Command and Control in CM

[Hon John Howard MP LLB]

Another item touched on in another thread has been the command and control elements of CM.

As the commander of one "side" in the enagement/fire fight/battle you have command and control of elements within your array.

However, aspect of the game have been questioned for realism in the tretment of both command - the ability to direct resources to and end - and control - ensuring that the end is achieved.

The smallest unit provided with a "non-manual" form of comms (radio) would have been the platoon (and this is country dependant) and even then the availbility of spares and their comparative delicacy would indicate a reasonable U/S rate. They would then be required to use runners...

(In the defence line would be used as a preference - cheaper, more secure and more reliable.)

My question is I suppose - does CM take account of "realities" in a realistic way or are there deficencies? If there are deficincies, what are they and how could or should they be accomodated in future releases...

[Gyrene]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> Another item touched on in another thread has been the command and control elements of CM.

As the commander of one "side" in the enagement/fire fight/battle you have command and control of elements within your array.

However, aspect of the game have been questioned for realism in the tretment of both command - the ability to direct resources to and end - and control - ensuring that the end is achieved.

The smallest unit provided with a "non-manual" form of comms (radio) would have been the platoon (and this is country dependant) and even then the availbility of spares and their comparative delicacy would indicate a reasonable U/S rate. They would then be required to use runners...

(In the defence line would be used as a preference - cheaper, more secure and more reliable.)

My question is I suppose - does CM take account of "realities" in a realistic way or are there deficencies? If there are deficincies, what are they and how could or should they be accomodated in future releases... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Do you write technical manuals for a living? Perhaps programming instruction books?

All communications in CM are an abstraction of the myriad ways that the "word" got around the battlefield.

To go into further detail in the game might make things more complicated than they are worth as far as any gain in playability.

Perhaps with future versions' implementation of a relative spotting system, enemy actions like cutting field phone wires would be worth to model, but right now the "borg" mode (One sees & hears, All see & hear), while not realistic, is what we have to use.

Gyrene

[Hon John Howard MP LLB]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gyrene:

Do you write technical manuals for a living? Perhaps programming instruction books?

All communications in CM are an abstraction of the myriad ways that the "word" got around the battlefield.

To go into further detail in the game might make things more complicated than they are worth as far as any gain in playability.

Perhaps with future versions' implementation of a relative spotting system, enemy actions like cutting field phone wires would be worth to model, but right now the "borg" mode (One sees & hears, All see & hear), while not realistic, is what we have to use.

Gyrene<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Perhaps I did not phrase it correctly.

Is C2 (and indeed C3) adequate in CM ?

Is it realistic (ie what was in place technology wise as well as its employment)for the timeframe being "modelled" in the game engine ?

Pehaps from debate of these matter CMII may well be a better engine...

[Michael Emrys]

This is a topic that has been debated at length several times before, including by yours truly. You will have observed that for squads and teams to be in CC, they must be within the command radius of some kind of HQ. This radius is generally as far as a shouted command or hand signal could reach. Outside that radius, there is a delay before a movement order commences, which I take to be the time that an order can be passed.

You will also note that that is the only delay penalty incurred. I assume that a squad/team outside command radius does not also benefit from any bonuses from any HQ.

On the other hand, orders reach subordinate HQs without bother, and targeting orders have immediate effect. This is not an entirely satisfactory situation from a realism point of view, but is perhaps as much as can be provided at the present time due to programming difficulties.

Michael

[JasonC]

C2 is much easier in CM than in real life. The player effectively gets to make the decisions of captains, lieutenants, and sergeants and to integrate all of them to a single analysis and vision of where he wants the battlefield situation to go. That makes for a better strategy game and I for one do not want to see it changed. But it does lead to innaccuracies as a sim. The two are not the same.

An accurate sim of only one person's role, for much of WW II infantry combat, would be an exercise in frustration. Only about half a dozen of a player's decisions would have any impact on the developing battle at all, and those would be picked at random out of hundreds he made and tried to get executed.

The primary requirement of a good strategy game is that the outcome must depend on the matched wits of the rival commanders. Thus chess and go succeed as strategy games, without needing to be accurate sims of anything concrete.

Tactical combat provides this only if the rival commanders' "command spans" are artificially extended, so that they effectively "play" the decision makers at several levels of the military hierarchy simultaneously. Because it is actually the cooperation and coordination of these different levels with one another, that is special. That is the process that is sufficiently complicated that its outcomes are unpredictable beforehand, and sufficiently controllable and sensitive to inputs that decisions make a difference.

No single military leader governs this interestingly complicated process, in real life. It is a distributed system. In a typical small game of CM, the decision inputs being modeled by the game are those made by one or two dozen people. They seek to mesh their decisions with one another, and with what the see going on around them.

In real life, the best military units show high levels of that sort of coordination, as staff sergeant so-n-so sees what captain whosits really intended, and how the sudden appearence of the enemy AT team on the right changes everything, and retargets his squad away from the objective his lieutenant had passed on - or whatever.

