What's missing from wargames in general?

[JasonC]

Perhaps I am not explaining the problem clearly. I can illustrate it by contrasting the dilemmas presented by a typical TOAW case and the problems set by the Battle for Stalingrad fire CRT.

In TOAW, the basic winning idea is to destroy battalions with divisions. He has a battalion alone in a hex somewhere. You can stack regiments in single hexes. You do so, and then put such regimental stacks in each of 2-4 hexes adjacent to the lone enemy battalion. You then attack simultaneously.

He evaporates. The next chance you have - with your units ready enough again - you do the same, and then the same again. In a few phases your division has destroyed an enemy regiment, in sequence, at very little danger to itself.

Modest losses to equipment totals in each battle effectively "dock" an overall pool, as resupply tops your subunits back up to full or near full. Only if supply is difficult or the replacement stream nil will the sequence of fights appreciably wear out the attacking units.

Effectively, losses of entire units are vastly more difficult to recover from than losses to units. And many on few attacks practically ensure destruction of the enemy *and* trivial losses to the winners. Occasionally an attacking subunit is slightly reduced, but the division as a whole continues as before, steamrolling much smaller units in sequence. At worst, a battalion is left out of a few fights as it recovers.

Pooled defensive assets - forms of general support and reserves - can try to stem this. To deal with those, a few soak offs at more like regiment to battalion odds may be needed as preliminaries, to draw in the air strikes and reduce their readiness, lower arty ammo, attract a reserve battalion, etc.

Now, this idea simply does not work in the Battle for Stalingrad system. Because the defender is going to fire, and first, and with his full terrain or combined arms amplified firepower. And that fire, from any reasonable position (even a relatively thin one if the terrain is good) is going to kill people. Whole units. Gone, before they even get to fire.

If you bring a whole division, you will take out the battalion. But you may well lose 1-3 battalions yourself, doing it. Try doing that several times in sequence. By the time you are on the third, you've got a regiment left, with maybe a little change. If the defender rolls well on that one, the attack may fail outright. Much much bloodier. Much less ability to avoid the losses combat inflicts simply by locally outnumbering the enemy.

You read the resulting positions and terrain entirely differently, as a result. You don't just ask, can I kill those buggers, but what will it cost to dig them out of that block? You see 2 little infantry units - but in terrain - and you think to yourself "well, sure I can kill them. But it might cost half a division. Do I really need that block, and right now?" Exchanging off the whole enemy force is a daunting proposition. Only if the conditions of that exchange are exceptionally favorable, is it going to be remotely affordable.

So you look for entirely different things. You want the 3:1 combined arms bonus (armor vs. infantry in open ground e.g.), not because you couldn't kill the enemy just by mindlessly piling up units opposite, but because that way is very expensive while the multiplier is "blood cheap". You look for the positions you can just bypass and ignore, because you do not want to pay to kill everything the enemy has. You look for the threats of encirclement that will make him want to leave. And you look for assymmetric ways of dealing with him, that might be slower but might not be so expensive (like shelling him for a week first, because it might cut the eventual blood price in half).

Also, the use of reserves and of depth is much more realistic in the BofS system. You need a second echelon because it is entirely possible the whole first wave will be shot to rags in one attempted attack. You do not get the illusion that your units are invulnerable masses of iron that crush things in their path, if only concentrated enough. Rather, they fly away like wood chips from a buzz saw the instant you try to apply forward pressure.

It is a much more realistic picture of combat and the problems it poses. It does not reward oversimplified and mindless hyperextensions of the principle of mass and sequential engagement, to the exclusion of all else. You have to ask of everything what it costs for your own force, not just what it will do to the enemy. And to look for efficiency of exchanges, as something rare and hard to find.

I hope this clarifies what I am talking about when I speak of getting attrition right.

[ April 08, 2004, 11:12 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[Guest Manstein22]

Hi all

I`m not a programing genius nor have I any idea how my idea can be implemented into a game.

