Elvis vs. JonS DAR Discussion Thread

[hoolaman]

I think it would be quite realistic for CM to be scrapped in favour of a text based adventure game. You type out orders to your battallion and a few seconds later the game generates an AAR telling you why your plan went out the window after the first five minutes. You then have to write letters to the mothers of all the boys you got killed.

But more seriously, there have been plenty of times in a PBEM indeed in almost every CM game that I pretty much knew I was beaten in "real world" terms, sometimes quite early when you lose that key support asset.

I also knew I could charge on and still have some fun and inflict some hurt on my opponent and maybe scrape some VLs together for a draw. It is at that point that I as a player make a choice to NOT immediately withdraw and give the attack up as a failure, but instead to lose MORE valuable vehicles and men for my own amusement. I don't believe there really is any fun and realistic way to make that decision on behalf of the player and award the game to the enemy.

[JasonC]

To dan on coding time - I can and do charge Fortune 500 companies $250 a hour for my coding time. I sincerely doubt you-all could pay me that for five or ten years coding an improved CM, and I'm not asking. But because I love the genre and the previous versions of the game, you get my advice for nothing - and can throw it out if you feel rich.

On games and realism, I assure you I am not making a fetish of realism and understand wanting a game to be fun. I spent half a day today playing Magic at a new set's release, and I can assure you the "realism" of Mirrodin Beseiged was not among the attractions (lol). A solid strategy game with paper scissors rock trade offs and tactics amidst uncertainty was quite sufficient. But that is beside the point - it just means I am a gamer (and a geek).

The issue under discussion, in case nobody noticed, isn't whether CM is nifty (it is), or a game (duh), or any of the other straw men trotted out by the usual suspects. It is a design philosophy point and quite a specific one. Does engineered vs. design for effect result in greater realism, and particular does it do so in the matter of overall loss rates over full battles? My contention is "no", and is not specific to this game. It has been the universal experience of engineered realism systems from Firefight by SPI in the mid 1970s through Tobruk vs. Squad Leader, that engineered results in much higher loss rates than design for effect, or reality for that matter. The reason is it is always easier to get the mechanics of firepower right in such systems than to get the "mechanics" of command, morale, death avoidance, confusion, etc. And realism about firepower is that fire kills. While realism about the rest is Clausewitz's old dictum that war is friction and the overall result never remotely approaches what appears possible a priori.

On Moon's entirely fair question whether my comment on orders not even being received in reality should be read as saying it is the player's fault, no I do not think so. I meant the statement quite precisely. Orders they would never have *received* in reality. That doesn't mean real world commanders would never *issue* such orders - some do. But organizations *dissolve* under the impact of confusion caused by losses and morale failure. Command attention is limited, and a disaster like 30% losses to an attacking company rivets every commissioned anybody within ear-shot. Who are then straining every nerve to get men out of the meatgrinder, to save those already ground into bloody beef, to get men screaming for their mothers to listen to them in the first place, etc. Leaving precious little time for elaborate schemes to juke left and fake the end around before pushing for objective Zebra instead.

Orders. Never. Received. Reread the army green book description of Ohama for a second. Visualize full bird colonels reduced to giving orders to the four scared privates and one wounded sergeant in earshot, over the din of the exploding mortar rounds. The result is utter paralysis because the *organization* that ideally or "normally" *transmits* command intentions downward, and *coordinates* the actions of atomized and powerless individuals, has ceased to function. Why does it cease to function? Shoot enough NCOs, scare enough PFCs into hugging the sand indifferent to anything beyond their own physical survival for the next 30 seconds, and you can *issue* all the orders you like and they can be as insane as you please. Only five men are going to hear anything about them and they are going to look at you like you are insane and not move a muscle.

In old fashioned CM terms, the "panic" morale state reflects this with perfect accuracy. There just aren't enough "panic" morale states after a company has taken 33% causualties. There mostly *are* enough panic morale states in *specific squads* that have *just* taken 33% causualties - bully. But the disintegrate effects on higher formations and the soaked up limited command attention, aren't. Hence the recommendation for some BCE-like system governed by losses and morale failures in a full formation larger than the individually depicted squads.

