A look at the Waal River assault, Sept 20 1944

[Runyan99]

My idea as we go is to compare this real, famous, battalion sized engagement to your average Combat Mission scenario.

One mile west of the railroad bridge at Nijmegen, paratroopers of the 82nd’s 504th Regiment prepare to cross the 400-yard-wide Waal River. Tanks and artillery will provide covering fire; Typhoons will rake the area with rockets for 30 minutes before the assault.

The paratroopers must paddle the boats across the river, climb the bank, then cross 200 to 800 yards to a 15- to 20-foot-high dike. Another 800 yards of flat terrain beyond the dike is a concrete fort.

So, total distance to the objective is 1400-2000 yards.

Jump off time for the assault is 1500 hours. The initial assault force is only two companies H and I 3rd Bn. of the 504PIR, 82nd Airborne, who will cross in 26 assault boats. The 504th's 2nd Bn will support with fire across the river.

Directly across the river is some portion of Kampfgruppe Henke, a hodgepodge force consisting of three companies of the Ersatz Battalion 6, and company from the Hermann Goering Traning Regiment, and an NCO school posted as bridge security. All in all, about 750 men, with some flak batteries in support.

To KG Henke's left, or east is SS Kampfgruppe Reinhold, which is not involved in the immediate battle at the crossing. I'm not yet sure what KG Reinhold consisted of, and I'll have to come back to that.

So, 1500 and the whistle blows. The boats jumped off and crossed the river.

Those who made it to the shore charged ahead towards the 15 foot high dike/embankment some 800 yards ahead. Men fired from the hip as they ran. There was nowhere to hide. They charged singly and in small groups.

As the men reached the embankment, they paused to catch their breath. A few wounded men were bandaged.

Here H and I companies were to reassemble. Then move towards the bridges. But here, one Staff Sergeant charges over the dike, and yells 'After them!'. All along the embankement the same thing happens as little groups charge over the embankment.

The plan has gone out the window. The attack had developed into a series of daring small unit actions of individuals from different squads and platoons. Little semblance of unit cohesion remained. The situation was confused and chaotic.

Ahead now were open fields, orchards and a scattering of farmhouses and barns. Beyond that was the Fort Hof van Holland. The two objective bridges could be seen to the right.

I gotta go. To be continued. I'm still looking for a map online of this battlefield.

[ June 10, 2005, 10:57 PM: Message edited by: Runyan99 ]

[Runyan99]

Okay continuing on. I found a nice map in 'In Never Snows in September', but I havn't found an online map I can link here yet.

So, as the men cross over the embankment, they realize that most of the fire is coming from the Fort Hof van Holland. It's not the original objective, but it has to be neutralized to continue on to the bridges.

So, the men continue their fight through the fields, orchards and farmhouses on the way to the fort. Here a few men charge a farmhouse. Then a few men move off to flush out a single sniper. A team sets up a machine gun 50-60 yards from shore and fires at an entrenhced German position.

Eventually, small seperate groups have moved to within assault distance of the fort. They do not assault the fort. Instead they set up support weapons and keep the occupants of the fort pinned down and neutralized so that the main assault can continue to the railway bridge.

Firefights were still taking place all over the area. The situation was still chaotic and confused.

Men from H company reached the approaches of the north side of the railway bridge, and were engaged by Germans who had fallen back in small groups from the 15 foot embankment near the river.

At this point, a German company gets caught moving across the bridge from south to north, apparently moving from Nijmegen to defend the northern approaches. They are cut up badly from the fire of both the paratroopers and the support forces, including tanks, on the south side of the Waal. Later, 267 dead Germans are counted on the bridge.

This breaks the resistance at the railway bridge. It is now 1700, two hours after the jump off of the assault.

[Runyan99]

I think I'll stop there for a few observations.

1) From jump off to railway bridge seizure, there was never a 'break' in the action. There was constant engagement, as small groups waged their own little wars for a farmhouse or whatever. Here are two companies fighting for two hours, without a pause, without resupply, without reorganization.

2) Even so, the battle STILL isn't over. There really isn't a pause, even now, although this point in the narrative is convenient to stop and take stock. Paratroopers from H and I companies immediately raced on to try to capture the Highway bridge, less than a mile away. They again faced resistance from Germans (from SS KG Reinhold, including some 88mm guns) in orchards, dikes, and houses along the way. They continue to press on until 1915hrs, when the Paratroopers securely hold the north side of both the Railway and Highway bridges. Then British tanks started to cross the bridge, and the battle was truly over.

