Empire of the Sun, studied properly
A solo study campaign of Mark Herman's Pacific War card-driven wargame, with a written learning-game walkthrough and a script for parsing VASSAL save files.
In progress
VASSAL Python
Empire of the Sun (GMT Games, Mark Herman) is a card-driven design covering the entire Pacific War at the strategic level, and it has a deserved reputation as one of the harder wargames to learn well. I am playing it solo on VASSAL and treating the learning process as a project in itself.
The study apparatus so far:
- A condensed rules quick-reference distilled from the full rulebook.
- A written walkthrough of the December 1941 scripted opening, working through why the mini-turn is the right teaching turn and what each move is for, not just what the rules permit.
- Notes on the traps in the module itself, where the VASSAL module and the printed rulebook quietly disagree.
- A small Python utility that parses VASSAL save files, because at some point every hobby becomes a software project.
The long-term aim is a series of annotated campaign write-ups.