Midnight Warrior

It seems to me (at he risk of being a bit ponderous and wordy) that the problem of comamnd delay is a indeed a mixture of technology (i.e. hardware) and the "liveware". This shows up to a larget degree in training, doctrine, and proceedures. These restrict how people act such that even though from a technical standpoint they could do certain things they may not ever do them due to non technical factors such as training, proceedures, doctrine, personality factors, or even national charatcter. For example technically you can send an EMAIL to your company president, or to the FBI, or to a Spam solitiror... but how often does one do that and the reason you don't are not due to a technical factor. The reason one doesn't is part based on doctrine (or protocol) and part due to risk. Thuis risk factor further complicate the issue for no matter how much doctrine and training is pounded into certain people they will either due to their own pluck and self initiative or the desprateness of their situation through all that doctrine out the window and do what makes sense. The glue that makes this all work in real life but is so hard to put into a simulation is this personal personal risk factor. For instance there is a risk factor drawing "outside the lines" and not following the part line. If you look at a lot of successful people (in any area but lets limit it to the military realm) the successuful people are often those that knew how and when to draw outside the lines and were either good enough or lucky enough to get away with it. Generally in an organization you have the generally competitent (with higher and lower levels), the lackies (ambitious and non ambitious), and the entrepreneurs (the sensible and the flamboyant flavors). The generally competent know their jobs well but in general dosn't stray too far from the party line unless provoked by dire circumstances (and then only as little as possible to get the job done). The timid lackies even won't do so when provoked by dire circumstances won't (e.g. Capt Quegs (?) in the Cain Mutiny). The ambitious lackeys will follow the party line and bring disaster becuase they don't know what they are doing but think that since they are falling the party line they will either succeed because they naively believe the party line always works or they even more naively believe that falling the party line will excuse them from accountability of enusing disasters that come from frelig=uosly following it. The entreprenuers will do dare devil things as more of a norm. The sensible entrepeneurs (e.g the U.S. Grants) will do these daring things only as the circumstances demands. The flamoyant entrepeneur (the McAuthurs) may do daring just for the sake of daring (the ego factor). Now in a war game trying to simulate C2 one has to conssider all these factors, the technical (radios and such), doctriine, training, proceedures, as well as the human element. The game usually tries to let the human player bring into the game the human element but the human player can be representative of the participant only do so up to a point (unless he goes into role playing which lets not go there in this discussion). For in real life the deicisions one makes have real consequences while they don't have real consequences to the human player. For example in real life when one deviates too far from the party line they either give you a medal (if it works out good) or a courmarshal if it works out bad) and rightly so in that it takes courage in life to what is right but take prudence not to do something stupid. However, the human player in the game does not face these factors. The only cost he risks is a blow to his ego if he does something stupid 9and when playing merely against the AI even this isn't that much of a factor). He doesn't face courtmarshal, shame, disgrace, death or dissmeberment fro making rash decisions. Thus game players take all sorts of chances that real life human will seldom if ever take (e.g. how many times do you kill yourself flying a flight simulator vs driving your car?). Thus any attempt at modeling these command delays that merely look at the technology will fail. And to put artificial delays in the game to "simulate" this command gut check factor will likly fail too! Now this shows up at the tactical level in just how agressively a commander puts his mean at risk or how timid he is about completing his mission. This shows up at all levels of the command from private (who cammands only himmslef) to the battalion comamnder who commands the whole show (but is still accountable to his superiors too. Now the human player in CM plays not just the battalion commander but issues commands at a number of command levels and this produces interesting effects. He not only has lots more information than his real life commander (the God information factor) but he also has another God factor (impunity from judgement of his superiors). Thus if the human player makes a risky decision as he plays a platoon leader he knows that he faces no risk from his company commander chewing him out since he is playing him too. Limited information I think will help slow things down (as per the discussion in other threads). Limiting what a commander could do due to doctrine and trainning etc is an entirely another matter because these are not pysical limits but intelelctual and moral limits and these are going to be really hard to model. Some games try to model this so that if you a player gets killed the game ends. However this acts more as a anoyance factor rather than a good simulation of the consequence of decisions. To put into a game a model of the consequnce of making decision would require some sort of pyschological model that looks at a commanders character, personallity, ect. While that may be a worthy undertaking for somebody to go explore it is not something I would expect to see in a CM in our liftime. The only thing that I thought might come near to help mimicking this effect is what I put in some other post (I don't remember which one) where I sugested that evey action the player makes (from chaning fileds of view to looking at how much ammo his subordinates have) cost him in command points and that each leader that he is acting in behalf of only has so many command points to make decisions and that each command point used also adds a tiny winne bit of execuation delay). Thus there is a cost in making decisions albeit not in getting courtmarshaled, killed, or relieved of cammand, but rather the loss of freedom to make other command actions for the rest of the turn. This adds one more thing for the player to worry with. If we get a critical mass of things to worry about the tempo of ops might slow down. Whether this is a good way or not is not the issue (for it probably isn't ...but it ain't my worry anyway.. that's BTS's worry). Rather, this just illustrates one of the possible ways of trying to skin this cat. However, the bottom line is that wargames (due to many factors the fun factor being the biggest) will always be fought more agressively than in real life no matter how much everyone wants to make it more realistic in that area. However, I don't think that this means that it ain't worth trying to come up with clever ways of getting closer to the ideal. However, to do so will require more than just thinking about radios. At the same time thinking about radios might be a great place to start and I'm all for it if that's the way BTS should decide to go! Peace! [edit: added some much needed paragraphs] [ March 05, 2005, 04:42 PM: Message edited by: Midnight Warrior ]

I haven't read through all 11 pages so my apologies if this has aleady been answered. Given we have 1:1 representation will each individual soldier have it's own moral check? If so when one soldier panics will it disaggregate itself from the squad or stay attached to it? If it stays attached how will it affect the operation of that squad in regards to movement? This could be pretty cool say you have a veteran squad of 8 experienced guys and have 2 newbies as replacements. It could lead to interesting behaviors.

