What's missing from wargames in general?

[jacobs_ladder2]

I am designing a hex-based game and want to know if anybody has any suggestions. What do you think is always missing from WWII games? Is there some feature that you think designers always overlook? If you could design a game what would you want to include?

This game is a personal project of mine that will probably result in no money, but will bring me a lot of satisfaction. Realism is my goal. The first step will be to build a hex-based environment that will change according to weather conditions. Here, I am referring to snow accumulation, varying degrees of mud, varying rainfall, visibility, wind speed, blizzards, rivers that get deeper and wider or vice versa, ground and air temperature, terrain, tree density, etc. Math, my friends, will allow me to do all of this and more.

Anyways, if you have any suggestions, let me know. So far I've run into a few areas that will require some pretty serious research. Supply, command structures, air recon, intelligence and rail transport are a few of the things that I am all but ignorant of. Any help would be appreciated.

Also, if you know of any websites or sources of info that I could use, they would also be appreciated.

I'm thinking about doing mostly East Front battles from 41 to get started.

Cheers

p.s. Hex based with 500m or 1km hexes, regiment or company sized units (in case you're wondering).

[junk2drive]

go to matrixgames.com forum. read about close assault and all that people ask for. the realise CM series is better than all of them

edit i meant combat leader

[ March 30, 2004, 05:54 PM: Message edited by: junk2drive ]

[jacobs_ladder2]

Originally posted by junk2drive:

then realize CM series is better than all of them

CM is excellent for the scale it covers. It's a good tool for understanding small unit tactics.

I have most of the stuff Matrix Games has put out and am a regular at their forums. Thanks for the suggestion.

[zukkov]

why not make a companion game to cm? so many of us would like to see an operational mode that makes battles "mean something" in the war as a whole. if you're going to create a game anyway, work on something like that. just a thought...

[Holman]

On a larger scale, I think what is usually overlooked is the problem (even the existence) of civilians.

What to do with them? I don't know.

[tar]

Well, there is also the issues of command and control.

One of the more interesting ideas along those lines is The Gamers: Tactical Combat Series. That line is now published by Multiman Publishing. http://www.multimanpublishing.com/

[HeinzBaby]

You could always try to pickup old SPI games such as 'Highway to the Reich', 'Campaign for North Africa', 'Mech War II'or maybe 'The Great Battles of the American Civil War' series, and get some ideas to good game systems.

These were the 'Grand tactical' multi-map sims of their day, way-back when boardgaming ruled...er 20-30 years ago

[Schoerner]

I second Zukkov's opinion.

An operational layer for CM would be great.

It depends on your programming skills, but maybe you should contact Steve?

Questioning doesn't cost anything.

[ March 31, 2004, 07:03 AM: Message edited by: Schoerner ]

[Ron53]

What about time. If you were advancing to contact and it was 4:00am then LOS would be different than at say 7:00am when you would engage. Different seasons different sunrise time etc.

What about direction, like a dawn attack from the east. The attacker would have better visibility than the defender.

Allowing the attacker to choose somewhat the time and weather most advantageous. Put the defender on edge sort of.

[jacobs_ladder2]

Originally posted by Ron53:

What about time. If you were advancing to contact and it was 4:00am then LOS would be different than at say 7:00am when you would engage. Different seasons different sunrise time etc.

What about direction, like a dawn attack from the east. The attacker would have better visibility than the defender.

Allowing the attacker to choose somewhat the time and weather most advantageous. Put the defender on edge sort of.

My thoughts exactly.

Cheers

[Hans]

Simply, fear as 'commanders' we are not suffering from any fear, hunger, wounds etc. That important psychological slice of the battle is not there. Also missing is the pressure on officers to accomplish the mission to support their careers or professional ethics. CMAK player commander are rarely relieved of their duties and assigned a desk job.

Hey that's an idea, if you REALLY mess up in a scenario the game locks you out for a few days....hmmmmmm

[Screeny]

Logistics......think of a good way to do logistics....in combination with what was mentioned earlier..a layer on top of cm..(basically teh campaign tool) but yeah logistics would be my suggestion

[jacobs_ladder2]

Originally posted by Screeny:

Logistics......think of a good way to do logistics....in combination with what was mentioned earlier..a layer on top of cm..(basically teh campaign tool) but yeah logistics would be my suggestion

Logistics and command appear to be what most people are saying. Actually I expected more complaints about the lack of reconaissance, but the point is well taken. Command and logistics are usually left to simplified methods or the AI. I would like to see more penalties for not maintaining a tight command structure.

It all works together. The better the system for logistics and command, the more realistic the effects of disrupting them. Mixed with a realistic air system (or some partisan units) this could pay big dividends in a game.