We all see the lack of a campaign mode in CM. My idea would be to have two games , one in which you have a campaign mode (as in EF2 by Talonsoft) and a game like CMBB.

There must be a random device which gives you sort of an order to battle out a situation you came to in the EF2-style game. Then the result of the CM battle is computed back to EF2. By this you have also solved the problem with command a logistics as this is part of the EF2-style game.

I played War in Russia by Gary Grigsby, EF 2 and now CMBB and always thought it would be great to link these games as they are just one side of the medal but in greater scope.

Manstein22

[Guest Manstein22]

Forgot to add the following in my reply:

In flight simulations sort of a "Living battlefield" as campaign mode is added.You fly a mission and that changes the outcome of computer missions and also your next mission. That should be possible for a future game in CM scope.

In fact that would lead me to search for a method to solve the dilemma sitting/standing/laying 48h of a 24h day at my computer.

Manstein22

[Vortex]

Soldiers are always fed.Tanks have unlimited supply of fuel.

And most important,there are no women!

[Zarquon]

It seems a fundamental design decision is: do you want to make it fun for the player or realistic? The complicacies of logistics, fog of war, the lack of reliability of subordinates, command delay, all this is realictic but it could easily mean that players will very soon refrain from any imaginative plan, anything that incurs a risk. Maybe that's realistic.

[JasonC]

Make a big blob out of maximum stacks right next to each other and beat up on small enemy sub-elements several times in a row, is not "an imaginative plan". It is mindless. If a system rewards it so highly that it almost always works, and heaven and earth need to be moved to even slow it down, then players do not need to learn anything else, and in practice do not learn or do anything else.

Rewarding the same simple old idea is not "letting the players do something imaginative". It is just a simulation failure, that deludes people into thinking the principle of mass is the only important principle in warfare.

One need not take all control over things out of players hands to correct this. Battle for Stalingrad gave players a high degree of operational control. A fight between entire armies was simulated with battalion sized units, which obeyed the commander's directives to go to this or that kilometer sized hex, to the letter.

That is always going to confer an enourmous amount of coordination and control on the whole side commander. He gets to make decisions actually made by large staffs at four nested echelons of command, from regiment to army. The need to cover the front will make him spread some. Unit coordination bonuses may encourage some relatively realistic formations.

But to keep his large command span - personal direction of hundreds of units - from creating completely unrealistic, single optimum plans, based purely on hyperextension of the principle of mass - he has to face realistic constraints. Realistic attrition is one of those constraints.

If on the other hand you find it "more fun" to smash disjointed counters with a large coherent object than to face the actual problems operational commanders deal with, then why not stick to bowling?

[Zarquon]

Jason, it's obvious you know a great deal about the history and theory of warfare. You also know a lot about wargames. You have high standards.

It is quite understandable that you wish for a product that reflects what you know about warfare. It would be a toy allowing you to play with it and test your ideas. It would have to include all the complex features that we talked about here, and maybe many we haven't touched yet.

It would then be a detailed and complex simulation. For you, it would be a game. It is also understandable that you have become frustrated with long years of seeing games being sold as 'the most realistic military simulation ever' while all there really was added up to a generic pile 'em on with flashy graphics.

So please excuse me for mentioning "fun". My interpretation of the original poster's intent was that he wants to design a game. CM is a good design IMO because it manages to combine a certain amount of realism - more than most games of that scale do - with an accessible interface and satisfying sound and graphics. The result is "fun" for many players. Does it attempt to be a perfectly realistic tool for simulating small-unit combat? I don't think so. To do so it would have to include so many features which take away control from the player that it would lose most of it's audience.

So, does being a 'game' mean being 'dumbed down', at least compared to a fully realistic simulation tool? I think so.

And I was was about to reply to your kind advice to go bowling but maybe I simply read you wrong.

Actually, at times I enjoy banging my head against a brick wall, just for the fun of it! Maybe you should try too, it helps to put things in perspective.