A mechanical application of previous orders, distorted by C2 problem modeling, would make the problem harder than it really is for the captain. The sergeant would become a piece of bit noise, instead of an adaptive player as active as the captain himself. But CM makes the captain's and the sergeant's problems easier than they really are, because it let one player make both sets of decisions.

There are other aspects of CM C2 modeling that are much more controlled than reality, as well. Others have mentioned borg sighting. But equally noticable is the effect of discrete squads at points in space, occupying sometimes not much more than 5 or 10 meters. When you put in a waypoint, the squad goes exactly there unless panicked by enemy fire, and does so entire. In reality, scattering of troops is a serious C2 problem on the battlefield.

A move of a platoon may leave 3 men behind. A squad told to move to the edge of woods on the left may go to the wrong spot, because the commander's intention was unclear. Moving at night, through cover, under fire, through or around obstacles - can all result in a cloud of men poorly coordinated with one another, rather than a tight bunch with 8-12 weapons all ready to bear.

The delays of CM don't quite model such difficulties. If suppression state, movement, terrain moved through etc - all built up a "disruption" level, which recovered with time if in command and not moving, such effects might be simulated more accurately. (This would represent, e.g. the slower or lost members of the squad arriving, the men rescuing wounded from immediate danger returning to action, etc).

Personally, I enjoy the playability of CM as it is. Its cleanness makes it a better strategy game, making the matched wits of the commands more critical for the outcome, and chance, random interactions of mistakes, less critical. As a serious sim training tool for people who really fight, however, I can see that one might want some of those additional difficulties thrown in.

[windstarz]

Well said JC. I agree. This is a game not a sim. If it was the other way around there wouldnt be near as many players. This game is great for its time and will only get better over its life span as each rendition will improve over the earlier ones.

[Wreck]

I like Jason's idea of a disruption level for a squad. A disrupted unit should be somewhat less vulnerable to point-fire (all the men are not there), but it should produce substantially less firepower. It should also be increasing hard to move a disrupted unit. Naturally, disruption should recover slowly for green units and faster for vets, so that greens would attack very slowly.

Another way disruption could be used to realistic effect would be as a result of fire.

Speaking of movement, another aspect of C2 in CM that BTS might improve is the move delays. Right now these are deterministic. The move delay is exactly what it says. This allows borg coordination. In a recent game I had a platoon with a green, a normal, and a veteran squad, and I wanted to charge an enemy. By pausing and mixing move and run waypoints, I got pretty much perfect coordination into a forward wave.

I would prefer the move delays to be probabilistic. A delay of 30 second might rarely mean just 10, sometimes, 20, usually 30, but sometimes 40 and rarely 50. On average this would not affect moving times, but it would prevent easy borging up of infantry waves.

[Vinci]

I think we all agree CM is a great improvement on anything else that was out there before (otherwise we would not be writing/reading here). That does not mean it cannot be further improved.

While it is unlikely we will ever get the level of un-control of real life (which would indeed take out some of the fun as well - kind of: give some basic orders and then watch a 30 minute movie...), a lower level of control than what is currently available is probably beneficial.

I like the idea of disruption levels as well (is used in some wargames to simulate decreased levels of combat efficiency).

I would also plead for a more penalizing approach to casualties. Currently most games tend to go on until one or both sides have been reduced to about 10% of their combat potential. While did this happen in extreme circumstances (stalingrad or so), mostly units would basically stop/retreat when casualties got too high. Chatting about this with a friend of mine we were discussing using a rule that when morale reaches 60-65%, that player would immediatly request/enable the cease fire option. So as soon as both sides reach that level the game would stop. If a similar thing could be automatically integrated (maybe influenced some modifiers and probabilities), that would not be a bad thing

[JasonC]

Vinci said "when morale reaches 60-65%, that player would immediatly request/enable the cease fire option. So as soon as both sides reach that level the game would stop".

I like this idea a lot. I've notice in the histories, over very long periods and extreme changes in military tech, that 1/3rd losses has almost always led to retreat of the remaining forces. Russian roulette with 2 chambers full just seems to be a psychological limit for bodies of average men. They do not mash into each other harder than that, if they have any way of helping it.

The exceptions are rare, and tend to involve losses taken extremely rapidly, rather than cumulative effects on men willing to continue regardless of losses.

[Michael Emrys]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Vinci:

I would also plead for a more penalizing approach to casualties. Currently most games tend to go on until one or both sides have been reduced to about 10% of their combat potential. While did this happen in extreme circumstances (stalingrad or so), mostly units would basically stop/retreat when casualties got too high. Chatting about this with a friend of mine we were discussing using a rule that when morale reaches 60-65%, that player would immediatly request/enable the cease fire option. So as soon as both sides reach that level the game would stop. If a similar thing could be automatically integrated (maybe influenced some modifiers and probabilities), that would not be a bad thing<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I like this. I would also like to see something like where a squad has taken more than 10-15% casualties, it begins to just hunker down and not want to do anything aggressive unless prodded by a nearby (not just within command radius) HQ unit. It would defend its own position against a close assault, but not much more unless given special leadership.

Michael