Speculation on game style, plus will teams become unbalanced towards the end

[Steiner14]

I find the idea of JasonC with pouring in reinforcements extremely interesting.

It shouldn't be impossible, to add that option for CMC-campaigns (Realistic punishment of gamey overloading? On/Off).

My 2 ct: the max points could be made dependable on the infrastructure/streets in the area. The better the infrastructure, the more streets, the higher the max points.

The more the points of the stacked force exceed that max value, the harder the impact of unrealiable reinforcements.

That could be intepreted as jammed streets, overloaded transport systems and logistical problems.

The amount of the point values and the percentage and time delay of the reinforcements should allow a quite good balancing of CMC to get the best compromise between the possibility of stacking, and a certain (more realistic) price that has to be paid for it.

[Sailor Malan]

Originally posted by JasonC:

People don't attack with negative odds.

There is little point in a "campaign" that consists of exactly 3 maps.

I didn't mean a 6X2 campaign, I meant a 6km WIDE campaign, x much deeper. And locally, 1 btn vs 1 isn't negative odds if the defender is stretched very thin. Tactically it is >3:1

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Campaigns kill entire side forces. Casualties racked up enourmously when you can fight "to the death" battles in sequence. What matters is how much force is left before the last 2-3 op moves. Holding anything before then is utterly irrelevant. Dead men hold nothing.

I'm coming around to your view somewhat. CM scenarios certainly tend to be 'to the death' affairs. So, I don't see why we should expect CMC campaigns to be any different. I suppose most of them will be decided when one side or the other loses the bulk of their forces. I guess that's a problem common to all wargaming. Players tend to be very poor at conserving their forces.

On the other hand, I do still see time as a limiting factor here. If you give CMC players 2 weeks of time, they will certainly kill every unit in the campaign. However, a CMC campiagn with a division sized force, that only lasts for 2 days, may not be decided by the elimination of one side or the other. Even the most bloodthirsty CM players will have a hard time killing a larger amount of troops in a shorter period of time.

Also consider - say the attacker needs to take 4 objectives along a front to 'win' the campaign. Perhaps the attacker would like to concentrate all forces in one mass and take each objective in sequence, but this would take 8 days to accomplish, simply due to the movement involved. If the campaign is only 4 days long, lumping all units together will only result in the capture of pehaps two of the objectives, and possibly the loss of the game. The attacking player will be forced to split his forces in order to take multiple objectives simultaneously.

I'm not a huge fan of time constraints, but as long as the time constraints have some basis in reality or history, they may go a long way towards limiting 'gamey' over-concentration of forces.

[JasonC]

Runyan99 - coming around perhaps, still a ways to go. You still haven't grasped how important repeated sequential combat makes absolute losses.

Forces don't fight once a day. Every place they advance they fight once per op move, and there can be half a dozen to a dozen op moves per day. 20 fights between dawn and dusk of a single day is perfectly normal for a regiment scale campaign.

If you make it a division instead, yes people will fight in multiple locations, they will also fight more in each op move. And they will still kill entire side forces, rapidly. They typically will not fight 3 times as often with 3 times the forces. But some of the fights will increase in scale, too - the most heavily stacked ones will be stacked 50 to 100% higher.

Nothing changes the fact that a unit on the line has to withstand a number of CM battles about equal to the length of an operational day, times a modest limiting factor (1/2, 2/3) for times it is not pressed because engagement only takes place elsewhere along the line. But that factor stems precisely from the tendency to stack and mass at particular points and not to fight at all at others.

It is not the case that there are fights at every location all along the line every op move, with only the local odds differing. Instead, in some locations neither side attempts to advance, and the forces thus remain static and get some rest - while also not contributing anything. Where people think they have a local edge they press. So the portion of the side forces engaged is typically greater than the portion of frontage fought over. (The more highly stacked portions of the frontage are the ones where fights tend to occur, because one side or the other is trying to advance).