[JasonC]

Plenty of ordinary people enjoy knocking pins over with a large solid object. There is a simply visceral pleasure in it. If some skill is required too, enough to keep it interesting and have a score to worry about, it makes a fine game. It does not, however, make a fine wargame.

Wargame design is not about exhaustive realism or simulation. It is a matter of design. Modeling. Judicious abstraction. The way TOAW fails is a perfect example of how not to design a wargame - pile in jobs of detail but put it all beneath the hood, out of player's reach, then leave the controls actually in player's reach unchanged from the days of AH's "Bulge" or "Panzerblitz".

Why does that fail? Because all the potentially interesting new carefully modeled relationships the game is supposedly an advance for capturing, are walled off from the commanders. A strategy game is one where the choices of the commanders matters. Meanwhile, something is left in player's hands, so the outcome does depend on their choices. But that dependence is no different than in the above old board wargames - make a big fist, smash smaller things, repeat.

Design is about confronting the commander with the real problems his historical counterpart faced. While leaving the outcome up to the interaction of player decisions. The first makes a wargame and the latter makes a strategy game. If the interface is also kept clean and simple, the command spans manageable, if the players have something to hang onto for immersion or a guide to tactics to try or both - then it will be a playable and fun wargame, as well.

CM succeeds at this, as did Squad leader. Terrible Swift Sword succeeded in this (and with it, the Battleground series). Battle for Stalingrad, To the Green Fields Beyond (Cambrai in WW I), Wooden Ships and Iron Men - a lot of games past succeeded in this. Some of them well known and many of them not.

They did so not because they imitated bowling, nor because they swamped players in minutae, nor because the programmers directed a movie script about how they think some battle went, over which players have tiny ineffective controls. Instead, they *designed* the major systems of the game. They integrated them. They picked the key military aspects of the situation and they deliberately modeled those features, under player control. Then they ruthlessly abstracted the rest.

CM does not even try to figure out where every member of a squad is. But it pays attention to 5mm differences in AP shot penetration. And lets units be positioned down to 2m accuracy, while providing realistic 3-D LOS tools. The designer has to think about what is really critical to the kind of problem he wants to present to his players. Tactical combined arms is a rich problem set, that needs certain things to be modeled in fine detail. Other things it only needs vaguely good enough.

And one of the critical aspects of WW II -operational- combat is the relation between the principle of mass, and attrition. Between concentrating to fight over and over in sequence, and getting worn out by having to fight even twice. Most operational wargames have flubbed this trade off, these relations. A few haven't (Green Fields, BofS).

Is this perfectionism? I would say instead that it is disappointing to see real modeling problems that have been solved recur in later games simply because designers are too bored with their job as designers to learn what has already been tried and whether and how it worked. And would prefer some other job - historian, artist, movie director, physicist, programmer - anything but game design.

Then they try to do these other jobs so well that the job of game designer will disappear as unnecessary. I won't have to get combined arms trade offs right if I can just count the beans minutely enough, or if the polygons just move fast enough, or if the eye candy is just pretty enough. Emphatically it does not work. The games that hold interest are the ones with depth of play. And depth of play comes from design.

My advice to game designers is to know the history of game design. Not as a commercial history - what as popular which year. But as the history of a science, art, or discipline.

After Squad Leader and other phased tactical rule systems nobody could play Panzerblitz again. They'd burst out laughing. "Run 6 trucks to point blank then hit 'em with Hummels from 3 kilometers away".

After Panzergruppe Guderian, nobody could look at attempts to simulate the operational power of armored forces that were just based on higher combat factors, rather than (phased) movement differences.

After Terrible Swift Sword, nobody could see why units had to be loss-less wholes that were either fully there or not at all - or why the ability of enough fire to trump the strongest or bravest unit could not be simulated accurately.

It was not a matter of perfect simulation. It was simply that real problems for commanders were seen and captured in entirely playable systems, and prevented old unrealistic "hacks" from trumping everything.