The martinet in the rear can say "charge men, ignore that machinegun fire, let's take that hill!". But does that immediately and effortless result in hundreds of men leaping up as one and leaving cover and charging forward as directed? In reality, no it does not. But if the virtual pixeltruppen in the game do so leap, and the firepower directed at them is depicted accurately, they will fall in heaps soon thereafter. Heaps that do not happen in reality not because fire does not have such effects if men do expose themselves in that manner, but because men in reality do not so leap. (Outlier green docile idiots like the lambs of the first day of the Somme, excepted).

It was also asked, what are some examples of real world tactics that won't work in the game because of such issues. Well, a typical German defensive scheme in Normandy only put infantry firepower opposite about one field out of three, maybe four. It was enough for the others that one was mined, and another had just 2 to 4 81mm mortars registered on it, and another was covered by one sniper and 1-2 flanking machineguns. Because when men walked into a field and half a dozen mortar rounds went off around them wounding a half a dozen men, the rest went to ground, and panicked, and focused on evac-ing their wounded, most of the time. Yes there could still be a close in firefight as bloody as that seen on the wooded hill in our AAR, in the one out of three or four cases of a dense infantry defense. But the bloody nose received there, and the paralysis created by much lesser defenses in the other sectors, would spread confusion and panic and a command assessment of "fiasco" back through the parent formation. With the combined result that a harassing defense, held. For days at a time, not 10 or 20 minutes.

The morale of which is not, CM isn't nifty. It is, if you want to impove anything you need to start by acknowledging the ways it isn't perfect, and if you want to avoid the useless labor of reinventing the wheel every ten minutes, it might help to look at the lessons of previous designs and design principles in the field. More specifically, design for effect kicks engineering literalism's behind every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and has for 30 years and counting, in these matters. It is in fact responsible for most of the realism successes of CM itself (that is has a solid unit level morale system, for example). Don't throw that away, run with it.

One man's opinions, FWIW...

[Michael Emrys]

More specifically, design for effect kicks engineering literalism's behind every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and has for 30 years and counting, in these matters.

Jason, I agree with almost everything you write up to this point, with which I cordially disagree. Yes, morale factors have been incredibly difficult to model in engineered systems, mostly because unlike firepower and protection there is little in the way of precise data on it. That makes it hard to engineer.

But that said, to go over to a designed for effect system means descending into a morass of fudge factors that are as unrealistic as what you are protesting against. The original Squad Leader was just such a system. Although of some interest and entertainment value, it often left me frustrated and furious by the way it worked. It was built on a set of poor choices whose consequences cascaded throughout the whole system.

I found Steve's second reply to you to be a good one. I suspect that such solutions that are apt to prove workable in CM will come from continued working with the engineered approach. Not that it will ever work perfectly, but that it is the lesser of several evils.

Michael

[Battlefront.com]

Originally Posted by JasonC

More specifically, design for effect kicks engineering literalism's behind every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and has for 30 years and counting, in these matters.

Huh. So when I played PanzerLeader and fought to the last unit, that kicked CM's butt? Wow... interesting. And in ASL nobody could push the battle beyond some sort of historical average casualty count? I've learned something new today

From a casualty standpoint, the primary "failing" in a wargame is the player, be it designed for effect of engineered. The secondary "failing" is the fact that these are games and people want to play until there's no chance of victory, not to the point of some real world tipping point.

Charles could change some things and within a day I bet you anything that CM would enforce realistic casualties as JasonC seems to think is so impossible for it to do because it is engineered. But I doubt anybody would be happy with it. All we would need to do is put in a feature that would stop the attacker if his casualties got beyond a certain % threshold. Piece of piss to do that. And for the defender, all his units would get up and run away when the % threshold was reached. Easy peasy.

But does anybody here want to play a game like that? No, I doubt it.

This sort of solution would be a designed for effect, for sure. An engineered solution could arrive at the same results, but would take more coding. Since the game ending is what is being triggered, there's not much point making a more complex system because once the game is over the game is over.