P.S. My sources don't exactly agree. "It Never Snows in September" says the highway bridge was taken by 1830hrs. James Magellas says it was taken by 1900 or 1915hrs. Whatever. At the mininum it was three and a half hours after the jump off of the attack.

[ June 10, 2005, 11:25 PM: Message edited by: Runyan99 ]

[Runyan99]

3) Force density on the battlefield must have been pretty low, when conpared to a CM type battle. Both for the Americans and the Germans. There just never seem to have been a lot of guys in one place, except for the German disaster at the railway bridge. Consider, two companies jump off, are decimated in a river crossing, but still are able to advance over 2000 yards of battlefield (maybe even 3000 all the way to the highway bridge). They must have been opposed by sparsely placed German defenders, made even more sparse by the way the poor soldiers of KG Henke seemed to abandon positions and move (half rout) to the rear. Handfuls of guys, maybe a squad here and a squad there, are able to take defended positions like the fort or a farmhouse. This, in my experience was the norm in WW2 combat, especially on the Eastern Front, where reduced formations were resposible for defending huge tracts of land (insert Monty Python voice).

[Runyan99]

4) I haven't mentioned the second wave of engineer reinforcements which come over in the remaining 11 boats after 1700hrs. I haven't mentioned the seperate battle going on at the same time by 2nd Bn. in Nijmegen south of the river against some 500 German defenders still holding in the town. If anybody want to comment on those.

[Runyan99]

That's all I can think of for now.

So, what's my point?

CM cannot depict the type of engagement I have described above. Or at least, it does not do it well.

And that's important because I don't view this famous river crossing as unusual in any way. I think what happened during this assault was very common. I mean in terms of the way constant combat was fought by small groups over a fairly long period of time, without a lot of overall control, or resupply, or reorganization. Replace the 400 meters of Waal river with 400 meters of open steppe and you might have a battalion attack on the Eastern Front.

I throw down the gauntlet. This is the way stuff really happened. Gamers weaned on ASL don't understand that. CM does not understand that. I know, because it can't simulate it.

[ June 10, 2005, 11:44 PM: Message edited by: Runyan99 ]

[Kingfish]

For what its worth, Bogdan posted a link to a Market-Garden site a couple of days ago. You can see a panoramic view of the area you mention, although as seen today. Still, the terrain wouldn't have changed all that much.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Runyan99:

I haven't mentioned the seperate battle going on at the same time by 2nd Bn. in Nijmegen south of the river against some 500 German defenders still holding in the town. If anybody want to comment on those.

They were assisted by the Guards Armoured Division, including Sherman tanks and British infantry....

The SL treatment (and the CM scenario I did to emulate it) is over in about 30 minutes....

[dalem]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

The SL treatment (and the CM scenario I did to emulate it) is over in about 30 minutes....

Isn't part of that really due to the way most of us handle our troops with regard to speed and risk though?

I know that I get frustrated at the fact that I have to wait a few turns for guys I just Advanced 100m to cover to actually catch their breath. I feel that if I get a platoon to take its objective with "only" 20 or 30% casualties that I've done a satisfactory job.

Now I can chalk some of that up to a limited "immersion factor". CM doesn't do a good job of making me feel like there is any desultory fire going on. CM doesn't do a good job of making me feel like there is any advantage to managing my movement very carefully.

Some of it goes to the fact that it is a game as much or more than it is a simulation - 30 minute scenarios being the rule.

-dale

[JasonC]

(1) No it is not typical, it is famous as one of the most outstanding feats of arms in the entire war.

(2) That 2 companies advanced several km into thin resistence is perfectly normal, but successfully doing so across a 400 yard river in assault boats was not remotely typical of anything.

(3) There was a much larger infantry quality disparity in this fight than in most of the war. The Americans are veteran paratroopers - select men - at their farthest outlier of outperformance. The defenders were replacement battalion and school units, still being trained.

(4) The defenders clearly did not expect the attack in the direction it came. The attackers took fire crossing the river but only from tiny sub-elements - we know, because they'd all be dead as doornails otherwise. Also, the feat itself was incredible enough not to be expected. Further, we have participant testimony that most of the defenders were encountering in one fortified location, or near the bridge itself. The defensive deployment was clearly not a linear one along the whole bank designed to stop a crossing anywhere, but was instead a strongpoint defense focused on the bridge.

