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Over the last five years I’ve been working on a Napoleonic project that I have come to think of as:
A Command Simulation with Beer & Pretzels Combat Resolution.
I don’t know if this is really fair in either sense but it is how it strikes me. The combat is quickly resolved and highly abstracted compared to your average tactical game. The game play all basically happens at the command level as that is where the player makes all their choices.
Simulation is another “funny” term in that it means many things to many people. Empire is kinda the poster child for simulation and the two are negatively regarded by a lot of people. Many see simulation as being mired in detail and thus resulting complication. The positive of simulations is their direct link to historical circumstance while from a design stance I would argue their negative is a combination of scope creep and overreaching – i.e. simulating everything simulates what exactly?
Beer & Pretzel typically is often seen as having no relation to historical circumstance which is probably unfair but to soften that some I’d argue Beer & Pretzel plays loosely with adhering to historical circumstances or accuracy either by disregarding it or by abstracting it. The positive of Beer & Pretzel games is they are generally highly approachable, quickly learned and fun to play *as games*, i.e. as Monopoly is to real-estate Beer & Pretzel is to historical wargames.
While my project greatly abstracts unit combat and attempts to simulate command decisions, neither are implemented in a “heavy” or complex fashion. I consider the command portion a simulation because I believe the problems presented to the player are the historical problems and the mechanics use historical motivators rather than falling into special case rules or worse, non-historical motivators to drive historical results.
An example of the latter can be seen in Command Points and in Command Radius. A fundamental criticism of Command Points is relating them to the issuing or orders. As yourself, have you ever read an account of a battle where a general lamented how he didn’t have a method for issuing an order? Or, better yet, when he thought to himself, “I issued the attack order to the I Corps first because it was most important and I knew whichever order I issued first had the best chance of success.” Well, I have never read such accounts.
By seeking to merge simplicity, approachability and historical motivators I am wondering: Can these two things [Simulation and Beer & Pretzels] be successfully combined and do justice to the positives of either? Would anyone be satisfied?
Sparker,
I’ll eat my hat if even the most successful battlefield commanders didn’t steadily develop tunnel vision as the battle developed, and concentrated their nervous energy, and fleetest ADC’s, on ensuring a particular Corps carried out their wishes! Which is a long winded way of saying, the game’s command activiation mechanic, in forcing the player to prioritise his impact on the action, is realistic in its effect if not in its format or phrasing.
Tunnel vision sure, but in wargames you wind up with players doing this:
• Let’s see, if I attempt to move the 3rd Brigade first it is more likely to fail because I’m so far away from them and then I’ll be done for the turn, so instead I’ll move the 2nd Brigade since they are within 4″ of me, then move the 1st Brigade because they are within 6″ and then I’ll attempt to move the 3rd Brigade last.
And wargamers do that *every turn*.
While I am sure one can find plenty of examples of a battlefield commander saying something akin to, “Bring me my fastest and most trustworthy courier!” to send off some important message, that is far different than the above example and it is also far less common than another typical wargamer example:
• Well, my first target roll is low, so I’ll use that on the X unit knowing that it might be the only order I issue for the next twenty minutes because apparently I only have one courier who owns a horse. Then, if by chance I make my other rolls, I’ll be able to issue orders to my other formations.
The reality is that *most of the time* commanders issued orders to all their troops to do all the desired things with a fair expectation that the desired action would occur. If commanders did not feel there was any likely hope of response to their orders then over several hundred years the system would have changed fundamentally rather than just evolutionarily as it has. No large system of people does something that fails to achieve its most basic goal the majority of the time without revising the system substantially.
Please understand my constant references to something like, “most of the time,” as I’m willing to grant there are lots of examples where the opposite is true but I am talking about the overwhelming majority of orders issued. There are many C&C systems in wargames that would fail to have a battalion march across a parade ground successfully during peacetime. And that is poor to my mind.
in forcing the player to prioritise his impact on the action, is realistic in its effect if not in its format or phrasing
Basically this is what I’m objecting to. Forcing a historical outcome by providing ahistorical motivations to my mind is a poor method of design, it is not always avoidable but I think better design results when historical motivations drive historical behaviors rather than the aforementioned alternative.
I think this perfectly feasible.
I hope so.
The problem with the vernacular use of the word simulation amongst wargamers is we tend to think it means we have to account for every last bullet at Borodino.
Indeed and if you simulate everything you likely simulate nothing as you create innate conflict through contradiction. It is hard. Sometimes Davout micromanaged his battalions, sometimes Wellington did. So should every corps commander in the game be required to at every opportunity? Well, hmm that isn’t realistic either because there were times that Wellington and Davout let them do their own thing… and here we have the problem. I can simulate that it was done but do so at an unrealistic level of occurrence, or I can remove it completely – both of those are easy. Hard is trying to allow it to occur without requiring it to occur. And I think that is what has dogged a lot of “simulation” designs over the years.