I return to my point before and that is design for effect systems do not work well at the tactical level. Nothing JasonC has said in this, or the other, thread has challenged this position. Vague references to boardgames don't really amount to a substantial case.

CMx1 was a mix of engineered and designed for effect systems. The designed for effect components were the places we had the most problems with realism and game outcomes. So CMx2 was made to be a much more heavily engineered solution. And the problems have, for the most part, been solved. And where not solved to our satisfaction, at least improved over where CMx1 left things. In all cases improvements are more easily implemented than in CMx1.

We're satisfied that our practical experience with both engineered and designed systems trumps JasonC's theories based on no practical development experience with either.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

JonS's comments, below, is exactly what I'm talking about in terms of enforcing real world casualty and/or morale factors which would end a battle early:

Think carefully about what you just asked for there. If that were part of the game, this AAR Battle would have probably been over at the 20-25 minute mark. The fight for Hill 144 would never have happened. The fight between the JgPz and the Shermans would never have happened. The set up and battle - brief as it was - for la Campagne would never have happened. Elvis would never have had to come up with a new plan on the fly. I would never have needed bother move my reserves about. The duel between the 50mm and the Sherman would never have happened. The MG suppression of the infantry moving up the centre would have been utterly irrelevant. The sniper's influence on the battle would have been negligible. Neither of us would have learnt a darned thing about improvisation and making do and changing plans.

None of those things - which individually were handled quite realistically - would have happened because the battle would have ended on the forward slopes of Hill 154.

I, for one, am profoundly glad that the battle did not end there.

This is the point that JasonC is completely missing. At the tactical level of combat, all of these component pieces in CMx2 are vastly more realistic, more rich in detail and effects, than any other wargame out there. Past or present, CMx1 included. Period. Designed for effect games can't hold a candle to them.

The issue about whether you can push your forces, as a whole, more than they could in real life is a separate one. It is true that you can push your forces too hard in CMx2 and CMx1. But it is also true you can do this in every single wargame I've ever seen or heard of, including all the ones JasonC mentions. The reason is as JonS just illustrated... where would the fun from the game be if one spent more time setting up his units than he did actually playing the game?

Steve

[Wiggum]

Charles could change some things and within a day I bet you anything that CM would enforce realistic casualties as JasonC seems to think is so impossible for it to do because it is engineered. But I doubt anybody would be happy with it. All we would need to do is put in a feature that would stop the attacker if his casualties got beyond a certain % threshold. Piece of piss to do that. And for the defender, all his units would get up and run away when the % threshold was reached. Easy peasy.

But does anybody here want to play a game like that? No, I doubt it.

If this would be a optional Feature that the scenario designer or the player could choose i think i would like it !

[sfhand]

Simplisticly speaking, from just one person's experience, there are frequently times during my pbem games that I feel a RL commander would call off the attack, or retreat/surrender if defending, but I don't take those actions. For me CM is like playing a more realistic version of 3d chess and that's how I sell it to people I'd like to get into the game. To be able to play after the point in which a RL engagement would end would seem to be one of the reasons some choose to play in the first place...

Were I to choose to play "realistically" I would only need to surrender when things start to go wrong. Of course, my opponents might feel like I'm cheating them, or am being a gamey bastage, by not surrendering in those situations. They might be upset that the game allows an obviously inferior non-grog type a chance to compete with them in an "unrealistic" manner as obviously that is the only way a superior wargamer could ever lose to someone like that.

The one thing I was concerned about, game mechanic wise, during the AAR was the surrendering. But until I actually have a chance to see the game in person I will withhold judgement on this since Elvis and Jon both seem to agree it's not a problem as modeled

[ChrisND]

If this would be a optional Feature that the scenario designer or the player could choose i think i would like it !

Set yourself a limit on how many casualties you will take before the scenario starts. Once you determine that limit has been reached, pull your forces back and Cease Fire. You will get the same result as this feature, no?

[sfhand]

If this would be a optional Feature that the scenario designer or the player could choose i think i would like it !

