sheet, and take the field.

If you would rather see a competent force than build one, press "Let the staff choose" and the machine will spend your purse for you.

Controls

Turn order

You move first, then the machine. At the end of each half-turn every objective pays its value to whoever holds it; the opening half-turn pays nothing. Because the first move is worth something, the command that moves second draws a purse 3% larger - a figure taken from machine-against-machine sweeps, not guessed.

Movement

Movement is paid in movement points. Open ground costs 2, so a rifle company with an allowance of 4 crosses two hexes of it. Woods and hills cost more, a lane costs 1, and vehicles will not ford a stream - they must use a bridge. Arriving in a hex beside an enemy body halts the march there: you may come up to them, but not through them.

Foot that did not march at all during a turn is dug in and harder to hurt.

Fire

A body fires once a turn: one die per surviving step, each at the chance shown on the odds strip before you commit. Range, cover, height, armour, being shaken and having fired on the move are all inside that number, and the notes underneath say which of them applied. A towed gun that moved may not fire at all. Foot at one hex gets a close-assault bonus against armour.

Defensive fire. Any body that has not yet fired answers an enemy march within its reach and sight, spending its own shot to do it. That is why crossing open ground in front of a machine gun is expensive, and why the Hold fire order exists: a body ordered to hold its fire stays silent during the enemy turn and still has its shot in yours.

Indirect fire. Mortars and batteries reach far beyond their own sight but need one of your bodies to observe the target hex, and they carry a fixed number of rounds for the whole affair.

Scoring

Objectives pay their printed value - the disc under the hex - at the end of every half-turn, to whoever holds them. Ground stays yours until somebody else stands on it. A body destroyed pays its full requisition value to the command that destroyed it, so a heavy tank lost is worth more than three turns of holding the middle village.

Winning and losing

The affair ends after the last turn, or sooner if a command is swept from the sector. Whoever has more points wins, and the margin is reported as Marginal, Narrow, Clear or Decisive. Equal scores are drawn.

Saving and restarting

The affair in progress is saved in your own browser after every order, under the key tronsoft_the_perfect_general_save_v211. Reopen the game and it offers to resume where you left off. Starting a new affair discards the stored one. Nothing is transmitted anywhere, and a browser that refuses storage still plays.