"That's all well and good and quite clever, but in the British and Commonwealth armies, at any rate, an infantry section was broken down such that each man in a squad file, or section of line, had specific "arcs" to cover. This was done to prevent the very thing you are asking to be simulated - ie only one or two men focussing attention in one specific direction at any one time. I remember very vividly my own basic training in 1987, and being told "WATCH YOUR ARCS"." Your right in that the way I described this approach and the example I used would not produce the behavior you described (I just picked that one example for illustation purposes, there are many different ways to implement this concept). However, the method I described actually would enable you to model the very behavior you described. The formula could be for each guy to watch his sector as you have described (perhaps these would be to the right and left of the noninal search point). Thus each guy would do a lot of LOS checks in his sector and not many outside it. The key here is that each guy can only do so many LOS checks (both to speed up processing and to simulate his real world limitations). The formula that these are handed out can vary from doing what you describe (modeling a well trained unit) to everyone looking at the same target (green horns). That's all in the hands of the game designer. Another way to implement this is the the search sector could be tied to the firing arcs. I'll leave the details to others in that I am not trying to design the game (that BFC's job) but rather just trying to toss out some general ideas that might trigger further discussion. Onre other thing, this would fix another problem. It always bothered me that once say a poor bazooka team gets spotted the whole German army would target him as a priority target. With this method only a small percentage of the possible shooters would even see him initially in that many of the shooters eyes would alight on other targets which would then somewhat curtail their search for jucier targets. Thus this approach would further help demolish Borg spotting. One more thought before I leave this topic. The human eye outside its fovial region also has mnotion detectors. Thus target motion could be another factor in devising the formulas that draw one's attention (i.e up the odds of a a guy getting to make LOS check on a given target).

I understand how 1:1 LOS checks are not possible. For even if you just had 10 good guys vs 10 bad guys that would be 100 LOS checks. However, I would think that there is a good compromise solution that may be possible that might in fact turn this "bug" into a feature. The reason being is the thing that makes 1:1 LOS checks so time consuming in the game is very similar to the thing in the real world that keeps people from seeing everything instantly (i.e a person can't look everywhere at once). For example, you could implement this by randomly picking a guy or two from each unit to do the LOS checks fro that unit. Say if you picked 2 of the 10 good guys cited above and two from the bad guys this would only require 4 LOS checks instead of the 100. Before going to the next step let me digress on the subject of human vision for a moment. The human eye has high resolution fovial vision that only subtends a few degrees. The angular resolution of the eye really falls off outside this fovial vision. The eye scans this fovial vision over a scene much like a modern radar scans it's pencil radar beam over a search area and as such it takes time to search a wide area with the very small instantaneous fovial field of view. The eye scan is partly semi-random and partly conciously directed. Now in theory this phenomenology could be modeled as part of the LOS check mechanization. For example you could specify where a units is focusing its attention which would cause more LOS checks to be applied in that area. Some sort of a formula could be devised that would pick more good guys and more bad guys to do LOS checks (say 4 of each which would require 16 LOS checks) for targets that are near the designated search points (reflecting the fact that more Mark I eyeball search time would be being directed at that region). For other targets outside this region perhaps only one or two guys from each unit are selected which would require only 1-4 LOS checks. Since these are randomly picked over time if something is there to be seen it will eventually be be seen by somebody given it stays visable long enough. On the other hand if a target only stays visable for a short period of time it may never be seen by anybody unless the target is in a directed seach region. Once anyone in a units spots somebody in another unit the formula might apply some form of hysterisis to model target lock on (or even fixation) so that he always does a LOS update on the guy he sees but also does a few additional LOS checks at random where the probabilities may be determined by some method that would reflect how a person might search the battlefield for targets. For example factors such as being shot at might also increase the LOS checks in there direction or if the range is short the units makes lots of LOS checks in that he can now see targets outside his fovial vision (since they subtend larger angles and thus require less resolution to see). Thus each guy in the battlefield would have a targetarea or a found target (or a few targets) that he is looking and hence gets a LOS check each periodically while at the same time he might get a few extra LOS checks to find other targets. The effect of this is that now units are not quite so quick at seeing everything that goes on around them even if a unit is in theory out in the open and not concealed. Also, since LOS checks are a now a managed activity and have to be metered out by some formulaic method a player could now apply tactics such as deliberately exposing a unit to draw everyone's attention to it (i.e it starts hogging LOS checks) so that another group is less likley to be seen. This is something that people do in the real world and thus my thesis above that this no 1:1 LOS "bug" could be turned into a cool game feature if dealt with cleverly. And I am quite sure the folks at Battlefront.com are sufficently clever enough to do just that. So the question is would something like this be worth the time and effort to do (vs all the other things that could be done instead)?

