I've been working on a way to add Air Units to some undetermined hex and counter type Wargame. Here's what I've come up with so far:
Each Sqaudron (anywhere from 12 or so to 1 machine/creature) is represented by a card in the player area, and has no visual representation on the board at all, except perhaps an airbase token or some such to show where they are based when they aren't in the air.
The Card would have the squadron name, the range of the flyers (potentially), the attack stats, etc and perhaps some artwork in the top half. The bottom half would have a few blank fields. These would represent the different actions possible with the individual flyers in the sqaudron. A typical squadron might have fields labeled AIR SUPERIORITY, RECON, GROUND SUPPORT and GROUNDED.
Each squadron would have a number of chits, chips, or other two sided bits to represent each individual flyer in the squadron. These chits would be placed in the fields based on what action that flyer is currently engaged in. They would be placed face-up, and when they are used, they would be flipped face down to indicate that they've been expended for the turn. Before they can be flipped over again, they would need to be shifted to the GROUNDED field to represent refueling, feeding, or whatever it is the unit has to do to keep itself running.
RECON, GROUND SUPPORT and their ilk are actions that directly affect the battle on the ground, either by giving you some hint as to what units the enemy has where, or adding strength to one of you other attacks, or other actions specific to a game. GROUNDED has been discussed already.
AIR SUPERIORITY represents the battle in the skies. I haven't worked out a combat system for it yet, and it would be best to adapt the combat system so that it is consistent with whatever game it is grafted onto or designed into. If a squadron is faced with another squadron (i.e. there are air units on both sides) they will need to put some flyers into the AIR SUPERIORITY field. These are the flyers that will be facing off with the other side's flyers. As long as you have enough flyers in air superiority, your other flyers will have no or less trouble flying their missions. If you have too few flyers in air superiority to keep up with the other side, their air superiority flyers will be able to interfere with your other flyers, and if your air superiority outclasses the other side's, you will be able to disrupt their other air missions. So in theory you are trying to keep enough flyers in air superiority to tie up the other side, while still having enough in the other fields to do what you need to do for your ground forces, while cycling flyers onto and off of the runway to keep them going.
My theory with this system is that it would be easy to attach to any existing game that doesn't have an air element (and could use one). It also seems like it would be easy to put into a new game design.
What do you guys think, are there any obvious problems that I'm missing, and has it been done before?
