The WE-GO concept of CM

[Le Tondu]

I posted some of what is below in another thread over in the General Discussion forum about WWII RTS, but it bears being posted here as well, IMO.

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When will the world learn? BTS has absolutely the BEST idea for a wargame. Namely "we-go." I do not care what type of graphics people can say that CMBO should have. It still is the BEST -even today because of "we-go".

I find the best part of CM is the gaming experience itself. You plot your units by giving them orders for a minute's action and you sit back and watch it happen. The inability to control your units during that minute has a very real feeling to it as it must for any real battlefield commander.

I guess a few eyes will be opened after the release of CMBB. I'm hoping that those crazy RTS (an oxymoron) games will be left collecting dust on the shelves when that happens. Maybe then someone else might just try "we-go."

I feel that "we-go" should be for all levels of wargaming, not just tactical level games. I'd like to see it in operational level games, etc....

Does anyone know if the concept has been patented by BTS? Thanks.

[CMplayer]

I'm interested in these questions as well.

TacOps also uses we-go. Did the developers of CM get the idea from that other illustrious war-game?

Can anyone tell the story of We-go?

Is its origins in refereed miniatures games, such as naval simulations? Somewhere else?

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by CMplayer:

I'm interested in these questions as well.

TacOps also uses we-go. Did the developers of CM get the idea from that other illustrious war-game?

Can anyone tell the story of We-go?

Is its origins in refereed miniatures games, such as naval simulations? Somewhere else?

Simultaneous movement was part of an old game (Dunnigan, I think) called Trenchfoot(?) This was 1970s perhaps early 80s. It was all based on written moves being revealed simultaneously - it was a man to man World War One boardgame. I don't know if it was the first game to have simultaneous moves, just that I remember reading about it. The concept is thus at least 20 years old.

Before computers, it was obviously not a popular concept - but it was an entrenched concept, meaning that if no one used it much, it was certainly discussed. I know Squad Leader critics - and enthusiasts - discussed the concept a lot.

[ May 12, 2002, 02:23 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

[zukkov]

i'd be willing to guess that the we-go system came from miniatures. i remember playing micro armor back in the 70s, it was my intro to wargaming. this game is a lot like that, only 100 times better. bts did it right, and i'm hoping they keep doing it!

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by zukkov:

i'd be willing to guess that the we-go system came from miniatures. i remember playing micro armor back in the 70s, it was my intro to wargaming. this game is a lot like that, only 100 times better. bts did it right, and i'm hoping they keep doing it!

Simultaneous movement was the method preferred by Arthur Taylor in his "Rules for Wargaming" and Charles Grant in his "Battle!", both published in 1970. I doubt that it was a new idea then.

SPI's development of their SiMov system began, I thought, with "Sniper!", which must have been about 1972.

With a computer to handle the mechanics of movement, I don't really see why fixed-length turns are necessary. Each turn represents an opportunity for each player to change the orders he has given to his units. There is no particular reason why this should occur every minute, on the minute, and a much richer simulation of command & control problems would be possible if the opportunities for changing orders were reduced. However, as Kip Anderson would doubtless point out, such a game would no longer be the Combat Mission we know and love.

All the best,

John.

[gredeker]

The oldest we-go system I can think of is AH's Diplomacy, which IIRC, originally came out in the sixties.

[NightGaunt]

diplomacy

and for computer games

robo wars? i believe the name was. something with robots it was one of gamespots "need a remake" list. great game.

[Teamski1]

Hey guys,

I thought the first "we-go" system was developed by the German army in WWI. They had a game they used in their General Staff college that was simply called "Kriegspiel", or war game. They would have the two players seperated by a wall or in different rooms. Each would have his own map of the area and given a force of troops with a very vague idea of who he was up against. Each move was plotted by each player simulataniously on each map. The referies, I believe, had a third map that they charted the moves and calculated combat as each player plotted moves in real time. They would in turn adjust the pieces on each players' maps to reflect PERCIEVED losses, gains and inteligence on enemy forces. Real interesting stuff. It was done to keep the realism to an extremely high level by witholding info on the area and enemy forces. With the simultainous movement, it worked quite well............

-Ski

[Le Tondu]

Originally posted by John D Salt:

John,

I think that I can see why a fixed turn length is important. It stems from why I don't buy those RTS games. I don't buy them because there is always so much going on (especially in medium to large battles) that somewhere, sometime, something gets neglected in an ahistorical manner which will produce ahistorical results for a historical simulation. It just doesn't work, IMHO.

As an example, in a RTS game, that cavalry unit doesn't get orders to move (because you are too busy elsewhere) and it gets pummelled by an artillery unit when in a REAL historical situation it would have moved so as to not assist the enemy by taking on unnecessary casualties.

A fixed amount of time helps the player to not miss something that really shouldn't be missed -by giving the player time to check everything every so often. (I hope I said that correctly.) A minute of game time works real well.

Wow, there is quite a history. I wonder what BTS's view of we-go is, in relation to CM and elsewhere in the future. It sure works well.

[ May 12, 2002, 05:04 PM: Message edited by: Le Tondu ]

[Bruno Weiss]

I don't buy them because there is always so much going on (especially in medium to large battles) that somewhere, sometime, something gets neglected in an ahistorical manner which will produce ahistorical results for a historical simulation. It just doesn't work, IMHO.

Quite right! IMO, the RTS games are little more than an AI versus AI duel with the added complexity of mouse driven exceptions based primarily upon how fast a fellers eye to finger control is. CMBO came along just in time for me, as the entire industry was seemingly stampeding to RTS at that point.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Le Tondu:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by John D Salt:

John,

I think that I can see why a fixed turn length is important. It stems from why I don't buy those RTS games. I don't buy them because there is always so much going on (especially in medium to large battles) that somewhere, sometime, something gets neglected in an ahistorical manner which will produce ahistorical results for a historical simulation. It just doesn't work, IMHO.