"I'm not clear about what you mean by 'education' in this context. I know that I don't buy a game so that I can sit down to a lecture; I want to play it." That is exactly my point. Different people are turned on by different aspects of a wargame. By "educational" I meant that having played a game one better understands what actually happened and why (maybe there is a better term I could have used for this aspect such as enhanced understanding). This is not to mean a lecture but rather you get to view history from a different perspective by participating in it (albeit vicariously) by having to make similar decisions, getting more familiar with the terrain and OOB's, or seeing how events and alternative outcomes play out) rather than just reading about it in a history book. For me (being a big history buff) I like this aspect. On the other hand it might not appeal to someone else. That's cool with me. This may be a function of individual preference or experience. For example I sort of noticed that some of those who are actually in the military don't seem to value immersion very much (perhaps since they experience the real thing to some degree in their training). Thus they don't want a lot of eye candy (that might enhance immersion) but value other aspects. On the other hand for others immersion may be the thing that turns them on. BTW. I thought of a couple of more fun aspect meterics. 1. Competitiveness/Game value 2. Drama/Historical Import 3. Remembrance/Heroic-ness Competitive/game value deals with the thrill of competition a beating another layer (or even oneself ). Their is a higher form of this that comes from the challenge that comes from facing stiff competition and a more smarmy side of it that appeals to people's ego's wherethey can used the game as a means to showcase their skills (I could be a Napolean or Rommel) or just to show off how much they know about history, military tactics, or whatever. Those of the former aspect tend to like to play a game just from the sake of that like games and competition (be it chess, checkers, or Chancellesville). Thus these (since they like the gaming aspects) may not object as much to "gamey" tactics unless they also have a aspects of what makes a game fun as well (e.g. historical accuracy). Drama is the sense of something important happening. For instance I find there is a sense of drama in any game (almost no matter how bad) that deals with certain topics such as the Normandy invasion in that the subject is of such a dramatic nature and has such an imense impact on history that it transcends. This ties in with the remebrance element in that when one plays a historical wargame it can be viewsed as a way of honoring those who actually were there. Now for some "honoring those in the past" might not just be their cup of tea. Great! For others they might not really that competitive and couldn't care less if they win or not. Once more that's great too. The idea is to try to capture some of the facets of what the cross section of those who like wargames so that individual features can better be discussed as to whether they are cool or not. For example take the discussion on PBEM. Why is that important to some people. Perhaps it is from the social aspect (they like interacting with other gamers via PBEM). For other it might be the competition aspect (they like beating people better than beating the AI). Or it might from the challenging stand point (i.e the AI is not a challenging enough opponent). Or perhaps it is from the historically accurate (the AI doesn't play as realistically as the human). The idea here is not to try to push one aspect over another but to better frame the discussion so that whatever aspects one likes they can better communicate how a game features affects those apsects. DoD some years ago tried to push this methodology that used a QFD matrix (I don't even remeber what QFD standatd far exacept he Q stood for quality.. alos I think the idea came from Japanesse car industry). In a QFD matrix the rows represent goodness aspects (like the fun aspecs) and the columns represent features. The elements of the matrix would have a value (like 0-9) that shows the correlation between a feature and a goodness factor. For example "ride qulaity" might be a goodness aspect and better shocks might be a feature and if the better shocks makes a better ride qulaity the element in the matrix that corrsponded to these two would be a 9 and if it didn't correlate at all it would be a zero). The idea was that one could use such a method to get a qualitative measurment of what features one should put into their next car (or tank, or airplane, or whatever). In practise I doubt that this never really worked (because people would inevitabaly mesd with the numbers until they got the numbers they wanted). However, notionally I think the idea was sound. What I was thinking is that (from a conceptual stand point)one could think about potentials features in CMX2 in a similar manner and cross indexthem against "funness aspects" to notional get a sense of the benefit of the possible function. I know that it in practice it won't work but I think something along these lines might be of some value in trying to elevate the discussion from above the purely subjective. Also, since there may be trades to be made (e.g. immersion verses interest)some sort of notional accounting system may be useful to help sort out these trades and try to come up with win/win solutions that let you have your cake and eat it too. At any rate I've probably have beat this dead horse enough. If you guys find this notion useful, great! If not, that fine too!