It is perhaps like giving the brits centurions and the regimental combat group in Normandy – not wrong, but simulating something else.
It is simulating a ‘what if?’ of a different sort.
What’s a VLB?
Oh hell.
OK, so the long and the short of it was that a man named George Jeffreys came up with this concept called “the variable length bound” where the amount of time that occurred during any given turn – called a “bound” – was variable. Instead of having a fixed turn length determine when you got to make your next decision, instead you made your first set of decisions – AKA orders – and those orders were in effect until a “change of situation” or COS occurred.
Sorta like, “I send my cavalry down the road,” so the cavalry move down the road until they come within range of your infantry which is considered a COS and that COS allows me to make a new decision. The act of moving down the road may have taken ten minutes or ten hours.
The problem with the VLB is that since it does away with time as a constant, it becomes difficult to conceptualize game flow. It is sorta like saying that you are going to allow the water to flow without structure to guide it and just know that wherever the water goes is where it is supposed to be. The VLB may very well be the true Zen of wargaming. It is also a unicorn because thus far it has proven impossible to provide rules for that can be executed by the masses.
In the finest traditions [of] the internet we are deviating a bit here…
Indeed. So to bring us back a bit:
Can these two things [Simulation and Beer & Pretzels] be successfully combined and do justice to the positives of either? Would anyone be satisfied?
Mark (ExtraCrispy) points out that he believes the two can *necessarily* be combined through choosing what you will specifically simulate.
I tend to agree with him but I am biased as it is my hope / cause. The second part of the question is:
Would anyone be satisfied?
And that is of great concern to me.
Apparently Polemos Napoleonics are much criticised because they do not allow you to choose column line or square for your units.
Are they of a scale that should allow your units to use column, line or square? Because if you’re pretending to be much more than a colonel in a Napoleonic army, what formation the damn units are in aren’t your concern
Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.
Are they of a scale that should allow your units to use column, line or square? Because if you’re pretending to be much more than a colonel in a Napoleonic army, what formation the damn units are in aren’t your concern
Any time I’ve said that (I’m not Peter or a Polemos player) I always have someone tell me about how Davout chose the formations of damn near every battalion at Auerstädt. OK… sure. But he didn’t do that every time any of them did anything, nor did he do it at every battle. There isn’t enough time in the day. And as Bill [McLaddie] likes to point out, army commanders who did have time didn’t do it either, perhaps because they trusted “the machine” or perhaps because they knew it was impossible to micromanage hundreds of individual units over a several mile front. In either case we fall into the trap of not only doing it but *requiring* it.
In either case we fall into the trap of not only doing it but *requiring* it.
I don’t. Haven’t *required* it for years.
It was very liberating getting away from all those ‘realistic’ 1980s rulesets.
Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.
Whilst leading cavalry charges, how could Ney tell Jerome to stop assaulting Hougomont and march up behinnd the cavalry screen?
The example I always like to use is Jena where Ney, against orders, attacks head on with the couple battalions and couple squadrons of his advanced guard while his *two whole divisions* march to their appointed positions towards the rear and …wait… cause hmm, “Hey, anyone know what we’re supposed to do once we get here? Where’s the boss man anyway?”
The examples of Davout micromanaging his battalions at Auerstädt or Wellington adjusting positions of battalions here and there throughout the day are not incorrect, it is just that for every one of those examples there are literally hundreds or thousands of times when the subordinates did it on their own. So are we setting out to simulating the model or the exception?
One of my objections to many rule sets (regardless of their category) is that they address many common situations through special-case rules. My issue with this is that then playing the game is practically a quiz on the rules where the player who knows the various special-case rules better and can apply them to his advantage is likely to prevail. Talk about attempting to design systems where you “play history” but end up “playing the rules”.
I played a game at a convention earlier this year. It was an Empire successor rule set. I was going to attack some troops in line, I was in column at the moment. Before moving to contact, I asked, “Do these rules favor attacking in line or column.” I got a long rambling response as to how the French always attacked in column and the English always attacked and defended in line. Yeah, that’s nice, depends on who you read but in any case, immaterial to my question: Do I get a benefit for attacking in column? Yes. OK.
One has to ask themselves, when playing a tactically nuanced game and attempting to “play the history” whose history is represented. We can all debate about columns and lines until we die, but as this pertains to rule development, such things presume the players will have the same perspective as the designer on such matter. No matter what position is taken, if the player has has a different historical bias than the designer, then that player will be forced to play the rules, not the history.
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