According to CMSF2 lore vs Civilian-Military casualties & Political factor?

[MikeyD]

I recall early in CMSF1 days I made a 3rd party scenario that used hoards of 'spies' playing the role of rioting civilians over-running a NATO compound somewhere in Africa, with scattered 'fighters' mixed in with the crowd. Your job as NATO compound defender was to make some difficult choices.

Within a month of me posting the scenario BFC  reworked how 'spies' operated in the game, effectively killing my scenario. I couldn't shake the feeling that they did that deliberately. I don't think they like seeing 'civilian' scenarios in their titles. They certainly weren't keen on visiting the Warsaw ghetto in Fire and Rubble.

Clausewitz said 'War is the continuation of politics by other means'. The same can be said of terrorism. People don't wage war and they don't commit atrocities as an end to itself. They have a 'political' reason. It may be a perverse reason but its  a reason nonetheless. NATO wouldn't carpet bomb Syria because their 'political' objective  is to be perceived as good guys, the nation's savior come to liberate it from oppression. Committing atrocities would be counter-productive to their political goal. Syria dropping barrel bombs on its own cities has its own perverse political logic. They want the nation's subjects to quake in fear and awe of their ruler. That's a 'political' objective. Admittedly, the concept does fall apart a little if your leaders are psychopaths.

[Aleksandr2033]

I love how the thread has evolved to several other more issues and aspects of the game and player based projects.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

15 hours ago, MikeyD said:

I recall early in CMSF1 days I made a 3rd party scenario that used hoards of 'spies' playing the role of rioting civilians over-running a NATO compound somewhere in Africa, with scattered 'fighters' mixed in with the crowd. Your job as NATO compound defender was to make some difficult choices.

Within a month of me posting the scenario BFC  reworked how 'spies' operated in the game, effectively killing my scenario. I couldn't shake the feeling that they did that deliberately. I don't think they like seeing 'civilian' scenarios in their titles. They certainly weren't keen on visiting the Warsaw ghetto in Fire and Rubble.

Clausewitz said 'War is the continuation of politics by other means'. The same can be said of terrorism. People don't wage war and they don't commit atrocities as an end to itself. They have a 'political' reason. It may be a perverse reason but its  a reason nonetheless. NATO wouldn't carpet bomb Syria because their 'political' objective  is to be perceived as good guys, the nation's savior come to liberate it from oppression. Committing atrocities would be counter-productive to their political goal. Syria dropping barrel bombs on its own cities has its own perverse political logic. They want the nation's subjects to quake in fear and awe of their ruler. That's a 'political' objective. Admittedly, the concept does fall apart a little if your leaders are psychopaths.

Trying to keep civilians out of warfare is actually rather unrealistic.....It's nice & neat in a gaming sense, but our games are be aimed at adults and the real world ain't neat, especially when it is at war.  Battlefront were right about a war in Syria, but it wasn't the kind anybody expected, they predicted the tech pretty well, but the way the war was conducted was completely new. 

I doubt any of us are here for the adrenaline filled gameplay, stunning visuals or the thrilling storyline.....We want wargames that model the realities of warfare as closely as possible without anything actually getting broken or anyone getting hurt.

I'd heard of your scenario concept and to my mind it was an excellent one.....I'd love to try to play it.  @MOS:96B2P, myself and numerous others have attempted to make use of Spies as civilians in their current format, it does sound like this older incarnation of the unit might have worked better for what we are trying to achieve.....Could we get both types perhaps?

In the past I've put forward the suggestion of introducing a third, neutral, side (Grey?), sure it's more work for scenario designers, but only if they want to use it.....The ability to treat that side as friend, foe or true neutral in VP allocations would add tremendous scope to these games, especially CM:SF2.

CM:SF2 could do with a patch to address several issues TBH.....Red C2 is catastrophic, nobody seems to have radios and they seem reluctant to share information between formations, even when horizontal information sharing is set up. 

I wonder if this issue, like the 'Red Combatant Occupy' issue isn't somehow partially baked into CM:SF1 maps & scenarios that have been exported to CM:SF2.  My problems with the above haven't been easy to replicate in tests, but they were all AFAIK on maps that had their origins in the older game.