I think that it might be of some benefit on what properties makes a wargame fun. I think some the "funness features" listed below captures some of these properties: 1. Interest/challenging, 2. vicarious correlation with actual historical events, 3. education/insight/illumination, 4. immersion, 5. engagement/entertainment, 6. community/commraderery (sp?) 7. escapism/relaxation, 8. excitement, 9. ease of play/absence of tedium, 10. aesthetics (and maybe a few more I left out). For example a game is interesting if it presents challenges problems with many dimensions for the player to solve. Most games want it to correlate with actual historical events (e.g. my soldies get cold and hungry) but only vicariously because I don't want to be cold and hungry when I watching them be cold and hungry.. I what to be chowing down). It is illuminating if when you play it the light bulb comes on and you can say "Ah! Now I understand why they did that!" It has immersion if it gives you a sense of really being there. It is entertaining if it gives you plenty to keep you occupied to keep your mind engaged. The community factor it gives you ways of interacting with other gamers. It provides escapism if it helps you forget some of the problems and stresses you had during the day and focus in on your own little world. It is exciting if it creates a level of suspense of what will happen so that it isn't all totally predictable. It has a high ease of play if it is user friendly and has playing aids. It has aesthetics if there is an element of beauty not only in its graphics and sounds but an elegance in its design and play. Now different people would weight these factors differently. A grog is going to weight say illumination factor higher than a FPS gamer while a FPS is probably going to weight immersion more. I think that the key is to get the right balance for the right audience. This is achieved by getting the right balance of funness features. For example the much touted follow command supports the ease of play funness feature while a cosmic LOS tool enhances ease of play at the expense of accuracy and illumination in that it gives the player too much information. On the other hand real time immersiveness is enhanced by real time play but not the escapist/relaxation element (I have to race against the clock all day. When I come home from a hectic day at work and play a wargame I want to savor what is happening not spend that time too racing agaisnt the clock so I think WEGO is a marvelous compromise solution. Now if you take something like 1:1 modelling and it has the potential to regiser in almost all of the funness features from immersion, to accuracy and detail, to aetheitics, to illuminaion, etc. Thus the mere fact that a game function would touch so many of these funness features says to me that it is a fruitfull area to explore. Where the value of Grogs come in is to help articulate on what the grogs consider as fun in a wargame as a counter balance to the general community since their are so many of them than there are grogs. What the game developers have to do is find the right balance so that they can sell enough games to stay in business but advance the state of the art so it is worth them staying in business. I think that the Battlefront.com have done a great job of this. So rather than freaking out that they will sell out on the Grogs like other developers such as Talonsoft did (which I think ain't a gonna happen!) rather the thrust should be to more accurate capture just what is it that makes a game fun for the Grogs and then to prioritize these against each oter to get the right balance.

If we are gonna have 1:1 representation (which I think is simply fantatstic!) and this 1:1 is more than just eye candy but involves higher fidelity modeling with less abstractions (another big thumbs up!) then are we gonna also have "1:1" terrain modeling? I mean like individual fox holes, trees, stumps, fallen logs, individual rocks, minor terrain height variations like ditches, mounds, creek beds, etc? Will buildings have "1:1 compatable" windows, doors, rooms, stairs, et al. Also are we then gonna have more explicit weapons effects that consider more detailed terrain effects on these weapons (i.e did the shot hit "me" hunkered down behind this big fat rock and not just some abstraction of my unit being in in a rocky tile? Did that grenade roll into my foxhole? Did I have time to toss it back before it went off? I think that something like that would indeed be revolutionary. Nor would I think that it require a lot of micro managing but rather micro modeling. I'm all for it! Forward! Forward!

Michael, perhaps you are right. What would make a face interesting is if it revealed something of the soldier's personality and/or character. If it were just something just totally made up then it might in fact be about as interesting as modeling his underware.

Now this idea falls into the category of pure, unadulterated eye candy but one of the things that one could do with 1:1 modeling is to provide a bit map image for each soldier in a squad/section. These individual soldier "mug shots" could be standard .bmp files (or jpeg, etc) but also could be modded so that scenario builders and users could provide their own. There are innumerable sources for the soldier mug shots (photos, paintings, etc). However, there are also programs like The Sims 3D that let you build and sculpture a face. Given one can add helmets et al to a face building program an industrious scenario designer (with obviously too much time on his hands) could use this features to add an addition touch to a scenario by puting a face (in addition to perhaps a name) to his digital soldiers in his scenario. Now given you have 200 to 400 soldiers per side that would be alot of imagery files that would chew up alot of RAM(even with compression). As such the mug shot sizes woud have to be kept pretty small (one wouldn't want then to take up too much real estate on the control panel either). BTW, These mug shots would not be part of the 3D imagery but would be more like the picture that shows the leaders insignia in the current game. The benefit to this feature would be 1. something more for modders to do (given they don't have enough to do already), 2. more identity between the player and his troops (given so many CM planners have decided that "getting a life" is not what it has cracked up to be and are content spending their free time interacting vicariously with digital representation of their fellow species (especially after having had to deal with the non vicarious variety of their species all day at work). Anyway, I don't know how this would stack up against all the other things that could go into CMX2 but given time and money were no object I think that this might be a nice feature.

