Chaos on the Battlefield vs. Our Perfect Knowledge

[vtsaogames]

A short discourse about C&C rules here.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood

[Steve Johnson]

All good points Vincent with which I concur:).

[Mike Headden]

What Steve said!

Of course for real mayhem you need rules that add a certain amount of C&C friction in a multiplayer campaign game where real world personalities and interpersonal relations kick in. 🙂

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[vtsaogames]

Ah, campaign games, the grail.

I was involved in several complex campaign games back in the day with the now-defunct Forlorn Hope club. In the mid 70’s we had an enormous ancient campaign using WRG 5th or 6th edition as tactical rules, a huge, lovely bespoke map and constantly evolving strategic rules – the latter a bad idea. Most fun was making the map. It had everything from Assyrians to Vikings at the same time, two Roman Republics, two Byzantine Empires, etc. The later heavily armed and armored armies that weren’t yet on the WRG army lists did best of all. Big surprise, eh? It petered out after a couple years.

 

Better was the American Revolution game played for the bicentennial from 1976 – 1977 or 1978. We used Avalon Hill 1776 for strategic play (much better than design-it-as-you-go) and like named tactical rules. The British team won.

 

Last was a game of the 1814 invasion of France. OSG’s Napoleon at Bay provided the strategic game. One major flaw: we didn’t have the artillery melt away on marches like the infantry. Made for some strange battles at the end. We had a set of tactical rules descended from the early AWI rules. Cavalry probably too strong. After some glorious victories over isolated Allied corps, including the Russian Guards, the French were duly stuffed and I relocated to Elba.

 

Years later we had some very brief DBA campaigns with the rules in the earlier editions. Lots of fun, like binging on burgers.

 

A few years back we played a Bloody Big Battles campaign of the Franco-Prussian War. No map movement, just playing some 14 or so historical battles. It was quite satisfying, with almost no paperwork involved. Since I was invariably the paperwork guy, a very good thing.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood

[Konstantinos Travlos]

Good points.

[Chris Pringle]

Like it. Added my comment to the blog post.

[Whirlwind]

Yes, all fair enough. Ultimately it can all resolve to lack of information in a system, which is a problem for gamers where they have to have perfect information to administer the game as well as play it. You can overcome this to some extent by adding randomness into the system – and you would theoretically overcome it if you injected enough randomness into that system – but keeping track of and administering that would become too hard to actually do. So I am relatively agnostic about which way a game injects some difficulties into the C2 system (not agnostic about the actual implementation of the mechanics though, some of them are definitely worse than others). None of them really reflect the actual issues, but that is largely impossible in a F2F miniatures wargame anyway. So when some learned poster tells me that Command Points don’t accurately reflect what happened on a battlefield of period x, I don’t think that my opinions change very much, and won’t until someone actually does produce that realistic set.

The above is quite distinct from using mechanics specifically to increase the ‘fun’ level of a game. I might care about this, I might not. I might prefer sets which more accurately replicated the effects (if not the real fundamental issues) to others which exaggerated or diminished them for another person’s vuew of what more fun would look like.

 

 

[Chris Pringle]

This has prompted a thought. In the context of factors causing chaos on the battlefield, we can distinguish between ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’. The latter would be the myriad random events that constitute ‘friction’: the lost courier, the broken wagon that blocks the road, the stream in spate. The former would mainly concern where the enemy forces are and what the enemy is trying to do.

I can imagine ways to modify an activation system to reflect the degree of imperfection of a commander’s knowledge. Eg, it wouldn’t be hard to define what constituted a concealed or uncommitted reserve. A side that has such reserves might be entitled to inflict some -1 penalties on the other side’s activation rolls. The number of these would be in proportion to the number of reserves = degree of uncertainty. Conversely, once some threshold of certainty is reached when enough of the enemy’s reserves are committed or discovered, the active player might be allowed a proportionate number of +1 modifiers to use on his own rolls. Cavalry reconnaissance could acquire suitable importance.

Something to consider for BBB 2nd edition (no, still no plans, it’s served us well for 15 years already!).