Edited August 25, 2021 by Sgt.Squarehead

[Battlefront.com]

On 8/25/2021 at 2:59 PM, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Trying to keep civilians out of warfare is actually rather unrealistic.....It's nice & neat in a gaming sense, but our games are be aimed at adults and the real world ain't neat, especially when it is at war. 

Absolutely.  And for our military customers, they want civilians as explicitly simulated as possible.  The problem with this for commercial games is twofold:

1.  explicit and realistic portrayal of civilians would likely add no less than 50% to development expenses

2.  the interest level in the average gamer having to deal with explicit civilians is exceedingly low

Combine the two and you have a massive expenses for an audience that doesn't want it, therefore they aren't going to accept the cost of it.  That's why we don't have civilians explicitly simulated in CM1 or CM2.  The market to support it simply is not there.

On 8/25/2021 at 2:59 PM, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Battlefront were right about a war in Syria, but it wasn't the kind anybody expected, they predicted the tech pretty well, but the way the war was conducted was completely new. 

This is not correct.  We were right that Syria was to be the next major conflict in the Middle East, but we decided to frame it as a conventional war because that is what we (and by extension our customers) were interested in.  What actually happened, obviously, is a civil war with the usual element of externally supported proxy forces.  That is a *totally* different game.  Which means what CMSF2 is has nothing to do about predictions being wrong, it was about making the game that we thought our customers wanted.  Conventional war yes, civil war not.  I don't think we wrong at all.

You are also incorrect about the Syrian civil war being "completely new".  It isn't.  For sure it has some new wrinkles (most large and long lived conflicts do), but it basically amounts to the usual array of competing power blocks willing to kill each other and destroy their infrastructure and hobble their long term viability as a society.

On 8/25/2021 at 2:59 PM, Sgt.Squarehead said:

I doubt any of us are here for the adrenaline filled gameplay, stunning visuals or the thrilling storyline.....We want wargames that model the realities of warfare as closely as possible without anything actually getting broken or anyone getting hurt.

Gotta disagree.  Poll wargamers and you'll find they are overwhelmingly interested in maneuver warfare, military hardware, historical battles, etc.  They are not interested in having civilians be a major factor in their gaming, nor do they want to see the horrors of what warfare produces.  As for the latter, this is why we don't have realistic gore or other effects in the game.

An example of the realistic effects our customers don't want... back when the Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan there was a film crew out with a Soviet convoy that got ambushed very badly.  The Mujaheddin hit them from a distance and did not close in on them for days.  You could hear the screams of wounded Soviet soldiers echoing in the valley all day long, not just in pain but probably pleading for aid.  Why the HELL would anybody want to experience that in a GAME?

On 8/25/2021 at 2:59 PM, Sgt.Squarehead said:

I'd heard of your scenario concept and to my mind it was an excellent one.....I'd love to try to play it.  @MOS:96B2P, myself and numerous others have attempted to make use of Spies as civilians in their current format, it does sound like this older incarnation of the unit might have worked better for what we are trying to achieve.....Could we get both types perhaps?

Not without a massive development cost.  Civilians move around and behave very differently than our Pixeltruppen.  There is simply no way to add civilians without massive expense.  Which is exactly what we told one of our military customers who requested such a feature.  Even they didn't have the money to pay for it

Steve

[Sgt.Squarehead]

You raise some good points, I hadn't considered this one at all despite trying to mitigate it while writing AI scripts for 'boats' (using quick & dash orders):

3 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Civilians move around and behave very differently than our Pixeltruppen.

Perhaps you could somehow have each movement bound automatically end at a shop window? 

Appreciate you taking the time to reply, I noticed that you didn't specifically say no to a third 'Grey' side.....Thus I am currently looking forward to seeing it implemented! 

[danfrodo]

My vote: I don't want civilians in my wargames.  Never ever.

I respect that others disagree in that they want missions where they need to navigate that (it is realistic).  I'm not wanting to disparage anyone on this, I just personally don't want it.

 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

I guess experiences differ.....I recall an event card driven game, forget which one, played out on a well laid out tabletop, with among the terrain a hilltop church and a valley graveyard some distance apart (IIRC it was set in Italy). 

One of the event cards was called 'Nuns On The Run'.....When it was drawn a group of nuns would emerge from the church and proceed at a sedate pace down the road to the graveyard, where they would remain for a number of turns, before returning the by the same route.