When the move to computers happened, wargame design initial went into reverse gear for about a decade. There were a few attempts to harness the computer's bean counting power, to make playable systems and fights that hadn't been before (e.g. Pacific War).

But the most successful computer wargames were ones that kept major design aspects from the best board wargames, and transfered them over wholesale (Talonsoft's Battleground and TSS, CM and Squad Leader). They sometimes improved them with new design features the computer made possible - in CM the big ones are "we go", double blind fog of war and waypoint movement.

Nobody has made a similar new advance over the operational games of the past. Every attempt in that direction has failed, by concentrating on the wrong thing (TOAW and bean counting, real time attempts). The best operational computer wargames to date are the V4Victory series, which were a refined translation of traditional board wargames.

Unfortunately even this best had serious bugs. The supply system was "hackable" (you could uber-supply the strongest combat units by starving unimportant guns). It rewarded operational fist forming too much. The fatigue system could be "gamed" by pinprick arty night after night. Overall, the design incorporated too many new features that had been inadequately playtested and in practice were exploitable in unrealistic ways.

But the stuff out there today isn't even that good. And that wasn't as good as the best of the old board wargames - not nearly as innovative as Green Fields or BoS, for instance.

[eichenbaum]

nevermind.

[ April 13, 2004, 09:57 AM: Message edited by: eichenbaum ]

[Cessna]

I'd like to see a game in which a player could - at the beginning of the scenario - pick which level of command they will take. Superior and subordinate commands could be AI controlled, and a player could only "override" the AI of a subordinate unit. Turns would be timed, so decisions would have to be relatively quick.

For instance, you could do a Kursk game. A player could pick to run a small unit - a platoon, for example - and play the game accordingly, making decisions appropriate to a platoon commander. He'd get orders from higher commands, and the other platoons around him would be busy with their own situations, receiving orders and trying to complete their missions.

He could then choose to play the same battle - using a similar or identical interface - as a company or battalion commander, making appropriate decisions. Instead of giving orders to squad leaders he'd be giving orders to company commanders. He'd have a limited amont of time to give commands, so if he chooses to give orders to a single machinegun team or tank he'd be eating up that might be used to order a whole company to make a more non-specific move (i.e., advance)...

[JasonC]

You might think it would be interesting Cessna. And you might have fun exploring the various levels, for a while. But you'd just be watching a movie the programmer wrote out as a script, in effect. Because the control you'd have over anything that happens would be so small, nothing you picked to do or not do would make the slightest difference. Strategy games work because they give the player control of multiple echelons, and the resulting coordination. That is what confers enough control over outcomes onto the decisions available to the player, that those decisions actually matter.

[Cessna]

Really? That's not what I intended at all.

As it is, CMBB is about battalion and company level games. Players don't have control over, say, individual soldiers. Tanks and squads, yes - but individual troops are run by the AI.

(Edit - and with good "fuzzy logic" and a dynamic campaign, it wouldn't be scripted)

I think it would be interesting to be able to "focus" one's level of command up or down the chain of command...

[ April 13, 2004, 05:55 PM: Message edited by: Cessna ]

[JasonC]

One level of command makes 3 decisions in a day of combat. 2 of them miscarry.

In CM, the reason players have control is (1) individual men in the squad are abstracted and do what their sergeant tells them (2) the player decides for 30 sergeants (3) and 6 lieutenants (4) and a captain or two and (5) all 37 of them know what the others are doing and dance to a coordinated plan dreamed up in the player's head, except perhaps 2-3 sergeants whose men are routed.

No single human being in real life has that kind of control, that kind of influence on what happens on a battlefield.

Strategy games work and are fun when the outcome depends on the decisions of the two players. Whether anything realistic is being simulated or not. Chess and Go are good strategy games, because this is true of them.