Any thoughts on how Fog of War could be handled?

[mrcoffee]

The railgun...

Ok, being serious...the ability to somehow interact with your subordinates the way real commanders do. I would like to be able to give general orders to subordinates, and let them take care of all the little things.

I think Highway to the Reich models this to a great extent.

[jacobs_ladder2]

Originally posted by mrcoffee:

The railgun...

Ok, being serious...the ability to somehow interact with your subordinates the way real commanders do. I would like to be able to give general orders to subordinates, and let them take care of all the little things.

I think Highway to the Reich models this to a great extent.

Good game, but frustrating to play. It looks to me like they're trying to develop a new system and are hitting problems with it. Like, for one, where is the enemy? It's too vague to just throw a generic marker down and say, "the enemy is here somewhere." It seems to me that they took away some of the bad points of other games (excessive control options, overflow of information, useless detail, etc.) but didn't balance it out with many other things that were also "realistic". Like air support (be it recon, CAS, carpet bombing or whatever) and detailed orders.

In other words, they increased the fog of war to simulate the problems a commander might face and simultaneously forgot a lot of the tools that a real life commander had. In short, they did half a job. But of course, they're still working on that one so who knows where they'll take it in the future.

By the way, I think it would be great to put railguns/large calibre guns into a game. The Germans used them extensively and to great effect in the Crimea during the siege of Sebastopol. True they weren't all over Eastern Europe, but I think railguns are one of those things that are just kind of cool to have in a game. As long as you remember that they required hundreds of men to fire, a couple of days to set up and fired 9 tonne shells.

[Trommelfeuer]

Surprise attacks would be great...

You'll always meet enemies ready for combat in CM, but you'll never encounter an unprepared / surprised enemy.

Regards, Sven

[Zarquon]

Hmmm... organizing recon and small patrol actions could be a game in itself. Kind of "what happened before that big battle?".

Most games in that scale center on 30-minute firefights and recon is included as a short paragraph in the scenario briefing, while the intelligence gathering before the battle took days to complete and was probably more important to the outcome than the force mix and battle plan.

You'd have limited assets at your disposal (as usual), too little time (as usual) and your job would not be to drive the enemy from it's position but instead to find out where he is and what he has. At the end of the scenario, you would have to "write" a report: click on the spots where you think the enemy is and give an estimate of what is there. If you goofed, your side's artillery will hit empty air and your tank division will drive straight into a deep AT minefield at H-hour.

Another thing is command delay (maybe that can only be simulated in a simultaneous movement game). A unit has orders to march to point X and began moving an hour ago. Now a report comes in telling you about enemy movement close to X. You order the unit to stop immediately and take up defensive positions but due to the delay involved (and some random bad-luck factor) the order doesn't get through in time and the unit gets chewed up.

[Andrew H.]

I like the command delay idea - but not just command delay - there should be lots of things that could happen due to being out of command. Troops get lost, go to the wrong objective, stop early, get disorganized, move more slowly than usual, can't be contacted for a random period of time, attack at less effectiveness because they aren't sure that they're supposed to be attacking here, don't follow up on an attack (i.e., move forward after an enemy retreats) because they're confused, etc. Maybe you could even have a chart with a large number of possiblities on it - like some RPGs used to have you roll a d100 on a critical miss with outcomes like "lose one piece of armor", etc.

Or you could do an update similar to the old SPI game "Panzergruppe Guderian." This was an operational level game where the soviet counters were initially deployed upside down (with a "?" showing) and neither the Sov. nor the German player knew what the units were until they engaged in combat. This was a very elegant way of simulating both the severe C&C problems existing for the Russians in July '41 plus the fact that neither the Russians nor the Germans knew how effective certain units would be until they engaged in battle.

Some counters were blank underneath, to represent a commander ordering a unit into battle that never showed up, or to simulate a unit that dissolved upon contact with the enemy, or both. It's abstracted, and not entirely realistic, of course, but the *effect* seems very realistic.

It's a very cool game to play, because the longer you play, the more C&C the soviet player gets, and the better he is able to respond to the German player. There's also a great sense of "Where's the 100th Inf. Div? I need them to defend this city and I have no idea where they are...And why are all of the regiments of my armored division scattered over 500 miles?" So the German player tries to take advantage of the confusion while he can, while the Sov. has to throw whatever he's got against the Germans, hoping he can delay them long enough to get his units organized and fight effectively.

I would think that there's a lot more that could be done with this, at many different levels.

It's probably been 15 or 20 years since I've looked at the game - I think that the units were probably regiments or divisions, and each turn was about a day or two.

[Slappy]

Some thoughts from my tabletop days.