(5) Air attack prep was rare. And the Germans used cellars or deep dugouts as protect from such things. Many of them were undoubtedly in their shelters when the attack jumped off.

(6) You say in passing "some portion of" but then give the whole KG composition, 750 men and some Flak. This is not a CM level force description. The actual number of guns and their types are needed, their deployment is needed (how many of what could sse any part of the crossing area? e.g.). Several hundred Germans are apparently on the wrong side of the bridge, others (a company? the standard unit of deployment anyway) are probably in the one fortified area most of the resistence came from.

(7) While you give depths of advances you don't really give frontages. It matters for force to space, particularly on the defending side. It is quite likely the densities were even and high only in the fight for the fortified position. Which resulted not in mashing together but in each side owning its own densely occupied area, their immediate counterparts being pinned.

(8) The example overstresses borg spotting to an exceptional degree. An untrained unit has some weak elements in position to see the crossing happening, but most of the defending force is encountered later and elsewhere. They did not know the real axis of attack. You have a much larger scale in space than one set of eyes can see, larger than CM is meant to show on one map. Borg spotting is only an acceptable approximation if the field is small enough eyes can take it in, short movements by runners can convey relevant information to other subunits, and the total time scale is small enough you don't see unreasonable levels of coordination in time and space between widely separated units that do not possess the same information, in reality.

(9) You could easily simulate these events with CM. You would just need to use multiple scenarios over multiple maps, linked in a CM "campaign", with an operational layer. I've successfully simulated actions between regiments using such a system. My own is called "CMx10" and uses the CM editor as a virtual "sand table" to record positions easily. Unaltered units might not be available to take orders until some release time (or closely approached). Operational prep fires can be simulated directly with fire mission and air attacks on maps containing only one side. Etc.

(10) The actual tactical fights that would result, would feature a few platoons of veteran paras with fanaticism, against platoons of green and conscript defenders in numerous small positions, rolled through in sequence. The attackers need to keep losses down in each fight, and to bypass the most strongly held areas. The defenders need to attrite the attackers as early as possible and eventually "stand" on some line they can man thickly enough to stop the remainder. The whole "campaign" might link 4 operational turns in sequence, and represent actions side by side on up to 5 adjacent maps, width-wise. With the attackers probably only hitting half of them, but the defenders deployed in all, and in depth.

[Runyan99]

Some responses to JasonC

1 and 2) Sure, a river assault obviously isn't typical. I was referring more to the infantry combat which results after they have reached the shore.

3 and 4) Agreed.

6) I don't know how KG Henke was deployed. There seem to have been strong points set up around the bridges, around two traffic circles (I think these were south of the bridges), early warning strongpoints manned by single squads at the south edge of Nijmegen, in the small village of Lent nearer the highway bridge, and the Post Office was occupied and fortified. This was as of 17 September, and might have changed.

What's clear is that this fairly small force was thinly distributed, and in any event was not concentrated where the crossing actually took place.

7) I can only guess at the frontage for the attack. Maybe 300-500 meters?

9 and 10) You are working around the limitations of CM with this solution. In an ideal CM environment, this mini-campaign wouldn't be necessary, and you could play the whole engegement as a single scenario or operation.

[Andreas]

Cory

I do not think the infantry combat is something typical. While force density on the German side may have been typical, it was nothing of the sort on the allied side, especially compared to the east, where the Red Army would push a regiment down a frontage of 400m or less. Also, I am not quite sure how artillery support compared to what would qualify as 'normal'.

I also have my doubts about the quality of the German defensive layout, since the units on the German side were not really experienced infantry fighters.

[JasonC]

"In an ideal CM environment, this mini-campaign wouldn't be necessary, and you could play the whole engegement as a single scenario"

I understand that you want this, but I do not think it is a reasonable thing to want.

Coordination of units km apart over a time scale of hours is not something to expect a squad level tactical game with single side commanders to simulate. If one commander is to give all the orders, you will always get unrealistic intelligence and coordination effects.

You can't prevent the player from knowing the immediate circumstances of 2nd squad, 3rd platoon, Bravo company, or he can't give it its orders reasonably. If he knows everything each of these requires, he knows more than any human being actually knew, in the course of any such fight.

An operational layer deals with this by requiring decisions at the time scale of an hour or so, committing formations of the size of a company or so, to be made all along the line, *prior* to knowing the details or ongoing outcomes at each spot, every minute over four hours.