A few more thoughts on this subject. Perhaps this notion of C2 time can be used to bring into effect certain behaviors that would be difficult to bring about without it. For example lets take assigning fire. This could be done either using a degree of altruism or being strictly short sighted. Short sighted would be to shoot at who is the biggest threat to you (e.g. who is shooting at you or who is closest). If done in a more altruistic sense one could shoot at the target that would best help your side to win (even if you might not live to enjoy the victory). For example a bazooka might be less of a threat to an infantry squad that a MG so it might opt to shoot at the MG even though the bazooka might be a much bigger threat to the tank supporting the infantry squad (and even the lethality might even be lower against the MG than the bazooka but the selfish units is not trying to optimize their fire but save their hides). From an altrusitic basis it might be much more important to take out that bazooka so that the tank lives which in turn could take out the MG (plus do other wondeful things). However, that is pretty savee behavior and requires both smart troops and troops that are willing to take short term risks for longer term gains (and the human race doesn't always have a great track record for that type of long term thinking). Let's say that the game designer elected to give the TAC AI the more self centered view and it targets the MG (maybe elite troops would use better judgement and use a smarter TAC AI). This shortsightedness could then be corrected by the units pltn commander (given he uis in command range) via the human players command intervention on the pltn commander behalf thus commnading the infantry unit to shoot at the bazooka. However, with the C2 time system he would have to do this at the cost of some of the pltn commanders c2 time. This would be the time he needed to observe what was happening (i.e. my squad is shooting at the MG and not the bazooka [say this takes 10 sec]), the time to orient himself (they really need to be firing at the bazooka because we need that tank to stay alive and take out the MG [lets say that takes 5 sec]) and then decide to order his men to do so (should I interfere with them or not? [5 secs] ) then act by giving the order (1st squad! shoot at the bazooka over there you idiots!). [10 sec]. Thus when the player clicks on the infantry unit and targets the bazooka unit 30 secs of his command time is used up and the infantry unit doesn't shift fire for 30 secs. If the above infantry was not in command range the delay time could be even larger (modeling the fact that the unit now has to figure it out for iteslf that it is not acting smartly). However, the pltn commander would not have his c2 time added on since he would be out of the loop. All this would be transparent to the player, all he did would be to click on the infantry unit and tell it to shoot the bazooka! However, just as the real commander had to decide what to spend his own cognitive time Observing, Orienting, and Deciding, and then Acting on the human player (if he wanted to not rack up alot of command delays) had to do likewise but not in real time but rather in command time expendature. Like Steve was saying how adding more uncertainty slows down the human player this would add even more uncertainty in that the human player is not going to know just how many orders he can give before he racks up a lot of delays in execution due to expended the commanders c2 time thus he will be more stingy with his commands so that he doesn't fritter them away on the less important because now everything he does cost him something. Another way of saying this is that right clicks on his mouse are or no longer free but cost him in command time. Another example would be Borg spotting. I gather from the previous posts that the solution to Borg spotting is that the computer will keep tabs for each unit on and every potential target whether he has spotted that target or not (Yeah!!!). Then if the player attempts to target a unspotted unit there is an element of uncertainty if the unit will spot the target that turn and if it doesn't it does not fire (cool!!!). I would think that alternatively the player could target the unit with area fire and avoid this uncertainty but with the cost of having less fire power on the target (unless area fire is denied units shooting at real estate close to unspotted units). Now to some this tactic might appear gamey in that the human player is taking advantage of his own knowledge to have a unit fire at something (albeit as an area fire) it would not normally fire at at all since it doesn't see it. Now perhaps there are other ways to fix this (if indeed it needs fixing) but for arguments sake lets apply the OODA C2 paradigm to this situation and see if it offers some other means of making this potential gamey solution less attractive to the a player. One could invision that the C2 time to order area fire is greater than ordering fire at a seen target. The reason being is that to decide to shoot at an area where the target is unseen requires more careful observation since it takes longer to see what is not there than to see what is. (Alternatively it might require information passed from another party to cue one in on the area of interest.) Also, it would require more thinking to get oneself oriented on an area target in that more mental deductions are required (why do I think there may be a target there even though I can't see it), the decision time might be greater (do I want to use up ammo and increase my exposure shooting at something I can't see and might not actually be there?) and the action time in issueing the command might be longer in that it takes might take more time to say shoot at that clump of trees.. no that clump.. not the other clump than it says to say shoot at that tank over there). Thus the c2 time might be say 30 seconds for the commander to order his troops to shoot area fire vs 5-10 secs at a spotted target. Thus if a player uses area fire for whatever reason (but in this case to partially circumnavigate the Borg spotting restriction) then he still would have to pay both a 30 sec delay in executing the area fire and also use up half his command time (in addition to reducing his lethality). This further raises his uncertaunty in that if he didn't try to micromanage the situation the unit might have spotted the target anyway in the next 10 seconds and started shooting on his own without having to incure any of the above costs. (But instead of spotting it it was busy listening to his instructions) Thus this C2 rule just adds that much more uncertainty to the game and further biases the human player from micromanaging and using gamey tactics while still permitting him to do so if he so desires. On the other hand skittish troops might start firing at an area on their on and the commander would have to use up some of his commad time to order them to stop firing. The commander would do this simply by selecting cancel fire on the unit conducting the area fire. The only new thing here is that the cancel fire comamnd would increment the commanders c2 time x seconds where previously this cost him nothing except some addition risk of making his carpal syndrome worse by making yet another round of mouse clicks. As far as muddying the user interface and making it harder for the newbie to learn the system if implemented correctly all the mechanics of this c2 bookeeping should be handled almost totally transparent to the player such that all he sees is added delays happen when he gives too many orders (similar to what he sees when he adds too many waypoints). Once he uses up his minute his command options when he right clicks are now grayed out until the next turn so he just moves on to his next commander for that turn. Also, even if he cancels his commands he doesn't reset his c2 time because the OOD time in the OODA loops has been expended even if the action is canceled. Thus it might be annoying to the player (though he only has himself to blame) but not more workload or a less clean interface.

One more thought on this. C2 time penalties might help even out the play of the human against the AI. Instead of making the AI smarter (which takes LOTS of programmer time!!!) it would make the player dumber in that he wouldn't have the luxury of micromanging in detail how to cream the poor AI. On the other hand the AI would not have to bother with any of these C2 retrictions in that its limited intelligence is restriction enough.