But playing a private on Omaha beach means, ramp goes down, run for the sea wall, get shot or don't get shot, spend an hour cowering behind the sea wall waiting for the chaos around you to turn into anything that might accomplish anything, take a mortar fragment or don't, if you last long enough peak up and fire off a mag or two at muzzle flashes along the bluff, without the slightest idea if any of your shots did a damn thing, then decide whether to listen to the crazy sergeant who wants you to crawl on your hands and knees through that barbed wire the machineguns are slashing, where your friends and screaming and bleeding to death, with no obvious point to any of it and no prospect of anything you do having any effect on the overall battle. And if you do, you get shot or you don't. And if you don't, maybe the destroyers in the meantime have taken out an MG, or a brush fire has started some smoke drifting across a line of fire, and you make it up the bluff. If so, maybe you get shot there and maybe you don't. If you don't, you can probably see some actual Germans up there for the first time all day, and shoot them while they are looking the other way down the beach machinegunning other men you can't see.

Not one of those events above will really depend on your decisions. 99.99% of everything that happens will simply happen to you, or when you are doing it, will be the only thing you could possibly do. And any effect of your actions will be swallowed in an immense sea of randomness and actions of others completely beyond your knowledge, let alone control.

Which might make a (rather painful) movie script, but isn't a strategy game. Because strategy on your part has absolutely nothing to do with it.

[Cessna]

I thought of something else I'd like - flanks that aren't static.

When we play a game now, we're put in (virtual) command of a section of the front. We attack, we defend, we run around within the confines of the map. We deal with the enemy to our front and, to a lesser extent, reinforcements and artillery from our rear. It's like we're playing in a valley with impassible walls.

We never worry about our flanks. Some folks even use map edges to pull off unrealistic tactics...

Wouldn't it be interesting to deal with something like this?

You are a battalion commander. You're pushing forward. Then you get messages from the battalion on your left that they're falling back. Suddenly you've got an exposed flank. The enemy gets reinforcements that appear on your map edge, and you're facing an entirely different battle. Your victory conditions are reset, and you must redeploy your forces accordingly. You must decide if you should continue your attack or shore up that flank.

Or - you're falling back, defending. You're being beaten back and ground down, when the battalion commander on your right makes a breakthrough, and suddenly you get a chance to roll up the enemy with some new tanks that appear at his flank. Now you have the chance to make a more solid defence, or launch a risky counterattack...

Is this realistic? Absolutely. It happens in real wars constantly. No commander can be 100% certain that he's fighting on a chessboard that has totally secure flanks - if he does fight like this, one day he's going to get badly hurt for not keeping a reserve. Real units constantly have to deal with situations like this. Doing this would make players think more like real commanders, forcing them to make more realistic decisions.

It would be relatively easy to so. For example, you could set it so that on a random turn, the situation changes - suddenly you've got something new to deal with. The victory conditions are reset appropriately, and the game continues. Also - maybe the event happens, maybe it doesn't. Perhaps players could spend points to have secure flanks - or buy the possibility of unexpected reinforcements or a changing scenario.

One of the things that the game Starcraft handled well was event triggers. I am NOT proposing that we make Combat Mission more like Starcraft or any other "real-time" game. What I am proposing is the possibility of a more dynamic scenario design. Maybe moving closer to a map edge could reveal more of the map, giving the player more options. Or maybe (seperately from moving to an edge) he'll get reinforcements - or have to deal with an attack from an unexpected direction. Maybe his artilery will suddenly become unavailable, having been pulled to deal with a different sector of the front.

Realistic? Yes. Fun? I'd think so. I'm not proposing that a scenario be a chain of random events, but the occasional unexpected event will both keep players on their toes and foster more realistic decision making.

[Sgt AA]

In OP you have a rolling window, if the windows could just roll sideways as well, could that give the game some of the options you're asking for?

Regards/

[Cessna]

Originally posted by Sgt AA:

In OP you have a rolling window, if the windows could just roll sideways as well, could that give the game some of the options you're asking for?

Regards/

Yeah, that's part of it. Add in variable reinforcements and shifting victory conditions and I'm sold.

