Morale, Efficiency, C&C

[Guest MajorH]

>FWIW, the enhancements that I'm most interesting in seeing in future >versions are: morale, and C&C limitations.

I am open to discussion and suggestions but ...

I don't have any new morale rules or codeable logic available that I consider to be realistic or to be supportable against criticism given the grand tactical scale of TacOps. In the last couple of years, I have had extended email discussions with a few folks who were willing and able to converse about morale and varying efficiency at more than the superficial level of 'I want it' <g>. None of those discussions led to anything that I considered to be codeable or defensible. The discussions always drifted to a close when we tried to get into the details of (1) identifying, quantifying, and tracking of recent combat stimuli that might be relevant to causing a modification in a unit marker's will or efficiency and (2) what detailed modifications to unit capabilities would be appropriate given that sufficient stimuli have accumulated to where a unit marker's will or efficiency should be modified.

The current TacOps morale model for the most part assumes that the fighters are exhibiting the best case situation of morale and efficiency. They will continue to do their duty unless they are thoroughly suppressed by recent incoming and accurate fire. If you as their commander tell them to get up and move forward into harm's way they will usually do so. That is the situation that all competent commanders devote their training toward achieving. That is the most troublesome kind of enemy to have to fight. Until I can find a defensible approach to implementing a stimuli based variable morale/efficiency model then I will to continue to cheerfully model just the best case.

The current TacOps combat results tables for weapons effects against infantry are a bit liberal on producing casualties. I originally made them so to partially reflect the combat attrition effect of people temporarily choosing to take themselves out of harm's way.

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Best regards, Major H

majorh1@aol.com

[Matt Lye]

When I think of morale issues - and usually, I think, when they are discussed in game terms - I'm usually conflating morale problems and combat fatigue / readiness problems.

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Readiness, at least, would seem to be an important thing to model. I'm guessing that an infantry unit which has been exchanging lots of fire would tend to act semi-autonomously (in terms of targeting, reversing, and possibly using smoke) and, more importantly, wouldn't be ready to implement new orders without some confusion and delay. In general, the time since a unit was last in combat and the safety of the local enviroment would seem to have an influence on efficiency... a notable case would be that of an infantry unit moving up a road in an area that they were confident was secure.

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I ran across a US Army training booklet on the web a whible ago that discussed 'combat fatigue' as explicitly distinct from morale problems... amongst other testimony from psychologists, and techniques for group (squad) support, they had a flow chart describing how to diagnose the severity of and treat combat fatigue (essentially a medical model). A point of interest was that many cases were only incapacitating for short (ie, 5-10 minutes) periods of time. I hope I'm remembering this information correctly, and someone can give a link to the site - it was a large web directory of practical training documents, in pdf format I think.

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My concept of 'morale' is based largely on some film footage I saw once from the Vietnam war. It recorded a long debate between the officers and troops of an infantry group about whether they would proceed up a dirt road by walking on the road, or by walking in the forest just past the junge face to either side of the road. The officers wanted to walk on the road because they had been ordered to get to a helecopter pickup spot in fifteen minutes; it was obvious that no-one knew why or to where. The troops wanted to at least have people on point walking in the forest (which would be just as slow) so that they wouldn't be ambushed on the road. Both positions seemed pretty reasonable - the officers had something to lose by not showing up on time, the troops had no confidence in the importance of the pickup and were unwilling to risk casualties by failing to follow the safer tactical methods they had developed. And so the unit barely moved while everyone debated (standing clumped in the center of the road), tried to get information about enemy units in the area (with which the officers were also concerned), tried to reschedule the pickup, etcetera. Ultimately, neither the officers nor the enlisted had any actual confidence in the command structure that was sending them orders, and it affected all of them, even those trying to follow the orders.

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Therefore, I think actual morale problems would be fairly complex (maybe too complex) to model. They would tend to involve a unit having an opinion about the capability of the leadership they were under, looking a few steps (turns) ahead, locally, not liking what it sees, and either balking or responding dramatically to impediments such as supressing fire.

[Rattler]

I have been playing TacOps for some years noe, following the discussions

about morale largely.

Still I find, readiness or other aspects are perfectly covered by

suppression in a level of abstraction that seems very realistic to me:

A unit marker under fire receiving hits will not always fire back (I imagine the

guys trying to get to Australia via earth while evading the bullets <g>,

usually the results match anyway <g>). An arty suppressed inf unit wont

move anymore, no matter what you ordered.

So,on the level of abstraction of the game (its a unit, not a person!) I find

it simple and impressive.