I've thought some more about the idea I proposed above and it seems for something like this would best work given that there are orders that follow some sort of SOP's. SOP's could be standard road march, standard advance, move into a line, etc. Thus a commander could order a SOP with little penalty in command time in that it takes little thought and explanation on his part to issue the standard commands since they are well rehearesed and well understood proceedures. On the other hand if we wants to do something fancy then it would take more of his time and attention to think it through and to communicate his wishes to his troops. This is sort of simulated in the game today by issuing group commands over individual. However, the group commands don't really exercise an SOP's other than move in parallel. Also, as it is today the only benefit for using a group order is laziness (or convenience on the positive side) in that there is no benefit in the game for doing a group command (or is there?). However with command time penalties modeled in the game if a platoon commander issues a group order per some SOP it would take x time. If instead he moves each man individually it might take 3-5X time. He would get a more control at a heavier price in decision and execution time. Thus with this feature there would be an actual benefit to the game to issue a group order using an SOP as opposed to individual orders while should he desire he can still give detailed orders. And if he gets too fancy with his orders, yes his men might be left standing around in the middle of a road waiting for the commander to finish telling them what he wants them to do. In addition, the squads themselves might be able to alter the commands by moving their waypoints within some bounds at no additional penalty to the commander much like you can alter waypoints in the game today without adding additional command delays. Perhaps this could be used to model different nationalities and experience levels of troops in that say the Germans might have more SOPs while the early war Russian fewer and the time cost of issuing orders may be different (as well as the delays in following them) so that the Germans could do more and do it faster than the Russians. I am thinking that situational awareness time could also be modeled such as penalizing the commander if he changes map scales (simulating him having to stop and look at his map). It could work something like this. A commander is selected. each time he chooses an elevated map scale, zooms around the local area where he is at, clicks on one of his troops, etc he does cost him in command time. Perhaps the level of commander he is effects this time simulated that a bn commander may have more resources for looking around the battlefield than a pltn commander. All this would be an abstraction of the commander studying what is around him, lsitening on the radio, looking at his map, listening to sounds and all the other things that casue him to build his level of situational awareness of ewhat is going on about him. The thought behind all of this is that everything the player does in the command phase cost him in command time (unlike the free lunches he currently gets in CM1 during the command phase). The idea here is not to slow the game down (for if he has the SOPs the game can still move along in a quick tempo). The idea is to make the game more interesting by adding yet another dimension of decision making to the player that also somewhat models the reality of having to plan and fight in real time without having to impose real time into the game (with all its bad side effects). John Boyd called this C2 process the OODA loop, Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Currently (other than command delays) there is no penalty for anything in the OODA loop other than the acting phase (i.e it takes time to move, shoot, load, unload, etc). What this type of modeling would do is add a cost for the Observe, Orient, and Decide part of the OODA loop. I think it would add some of the urgency into the WEGO system even though the clock is stopped in that if you start exploring too many options, give orders and the keep altering them or adding too much detail, spend too much time slewing around the map then presto, you can't give any orders more that turn because your minute is up and you have to put another quarter into the machine. BTW, To handle the case where you have only issued half of your orders you don't want half you forces moving and the other half not you might have a execute trigger where you issue orders but the units don't start carrying them out until you issue the execute command. That way if you blow a turn issuing commands you can delay iisuing the execute command until you finsish issuing the remaining orders the next turn. This would also allow you to issue detailed orders in advance and wait several turns to initiate their execution. One other thought here in regards to orders. Some of the orders in the current game are more in regard to cause rather than effect. It might be better to also have effect based orders as well as cause. For example the dealy command is a cause type order in that it causes a unit to arrive at its destination at a different time. A time on target (TOT) command would be an effects based order in that it doesn't specify the cause (i.e. delay) but rather the intended effect (TOT). Thus you could click an object and command hit this at 10:30. The units would then adjust their departure time and rate of advance to hit their objective at the TOT as opposed to the player having to figure out all the delays to make the units hit their objectives at the right time. This would allow the commander to issue the desired effects and the units could then use the TAC AI to figure out the causes to make it so. The whole idea here is to allow the player to micromanage to his hearts content (if that is what he finds fun to do) but at the same time to give him an incentive not to do so (without having to impose actual time limits on him). This whole thing couild be handle as an option like extreme FOW (it might be extreme C2 option). When playing CM often I use rules such as this as a house rule in that if I spend too much time trying to figure out what to do I then just do nothing thinking that in real life I would have used my minute+ up deliberating. I think it would be cool to have this built in into the game itself. My reason is that added realism (if done right) usually means added fun! I don't know how this feature would stack up against others but in some ways it is fundamental which means that it could affect many other features and thus perhaps is worthy of some consideration in regard to CM2.