[Redwolf]

One idea I was kicking around is have a certain allowment of micromanagement but not more.

Consider an operational wargame like TOAW. Lets say your force is a corps and your level of markers is battalions. You have 60 unit markers.

Now, for some of the marker you might not like the organization and you would like finer graded control. For example you might have a tank hunter battalion half of Nashorns and half of Jagdpanthers and you would prefer to have two half-battalion markers. Or you have a Tiger battalion but you would prefer to have three Tiger companies. Or you have a tank hunter detachment of 75mm AT guns and 8mm FlaKs and you would like to use the 88s in indirect fire and the 75s in AT combat.

If the game was freely allowing the player to split then you would get into a nightmare of micromanagement, especially in competitive play.

The solution is that you get 60 markers to start from and the overall limit on markers you can have at any point in time is 70. So you can go and split a few things where you think it is important.

But after you create ten more markers you cannot split anything any further. To split something else you would have to recombine something else.

Obviously the game would also limit how many units split/recombinations you can do per minute and/or you may give a penality for split units which might be persistent even after recombination.

[Cessna]

Originally posted by JasonC:

But playing a private on Omaha beach means, ramp goes down, run for the sea wall, get shot or don't get shot,

And yet WWII: Normandy - a first person shooter which is about exactly that subject - has sold very well.

No, I'm not proposing that we make a "shooter" game. Rather that we be able to choose the echelon we command.

Talonsoft's Battleground Waterloo did this very well. If I remember correctly, you checked boxes on an organizational table to decide what you'd command. Want to play a small scenario and just assault Hugomont? No problem. Want to just take a cavalry division? Done. Want to take Ney's Corps alone? Sure. Or play the entire battle. The AI handles the rest of the game.

Just a thought - I believe it could be interesting.

[Schoerner]

redwolf,

i like your idea, but IMO it would be best, that CM would simply offer to setup battles externally and import the data.

That way any kind of strategic-layer could be done by enthusiasts.

BTS could concentrate on what they can do best - refine the tactical engine and the players would get all the possibilities for strategic/operational-layers.

[JasonC]

Cessna - so it sold. Did it have any strategy? No. A lot of people go to the movies, but nobody pretends the outcome on the screen depends on what they do in their seats.

Did you ever try to play the battleground series with the AI in charge of most of your side? The AI was so weak it was unplayable that way. Without a detailed script for the particular fight it was hopeless. And with one, it wasn't much better. You could indeed play fights just commanding a division - but with only that on the battlefield.

The battleground system worked best for corps level fights. At the army level the forces were too resilent, if you cycled fresh troops through active areas etc. At the division level, it was too easy to get flanks, and mass surround kills decided the whole thing (or one big rout).

There is nothing wrong with varying the player scale, if you can get the rest to work. But you want to give the player not the role of one person at one level, but more like 3 full command spans. (Division and regiment and battalion, or regiment and battalion and company e.g.). That is enough to have real control and ability to coordinate things. One level, alone, is not.

[Broken]

Originally posted by redwolf:

One idea I was kicking around is have a certain allowment of micromanagement but not more.

Consider an operational wargame like TOAW. Lets say your force is a corps and your level of markers is battalions. You have 60 unit markers.

Now, for some of the marker you might not like the organization and you would like finer graded control. For example you might have a tank hunter battalion half of Nashorns and half of Jagdpanthers and you would prefer to have two half-battalion markers. Or you have a Tiger battalion but you would prefer to have three Tiger companies. Or you have a tank hunter detachment of 75mm AT guns and 8mm FlaKs and you would like to use the 88s in indirect fire and the 75s in AT combat.

If the game was freely allowing the player to split then you would get into a nightmare of micromanagement, especially in competitive play.

The solution is that you get 60 markers to start from and the overall limit on markers you can have at any point in time is 70. So you can go and split a few things where you think it is important.

But after you create ten more markers you cannot split anything any further. To split something else you would have to recombine something else.

