Drones in games, how would you model them.

[kyoteblue]

Not to get too topical how would you use drones in modern games? Pluses to spotting and ranging in??? Anti-drone warfare??? How far down the ladder of units do they go??? Brigade Regiment Company Platoon Squad??? What do yall think like I said please keep it theoretical.

[Jim Webster]

I think it does depend on the level of detail and scale. So, for example, if your manoeuvre unit is a battalion then drones might just be factored in. Not quite as simple as +1 to hit with indirect artillery but along those lines.
I do think at the lowest level, squad and platoon you could build a game around the drone use, perhaps as a solo game, or all players on the same side tackling the umpire 🙂
I’m still pondering this 🙂

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[John D Salt]

I find it hard to see why any special rules should be needed to cover drones.

What makes a drone a drone is the fact that it does not carry a pilot (either it is piloted remotely, or it is autonomous and does without altogether). Pilotlessness is not especially relevant to any tactical mission a drone might undertake. Not having a pilot might increase the g forces a UCAV can pull over a crewed fighter, and not losing a human when a drone is shot down suggests less regret at losses, and no need to undertake combat recovery missions (thus depriving the wargamer of a bunch of interesting scenarios). Remotely-piloted drones might be vulnerable, or have their range reduced, because of EW action against their command link. Tiny drones might become inoperable in high winds. Other than those marginal cases, I don’t see how dronitude is interesting.

Recce drones are just like recce aircraft, because they are recce aircraft.

Observation drones are just like AOPs, except that the observer is in the rear with the beer.

Armed drones are just like armed aircraft, because they are armed aircraft.

Suicide drones are just like guided missiles, except that they tend to move a lot slower.

Airborne relay drones are just like other airborne relays, because they are airborne relays (show me a set of wargames rules that even mentions siuch things).

Drones may come in smaller sizes than other aircraft, because you don’t need to fit a pilot in, so they may be harder to spot, and issued at lower tactical levels. But the fact that a rifle platoon might have its own spotter aircraft doesn’t change the essential nature of a spotter aircraft.

All the best,

John.

[willz]

Why not buy a small toy drone with a fitted camera and fly it across the wargame table.  The gamer using it may only attack targets they see through the camera.  That would make an interesting game and troop camouflage would be very important.

[Deleted User]

For me, getting a god’s eye view of the board and the ability to measure range pretty much represents what drones does.

Unless its a double blind game, the advantage of the players being to see everything and have knowledge of enemy positions more than represent the added situational awareness drones provide. Otherwise I see a lot of complicated rules for spotting, visual ID of target and friendly fire to tone down combat effectiveness, or simply make the to hit roll a lot less successful.

Going with Jim Wester abut drones and solo games. Games by THW might be more interesting with drones with the spot and reaction checks.

[Paint it Pink]

It all depends on what you want the game to do? Assumptions people! It’s all about assumptions. They get you everytime.

My assumption would be that drones are an effect. Events that influence the game that players can call upon. YMMV.

PS: Funny you should ask, as I’m noodling this for the rules I’m working on, a near future SF game based on Chain-of-Command. I think I’ve already upset Rich by declaring that I threw out the buckets of D6 in favour of paired dice to determine hit and effect in a clever little mechanism, even if I say so myself.

One is good, more is better
http://panther6actual.blogspot.co.uk/
http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/

[Mike Headden]

I’m with those saying they are an asset like any other. By and large I don’t think you need new rules for them you need to work out which existing unit type they resemble. It may mean that assets are available further down the food chain, of course.

Paint it Pink wrote:

PS: Funny you should ask, as I’m noodling this for the rules I’m working on, a near future SF game based on Chain-of-Command. I think I’ve already upset Rich by declaring that I threw out the buckets of D6 in favour of paired dice to determine hit and effect in a clever little mechanism, even if I say so myself.

Colour me intrigued!

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

[Jim Webster]

willz wrote:

Why not buy a small toy drone with a fitted camera and fly it across the wargame table. The gamer using it may only attack targets they see through the camera. That would make an interesting game and troop camouflage would be very important.

 

I’ve heard a lot of comments from people about the problems they have estimating depth and working out who is who when playing remote games where you see through a fixed camera. I think the drone version could be really interesting

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[Guy Farrish]

‘Drones in games, how would you model them?’

