Bringing faux operationality to quickbattles

[Grimly Fiendish]

Has anyone developed a set of rules that introduces an element of operational-level direction and thought to a series of otherwise random quickbattles? perhaps by giving the victor of a engagement enhanced ability to determine the circumstances of the next battle?

I and some people I play against have already

agreed that the victor sets up the next quickbattle. But we are so fair to each other when we do this---each of us no doubt fearing bad treatment in return---that the privilege we have earned is meaningless, and we find that we each win every other battle. I have proposed that the victor can also ditch any game he comes up with once he sees the map---to refuse battle, having won the initiative and therefore the right to do so. I can envision a series of battles progressing to the end of the war (perhaps 5000 points per month, or a set of battles each month beginning with a small probe and ending with a blowout assault determining the next month's circumstances?); the winner of the last battle may even win the war. Fionn's rules would apply; weather should probably be required to be always random.

Has anyone else been thinking along these lines, or already worked this out?

[Grimly Fiendish]

The point being---I should clarify---to raise the stakes for each battle.

[Grimly Fiendish]

:eek:

[ November 29, 2003, 07:40 PM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]

[dugfromthearth]

interesting idea.

my friend just plays solo and uses a board wargame for the strategic scale and then plays the battles out against the AI using CMBB.

a campaign system for quick battles is interesting.

do you want to have any strategic decisions, or just tactical?

like choosing to attack, or defend, or meeting engagements?

off the top of my head:

1st battle: meeting engagement

either side can abandon the game at the start (just looking at the battlefield). If they do, then they have to be on the attack in the next game.

The winner of a battle gets to choose which type of battle for the next engagement.

[Grimly Fiendish]

Exactly. The thing to figure out and agree on is this: what would benefit a player in the next battle, and what would hurt his opponent? By "benefit" and "hurt," I mean something that would not necessarily increase the chances of winning the next one (though that's a possibility: maybe a scale of increasing force bonuses with each increase in the level of my victory over you), but rather that would close off my enemy's options and increase mine, leaving me something of value I can hold in reserve if I choose, even if just a get-out-of-battle-free card.

What is needed is something that is fixed and does not change, so that other changes have meaning. For example, if we agree that I am in a tank division and you are in a parachute division, then we can fight it out to determine whether the next terrain will be heavily wooded (benefiting you) or less so (favoring me), because I will always be using armor (the armored force setting, picked by the AI for realism) and you will never.

Or, the battles could be tied to the historical offensives. Tank battles in the hedgerows until the breakout, then paratroops in the plains, then blitzkrieg in the winter woods, then desperate defenses by the hapless Volksturm militia.

Another question is exactly what makes a battle easier to win? I have observed that attacks in clear terrain on the AI are far more devastating than attacks in wooded hills. If the engagement type is fixed, then, I could screw you with terrain; if the terrain is fixed, then I could screw you with the engagement type. The problem here is that exploiting a victory means attacking again and again, so that eventually the attacker may run up against a defender in the wooded hills--which is exactly where an attacker doesn't want to attack! (The Ardennes offensive being an insane exception.)

Maybe the best course is to start with a standard battle series. Pick a city: Paris (flattish, lightly wooded?), Antwerp (flat and open), Bastogne (hilly, wooded), Ruhr or other, maybe Bavaria. Define and fix the terrain parameters for each zone, realizing that heavy buildings will progressivly replace heavy woods, and set the weather to random and the season to the historical one. Then:

Small meeting, rural

Medium attack, farmland

Medium probe, village

Large assault, town

If the zone is Bastogne, the Germans get the attacks; otherwise, the Allies. If the attacker loses any of these, he loses the match; if he wins, progress to the next item in the list. If a match is lost, you start a new match with a new meeting engagement. The winner wins the town and you progress to the next town.

Unfortunately, this approach puts a lot of pressure on the first battle. Alternatively, each side is assumed to have a town to defend, and the defender is always the loser of the last battle.

There are so many possibilities I don't know where to begin! But I might point to the brilliant approach of the PanzerGeneral series, in which victory brings prestige, and prestige brings forces if you choose to spend it, but throwing away your forces means your prestige drops, so it's never just a snowball effect. That system provides an accurate model of the swing of operational initiative back and forth during a campaign.

(If the winner were awarded a cumulative 10% force bonus, unneeded forces could always be sent offmap. That way, they are safe from destruction, and if you win you get them back because in the next battle you'd get 20%.)

Then again, I am afraid I tend to make things complicated!

[dugfromthearth]

I would suggest a point victory system.

You win the campaign by achieving a "total victory" worth of relative points.

Assign point values to each victory level. After each battle the points are used to modify a sliding chart (ie you don't track each sides' victory points separately, you have one chart and each victory moves the towards one side's ultimate victory.)

[Cambronne]

Originally posted by dugfromthearth:

interesting idea.

my friend just plays solo and uses a board wargame for the strategic scale and then plays the battles out against the AI using CMBB.

how does he avoid knowing all about enemy movement?It's an interesting concept but the lack of FOW is a big problem.