No unit was allowed to draw a line of fire within a certain distance of the nuns (there were some other rules that I can only vaguely recall now), suffice it to say it added a lot of humour to an already well done game.

[Erwin]

The COIN and Uncon type scenarios designed by MOS would benefit from the added challenge of dealing with civilians.  Altho' he does a pretty good job using unarmed spies etc. as civilian stand-ins.  It's just that they often look strange (the "air guitar").  So, we already have "civilian actors" in the games. 

It's just a question of whether there are additional features that "dedicated civilians" (ie neutrals) rather than stand-in units which were never supposed to be civilians, would add to the game.

[Battlefront.com]

CM2 would have to be rewritten from scratch to have more than 2 sides.  Sometimes baked in assumptions can not be undone, and this is one of those conditions.

If adding civilians was technically viable we'd probably be working on it right now for our Professional version.  But it's cost prohibitive so we aren't.  And if it's cost prohibitive for a customer willing to pay a lot more than $60 to play it, it's certainly out of the running for the Commercial version.

Steve

[The_Capt]

Been lurking on this one for a bit and first off it is a bit of a testament to the community that we can have this discussion without it becoming all "nasty" or silly.  So a couple thoughts:

- As to the OP's first set of questions which really surround the ROEs (Rules of Engagement) within the context of the backstory of CMSF, this is not a simple nor straight forward issue.  In RL, every nation is responsible for their military ROEs and they vary vastly on any given operation along with the notorious "national caveats".  That said the coalition does have a  high and low water mark for these.  So for instance if a nation, bent on revenge shows up with overly aggressive ROEs they will find themselves withdrawn from the theatre, or totally on their own, very fast.  

- So what happens if a lot of nations experience catastrophic attacks?  Well here it is very tricky and very political.  The first question has to be "were these attacks and threat of follow-on attacks existential?"  If the answer is "no" then no matter how terrible the community of nations are not likely to risk breaking the Rules Based International Order.  So, if for instance Country X declares "total war" on a sponsoring nation of a WMD terror attack then they will likely 1) find themselves going it alone and 2) suffering some significant repurcutions within the international community which can impact things like trade and neither of these conditions are really good signs of success.  If the attacks are existential, and in the case of the CMSF backstory they really are not, then, yes it is possible that the gloves will come off and a modern form of "total war" would be collectively waged...we are literally talking WWIII here.  Then really bad things start to happen, which we know exactly what they look like because...WW2.  Internment camps during the Second World War are a stain on both the US and Canadian history but they are were an existential war takes us.  

- So what about in-game?  Well the WW2 titles are already there, but remember even then we did try to adhere to a Law of Armed Conflict on the western front (eastern not so much).  Cold War is definitely on the doorstep and maybe Black Sea at least regionally but at the end of the day..."so what?"  Steve is absolutely correct, modelling civilians is not only expensive, it is not a feature anyone in their right minds would see as "fun".  The professional military market wants them, they also are going to want stuff like logistics, military engineering and C4ISR because it is the job.  War gamers want to play realistic, to a point, and most of it centers on military combined arms units, equipment and tactics.  Adding civilians would be a game playing nightmare coming at it from just about any angle.  Players would either find it very frustrating or just ignore them and neither one are a feature that really plays out well.

My two cents anyway.  

[Sgt.Squarehead]

7 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

CM2 would have to be rewritten from scratch to have more than 2 sides.  Sometimes baked in assumptions can not be undone, and this is one of those conditions.

[Erwin]

31 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

if it's cost prohibitive for a customer willing to pay a lot more than $60 to play it, it's certainly out of the running for the Commercial version.

It's obviously reasonable if adding civilians cannot be achieved with the current CM2 engine.   However, re price, I note that all BF customers who have purchased all the games and modules will have paid out almost US$1,000 for the family of games.  So, it's not so much a problem of total cost, but a question of how that cost is spread out.  BF uses a good strategy that spreads the cost over several years, so it is less painful.  

 

Edited August 26, 2021 by Erwin

[domfluff]

If you think that the MoD are paying only $1,000 for CM Professional, I don't know what to tell you...

[chuckdyke]

Good leave out Mrs. Smid we came running out of her house with her red-white and blue flag. Shouting "Long live the Queen!" During a fire fight rugby tackled by her husband. I like to play the Road to Nijmegen as it is.