A game called Air&Armor representing '80s cold war division scale conflict in Germany had a pretty interesting command point system. You had a certain number per turn (half at night I think) in which to order formations to do things (move, attack, defend, etc.) Different actions were different costs and the scales and starting points were different for NATO and Soviets. It did an interesting job of representing the command structures and flexability of the different sides. One of the quotes in the notes I remember was something along the lines of 'The war won't be decided on the relative merits of the M1 and the T-72, it will be decided on how many of them you can get to the right place at the right time'.

I'm not sure of the name on this one, may have been 'Great Battles of the Civil War' (was a series with the same engine, but different maps and counters in different boxes) actually had a back and forth initiative system each hour. You had to make moves and then roll after each one to see if you could make another, had to pass to your opponent, or if the turn would end entirely. It definitely created some real FOW as you never knew how many moves you could get out in a turn (much like real life I imagine) and made you focus on the most important moves first (ditto).

My experience is that different games have different angles on these things depending on the authors' beliefs about warfare. They all give interesting points of view, but all were flawed in some way or another. I'm not sure that there is really a way to pack it all into one game that is simple enough to be playable for any length of time without bogging down into the mechanics. That said, I think some system to represent the inability of the commander to run the show perfectly all the time is necessary in a wargame to prevent it from becoming chess.

[Cessna]

Originally posted by Slappy:

'The war won't be decided on the relative merits of the M1 and the T-72, it will be decided on how many of them you can get to the right place at the right time'.

And reliability is itself one of the main relative merits of an AFV's design. I was a USMC tank commander myself ('87-'95) and the vast majority of my time was spent working on my tank, performing maintenance to keep it up and running. Things that are stressed "in game" - like armor thickness and gun caliber - were of very minor importance relative to just keeping the thing going.

I'd like to see this modeled "in game." I don't want the game to become one of constand armor breakdowns, but perhaps this could be modeled in operations. For example, a KV required many hours more of maintenance than a T-34 - maybe between battles that KV could have a chance of breaking down?

[Big Jim]

I want tank tracks in snow. And little footprints left by infantry.

[JasonC]

Confusion. Andrew Hedges has the right general idea. But most operational wargames have always been way, way too forgiving about such matters. The commander has a nice neat map where everything is where it actually is, and everybody goes just where they are told, and everyone can expend every movement point every phase. The result is a tuning of sub unit to sub unit that is so orderly and flexible it makes a marching band look like a riot. When a real war makes a riot look like a marching band.

Lots of things that happen to units should sap their movement allowance or forbid them from attacking until after the passage of some time period. Losing a battle, retreating, being shelled, trying to move off road at night, crossing areas heavily fought over, or mined, just running out of fuel, occasionally getting outright lost.

Units should sometimes stray a hex as they are moving and then get confused and lose half their remaining movement allowance. Elaborate stacks of perfectly balanced combined arms should concertina along roads over many kilometers of road space, separate, stretch like taffy, and take hours to reorganize into a neat fighting group again.

Attacks from two directions should be delivered in sequence separately, rather than combined, more often than not. Some units should have their supply state in some relevant category just go to half or near zero for no reason at all. The bigger the force, the less of it can be counted on to be doing remotely what it was told to do, rapidly.

Given four times as much time as it ought to take and half a dozen snafus, eventually the basic intention should emerge. Meanwhile the bestest thing about a single small ranger battalion or commando company ought to be not its high combat factor but the mere fact that it typically does exactly what it is ordered to do, reliably and immediately. Which should be true of very few units.

In the Napoleon at Bay operational series, every commander had to role initiative to move when it was that sides phase. If he failed he just sat there. So a 3 initiative commander would only do anything about half the time. That was a somewhat extreme version of the idea, but something like it is warranted.

As a related matter, few games accurately reflect road space issues. Most allow very large road movement benefits to far larger forces than could actually benefit from them over short time scales. Fully motorized units rarely advanced more than 50 miles in a day, even unopposed. And only very small units could lead, with significant delays involved for following forces to file off the road at any jump off point for a deployed attack.

The other big one is attrition, real casualty problems, the real need to cycle men through the front as combat burns them out. Artillery fire in most games adds a few combat factors to a maneuver unit assault. Maneuver units that win typically keep their full combat power, or take only occasional and marginal step reductions.

In the real deal, artillery fire gradually sapped units of manpower, over a longer time scale than maneuver combat, but inexorably, according to the tempo of enemy logistics supplying his guns. Forces had to adapt to avoid situations in which they could be bled white without doing equivalent damage to the enemy.

And they still bled, gradually crumbling. Half the tanks in a division are in the shop after a few days in action. Continual returns to service, repairs, men out of hospital, replacements, etc, stream back in. A few games used step loss systems and occasional replacement points, but it was all rather ad hoc and not very realistic.

