Soviet SMGs

[Melchior]

There is also a scenario design issue of designers frequently putting too much into terrain objectives that are all controlled at start by one side - or similar effects with exit conditions - which basically force a push for complete victory.  The better design for loss realism is to have a moderate amount of points for terrain objectives compared to those potentially available from knock out points, and then in addition to spread the terrain objectives around, some being quite easy for the attacker to reach and hold.  So that a normal, probing or tentative attack outcome would split the terrain objective points, with perhaps the attacker getting 200 of them and the defender 300 or 400.  Not 500-600 to nothing, unless the attacker takes the entire field.

Which drives me nuts too. I think the overall problem I have with the game and I think what you're getting at is that the maps are usually overpopulated for the given force allotment. The sides should be picking and choosing what objectives they want to pursue than just knowing they need to either capture everything or hold everything.

There is another way to enforce realistic loss tolerance levels by using global morale.  It requires the players to adopt the system and abide by it, rather than any change to the game engine or scenario design (though the scenario design should specify the details).

Isn't this already in the game though? Knowledge of casualties and losses already moves up and down the command chain and can lead to Rattled status on units that haven't so much as fired their weapons.

 

 

The point is precisely to avoid any one formula as supposedly "typical", to say to heck with "play balance", and instead just make lots of varied situations that feature only this long suit against that one, in this type of terrain problem or another.  Both sides need to assess what they can actual accomplish in the situation in front of them - which may be only "die gloriously", lol.

 

FWIW.

It sounds to me like overall, we need to broaden the definition of the conditions for "victory" and "defeat" in the game.

[JasonC]

CaptHawkeye - no I don't think the necessary global morale effects are already in the game.

As for victory, nobody I know who plays CM - any version - with any seriousness pays much attention to its VCs afterward, always preferringnto assess for themselves how they did. It isn't that they don't respond to designer incentives, they do. They just also don't remotely believe them, and think they are a load of crap, pretty uniformly.

I agree that battlefiekds are a bit "overpopulated", but the bigger thing is that players believe - and the game gives them no reason to think or act otherwise - that all forces they can touch are available to get killed on this specific mission in the next 20 minutes. Setting a loss tolerance VC doesn't even begin to change that. Not being allowed to continue the mission if you get more than a third of your force killed, would. Couple that to presenting a bit more of the field than you woukd otherwise, and with more, spread out and some easily reached terrain objectives, and suddenly it starts making sense to have one subformation that has a support role, and to only uold over here, and probe over there, and to limit the balls out death or glory push to just these guys and this piece of the map.

Which is much more accurate, in terms of presenting this little corner of the war in its rest of the war context, than the cage fight death match we usually see, these days...

Edited August 6, 2015 by JasonC

[womble]

...players believe - and the game gives them no reason to think or act otherwise - that all forces they can touch are available to get killed on this specific mission in the next 20 minutes. Setting a loss tolerance VC doesn't even begin to change that. Not being allowed to continue the mission if you get more than a third of your force killed, would. 

What's needed is punitive VCs. Negative points for losses. It's no good that the enemy gets points for killing your troops; you can usually balance that out by killing them right back, only more. but if 30% casualties hit a -10000 point penalty, out of a 1000 point game, people would pay more attention. Putting scenarios in a campaign context helps too.

[JasonC]

womble - doesn't work.  The enemy just wants to push the other guy into the -10000 point range.  Nothing purely competitive will serve, because what is overmodeled is the mutual willingness to mash the rival forces together.  There needs to be a threat that one's forces simply refuse to do what you are trying to get them to do, *regardless* of what you have succeeded in doing to the other side.  VCs cannot accomplish that asymmetry, because in VCs, my wins are your losses and your losses are my wins, zero sum fashion.  The mutual willingness of our pixeltruppen to die for we player martinets, however, is not a symmetric thing, but can instead afflict both of us.  Yes I can still try to strategically use some effect from forcing you to that level faster.  But it is still a constraint I must operate under, that I cannot make irrelevant merely by hurting you more in the meantime.

[womble]

womble - doesn't work.  The enemy just wants to push the other guy into the -10000 point range.  Nothing purely competitive will serve, because what is overmodeled is the mutual willingness to mash the rival forces together.  There needs to be a threat that one's forces simply refuse to do what you are trying to get them to do, *regardless* of what you have succeeded in doing to the other side.  VCs cannot accomplish that asymmetry, because in VCs, my wins are your losses and your losses are my wins, zero sum fashion.  The mutual willingness of our pixeltruppen to die for we player martinets, however, is not a symmetric thing, but can instead afflict both of us.  Yes I can still try to strategically use some effect from forcing you to that level faster.  But it is still a constraint I must operate under, that I cannot make irrelevant merely by hurting you more in the meantime.

As a general mechanic, it might just be an incentive to do damage, but as a scenario-based objective for one side that the other side doesn't know about, it could be effective.