[Cambronne]

you may have partial fow by setting the units on the table as ''points''(e.g. you see a 10000 pts Armored unit but you don't know how many tanks it has or it's experience-you set the experience level in QB as random-).But the unit's movement has stll to be done by yourself and where are you moving an anemy unit you are expecting to encircle?And if you know you are about to retreat it,will you still begin the encirclement maneuver?And what's worse,you always know where the enemy is!How,s your friend dealing with those problems?Thanks!

[dugfromthearth]

he just fakes it.

he decides what each side would do knowing only what they should know.

I have to say with no offense to my friend (who typically beats me in these sorts of games - I never beat him in a game of Steel Panthers) that he doesn't do anything clever.

He will think "I need to defend a ridgeline with infantry against armor" and will set up in the proper way to do so. He uses his units properly, does good coordination. Whatever he decides to do he does well and by the book.

So if he is playing one army looking to seize a town he deploys them in a standard way, nothing innovative but not making any mistakes.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

If you play CMBB, you folks need to This thread

Its a long thread, but most of it is just questions from players. The rules explain everything you need to do to play a nice campaign against the AI.

[Joachim]

I'd suggest that you use some rules of the "long campaign vs AI" type and mod them.

Suggestions for mods:

1.) If you keep up your "the victor sets the next battle", I suggest anybody winning 6 times in a row is promoted to another player level and the force bonus changes (e.g. after you win 6 battles, your opponent gets 10% bonus. Another 6 wins, and your at 25%. 6 wins for your opponent and your back to 10%).

2.) Terrain&Weather is set by one of those long campaign generators.

3.) Force type, division type etc. are set by those generators, too.

4.) The most intriguing part is keeping track of 2 forces.

If you like to play with the same core in every battle plus some support forces varying over battles, you can keep track of your core like in

BCR or ROQC (kind of Panzer General or Steel Panthers campaigns for CM)

But I guess you don't want to use the same core force in each battle - your enemy knows to much about the composition.

Some ideas to reduce that:

a) Don't use a core force (saves some bookkeeping)

upgrade them often.

c) Using only inf or support as core could reduce the value of the information.

5.) And then there is that suggestion about balance: Do not use the standard point allotments from CM, but let the generator decide how many points you can spend on which category.

Example: Player A has a core of 700pts, B has 650

First you roll the battle type and the base force size

It is a ME, no casualties and the force size is 2000.

Player A gets 700 inf, 200 vehicle, 300 armor and 200 arty. So he has a force total of 2100 pts. As this is too much for a 2000pts battle, Player A has to adjust his force. He has 100 support pts too much out of a total of 1400 and should have only 1300 pts. So he has to reduce every support category:

700 inf gets 700*1300/1400 = 650pts, vehicle is 200*1300/1400 etc.

Player B rolls 300 inf, 100 vehicle, 500 armor and 150 arty. So he has only 1700 pts. No adjustment, as this is below 2000 pts. Tough luck. (If he had a 10% bonus cause player A won so often, he can use 330 inf, 110 vehicle and gets additional 65 pts infantry for his 650 pts core

Gruß

Joachim

[Rokossovski]

Perhaps I should jump in here. I am the friend "dugfromthearth" has been referring to. (Unless he has another friend he has been playing wargames with all these years whom he has neglected to tell me about.)

The system I use is modified from ones I created years ago to create an operational or strategic system with the tactical battles fought out using board wargames, such as Squad Leader. The strategic level takes place on a map using various movement zones or map hexes, each of which has a tactical map associated with it. Forces are moved on the strategic map, and if hostile troops come into contact, the battle is fought out using the seperate tactical system. (Presently Combat Missions.) Losses are tracked, (as well as whatever other statistics seem relevant) and so are naturally unavailable in the future. Arbi is correct that the lack of actual fog of war is a problem when I play the games solo. This is more true of the "upper" strategic level than at the tactical level, where I let the computer AI choose its own setup.

I must stress, however, that the system is not designed really to be a single player game. I used to set up campaigns with multiple players, and usually served as a referee. Because I would process the orders and set out the forces in my capacity as referee, (and two maps would be used, one for each player - remember, this was long before Combat Missions came along) there was suitable fog of war.

The modification I use for Combat Missions has not yet been used in a multi-player game. I have been testing the system by myself, and the battles have been played out against the AI, but ideally the game should involve at least three players - Allied Player, Axis Player, and Referee.

- Rokossovski

[Rokossovski]

I should, in addition, point out that my system is really not related to "quickbattles" and is of no use in creating or stringing together quickbattles. It is instead a way of placing tactical battles into a broad operational context. I like the system because the importance of the objectives and of casualties are "organic" rather than simply by fiat because they are worth a given number of points.

Among the downsides are the hours of preparation and that a campaign of any complexity requires a certain amount of bookkeeping and many weeks to play out.

- Rokossovski

[Grimly Fiendish]

Thanks for the comments amd ideas, and thanks, Verg, for the link to ROQC.

Dave