I haven't read through all these so my apologies if this has been covered elswhere. I have been playing the new ASW game 1st Bull Run lately and thinking about real time play vs WEGO. I think they did a good job of simulating C2 in 1st Bull run and insteaf of a click fest you have to rely on the AI. It naturally models command decision limits by having the clock always running but it also limits the players ability to understand and know what is happening in the battle, not as his role of battle commander (for the battle commander is in reality also limited) but rather as his role as game player trying to have fun and take in what is going on for his own enjoyment. Thus I have been thinking a bit about how one might put this time criticalality factor into the WEGO system. My thought is that commander decision times could be modeled not just as a delay in the execution of the command but also as a task that consumes the commanders available command time. Thus in a one minute turn as the commander issue an order it might take say 30 secs of his command time that turn. This would limit what other orders he could give in that he can't exceed one minute of giving out commands. Thus once he uses all his time for a turn he can't issue any more orders. This accounting could be done for each commander at whatever level (pltn, co, bn) but his order would be limited to those under his command. This feature would allow the human player to spend as much time as he wants viewing the battlefiled and thinking about what to order his men to do but it would limit how many commands he could give per turn. Perhaps situation awareness functions could also consume command time. And command time may also restrict his other actions like moving and shooting, etc (giving he can't chew gum and walk at the same time). This idea also implied that every command that is given can be associated with a specific commander. For example a fire command given to a squad would be issued by the platoon commander (given he is in command range). In some ways this is somewhat reminicient to the card system like the the old AH game Up Front where the lack of cards kept one from doing things that were physically doable. The cards apporach is a bit more of an abstraction and probably wouldn't fit in with the CM personna. However, the command modeling is more concrete and perhaps might. edit. fixed a few typos.

This is slightly OT but I thought that a neat follow on to CM would be to combine CMBB and CMAK to allow the Allies to fight the Russians. This could simulate a hypothetical Western Allies vs Soviet union war at the end of WWII as well as the Korean war. One could have US and British fighting along with their new German allies against Russians and their new eastern european allies. This would pit US, British and German equipment against Russian and german equipment. The Korean war variant would add in later equipment such as Patton tanks as well as North Korean, ROK, and Chineese troops with Russina equipment. I am sure that this idea has been thought of and posted before. Just thought it might be worth mentioning again. p.s. I just finished reading Korea, the Forgotten War by Clay Bliar. It is an excellent book on the Korean war!

Here is one of the things I would like to see. Feature. Embedded Journalist Rationale. To remove some of the time and tedium of positioning play back camera Description. 1. An Embedded Journalist (EJ) can be either user defined/ user named units (added at will during any movement order phase) or a role assigned to existing units. EJ’s can be moved like any other unit. However, they cannot spot, fire, be seen, or do any other activity that affects game play. If an EJ is a role assigned to an existing combat unit the EJ functions much like the current “tab” function in that the journalist moves with the unit. 2. During a play back phase a list of currently instantiated embedded journalist would be presented in a some sort of list (e.g. right click embed journalist button and get a list of EJ’s) 3. Once selected the camera position is immediately becomes that of the embedded journalist. When in play back in mode the camera position moves with the EJ. 4. The embedded journalist can be instructed to point his camera at certain events that fall within its event range, such as kill events, firing events, arty explosion, movement, enemy detect events, and etc. The event range could be specified by the user. Also, a LOS limitation option can be selected so that events outside of the EJ’s LOS are not reported. Also a sound event detect threshold might also be selectable . 5. If any of the above events occur during a turn the EJ name in the EJ list will become highlighted so that the user knows that that EJ has seen something of interest that turn. 6. Each detected event of interest (EOI) is added to an EOI list for that EJ along with an auto generated text field describing the event (e.g. Tank hit event: Veh 1, Sherman Tank recieves hull penetration from Veh 4 Pz Mk1V). Some portions of these text descriptions may not be viewable under certain Fog of War options until after the game (e.g. in the above example it might only be reported as a tank hit event). The player can add his own comment line to any event of interest (e.g “1st platoon got whacked bad by that Jerry tank's MG in the tree line in front of it”). This EOI list can be selected which in turn cause the replay clock to be set to the time of the event of interest (less a preamble time) and the camera pointed toward it. This list is cleared at the beginning of each turn for each EJ. 7. A cumulative log each turns of events of interest can be dumped as a text file at the end of a game as a aid for after action reviews. Example. Two user defined EJ’s are created one named Pegasus Bridge (PB) the other Orr River Bridge (OB) with a 500m even range. Plus the Company HQ is assigned an EJ role with a 200m event range with LOS limit and a sound detection threshold. All EJ are enabled to respond to enemy detect events. Nothing happens until turn 6. The player being in a hurry to get to the actions skips watching the playback video based on the knowledge hat nothing of interest happened. On turn 6 the PB EJ indicates 3 enemy detects. The user during turn 6 playback selects EJ PB and this calls up the EOI list. The list has detection event 1 at time 33, 2 at time 37, and 3 at time 58. The user selects event one and the camera clock is set to 23 second (10 seconds preamble time before the detection event at time 33) and the camera is pointed at the detection event. The user hits play and sees the detection event on the replay. The player was able to save about ten minutes of replay time reviewing videos that nothing of interest happened. At the and of the game he prints the cumulative event log and loads into his MS Word or EXCEL document and sees that in turn 6 1st squad spotted a German MG and identified it as infantry, etc. His recorded comment was “Drat! Didn’t think Jerry would be that close”) edit. fixed some typos [ September 06, 2004, 10:30 AM: Message edited by: Midnight Warrior ]

I'd like to see a smart camera capability. The smart camera would generate a list of events of interest during a turn. Events of interest could be events such as losses taken by a unit, units being fired on, etc. Clicking on an event in the list would position the camera and the clock to view that event. This would be espeacilaly handy for large scenarios and could save a lot of time replaying a turn to catch all the significant events.