[Battlefront.com]

55 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

Good leave out Mrs. Smid we came running out of her house with her red-white and blue flag. Shouting "Long live the Queen!" During a fire fight rugby tackled by her husband. I like to play the Road to Nijmegen as it is.

OMG, I haven't thought of that bit of propaganda in a very long time!  "We want to show the Nazis as awful enemy.  How do we do that quickly?  I know, have them machinegun an old lady.  Oh, and while we are at it, let's have the Brits stop their advance for tea."

Steve

[Sgt.Squarehead]

11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Oh, and while we are at it, let's have the Brits stop their advance for tea.

And why not?  One has to maintain civilised standards, even in times of war. 

[chuckdyke]

15 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

One has to maintain civilised standards, even in times of war. 

Yes, with scones jam and cream served in Royal Dalton porcelain. 

Edited August 27, 2021 by chuckdyke

[Ultradave]

When I was in the 82d we did an exchange with the Cdn Parachute Regiment. We paused for tea on the drop zone after a jump. Mess truck came out for the troops and the Colonel's driver brewed up for the officers on the hood of his jeep. Very civilized (it was an admin jump - we weren't doing anything tactical after the jump, but even then there's always tea).

I lived in England for some years too (work assignment), which my wife and I LOVED, and we do miss the couple of tea houses in town we used to frequent. One was a very British one, tea and cakes and scones and clotted cream, and the other we really liked was run by the Buddhist monastery in town. Nice tea and really good food. We lived next to the Lakes District in the northwest for anyone familiar with England. Gorgeous countryside, small towns. Idyllic, really. And civilized. We don't just miss the tea - we miss England. It suited us - ocean and mountains, lots of places to walk (nothing like the footpath culture here in the US), and the people were as nice as could be.

Dave

[Sgt.Squarehead]

44 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

Royal Dalton

What heresy is this? 

 

[LongLeftFlank]

I recall dimly that a primary motive for BFC's choice of (fictional) theatre was their interest in gaming out how the Stryker brigades might perform in a 'force projection' (i.e. Iraq style invasion of a hostile sovereign) when compared to other kinds of Army (and then Marine and Allied) heavy mech or 'light' (RDF/MEF) forces.

...I give BFC due credit for being a little skeptical about this flavour of the month concept, which has now been abandoned (together with the hapless fish-nor-fowl Stryker IFV).

While it was entirely possible for BFC to stay 'historical' by setting CMSF in the Iraq War (OIF1 / OIF2), it would have made an entirely unsatisfying 'sandbox' for the above (in addition to drawing political flak). Saddam's army c.2003 proved incapable of fielding a mechanised RED force of any size to oppose the Coalition forces. Iraqi RED would have been even more of a pushover than Syrian RED, with BLUE knocking over half-hearted positional defenses (bunkers and berms) that had already been largely trashed by airpower.  Or else various flavours of (mainly urban) Uncon hit and run (OIF1 / OIF2) ambushes at platoon scale. None of which exactly showcases modern mech forces....

So all the Why We Fight dirty bombs backstory is really kind of an afterthought. As is the civilian stuff.

I take the OP's point about ROE stopping BLUE from leveling whole towns with HE. 

But the 'human shield' factor is much overstated except when we're talking small Uncon hit-and-run stuff, and even that becomes irrelevant after the first shot as all civilians go to ground (as do the soldiers).  Maybe not even the first shot; civilians are rather good at detecting when armed strangers are in their neighborhood and making themselves scarce. In fact, that's generally the first sign BLUE troops have that something is about to go down.

In the game, this is all pretty well abstracted in the existing Population Density factor which makes 'unconspicuous' Uncons harder to spot until they shoot.

Edited August 27, 2021 by LongLeftFlank

[Battlefront.com]

4 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

I recall dimly that a primary motive for BFC's choice of (fictional) theatre was their interest in gaming out how the Stryker brigades might perform in a 'force projection' (i.e. Iraq style invasion of a hostile sovereign) when compared to other kinds of Army (and then Marine and Allied) heavy mech or 'light' (RDF/MEF) forces.