To an extent, (and it's by no means obvious at 1/3 casualties for a Normal motivation formation), contagious morale does have that effect: once your formation is badly-enough beaten up, your troops will stop following your orders because they're Broken, even the ones who've not been involved yet if they're in the same formation. They might set off to go where you send them, but if they're fired upon they'll stop and either hide or flee. Granted, your formation has to be horribly, horribly mangled, way past 30% casualties, but the mechanic is there. I wonder if there's any levers on that mechanic which could be placed in the scenario designer's hands, or if they're necessary beyond giving Poor and Low motivation soft factors. I'm playing through the KG: Engel campaign at the moment, now it's been fixed, and the American defenders are, for the most part, running away at the first sign of incoming, and running away "for good" after they've been rousted out of their "fallback" (to use a term generously) position. That level of poor morale would rapidly make it hard to herd your troops into the "force masher" if it was applied to the player.

[slothropsez]

Something else which can work to limit the mashing effect is to place a strong defensive position towards the back quarter-band of the map and the objective roughly in the middle-front quarter-band. I have created a few maps at company scale where an advancing company has a 75% or 100% advantage in man power which must be leveraged, not to wipe the map clean, but only to secure an enemy OP. So, in this model, the enemy man power is maybe 60% in the back, 30% in the middle, and 10% extremely forward. The advancing player has to move through up to 500 meters of thinly defended terrain (snipers, machine gun teams of two men), taking some losses and losing cohesion, before he arrives at the objective which is held by about a platoon with some heavier weapons. At this point, the player has to overcome the platoon without becoming tied up the the real company position which he is not prepared to assault.  An ordinary CM approach (i.e. everything on the map is in principle a possible target) would lead the player to drive into this second defensive belt and get shot up pretty badly. I don't think it's possible to discipline the player into exercising realistic conservatism unless he is fearful his force will be outmatched if moved into the depth of the enemy position. I also like this approach because it emphasizes the importance of recognizing the natural culmination point of an attack, i.e. going any further forward dissipates strength and cohesion to no effect. The player might also have to be comforted by the fact that most attacks fail to achieve their objectives and instead gain a little ground from which to launch a better-informed attack

 

Such an approach requires maps rarely go below 1 kilometer in depth or 800 meters of frontage for even small-scale scenarios. Without these dimensions the player is too confident about what cannot hit him from the side/ what cannot lie beyond the next hedge/hill/block. Ideally, the player should halt his movement because of enemy positions, not because he has run out of map.

[womble]

Something else which can work to limit the mashing effect is to place a strong defensive position towards the back quarter-band of the map and the objective roughly in the middle-front quarter-band. I have created a few maps at company scale where an advancing company has a 75% or 100% advantage in man power which must be leveraged, not to wipe the map clean, but only to secure an enemy OP. So, in this model, the enemy man power is maybe 60% in the back, 30% in the middle, and 10% extremely forward. The advancing player has to move through up to 500 meters of thinly defended terrain (snipers, machine gun teams of two men), taking some losses and losing cohesion, before he arrives at the objective which is held by about a platoon with some heavier weapons. At this point, the player has to overcome the platoon without becoming tied up the the real company position which he is not prepared to assault.  An ordinary CM approach (i.e. everything on the map is in principle a possible target) would lead the player to drive into this second defensive belt and get shot up pretty badly. I don't think it's possible to discipline the player into exercising realistic conservatism unless he is fearful his force will be outmatched if moved into the depth of the enemy position. I also like this approach because it emphasizes the importance of recognizing the natural culmination point of an attack, i.e. going any further forward dissipates strength and cohesion to no effect. The player might also have to be comforted by the fact that most attacks fail to achieve their objectives and instead gain a little ground from which to launch a better-informed attack

 

Such an approach requires maps rarely go below 1 kilometer in depth or 800 meters of frontage for even small-scale scenarios. Without these dimensions the player is too confident about what cannot hit him from the side/ what cannot lie beyond the next hedge/hill/block. Ideally, the player should halt his movement because of enemy positions, not because he has run out of map.

Such approaches also only work for vs-defender-AI, as an active human player would leverage his own advantage to make the middle objective functionally impossible to achieve. If he knew about it.

[JasonC]

Scripting what the attacker is supposed to do is bad scenario design.  The designer has to set some incentives and then get out of the way, and let the players command their own forces.  Change that too much and (1) people won't play it and (2) there is no reason why they should, because they can't explore command possibilities and plans and such.  The designer winds up playing the game, not the players, who are just his puppets.  Bad, all the way around.

 

Unless you are telling the players "here's your force and here's your mission; your plan is entirely up to you; good luck", you are doing them a disservice.  Whenever a designer is instead thinking "first they will go to here, and then they will need to deal with that, and then..." he needs to pause, rethink, and get the heck out of the players' chairs.

 

Expecting the attacker to stop because he has hit such strong defenders, then, has the problem that there isn't any particular reason those strong defenders have to stand on defense.  Or defend from way back.  It might work with a literally scripted (or passively brain dead) AI on one side,  but not with rival human players.  They are always going to make full use of whatever you give them and you can't stop them.  They can always choose to have that use be an aggressive one, if they can get it to work - and you can't stop them.