1. Explicit modeling of radios and radio nets with radio traffic .wav files. 2. user selectable mouse wheel control to change viewing elevation, viewing elevation angle, step through units, or step through HQ's. 3. Aircraft "gun camera" view. 4. Easy way to identify scenarios that one has played from scenario list. 5. Embedded mod manager function tied to each scenario 6. User editable text file for each unit to keep notes for after action reports (e.g. as an expansion on the kills report 7. Way to export surviving units to other QB scenarios (build your own campaign game).

I'm reading a very good book on the Korean War, The Forgotten War By Clay Blair. It looks to me that the fighting in Korea was just as intense as it was in WWII (at least in '50) only not to the same scale. I think the Korea war would lend itself quite well to an CM adaptation. The tactics and equipment and scales are not that different from WWII. What would be different is is pitting T-34's against US tanks. Also, it would be cool to have Pershing and Patton tanks. The HPS squad battles Korean game is fun to play but just whets my appetite for a CM version. Thus, I would vote for a Korean war version of CM at some time. Korea also has relevance in that we are still sitting there 50 years later and it is one of the most heavily armed spots in the world. Both sides get to be on the offensive and defensives. Both sides get tanks and have tank superiority at different times. The play balance should be pretty good since from a historical (it ended in a stalemate. You have everything from mobile war to trench warfare. Human waves and tank, river crossings, winter and summer scenarios, seesaw warfare, and even amphibious operations and even some helo's. Thus there is a lot of variety in the combat. Plus it involves troops from many nations.

My dad served in the navy on a LCT. He was at landings at North Africa and in the first wave at Omaha at Normandy and unloaded vehicles of the 29th ID. His job during landings was to pull in the anchor once the LCT was unloaded which would pull the LCD off the beach. He also was in London during the V-1 blitz.

My dad served in the navy on a LCT. He was at landings at North Africa and in the first wave at Omaha at Normandy and unloaded vehicles of the 29th ID. His job during landings was to pull in the anchor once the LCT was unloaded which would pull the LCD off the beach. He also was in London during the V-1 blitz.

My dad served in the navy on a LCT. He was at landings at North Africa and in the first wave at Omaha at Normandy and unloaded vehicles of the 29th ID. His job during landings was to pull in the anchor once the LCT was unloaded which would pull the LCD off the beach. He also was in London during the V-1 blitz.

It has arrived in Foat Wuth, Texas! Yeah!

1. Maybe. From my reading three major factors led to the Japanese attacking the US. 1. They saw a window of opportunity with the Western eurpean colinial powers being either conquered ( France, Netherlands) and/or fighting for their lives (Britain) that left their aisan colonies vulnerable. 2. The US oli embrag in response to their moves in China forced the Japanese either to fight or back down in China. 3. The climate in Japan was militiaristic and they seemed to be spoiling for a fight. If England was successfully invaded by the Germans then the first reason would be even more valid. However, if Great Britain negotiated a end to the fighting but maintained their sovereignty then the their ability to defend their colonial possesions in Asia may be increased in that they would not be engaged in fighting the Germans. On the other hand reason 2 and 3 may have prevailed anyway. 2. Probably. Hitlers stated reason for attacking Russia was that he thought that this would be a back door way ofbeating the British in that he thought that it was insane for the British to continue the war alone against german and thus they must be puting their hope that the Soviet Union would eventually join the allied side. Hitler thought that a quick defeat of Russia would demoralize Britain and cause them to throw in the towel. I have for a long time suspected that Hitler had a healthy respect for the British (having fought againmst them personally in WWI) and though he was shrewed enough to not be afraid of the weak intra war British Governments once the British started getting their act together under Churchill and he started loosing the battle of Britain he certainly seemed to not relish the idea of directly invading Britain ala sealine but lloked to indirect methods of knowcking Britain out such as the Battel of The Atlantic or quick strike in Russia. If the British quit (but still reamined a threat) he perhaps might have decided to quit while he was ahead. Of course at the same time he had said that he intended to sieze large chunks of Russia in Mein Kampf and probably intenend to do so and the demoralizing the British to give up may have just been a rationalization or icing on the cake for his real motive of enslaving Euro Russia). Also, I am sure he thought that eventually one of these two great totlalitarian states must inevitable must destroy the other and that the longer he wait the stronger the Soviet Union would become. Also, with the British out of the game he might have felt emboldened to go into Russia even though the immediate nned of doing so may have been perhaps reduced with the end of the European shooting war. At any rate my guess is that he would have invaded.

As we are waiting for CMAK, I was thinking that it might be neat if some good hypothetical scenarios were developed for the Malta Invasion that the Germans almost launched. Also, a question. Does anyone think that the Germans could have pulled off a successful invasion of Malta and if so what effect would it have had on the war in North Africa? I haven't ever seriously investigated this but my thought (off the top of my head) is that based on the mauling the German para's initially had at Crete and considering that the Allies had Ultra it would have been a real iffy thing for the Germans to take Malta. And even if they suceeded it probably would not have affected Torch and thus probably wouldn't have affect the course of the war that much. Anybody agree or disagree with this?

IIRC, the original plan of attack was that Charles would start working on coding CM2 (or whatever they now call it) while the rest of the team worked on CMAK. Anybody know if this is what has been actually happening? Or did Charles get sucked into the CMAK development? If not, is there any info on how CM2 is coming along? BTW. It's not that I am in that big a hurry for CM2 but rather this is perhaps another topic to kill some time thinking about as we all anxiously wait for CMAK to arrive.