Rattler

[Matt Lye]

In a near-term, practical sense, I'm quite content with the way this is handled in TacOps.

On the other hand, a supressed infantry unit will abandon defilade and attempt to move in accordance with (new) orders during the next turn - even into the supressing fire. Given the time scale of TacOps (one minute per turn, fire on a 4 pulse/turn cycle), this would sometimes seem to be improbable behaviour at the level of abstraction we're talking about (squad * 15 seconds * 10m^2). Sure, trained professionals might be willing to advance (cautiously) towards a position shortly after small arms fire killed one of them. But readiness becomes a factor, say, if they had several casualties from an unspotted machine gun in the last pulse of the previous phase; and not just as a 'morale' type consideration. The combination of unpleasant suprise, checking injuries, trying to figure out where the gun is, trying to give and hear orders in the confusion, reporting the incident on the radio, and etcetera would have a definite impact on thier ability to report -> recieve orders -> distribute orders squad wide -> implement orders (to improvise a little model). This aspect of supression would be a C&C abstraction problem, and would be difficult to adress 'realistically', since C&C is transparent in TacOps at this time, and your imperialist DoD won't sell me JANIS for the mac .

<HR>

However, I'd like to reapproach the same situation from a more 'morale' oriented perspective, as well. The troops in TacOps are optimally trained and intrepid. Ok. That's reasonable, up to the point where events start to depend on the nature of that training and interepidity. For instance, are members of the American infantry trained to 'go over the top'? (To leave entrenched or defilade positions - say, already within firing range of the enemy position - in order to close at a run; I actually don't know, myself). Certainly, in Korea, that proved to be an aspect of OPFOR's training. However, my uninformed guess would be that in a volunteer army without extreme incentive, the best you could do would be a sort of slow, person-by-person, mostly defiladed advance - unless they were stuck in the middle of a golf course 350 meters from a tank. [with a 300m range LAAW]. If I'm wrong about US forces, substitute 'NATO', 'UN', or ? into the question. Here you have a case where a tactical situation within the level of abstraction of TacOps can depend on what sort of orders soldiers are trained to expect. This isn't morale in a "Let's not and say we did", "I'm tired", "I quit", "I vote we go on strike" sense. An implicit contract between the troops and the command structure - that the command structure will not issue insane orders, orders that cannot be obeyed, or orders that will not be obeyed - has been broken. A clearer, if less usefull example: illegal orders. Ordering missile battery strikes on your own reserves, air and artillery strikes on a single sniper in 'town' terrain (Geneva convention - re: undue force and collateral damage), etcetra. I'm not saying that TacOps should ultimately attempt to model these things, or that trying to do so would be a good use of Major H's time. TacOps is at such a 'high resolution' level of abstraction (compared to, say, AVH's Stalingrad) that there are literally hundreds of instances like this where there's a temptation to break that abstraction down further, and this is far from the most tempting (well, except to me) or important (to any of us, I suspect) instance. I'm just saying that where a game (in the formal sense) resolves towards a model or simulation, these 'abstract' or 'nebulous' factors have more - rather than less - impact, and it becomes important to understand what thier absence means, and note them as limitations of the model, rather than ignoring them or avoiding them (which, from the outside at least, would seem to be the military response to these "'morale' category" types of factors).

<HR>

Especially for you Americans. To use recent events as an allegory to contain the preceeding moral: the Pentagon assessed it's air capabilities versus the JA in Kosovo with the implicit assumption that the JA would be actually deployed or deploying in the theater (it didn't), as an 'unthunk' basis for believing that their remote observation capabilities would suffice to designate tactical targets (they weren't) and that they could effect decisive destruction upon the JA by air (they didn't, except where the KLA provided close observation and reporting towards the end of the campaign). So, they were willing to get into a situation of limited engagement with allies that were not willing to use ground forces, which led to a failure to deploy ground forces in a threatening manner, which led to the non-necessity of the JA deploying ground forces in a defensive manner, which led to those elements (most) of the JA not engaged with the KLA or civilians being hidden piecemeal in houses, which ended the effectiveness of the remote observation, which diminished the threat from the air, which led to a standoff situation where NATO's political resolve was severely tested, and might have broken if the Russians had continued to support Milosovich. Which was exactly the sort of limited engagement nightmare they never would have agreed to, if they hadn't had (needed to have, for political reasons) such faith in thier investments. A junior officer who practices expending infantry to save armour, or an Orc chieftan who plans on micromanaging his warriors in battle... either may someday encounter similar problems.

<HR>

sorry for the very long post.

matt lye