It properly simulates the limited intel and the limited decision points actually available to commanders up an echelon level or two. The inability of the operational side commander to reach down and change all his most recent operational decisions, because of what happens to one gun or team in one spot, on a time scale of a minute or three, is vastly more realistic than anything you can hope to simulate with CM.

Any CM. No matter how you tweak it.

Deliberately stressing command span and the *conceptual* scale of an engagement, then trying to resolve it with a system designed 2-3 echelon levels lower, will always fail to produce accurate trade offs or accurate results.

Every strategy game already produces some such stress, some additional level of coordination beyond what the real participants could achieve, simply by putting one man in charge of all the distributed decisions actually made by several dozen officers and NCOs. Frankly, it has to, to make such things at all interesting. The individual decisions trees available to single men in combat are not complex enough to hold anybody's interest. Nor do they objectively have enough impact, taken alone, to support a strategy game (who outcome must depend on the match wits of the rival commanders).

But this introduces a characteristic scale for any game. There is a command span beyond which the results will deviate comically from reality. CM is best at the company scale, and it is already stressed at the battalion scale, when a battalion fight takes place within the tactical range of the weapons present (a kilometer or so). Multiple miles and hours, even if the absolute force sizes engaged remain a battalion, it will break.

This is not any failure of the design. It is a failure of the desire - you want to simulate something with the wrong base scale in the simulation. To get hours and miles right, you need to be moving companies around, tasking at the level of platoons perhaps but not maneuvering independently at that level. And certainly not coordinating every minute of movement by every packet of half a dozen men.

[Runyan99]

I was at the bookstore today and picked up MacDonald's book about the Battle for the Huertgen forest. I didn't buy it, so I'll have to paraprase from memory. Andreas, you probably have some information on this. I know you have a Huertgen fetish.

Anyway, here is the first account I read:

On the exact same day as the Waal crossing, Sept 20, 1944, a U.S. Battalion is given an order to advance deep into the Huertgen forest. The attack jumps off around noon. The objective is some town a mile or two away. Resistance is supposed to be 'negligible'. The vets don't buy that, but they set out anyway.

Initially, the battalion overruns serveral unoccupied bunkers. There is no sign of the Germans. The vets begin to think, 'Hey maybe the intel was right for once!'

Then the forward scouts give the caution signal, and soon after the first German MG opens up. The lead company is pinned down.

The second company (I think it was a two company attack, or perhaps a two-up-one-back formation) tries to move around the flank of this MG, but is itself pinned down by another MG in a cleverly concealed bunker.

It now takes all afternoon for the pinned company to move around the flank of this second bunker and knock it out. In the process, the company CO and all of his HQ section are killed or wounded.

So, in summary, a two company attack against two bunkers, which takes all afternoon. I imagine a long tense day with guys crawling for hours on their bellies across the forest floor. Small groups probe a gully or ravine to find a clear path around, then have to crawl back and try again, and again. Every once in a while a GI takes an bullet. At the very end of this ordeal - a quick terrifying assault. Or maybe not. Perhaps it ends anti-climacticly with just a couple well thrown grenades. Who knows?

But guess what - CM cannot simulate this type of engagement either! Or again, at least not well. The CM version will either be a short scenario in which the bunkers are encountered and knocked out in 1/6th of the time it actually occured, or it will be a two or three battle operation in which the player simply repositions his forces in between battles, then makes the assault, cutting out all of the crawling and scouting bits. Neither option really gives you a feeling for what actually happened.

[JasonC]

I will put the same point another way. Imagine CM (or ASL) did not exist. You now have to determine from first principles what scale of controlled decisions by one party, what fineness of subformation responding to orders, orders given in what level of detail as to placement and interval of time, resolved with what granularity, would best simulate the crossing of the Waal.

What apriori reason is there to believe, you would have to land on the answers, "battalion overall command span, subformations down to fire team, orders to the square meter of positioning every minute of time, firing at staggered ten second intervals, overall world-state updating every second"? Why must every event in history be shoe-horn-able into that set of choices? Would you try to simulate the campaign in Normandy from June 6 to August 15 with those choices?

[JasonC]

In re your Hurtgen example, the 2 bunkers may have been the most important features of the tactical struggle involved, but it is most unlikely they were the only opposition faced by two infantry companies, and still succeeding in holding them up for half a day and inflicting serious losses on them. Very likely, they did some pinning down, and arty or mortars did the bloodletting. While other infantry positions, mines, etc prevented most of the easy approaches.