As an example, in a RTS game, that cavalry unit doesn't get orders to move (because you are too busy elsewhere) and it gets pummelled by an artillery unit when in a REAL historical situation it would have moved so as to not assist the enemy by taking on unnecessary casualties.

[snips]</font>

You seem to be assuming that any game that does not use a fixed-increment bound must use real-time (or at least scaled-time) player interaction. A moment's reflection will reveal that it's not so.

It would be easily possible to devise (though I'm not aware of anyone yet doing it in a computer game) a scheme whereby both players compose their plans at the start of the game, and then get the opportunity only to revise them at nominated "decision points". Decision points could be inserted in a plan, just as military planners in fact do, with contingency plans (conplans) hanging off each decision point. Decision points might also arise on an "ad-hoc" basis when subordinates report situations that seem to demand a complete change of plan. The game would evidently have to be arranged so that players who inserted a decision point every minute "just to make sure" would be severely punished. Some system of time penalties and a (troop-quality based) probability of a cockup every time plans are changed would tend to favour the simple, robust plan in a way that current wargames just don't. Players would be rewarded for making plans that were robust under uncertainty, instead of, as now, being rewarded for a steady stream of improvisation. It would, at last, be possible to give a convincing representation of the old military proverb "order, counter-order, dis-order".

There has been some discussion in another thread of the OODA or Boyd loop (which incidentally seems to me to be an idea that's rather too simple to be useful, but that's another story). Now, although agressive and subtle play may psychologically rattle a human opponent, there is simply no means by which it is possible to "get inside the OODA loop" in a game structured like Combat Mission. Both players get a chance to completely reconsider their position and make fresh plans every minute, on the minute, quite literally as regular as clockwork. Any time pressure that arises from time-limits on turns in TCP/IP games is in the same degree artificial as such time pressure is in RTS/scaled-time games, and for the same reason.

This also ties in with other well-worn debates such as the choice between the God's-eye-view and the Commander's Shoes View. Scaled-time games, as you have pointed out, fit poorly with the God's-eye view; scaled-time and Commander's Shoes gives you FPS games, with a pretty loose definition of what constitutes a "shooter". A command game as described above would pretty much have to take the Commander's shoes view, whereas CM:BO is wedded to God's-eye. It often seems to me that CM:BO is not so much a simulation of WW2 tactical combat as a simulation of Advanced Squad Leader De Luxe with those interminable Greenwood-edited rules rendered down to software and the toy soldiers and tanks animated by magic smoke. Which isn't a bad thing, but it's not the only way one might handle it.

All the best,

John.

[Mud]

Aye. Either orders are given by the player, in which attention must be directed there, or by the AI. And game AIs usually aren't exactly geniuses at either the tactical or operational level, resulting in player-neglected units doing idiotic things like ignoring enemy units, or blithely charging ahead instead of waiting for support units to catch up.

If game AI were exceptionally good, and one could delegate high-level tasks ("take this armored formation, call upon these arty assets if necessary, and knock out that strongpoint") instead of a player having to micromanage ("hydra 1, go to back of mass and regenerate. Hydra 2, move up. hydra 3, take hydra 2's place. hydra 4, target that structure. Damn, they're attacking there too, click click click...") then large-scale continuous might be more playable, but it isn't.

If player attention is to be directed, then either the game scope needs to be quite small (few units, slow speed, small map, simple interface) to be manageable, or you're playing not a historical wargame in which units behave even slightly realistically, but a crisis management game called "micromanage the remote-control idiots" in which everybody's forces will likely behave unrealistically badly whenever the Puppet Master isn't watching them.

(Not to say that real-time tactical can't be FUN -- it can be -- but it throws out a lot of the "historical wargame" ideas when you don't have the time to have units behave with reasonable amounts of coordination and intelligence).

[dalem]

The first WEGO system I ever played was Task Force Games' "Star fleet Battles" back in '76 or so.

Very innovative at the time.

-dale

[Andrew H.]

In a discussion several months ago (maybe a year ago), someone suggested simulating bad soviet C&C by using a concept from some other game (whose name I've forgotten) called (maybe) "focus points." The idea would be that each commander was limited as to how many units he could move each turn, perhaps with a certain amount of randomness built in. Meaning that in a, say, 1941 battle, the Sov. player might only be allowed to give orders to maybe 5 units, whereas the German player could give orders to 9 units...or something like that.

This scheme is not exactly right for CM for a couple of reasons, one big one being the scale of the game (i.e., regardless of C&C, a platoon sgt is going to move a couple of men few meters if that will help him find out what the loud tank-like noises nearby are, and he may take other measures; by contrast, once a battalion commander has carried out his orders, he's not going to up and move the whole battalion a kilometer east just to investigate something suspicious). Nevertheless, for some other, larger scale we-go game, it would be a very interesting idea indeed.

Dalem: I remember the old SF battles; I and this one guy I played against were the only people I knew who actually used the give-orders-and-move-simultaneously rule of SFB; everyone else I knew just moved according to the chart, but without the pre-plotted moves. Which was simultaneous after a fashion, I suppose.

[Patgod]

Originally posted by dalem:

The first WEGO system I ever played was Task Force Games' "Star fleet Battles" back in '76 or so.

Very innovative at the time.

-dale

um, sfb wasnt wego iirc. it cut the turn up into 32(?) "impulses", but it was still a "i go, then you" system.