Isn't that a decision that a RL commander makes? Why would you want the game making it for you?

[Wiggum]

Isn't that a decision that a RL commander makes? Why would you want the game making it for you?

Not necessarily for me, but for the AI to surrender or route at x% casualitys (+/- something).

But if my men would not attack a mg over open field i could not do such a move even if it would let me win the game (because of the VP i will get by capturing this position).

I would have to accept my fail in this one.

[Blackcat]

I have followed this thread with keen interest and I listened to JasonC's arguments with care. I am at this point confused.

JasonC is either asking for a different, higher level, game or he wants everyone to play this game to his rules. I can't make up my mind which. If its the former he is clearly howling the moon. If its the latter he can get the results he desires when he plays already without forcing everyone else to comply, so why bother.

CM:BN is a game. By definition it is to be played for fun. Real-life soldiering is not a lot of fun. It is frequently mind numbingly boring and uncomfortable in the extreme, occasionally bladder-emptyingly frightening and, very rarely, exultantly satisfying. Any company that tried to make a "realistic" game about soldiers in combat would go bust very quickly.

[sfhand]

I am not a grog nor military historian, but I wonder how battles such as the Charge of the Light Brigade have happened since, according to some in this thread, soldiers refuse to follow crazy orders. My understanding of antiquity is that large numbers of men fought to the death using very crude weapons. War is insanity to begin with...

Question about attacking mg's over an open field, are you talking CMSF or CMx1? Do you mean you won't "charge" the position? Surely you would have no problem attacking it from cover with a platoon split into 3 squads using today's grenade launchers and rpg type weapons?

[Wiggum]

Question about attacking mg's over an open field, are you talking CMSF or CMx1? Do you mean you won't "charge" the position? Surely you would have no problem attacking it from cover with a platoon split into 3 squads using today's grenade launchers and rpg type weapons?

...yeah, that was kind of a bad example.

I mean if the MG was in a dominating position, restricting movement to a objective.

But ok, bad example...

[The_Capt]

...One man's opinions, FWIW...

Well not $250, that is for sure.

I think you have failed to convince that your approach would yield a better product. I think it would produce a totally unplayable mess that left the player helpless to influence events beyond his initial orders at the start line.

What I find insulting is your portrayal of US operations post D-Day. By your description the US forces advancing thru hedgerow country were frightened mice, led by a C2 structure that would freeze up at the slightest contact.

Hell a german sneeze by your description could bring a Div to a halt for days. Now I do not have your WWII depth of knowledge but I do have plenty of real world experience.

Good thing the US troops of today are made of sterner stuff than your portrayal of their grandfathers. I have personally seen US forces come under contact, take losses and keep attacking, thru country that makes Normady look like a golf course.

Must be the floride in the water.

[Jon L]

To be fair to JasonC, I think in his latest post he finally proposed a mechanic which fits at the tactical level and could feasibly be implemented in CM. Instead of morale penalties being limited only to the squad or team that's directly suffering, have them be propagated in some manner to related or nearby units. If a platoon is maneuvering together and one squad suddenly gets shredded, I can understand it being more difficult to get the remaining squads to continue. Currently that's not really represented in CM besides maybe some temporary suppression if they're too close to the gunfire.

It's much less draconian than ending the game after a casualty limit. Really you're just adding more bite to the current morale system.

[dan/california]

The difficulty, from a practical standpoint, is that one squad or platoon should only respond to another's losses if they are aware of them. So if the squad that gets blitzed is out of C2 how would the other squad know? Probably doable,but non-trivial programming.

[Jon L]

The CMx2 engine already tracks whether friendly units are aware of each other so you may be able to leverage that.

[Vark]

Capt, the troops you had saw in action are professionals, superbly equiped, well motivated and trained whose opponents have neither the training or equipment to match them. Compare that with the US soldiers in the ETO, conscripts barely trained (by modern standards) with often poor leadership and a high command indifferent to the strains placed on them, facing an opponent that was sometimes qualitatively superior with a core of superb NCO's. If you knew the war was won, but not over, if you could call upon devastating fire strikes, would you be so eager to push ahead? The very fact they did speaks volumes but it still does not detract from the realties as evidenced by official combat logs and exhaustive after battle analysis.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

Your cartoon cutout, Captain America characterisation is not only wrong, carried with it an internal contradiction. If no one ever left their mates in the lurch, why would anyone be tormented by anything for decades after?