Above all, the real trade offs were not captured - the tendency of the best maneuver units to grow dull when too much is asked of them in terms of sequential fight after fight, the way the logistically dominant side gradually dominates a weaker one by trading its arty ammo for their blood.

There was a Battle for Stalingrad SPI game that managed to capture some of this, by using a combat system that as pure firepower based. First the defender then the attack shot on a fire CRT, and the result was a number of steps eliminated. Before the reply. Good defensive terrain and combined arms effects gave high FP multipliers, like "infantry tripled in heavy urban", or "AT unit type tripled against armor".

Anything killed was gone, before it fired back - though the Germans got a modest replacement stream that amounted to returning 1/3 to 1/2 of the "dead" units at the end of a week. The Russians had a scheduled reinforcement stream instead. It captured the relentless attrition of combat better than any other system I've seen, because the only way to avoid real losses was to avoid fighting altogether. Any attack on a serious position always involved permanent losses.

[Brent Pollock]

What about the "Turning Point: Stalingrad" approach? Generally, once the unit attacked, it had to wait another few days before it could do anything other than defend and move very slowly. Fairly simple mechanic without the detailed replacement pool. "The Longest Day" also had a bit of this, then threw in replacement units too.

[Zarquon]

I think that step losses of the "8-4-8 becomes 4-4-7" are a thing of the past now. TOAW (I think) modelled equipment down to the last can opener. That's probably bean-counting overkill but it allowed for very fine reductions in combat strength. Also most computer strategy games nowadays already distinguish between pure firepower, morale and disruption values. Have that company march through a swamp at night and see their disruption/cohesion attribute drop to zero.

I think that Airborne Assault addressed many of the issues mentioned here, including the unit commander's personality. And a boardgame maybe worth checking out is Victory Games' "Vietnam 1965-75", if you can find a copy. It's system of search & destroy operations is maybe not easily applied to the eastern front but the scale (battalions, 10km hexes) is about right and some concepts were quite unique I think, e.g. losses are calculated on the basis of *your* artillery points and the *enemy's* ground (manpower) strength and vice versa. The reasoning was that artillery doesn't care about how superior your force is; the more men you have in a hex, the more get caught in a barrage, the more you lose.

The option of designating offensive and defensive reserves is another point that is missing from most other games I know.

[JasonC]

TOAW bean counting does not work in practice. The game simply rewards overstack attacks, in practice, while actual equipment tracking is pretty pointless, and combat value quickly becomes a function of highly abstracted logistics over which players have essentially no control, and stacking bundles over which they have far too much control.

As for the Nam game, its combat system suffered from two critical defects. First that it turned "pursuit" MPs into combat adds (which is a ridiculous overemphasis on largely imaginary "speed", rather than firepower), and second that it deducted all losses from global attrition pools. The former made victories snowball through successive rounds unless a successful retreat from a first close one ended the fight.

The second meant there was essentially no tracking of where losses occurred or to which unit. In practice, units died when "outrun" in pursuit or when the owner didn't want to keep them; otherwise all losses were just tossed into a pool, the Mekong indistinguishable from Hue, etc.

The V4V series did better on both counts. Losses were to units, not whole side pools. Replacement was not a rapid every turn function entirely hidden from the commanders, but an occasional affair where they chose which armor unit to rebuild with a scarce armor reinforcement point.

But none of the above were remotely bloody enough to depict real attrition over a time scale of weeks to months. Which is not a rear echelon bean counter's affair. Combat is an like a wrestling match between contestants with arteries open. Each local maneuver does little compared to the ongoing life threatening process created by fighting at all. This makes pausing to recover an almost automatic way to strengthen oneself relatively, just by avoiding wastage.

Wargames instead typically treat maneuver units as definite sized "bags" of combat power, only occasionally reduced due to poor resupply or something similar. As though it is rare and temporary for units to be significantly below TOE. They tend to emphasis the own-side maneuver unit reconstituting aspects of own-side supply. When its real main effect is to enemy side losses. (Arty ammo typically varies directly with thruput. Manpower and major equipment are much more strictly limited).

Both sides get weaker and weaker when they actually try to continue fighting. Combat pauses and lulls happen for reasons that wargames rarely model well - that is the connecting issue in both of the issues I cited. And echelon depth is far more important in real warfare, because of the need for fresh intact forces this whole situation creates. In wargames, instead, the incentive is almost always to press vigorously with over-heavy fronts while any local maneuver advantage - or resupply advantage - exists, until enemy evaporation. Nobody actually manages to do that in reality.

[ April 08, 2004, 11:08 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]