Building Scenarios for Solo Wargames - Part One

While I've been reading about and toying with solo wargames for various reasons, one of the primary goals of mine is to build something for myself.  After a bit of fiddling and writing I've tentatively settled on the idea of scenario building for solo games to facilitate play.

What that means is I would craft a basic scenario but make it as open ended as possible for it to be functional for as many time periods as possible.  Then within the limits of my technical skills, find ways to program the opposition for the solo player such that they can try to anticipate how they'll behave and plan appropriately rather than be completely at the whim at the gods of randomness.

So to start things off I sat down to define what the scenario should do for the solo player:

1. Provide a predetermined battlefield.  Building a field for battle that is balanced for play or even favors one player when appropriate is an important element of a wargame.  Taking the building of the battlefield out of the player's hands creates the opportunity for players to survey the field with fresh eyes and keeps some element of bias out of the building process.

For example: The Blue and Red vanguard forces met the previous day, engagements ended at nightfall in stalemate.  Overnight both sides received reinforcements and have begun to settle into their positions in preparation for the day's meeting.

This would be accompanied by a map of the ground showing enough detail to be reproduced easily but not so much that it cannot scale or be modified to fit various rules or even time periods.

2. Provide fog of war for the opponent when desired.  Some people play both sides as if they were commanding each individually.  Others like an opponent that offers some mystery and the challenge of trying to anticipate based on scouting and other clues given in scenario background.

Continuing the example: The Blue force (player driven) learns determines what strategy the Red force will use (randomly) and is given a scouting report.  This may be vague and simple, enough to give suspicion as to the enemy objective without identifying it outright.  In this case "Enemy troops appear to be massing against our left flank."  The Blue leader then deploys.  With this done, the Red force deployment is shown and the player follows that deployment as described.

3. Provide asynchronous objectives that may not be known to the player of the game at game start.  Revealing immediate objectives for forces that set up later reveals of goals for the opposing forces to provide a player a chance to try anticipating and thwarting the goals of the opponent.  If these can be provided in different ways which bear investigation it should be possible to minimize randomness by tailoring the information provided to the scenario and give reasonable objectives without feeling completely unintuitive.

Completing the example:  The Red team is given a "first two turns" goal to set up but ideally not flat out give away the objective.  Its assumed a good player will put together the deployment and first steps to anticipate the enemy goals.  Following the completion of the second turn the actual goals are revealed.

One obvious problem:  This system fails when the objectives are simply to defeat the opposing force.  Fighting for terrain objectives can benefit towards that goal but don't serve it directly.

So it needs work.  What do you think so far?