You need better sources, not a better command of the language.

you got me very wrong if you think i want more heroism. more cowardice, systematic cowardice, is what i want.

as for cartoon cutout, besides the banality etc, i think the emotions related to circumstances in which a person ended up letting his comrades down are possibly the strongest and the most lasting ones, even if they don't get expressed in such strong ways as the various syndromes do.

my sources consist of a good number of the standard studies done on the subject. they have well established that the primary motivator for soldiers is not self-preservation, sense of duty towards your nation or party or things like that, but the loyalty to other soldiers in their unit, and that the mechanism behind the loyalty is group bonding (which soldiers often say to be stronger than the one towards their wives). this (group loyalty) is also how the military chain of command is established on the concrete level of things and in reverse the reason for negative effects when bonding deals for one reason or another do not exist in an unit.

of course none of the studies claim that things like surrenders didn't happen or weren't done by individual soldiers. on the contrary most of them document the systematic cowardice (re: Captain America stuff, comic book style heroism) and how it was accepted behaviour (from the viewpoint of the group's norms). the way it manifests, however, is not one guy of the team surrendering while at the same time the rest of the team within the same 8x8 meter area are still fighting. rather it usually manifests through becoming "routed" but showing it by doing things that are more useful than sobbing in your foxhole or just running away, e.g. taking a wounded guy to the rear or getting some ammo. of course full blown retreats happened as well. surrendering in most cases required that the group became cut off from the rest of the guys (or chain of command) and in those cases through the decision of the highest ranking person in the group (if any). of course there were plenty of cases, especially in trench rolling style situations, where a guy would try to surrender once the enemy was within almost touching distance (sometimes by surprise, sometimes not). in most cases it didn't make you a POW, it made you an easier target.

as for the logical error in my post, it exists only if your look at the subject is a binary one: either individual guys surrendered while their comrades were still fighting right next to them or there was no surrendering at all. as for finding a good number of well documented cases to be able to say with certainty what the emotional effect would have been like, i honestly don't believe it to be necessary since the basic rationality and logic of small unit moral norms (and the concequences for breaking them) is so well established that there's really not much left to doubt.

[LongLeftFlank]

It was also asked, what are some examples of real world tactics that won't work in the game because of such issues. Well, a typical German defensive scheme in Normandy only put infantry firepower opposite about one field out of three, maybe four. It was enough for the others that one was mined, and another had just 2 to 4 81mm mortars registered on it, and another was covered by one sniper and 1-2 flanking machineguns. Because when men walked into a field and half a dozen mortar rounds went off around them wounding a half a dozen men, the rest went to ground, and panicked, and focused on evac-ing their wounded, most of the time. Yes there could still be a close in firefight as bloody as that seen on the wooded hill in our AAR, in the one out of three or four cases of a dense infantry defense. But the bloody nose received there, and the paralysis created by much lesser defenses in the other sectors, would spread confusion and panic and a command assessment of "fiasco" back through the parent formation. With the combined result that a harassing defense, held. For days at a time, not 10 or 20 minutes.

All of which appears to me to be readily replicable with the CMBN engine, given a scenario designer's will to do so. It may be that most CMBN scenarios issued with the game won't meet your personal standards of realism. But that isn't really BFC's problem, or the designers' either.

I was dissatisfied with the unrealism of the Middle Eastern MOUT streetscapes provided in the CMSF Marines module (they mostly looked either like Miami Beach or Levittown), so I went ahead and built my own Brobdignagian map (Shameless Self Promotion). Now that I'm finally in playtesting phase after 3 years of sporadic effort (oh, I should mention that I'm also batsh*t crazy), it is working absolutely beautifully. I plan to release it but I expect only a few of the CM community will actually slog through it as opposed to cruising around the map a bit. And that doesn't matter to me.