In addition, one needs to understand the Hurtgen was not a level woods like you'd find in your backyard. The reason the ground is left forested by the populace, is it is very rough hill country, with very steep ravines, etc. "A bunker" in such terrain can mean, a concrete pillbox 400 feet above the floor of an ascending ravine or draw, dominating its entire length. And "taking it out" can mean, successfully fighting a half mile up a parallel ridge to draw level with it.

Here is what you can't assume it means. Blanket of CM woods or scattered tree terrain, two wooden bunkers with MG, nothing else, practically no field of fire as a result, attacked by two infantry companies.

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by JasonC:

CM is best at the company scale, and it is already stressed at the battalion scale, when a battalion fight takes place within the tactical range of the weapons present (a kilometer or so). Multiple miles and hours, even if the absolute force sizes engaged remain a battalion, it will break.

I agree totally, and this is at the heart of what I really want to talk about. CM is designed for a company sized engagement, but the war was never fought at the company level! AARs are not written at the company level. Everything took place at at least the battalion level and almost always encompassed, as you put it, miles and hours. A game which cannot cope with the basic maneuver element of the war - the battalion - and carry it over miles and hours, cannot possibly hope to SIMULATE the war. It will always be just a company game.

This is not any failure of the design. It is a failure of the desire - you want to simulate something with the wrong base scale in the simulation. To get hours and miles right, you need to be moving companies around, tasking at the level of platoons perhaps but not maneuvering independently at that level. And certainly not coordinating every minute of movement by every packet of half a dozen men.

I think I tend to agree with what you are saying here. Still, I'm not sure that you forsee all of the possibilities from a game design perspective, and I'm hoping that BFC is thinking very creatively along these lines. My desire is to be able to simulate WW2 actions and get realistic results. I find that almost impossible to do with the tools I currently have.

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by JasonC:

What apriori reason is there to believe, you would have to land on the answers, "battalion overall command span, subformations down to fire team, orders to the square meter of positioning every minute of time, firing at staggered ten second intervals, overall world-state updating every second"? Why must every event in history be shoe-horn-able into that set of choices? Would you try to simulate the campaign in Normandy from June 6 to August 15 with those choices?

We're responding right on top of each other here.

As you clearly seem to understand, the paramaters you outline above DON'T work to simulate an event as large as the crossing of the Waal. That's the great failure of CM. It cannot simulate the real war, because the...parameters of control...are too fine.

[JasonC]

"the war was never fought at the company level!"

Baloney. It was fought at all levels, from individual to army group.

"AARs are not written at the company level."

Baloney again. Most AARs are written at much higher echelon levels than battalion, and some are eyewitness affairs at the level of personal experience, in which a man saw no more than a handful of his fellows around him.

The art of scenario design is making a fight fit the game system. You can make a series of scenarios that depicts a larger fight, readily. You can't tell me I can't do it because I have. In my campaigns, the forces on one map are typically reinforced companies, the battles resolve just fine, it takes 20 of them or so to add up to a day's events. But they so add up.

Would it be nice to also have a good company level operational game, entirely distinct from CM? Sure. There are any number of battalion and regiment and division level games, which typically have you stack 2-4 times those amounts in 2-4 locations, and thus hit individual bits of the map with divisions or corps at a time.

There is nothing more realistic in that. It shunts off all the real events into very poor abstractions in combat results tables, rewards mindless fist forming, factor counting, etc.

[JasonC]

To simulate crossing the Waal with a static set of scenarios, you'd have separate games for the crossing itself, the probe into farmland, the fight for the fortified area, the push for the bridge, etc. No problem. If you want to link them in terms of forces, you use a ref and make minor tweaks to the US force, say. Or you can make 4-5 historical scenarios each of which works, instead of one broken one that doesn't. This is no more to be lamented, than your inability to show the battle of the bulge on one CM map.

[JasonC]

Dude, "the real war" does not consist of a few events you'd like to see in one game. It consists of pieces of those events, and of much large events in which everything that happened on those occasions are the most trivial footnotes, a single occasion when somebody just "rolled high". Your fixation on a level does not make that level "the war".