Well, if you have to fight 5 times with each force, you can't lose 20% in any one fight. To remain combat effective in the last fight, you can't lose much more than 10% in an average or successful one. There will be occasionally blowout losses (100% or nearly so), and many times when you lose 30-50% of the force.

Do the math. 1/2 engaged times .7 chance of .1 losses from original strength and .2 chance of .3 losses and .1 chance of .9 losses means the force is gone in 9 operational moves. If you avoid the last entirely you might stretch it to 13 moves - still less than 2 days.

Ergo, you must have units out of battle entirely and static portions of the line where nothing is happening and easy wins without any losses to speak of and retreats where you run away instantly - or you will run out, rapidly. And if 33 to 50% of the engaged forces are pushing vigorously and fighting nearly every move, with losses up in the 20-40% range, even all of those for all the rest of the force will not keep enough in being to hold a line after just 2 days.

So no, nobody is going to lack sufficient time to wipe out the adversary. The struggle is not between own losses and time, but between own losses and enemy losses. Somebody is going to "give" first. If your loss rate stays below your starting odds and the other guy's exceeds his starting odds, he'll be the one who "goes" first.

[Ardem]

JasonC

"The people peddling their silly solutions simply haven't played a CM campaign."

Your not the supreme hero of tactics in CM, neither am I but I don't make I am either.

I have a fair few campaigns under my belt and I have watched fists dwindle away, then counter attacked when they are at there weakess.

I have seen fists succeeed.

But to make a statement fist are the only thing that will happen in CMC is presumptuous and arrogant.

Also my simple solutions as you call them have been tried and tested, I cannot set an example otherwise it would lift fog of war in CMMC, but limited units can tie down superior ones and Large Arty can make a mess of armoured formations.

[ July 18, 2006, 10:57 PM: Message edited by: Ardem ]

[Steiner14]

Thanks Ardem. First he says, stacking means victory, then he suddenly discovers, that the absolute losses are key...

[JasonC]

It is a useful report certainly. A bit thin on the details.

As for losses and stacking, um, obviously my claim is that stacks generate other side losses and those snowball into campaign wins. That has been my experience. With some wildcards, to be sure, from things like poorly handled fights with lopsided losses, subcommanders ignoring orders and fighting to the death when told to limit losses, etc.

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Well, if you have to fight 5 times with each force, you can't lose 20% in any one fight. To remain combat effective in the last fight, you can't lose much more than 10% in an average or successful one. There will be occasionally blowout losses (100% or nearly so), and many times when you lose 30-50% of the force.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a CM battle where one side only suffers 10% casualties. And yet, historically, I would guess that instances where units took more then 10% casualties in a single engagement were more uncommon than not.

I'm still not sure what you're getting at though. Are you just trying to tell is that CMC will be horribly broken and unable to produce anything like historical engagements simply because wargamers will mash their forces together and chew them up much at a much faster rate than real commanders did? That every CMC game is going to be over in 12 hours once contact is made, because players will have killed all of their units by then?

[JasonC]

Players will fight hard enough that their losses will be high, not in single fights but over several. At first it will be true even in single fights - but the winners will figure that one out rapidly, and become a lot more careful about losses.

What they won't care about is control of ground, because you can't regulate 2 variables with 1 dial. They have to press or back off with a view to (1) staying alive and (2) running the other guy out of men before they run out themselves. Ergo, they won't press because there is a flag there or some extraneous idjit tells them op square C-2 is important. Because they will have other more important things to worry about.

Once you realize losses are the thing, the reason for stacks and the counters to stacks are much more realistically constrained.

Here is an unrealistic counter to stacks - attack every turn in every op square you think won't have the stack, with a full battalion team. It won't work because (1) it will lead to whole force evaporation in 4 moves and (2) occasionally the stack will hit one of them and blow it away.

See, the fact that people have to restrict the number of fights per op move, to last at all, means some portion of the side forces are idle at every op move. A fair number, actually. Sitting opposite each other in quiet sectors with neither side pushing.

The business end is the stack, and the winning move is to thin the quiet sectors to win in the unquiet ones.

Etc.