We're so spoiled (and yet not)

[John Kettler]

When I stumbled onto the below site, I realized, practically instantly, how incredibly far we've progressed from war with miniatures, troop stands, piles of lead/tin/plastic, primer and valiant efforts to assemble (maybe create from scratch or semi scratch), decently painted figures and equipment. I had friends who did fabulous work, but I wasn't gyrostabilized. Happily, MicroArmour™ didn't require much in the way of painting skills, and we never really got into the infantry side of things.

http://www.modeldads.co.uk/Gaming/Flames-of-War-After-Action-Reports.html

When you look at CMBN unmodded, compare that with the immense effort to duplicate the bocage (and other locales) seen here. We are incredibly well off, have far more interesting terrain and don't wind up with our armor jammed ridiculously close together (generally--wait'll I post my pics from "Cats Chasing Dogs").

I well remember the ROCO MiniTank Kursk a well-to do-friend built in his then-unsodded huge back yard. Hundreds and hundreds of pieces, including numerous U.S. 105s turned into ZIS-3s. Fabulous--in theory. But add humans to this vast martial panorama and Crunch! There goes the 8" howitzer subbing for the Russian B4. Take a few steps more and you've mashed a sunken gun emplacement. Of course, it rained in between battle segments! Such circumstances led, many years later (model builder first, my gaming was on maps) to a sand table, too small for ROCO, really, but cool with bunkers made of match sticks, coastal fortifications molded in spray can tops from Plaster of Paris and such. Ridiculously short apparent ranges at that scale, but MicroArmour™, when we switched, was a whole new world and looked good, too. A sand, colored PaK 40 was practically invisible, making ambush a real possibility. We had to do a piece count after the battle to make sure no pieces were lost forever, and because we were hardcore, our turrets were left rotatable. Even with goo young eyes, finding an errant SdKfz 231 turret wasn't much fun.

These days, we have a virtual sand table, don't have to flip through the rules, the vehicles look phenomenal compared to what I'm used to, and the AFVs can pretty much run themselves to some degree. If we want to fight on a battleship gun cratered landscape, we can. I can still recall doing craters in the green sawdust-sprinkled sand manually.

There are things shown here at the link that we don't have, and that smarts. It smarts even more that for all its chart flipping limitations, Tractics provided far more military capabilities and options than we have now, and that was the 1970s. I'd be remiss, though, if I failed to point out the ballistic modeling didn't come close, I never heard of edge effect and didn't know a thing about Brinnell numbers, but a great deal was done with aspect, slope, trajectory modeling (transition from horizontal strikes to plunging hits) and weak spots even so. Armor quality was definitely not addressed. I think the behind armor effects for APHE were more credible, and I think HVAP was in for the U.S. I recall no PzGr 40 for the Germans or arrowhead for the Russians, but this may simply be faulty memory. I'll never forget, though, losing almost an entire King Tiger platoon to first round IS-2 hits by a longtime friend on his first sand table outing. I barely had my MicroArmour™ on the table before it started exploding!

I love to be able to issue orders and watch my forces move (or not), and it's much to be preferred over tape measures, knocking over things and the hazards of rolling dice (anyone remember the "toad" that preceded percentile dice?). So abrasive was the sand that we wore the points off Gen One (soft styrene?) Lou Zocchi polyhedral dice and ruined a beautiful first surface mirror we used to check LOS.

Combat engineering was much more developed in Tractics, making things like blowing bridges (practically a Holy Grail to us), by fuze or command, easy to implement. Charge requirements varied with bridge type and size, and the race to disarm the charges could also be represented. Obstacles, wire and above, could be destroyed. Or built. Times to do various tasks were all listed.

Artillery had different modes, depending on LOS and other conditions. Unlike our game, you could target an unobserved area during the game and without a TRP, but the accuracy penalty was fierce. Remember BFA (Blind Fire Aspect)? The ability to conduct map fires is historical, and it frustrates me we can't, just like our having to see the AS for a shell burst, rather than usually being able to adjust from the top of the plume (some exceptions, such as city fighting, where seeing the spotting round was challenging at times).

Though airpower was likely way too effective, the few times we had medium bombers, which we don't have) come through, I held my breath and somehow emerged still able to flight, the pattern having deviated enough (1 D6 for direction 2 D6 for distance) that I avoided the fate of Panzer Lehr!

I shall be most interested to see what we get next, and I freely confess I wish we had many of the toys we had in CMx1, such as flak that could be used for air defense and eating infantry. But we are several orders of magnitude beyond the pushing tin of yore, and I'm sure I'll be blown away by where we go. "But, honey, I really need the holotank version! It's got superb quantum tunnel modeling for true random number generation. Besides, the AI's smarter than I am!" "Yes, dear. I know."

Regards,

John Kettler

[Dadekster88]

I agree, it's a good game. You do give up the human interaction which sometimes depending on company was more fun than the game sometimes. For that reason I still enjoy tabletop games...nothing like seeing the look on your opponents face as you sip on your poison of choice.

Long live gaming!