 

What needs tweaking is just the way abstraction influences the scenario by cutting it off from the war around it.  That is what good global morale rules and proper VCs and the right map size and force to space ratio can all mitigate.  They can't eliminate the issue entirely - there is always a real war going on left and right of the map that the players won't have to pay any attention to, unrealistically so.

[slothropsez]

Yes, I was talking about vs AI, obviously. Playing head to head CM is really neither here nor there. It's not possible to get the players to treat the little pictures of men like real men unless both players agree to role-play to some degree.

We just can't produce better simulation than playing by our games "as if" we were actually impinged upon by long term goals. Unavoidably, we all know at a deep level when we are getting into a one night stand and when we are getting married. Staff level wargames had referees for a reason; if left to our own devices, we're all gamey bastards.

[LongLeftFlank]

CM players try to use infantry as an arm of decision in its own right, accepting very heavy casualties to mash like on like and trade with similar enemies, at ranges down to point blank. That did happen occasionally in the actual war, of course, but always as a sign of a fearsome stuff up in the chain of plans and maneuvering and combined arms application.

Normally SMGs don't kill many infantrymen because normally friendly infantrymen spend very little time within 50 meters of the enemy....

.... Sometimes it has to threaten that to reveal the defenders by the threat of close approach in far superior numbers - then it mostly gets stopped as described in the previous, and the friendly heavy stuff finds something to "chew on" and goes to work. In all of which, infantry are targets far more than direct threats, and their firepower mostly defensive, suppressing their opposite numbers long before they can close....

...When instead you artificially force everything to be a short range, even odds, infantry dominated encounter, and in lots of cover, you won't get historically realistic outcomes or importance of different weapons. You've cherry picked the occasions for automatic small arms carried by each man, to shine.

...That war as a whole was not even knife-fights inside 100 yards between evenly matched infantry companies. When it was - some city fighting e.g. - infantry loss rates were astronomical and SMGs were highly prized. That just wasn't the whole war.

Great thread here, both the original topic and the morphed topic on casualty thresholds.

Note that the above describes jungle fighting -- Pacific, Vietnam, very well indeed. Combined arms options are far more limited and the grunts have to go in with Thompsons and grenades.

And BFC hates this kind of setting, yet here we are all saying that's the very kind of close quarters infantry slugfest players aim at.

[womble]

Great thread here, both the original topic and the morphed topic on casualty thresholds.

Note that the above describes jungle fighting -- Pacific, Vietnam, very well indeed. Combined arms options are far more limited and the grunts have to go in with Thompsons and grenades.

And BFC hates this kind of setting, yet here we are all saying that's the very kind of close quarters infantry slugfest players aim at.

I don't think we're saying people aim at it, so much as they end up forcing it because of the incentives provided and lack of disincentives not to. Often-given advice for "How to assault a defended building," is "Don't unless you absolutely have to." Superiority by fire (from whatever, but preferably the most appropriate system) is the way to go, but people want to rush. It's like using a power tool: you can let the tool do the work or you can force it and get binding and unnecessary wear and tear.

[Melchior]

Well some of what needs to preserved here is the challenge and drama of the battle. That more scenarios could reflect more realistic circumstances is not impractical but in some ways the knife fight should survive. I think what JasonC is getting is that the scenarios should be approached with more of a sandbox-game mentality with something of a freeform approach. The scenarios need to be less top-to-bottom with less of the designer saying "go here do this then go there do that." It should be more "here's what you've got, here's what we'd like to see, go do your best." 

 

They can't eliminate the issue entirely - there is always a real war going on left and right of the map that the players won't have to pay any attention to, unrealistically so.

 

It would be interesting if some kind of mechanic enabled exterior circumstances to affect the battle. 

 

Random Event: A Coy succeeded in taking nearby hamlet, will be sending platoon to you down road from the East ETA 20min./Minefield discovered in off map area to North. Avoiding skirting map edge./5th Battalion made a wrong turn at the T junction, 40% chance they won't show up./Division Artillery misunderstood orders, covering your sector instead of planned. Bonus artillery. 

[kevinkin]

"When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity." Albert Einstein

 

Perhaps scenarios could be designed using time as a major part of the objective/parameter setting. Maybe the major. The scenario time would be longer than normal. With the overall result based on obtaining terrain objectives, or a percentage thereof withlower casualties and shorter time being "better" than higher losses and longer time. There are too many ways to set these up that a single example would not be sufficient. The ceasefire option would become more important with the player having to determine if they have maximized their result then and there vs continuing. Causalities above a certain level would be highly punitive. Objectives / parameters achieved would have to be well worth the cost of pushing on. The use of the ceasefire button would be prohibited until a certain time, causality and/or terrain threshold was met. The use of the button would have to be regulated for the offensive and defensive side via the scenario briefings. I imagine most scenarios would end via the ceasefire button not the countdown timer.

 

Kevin

Edited August 8, 2015 by kevinkin

[womble]

There are ways of making a score time dependent, in games vs the AI. Much harder to enforce in HvH, because they rely on AI order groups moving a unit about in a time-determined manner, and a human player could just almost-instantly get the best VP score out of that sort of thing.