[Whirlwind]

That is an interesting idea, isn’t it? Would partly reflect sub-commanders caution at all levels when it isn’t clear what they are getting themselves into. Will have to think about it some more, but intriguing.

[MartinR]

The ACW examples in the OP are very entertaining. I love Polk just eating breakfast, although it isn’t as bad as the Army of the Elbe in 1866 whose commander deliberately tore down the Telegraph lines as he didn’t want to communicate in any way whatsoever with von Moltke. And pity poor Benedek at Koeniggratz who suddenly discovered that his entire right wing had decided to attack the Prussians on their own.

I sometimes think that for large nineteenth century battles you may as well deploy the troops and then roll a few dice to see if any of them do anything useful at all.

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Guy Farrish]

Chris, that’s a neat game mechanism.

Generally I feel that anything that encourages and rewards players to keep reserves is a ‘good thing’.

But (there’s always a ‘but’ isn’t there?) it feels odd to connect uncertainty so directly to a reserve. (Obviously haven’t tried it yet!)

The reward for having a reserve should come when the reserve is committed, assuming it is used at an appropriate time. The fact the commander has a fresh force under control to commit as and when required is the reward itself. (not usually rewarded sufficiently in most games for a whole slew of reasons which I feel we’ve probably talked about elsewhere on here).

Uncertainty in the enemy, wondering, if a reserve exists somewhere, what it may be and when it may be released, may play a part in unsettling command- so ‘justifying’ the negative modifiers. But it’s a mechanism which crystallises the level of uncertainty for the command – it has a value which declines as bits of the ‘reserve’ are discovered or used. This, in and of itself, gives the enemy an idea of the existence and rough size of a remaining reserve.

Then just at the point the reserve should deliver its battle winning/saving positive impact, the niggling worry about what may be out there disappears (when command shock would be at its maximum) and the revelation of the horror befalling him allows the commander to encourage his subordinate commanders with ‘Its okay boys! This is it! Things can only get better! (apologies to D.Ream).

Just when commanders at all levels affected would be scrambling to react, they can suddenly operate faster and more effectively. Not much of a reward for using a reserve! And possibly not reflecting what happens to tired troops and command teams suddenly exposed to a fresh, previously uncommitted masse de rupture?

It feels too neat not to be used somehow, somewhere, but on reflection I’m not sure how.

[Chris Pringle]

Whirlwind, glad you like the idea.

Guy, excellent point. Perhaps the advantage in terms of +/- modifiers goes to whoever has the last reserve to commit? Obviously I haven’t thought this through but I think there is something useful there.

[vtsaogames]

Some ideas for reserves:

Rules of Battle (Minden Games, not played) had designated reserve units (up to 1/3 of units on table) make a triple move the turn they were activated, provided they stayed beyond 4″ of enemy. Otherwise they could make a single normal move, including into contact with enemy.

 

My untested preference is to allow a double move including into contact.

 

From a home brew set of rules* : On the turn reserves were committed (once per game per unit) friends within 6″ of final location removed one Disorder marker immediately. Think of the hard-pressed lads cheering as reinforcements arrive. Don’t use multiple disorder markers? Allow an immediate rally test. Or something.

 

*Rules were canned because some of our guys didn’t get them. Also, too much chrome was added to them. So easy to do, a very bad habit.

 

Off the top of my head yesterday for off-table reserves: put units off-table for each side. Make up a set of cards (index, whatever). Say six per side. They specify how much of the off-table reserve is available (all, some, none), what turn the player can start dicing to see if they arrive, (if none are coming, dice anyway and complain of lousy dice to keep the other side guessing), and where (left, center, right).  Each side draws one card. On the turn they arrive (if any), show the card to the other side. A player could opt to keep them off-table past their arrival time to keep the opponent guessing, though I imagine that would take some iron discipline.

 

All this presumes that the game is moving fast enough that there is time for the reserves to have some effect. Bit of a problem with the Fencibles these days. We gab so much after the prolonged plague lockdowns that the games move at a stately pace.

 

It's never too late to have a happy childhood

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