Obviously the game would also limit how many units split/recombinations you can do per minute and/or you may give a penality for split units which might be persistent even after recombination.

I like this idea. Basically, it forces you the commander to prioritize detailed decision making to key points of the battle. Perhaps the markers can represent "commands". Only a limited number can be issued in one turn.

Another system would be to have a Marker representing your (overall commander) position on the map. Battles within range of your marker would be executed on a CM scale. Battles ouside the range of your Marker would be resolved on a higher scale, say battalion or company.

A third system would be to allocate only "N" command points per turn. These points could all be spent on one high-detail battle or many low-detail battles, or some combination. This would represent a natural limit one what one commander could actually command.

[Redwolf]

Broken,

While I would limit the amount of splitting, I don't think I would limit the number of commands to give.

Two reasons:

1) too much effort if you see a unit with some orders, change your mind what it should do and then have to go and delete orders from some other units to free up "slots".

2) I am a friend of far-reaching orders. I like to plot orders that are good for many turns unless something unexpected happens. A wargame I would write would make heavy use of SOPs (at least TacOps style), and SOPs could have a conditionalized change system at waypoints, analogous to what Steel Beasts does.

[Broken]

Originally posted by redwolf:

Broken,

While I would limit the amount of splitting, I don't think I would limit the number of commands to give.

I think we are advocating more or less the same thing. By "splitting", you are giving the top-level commander (the player) control over lower level units; increasing his command depth, so to speak. You advocate limiting the player's ability to micro-manage by limiting the amount of splitting.

This amounts to the same thing as limiting the number of player-commanded low level units. I would add to that the restriction that the player can only split, or command, lower-level units if his Marker is within some command range of them. I would distinguish between commanding (splitting) and detatching units. A commanded (split)lower-level unit would still be under the players control. A detatched lower-unit might be under either player or AI control.

Two reasons:

1) too much effort if you see a unit with some orders, change your mind what it should do and then have to go and delete orders from some other units to free up "slots".

I see your point. However, I don't like systems that favor micromanagement, where a player can issue an endless stream of orders in five minutes of game-time. Perhaps a solution is to invoke a "command delay penalty" when a player issues a large number of new orders.

2) I am a friend of far-reaching orders. I like to plot orders that are good for many turns unless something unexpected happens. A wargame I would write would make heavy use of SOPs (at least TacOps style), and SOPs could have a conditionalized change system at waypoints, analogous to what Steel Beasts does.

Yes, I like all three of those ideas: orders that cover a significant span of time, SOPs to control a unit's reaction to specific circumstances, and waypoint change of SOP.

However, I don't like the ability to "change doctrine" mid-battle. A given army has a limited doctrine, reflected in the set of available SOPs. A player could customize his set of SOPs during setup, but during battle, he can only change which SOP a particular unit is using.

I would like to see a command system which properly reflects the ideas of "momentum", confusion, and being "behind the decision curve". Issueing lots of orders mid-battle should cost a player momentum. Significant command delays would be one way to accomplish this.

I am thinking in terms of division-level game-scale with localized CM-level game-scale for small parts of the battle-map.

[Cessna]

Originally posted by JasonC:

There is nothing wrong with varying the player scale, if you can get the rest to work. But you want to give the player not the role of one person at one level, but more like 3 full command spans. (Division and regiment and battalion, or regiment and battalion and company e.g.). That is enough to have real control and ability to coordinate things. One level, alone, is not.

Fair enough. I see your point. Maybe today's AIs are too limited to present the game I have in mind.

I'd just like a game that is more in line with the actual decisions a real unit commander is making...

Edit - and, not to belabor a point, "Squad Assault" by Matrix Games starts off with a squad disembarking from a landing craft on D-Day, and is very much a strategy game - on a squad level.

http://www.squadassault.com/main.asp

[ April 16, 2004, 09:15 PM: Message edited by: Cessna ]

[Pyewacket]

So what are you going to programm, jacobs_ladder2?