So build a few scenarios, or pieces of them as a "how to" guide for others. Label them with a health warning. There's a few of us who will "Get It".

[The_Capt]

Capt, the troops you had saw in action are professionals, superbly equiped, well motivated and trained whose opponents have neither the training or equipment to match them. Compare that with the US soldiers in the ETO, conscripts barely trained (by modern standards) with often poor leadership and a high command indifferent to the strains placed on them, facing an opponent that was sometimes qualitatively superior with a core of superb NCO's. If you knew the war was won, but not over, if you could call upon devastating fire strikes, would you be so eager to push ahead? The very fact they did speaks volumes but it still does not detract from the realties as evidenced by official combat logs and exhaustive after battle analysis.

I beg to disagree. Most of the troops in Normandy had spent, what 2-3 yrs training in England. They were in fact very well equiped for the time and even more importantly were new to warfare and as such took more risks than seasoned vets many of whom were coming in from the Eastern Front.

The flip-side argument is probably more applicable to the Germans. War weary and knowing it was pretty much over by '44. The best they could hope for was a negotiated end.

I think it is a dis-service to qualify the troops in Normandy as a bunch of floppers, ineptly led and poorly trained. Mistakes were made, many of them beginner, but the spirit of these troops defies logic sometimes.

BTW our modern opponents aren't "trained", they are bred in an environ which we cannot begin to understand. They are also some of the toughest fighters we have evered faced..thank god they are not well equiped!!

I will also weigh on on the sub-global moral issue (ie platoon or Coy morale). Why does this have to be programmed? Why does the game have to simulate everything? Spoon feeding the experience to the player.

I have many times seen the player and his moral be a significant factor. How many times do players think they have won/lost and made wreckless decisions as a result? I am not sure why some people are so quick to remove the player from the game and try to replace it with algorithms. We are central components of the game. And I will tell you people are central components to warfare in any age.

Trying to marginalize people and "force" the game-to-effect thru design is bad design. Let me have the environ and play the man, as all great human competitions have, and the experience will speak for itself.

[Hiram Sedai]

Interesting discourse, gentlemen. I still agree with "The Capt" many years later.

[Blackcat]

US soldiers in the ETO, conscripts barely trained (by modern standards) with often poor leadership and a high command indifferent to the strains placed on them

Maybe, but then explain Omaha and a 1001 other enagagements between 6th June 1944 and VE day in which the US amy took fearful punishment but still not only kept the field but won the fight.

If the rules that JasonC wants, as I understand them, were in play the yanks would have been thrown off Omaha beach, 101st Airbourne would have accomplished none of their missions, Bastogne would have fallen and so on a so forth.

The US army in the ETO 1944-45 was a flawed but brilliant creation led by some flawed (I am sure patton was certifiable) but overall very good generals.

[Michael Emrys]

If the rules that JasonC wants, as I understand them, were in play the yanks would have been thrown off Omaha beach, 101st Airbourne would have accomplished none of their missions, Bastogne would have fallen and so on a so forth.

Don't forget, the Germans are subject to the same rules. The Germans at Omaha run low on ammo and get tired of being shelled by naval guns; they are shocked by the appearance of paratroops in their rear; and they break off the attack on Bastogne after suffering heavy casualties.

Really, I can't see why people are making such a fuss over this. In the first place, it's not going to happen unless BFC makes it happen and so far their only expressed interest has been negative. Secondly, if it did get implemented, it would just be another feature that needs to be tested and tweaked until it performs satisfactorily. The sky is not falling. Honest.

Michael

[Blackcat]

I think you missed the point. Stick in rigid rules that JasonC seems to want and some of the events that actually happened cannot in the game. A quest for realism would turn out to be the opposite.

However, I agree that BF will have better sense than to implement JasonC's ideas, so the whole point is moot. But then it is Sunday evening and he has derailed a thread on an interesting subject, so those of us with contrary views are, I think, entitled to have our say too.

P.S. Your counter examples don't work (e,g, there were no paras at the rear of Omaha).