moonglum01 wrote:

I agree about the relationship between shoot downs and encounters in WWI, although I would think it better to talk about fights instead of encounters, as there were lots more meaningless encounters than real fights. While I do not fully agree that the "usual" outcome of games is annihilation or near annihilation (at least not in the games I seem to play - allowing for exiting aircraft), I definitely grant that the game's casualty rate is far above that of the actual war. This situation seems to be more a consequence of various site controllable, artificial constraints (especially board size and the highly limiting and unrealistic exiting rules), and, most importantly, the fact that the player's lives are not in jeopardy in a combat. Such is the unfortunate reality of all gaming (often known as the "hero gamer" complex). Some of the conditions which reduce historical accuracy could be corrected on the site, some obviously cannot.

With regard to scoring, no I do not believe that a game without a kill should be a tie, and have said so previously. As I stated in my post (33945): "While I do believe that points should be awarded for damaging a target (not just shooting), the total for such shooting should never be able to overwhelm the points for achieving kills." Clearly, from what I said there, a game without a kill would be judged on the points for hitting (i.e., damaging the enemy). But, even one kill should be worth more points than all the non-kill hitting someone does in a game.