WARCOM

WARCOM, originally written by David Eubanks, is a DOS-based application which helps play out mass-combat situations with a slight nod to Rolemaster's War Law system.  I say "slight nod" because the WARCOM app takes much of the abstraction of groups and armies that War Law works so hard at, and makes that work unnecessary.  This is because WARCOM does a very good job of taking groups of like combatants as input and faithfully applying an excellent approximation of Arms Law-based combat resolution (e.g., open-ended attack rolls, hit points and critical results).  A battle with thousands of armed and armoured participants requiring the resolution of hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of attacks becomes resolvable in the course of a normal role-playing gathering.

While a DOS-based (and keyboard-only) application, WARCOM has no problem running in a window under XP and has been used extensively in that environment.  Eubanks' original (1.0) WARCOM relase circa 1991 has been "out there" a long time (here, for example), but I re-release it now in updated (2.3.1) form and with Eubanks' blessing as freeware.  While I have done very little to modify the basic interface, about four good years of playtesting and bugfixing went in and have improved the accuracy and usefulness of the app.

WARCOM 2.3.1 zip package (use "Save Target As")

WARCOM ReadMe file as HTML

To fully understand what motivates some of the features of WARCOM, it would be necessary to obtain a copy of War Law and read how Rolemaster treats morale, exhaustion, tactics, etc.  Nevertheless, the application is still very useful even if those WARCOM support features are not exploited since the app is fundamentally a mass-attack resolution engine.  For the Anderson Campaign "House Rules" on how a character's Secondary Skills impact War Law characteristics, consult the list here for mentions of "War Law," as well as the stat table page here.


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