Sorta!  We had the idea to do modern first, then during the research phase ran into the brand new Stryker concept.  No vehicles had been built at that time.  We thought it was an excellent opportunity to not only explore a new (for the US anyway) concept before it hit the ground, but also a shameless marketing angle that put us out ahead of any other contemporary warfare environment

4 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

...I give BFC due credit for being a little skeptical about this flavour of the month concept,

Oh, we weren't skeptical at all.  In fact, huge supporters of the concept right from the start.  Having only light and heavy options available to such a huge military was, and still is, a really dumb idea.  As for the specifics of how the Stryker program was implemented, such as costs and the obvious fudging of C-130 deployment capabilities... well, the devil is always in the details.

4 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

which has now been abandoned (together with the hapless fish-nor-fowl Stryker IFV).

Abandoned?  Huh?  The US Army has expanded the number of brigades and is in fact now in the process of developing the third generation Stryker vehicles:

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/9/18/army-begins-fielding-upgraded-third-generation-strykers

Not what I'd call abandoned.

Steve

[Lethaface]

On 8/24/2021 at 9:40 PM, Aleksandr2033 said:

Regarding the first point, I mostly agree on anything but I do still believe that there would be a difference on their behaviour when it comes to the Western civilian losses. Let's suppose Spain gets one of her major cities attacked but only 10-30 people die from inmediate, brutal doses of radiation while still getting some urban areas highly contaminated, Spanish forces may likely act as in CMSF is stipulated, taking care not to cause many civilian casualties. But on the other hand, somehow in The Netherlands, one of their cities gets not just highly irradiated, but also half a million people get extreme doses of radiation... I strongly believe the Dutch Army commanding officers would overlook a lot more civilian casualties than Spain, ignoring possible barbaric acts from their own soldiers. (Btw, I would pay for a Spanish Army mod in CMSF2  )

I'm not so confident of that (as a Dutch person ).

To address the larger point, it seems to be that already only sending an armored battlegroup to another country with an offensive mission would be a BIG step for The Netherlands. Unless we would be talking about a IS warrior nation where all males/adults are soldiers, I don't think that committing atrocities would be something that would be acceptable among the majority of armed forces; of course there will be groups of extremists among our soldiers as well, perhaps more in the situation you describe than now. 
I do think things would be different compared to the missions NL did in Iraq/Afghanistan, where 'winning the hearts and minds of the population' was a large factor at least politically. For example there would probably be less scrutiny on proceedings from back home in the media / activist groups (they certainly wouldn't be starting court cases because of civil casualties after bombing IED factories, like they did recently), but I don't think that serious misconduct will be tolerated as a standard inside our armed forces. Killing innocent civilians is still killing innocent civilians. Anyway, hopefully we'll never find out what will really happen!

Coming back to CM, I usually do take the 'preserve' objectives with a pinch of salt. I might not target them with 155mm preliminary bombardment ;-), but if I take serious fire (RPG/ATGM etc) from such buildings I'm not limiting 120mm / 35mm return fire. Not that .50 itself isn't capable of dealing with most squishy things inside buildings.
Probably in an actual invasion the ROE on the ground would be similar. Good luck if the politicians back home say not to shoot at a certain buildings, if you are losing soldiers from fires coming out of those buildings...? I don't think a command to open fire will be necessary. 
In WW2 there was reluctance to destroy historic buildings like Churches, but if necessary they'd come down. I guess that will be the same in such a war. 

Obviously our forces wouldn't go seek to find battle on a busy market full of people, we're still humans and it is not a civil war.
From that perspective I wouldn't mind CM modeling civilians. It would give ROE a more 'immersive' implementation, with the consequence that unethical conduct be more clear. If you see civilians walking around I would probably hesitate to fire a harassing mortar barrage, where 'civilian density = high' usually doesn't limit me doing that (as in my mind they are all sheltering in the basement). Although I understand some people wouldn't like such things from ethical grounds, I wouldn't mind because it's a simulation. But surely don't think it is worth 50% dev time!


 

 

[Lethaface]

Although I guess the current 'panicked' state could go a long way of modelling civilian behavior in a combat zone, especially if combined with a subconscious routine to move into civilian specific exit zones modeled around basements or map edges. 

[chuckdyke]

10 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Royal Dalton

Royal Doulton wrote something without checking the spelling lol

[chuckdyke]

The spotting ability of troops will improve among the veterans. Children accepts bars of candy, or their moms storm out of the house to get them inside. We could easily make towns with a good morale setting to panicking and anything in between.