Suppose you had a perfect company level hours simulating game. OK, then I break out my Battle for Stalingrad map and I notice the first week of fighting for the north end of the city features 5 German divisions attacking 3 Russian divisions along a front 14 kilometers long, backed up by an inner ring around the railway station 4 kilometers long. "Your new system can't simulate this, this was the real war, your new system is worthless" yada yada.

It is just silly. One level of modeling cannot simulate every possible scale of events in the war. The level of modeling has to fit the event you want to simulate. If it doesn't, you need a new modeling level - as the only one, or as an operational layer above your tactical one, if you care for two.

[Michael Emrys]

Runyan,

I would take your argument and turn it around for just a moment. I tend to agree with you for the most part that WW II was mostly fought at the battalion level. But I doubt that was what BTS (as it was at the time) set out to model. They wanted to model combat at the tank/squad/gun level. Whether they were aiming at a specific audience, the fact is that their interests were shared by a huge percentage of wargamers and had been for decades previously.

Personally, I think their goal was a perfectly legitimate one and they came close enough to it to justify their efforts and the subsequent popularity of the game. As I recall from the conversations that Steve participated in at the time that the parameters for CM were being mooted, it was not the primary intent of the designers to go beyond modeling a company-sized action in terms of total forces of each side on the map, notwithstanding occasional larger battles of battalion size. It is only due to the nutcases among us that we have scenarios of regiment and even larger size. What they are doing is the equivalent taking an icepick and trying to drive nails with it. And in a sense, so are you.

What I think Jason is trying to say is that in order to portray the Waal crossing, you either have to break the battle up into individual actions that are the size that CM was meant to handle, or you have to design a different sort of game that has a scale that fits battalion to regiment-sized actions without straining the bounds of plausibility.

And I have a hunch that's something that each of us would like to see.

Michael

[ June 11, 2005, 06:01 PM: Message edited by: Michael Emrys ]

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Suppose you had a perfect company level hours simulating game. OK, then I break out my Battle for Stalingrad map and I notice the first week of fighting for the north end of the city features 5 German divisions attacking 3 Russian divisions along a front 14 kilometers long, backed up by an inner ring around the railway station 4 kilometers long. "Your new system can't simulate this, this was the real war, your new system is worthless" yada yada.

Fine. Give me the perfect company level game that can carry a company over 'miles and hours' (I love that phrase). I think that is the most important thing right now.

Then, if I want to, I can stretch it to a 2+ company scenario, and attempt my Crossing the Waal scenario for two companies over two hours.

Maybe I'll try and stretch it even further by picking one whole battalion from the Stalingrad map you mention and take it through a full day in the streets. The results I get might be somewhat off again, because I have too much knowledge and coordination between companies, but the overall result won't be too far off the mark.

I'd be a happy camper. I believe progress would have been made in the direction of realism. My ability to create scenarios would be vastly more powerful.

The problem is what I currently have is a system which gives pretty good results for 30-45 minutes and then breaks down. That isn't acceptable to me, because I find it extremely hard to tell the 'stories' of the war that way, whether the story is crossing a river or knocking out two bunkers in a forest. I don't want to bend over backwards and create ten linked scenarios which cover what was actually one constant running engagement. If you are satisfied with that, more power to you, but I think we can do better.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Runyan99:

I don't want to bend over backwards and create ten linked scenarios which cover what was actually one constant running engagement. If you are satisfied with that, more power to you, but I think we can do better.

As we discussed before, we can't. Aside from the logistical issues that aren't addressed by a CM like game (ammunition resupply, movement of wounded and prisoners to the rear, etc.), the basic problem - of having one omniscient player - will never go away.

The closest you might come is to have an Operation Flashpoint like game where every player controls one squad. But it would have to be RTS 3D first person.

Imagine playing CM where all you get to command is one single squad. And that is the only way you would get a game with a realistic use of time and space, as you discuss. Anything else is just an abstraction - and that 35 minute scenario is really representing two hours or even 2 days of actual "fighting."

[Michael Dorosh]

Oh, and we actually did that by the way - the Tank Rumble was great, where each player commanded a single tank, and we all PBEMed that way - and emailed in instructions each turn. Took forever, but was very realistic.

We also did a Battle of the Bulge type game where a dozen or so players on each side commanded a platoon each. The scenario was crammed into a 30 minute game, which seemed unrealistic to me, but that kind of setup would be the only way to do a realistic force/space type thing.

The less assets you have, the more careful you are with using them. In real life, of course, you have one asset - yourself - and are very reluctant to lose that!