Despite the importance of UAVs to remaining competitive, their attrition rates were extremely high. Of all UAVs used by the UAF in the first three phases of the war covered by this study, around 90% were destroyed. The average life expectancy of a quadcopter remained around three flights. The average life expectancy of a fixed-wing UAV was around six flights.

https://static.rusi.org/359-SR-Ukraine-Preliminary-Lessons-Feb-July-2022-web-final.pdf

I like the (low tech) idea of having both (all) players sitting down with eyes at table level  unless and until they launch or net into a feed from a drone. Then they can stand up and look but they need to throw on a dice to remain standing for the turn. If they fail – drone shot down and they sit again making decisions from the memory of where things were.

You can see why manufacturers like selling these, great income stream.

A related fun game might be a group of ‘cyber warfare’ manufacturers and software houses trying to flog their latest set of emperor’s clothes to the Pentagon – lots of room for lobbyists, Congresspersons and other Beltway shenanigans.

[irishserb]

In my homebrew rules, they are just aircraft, with their own relative performance ratings.  I tend to approach them much like John suggests up above.

[Guy Farrish]

Yes, I think John had it right.

Worth noting that one reading of the RUSI piece suggests they tend to be throw away pieces of kit. There aren’t pilots involved so people tend to regard them as expendable assets. You do have to replace them however and if you read the RUSI article the attrition rate probably had significant effects on UAF performance at times.

The other things is – define your ‘drone’ – cheap quadcopter bodged from Amazon doing tactical recce, or multimillion fixed wing high flyer?

[John D Salt]

willz wrote:

Why not buy a small toy drone with a fitted camera and fly it across the wargame table. The gamer using it may only attack targets they see through the camera. That would make an interesting game and troop camouflage would be very important.

I have fond memories of a game run by John Bassett that did pretty much this for a game based on the FARC-EP kidnap in 2003 of Northrop Grumman contractors from a crashed surveillance Cessna in Colombia. Even the gadget-fiend responsible for the setup was not quite mad enough to use a real drone, but a digitial camera on a stand was mounted over the wargames table, with a feed to a separate room where the security forces had their operations room. I think this must have given them a perspective a bit like trying to fight a battle you are watching through a drinking straw, but submarine commanders have been doing that for years.

The disparity in scales between the ground and the models/figures means that such a method can hardly produce a convincing representation of the problem of target acquisition. Using the popular ground scale of 1mm on the table to 1m in real life, the area you have to search is almost 200 times smaller with 1/72 models, and more than ten times smaller with 1/300. There’s also the point that wargames tables never include anything like the number of false targets that occur in real life.

One of the lessons learnt from the game was the equivalent of “never wear a red hat in a riot”, namely “never drive the visiting IRA bomb-making team around in a white Land Rover.” Other lessons learnt were quite independent of the reliance on drone recce, but included “Never trust a Ukrainian arms dealer”, “Never trust a Colombian drug lord”, and “Never trust these new-fangled IRA-supplied radio-controlled bombs, use string, you know where you are with string.”

Deleted User wrote:

Unless its a double blind game, the advantage of the players being to see everything and have knowledge of enemy positions more than represent the added situational awareness drones provide. Otherwise I see a lot of complicated rules for spotting, visual ID of target and friendly fire to tone down combat effectiveness, or simply make the to hit roll a lot less successful.

Just so, and this has been a problem for professional wargamers and simulationists. When “digitization of the battlespace” was all the go, people wanted to use existing simulations such as Fort Hatstand’s Battlegroup Model to explore the advantages offered by improved communications and better situational awareness. The problem was that, as this and other models of its generation had been written to explore proper old-fashioned Cold War questions of two sides shooting the bejasus out of each other, the designers had made the simplifying assumptions that communications and situational awareness were perfect. Some models actually went further; MODSAF, a popular medium for writing such simulations, could be shown to permit what can only be described as telepathy. It’s hard to write a model showing the benefit of better communications if people already have telepathy.

It’s not surprising if amateur wargamers fight shy of rules about spotting, identification and friendly fire; the professionals largely sloped shoulders rather than develop better models. A political problem was that, typically, the higher-fidelity the model, the less brilliant is the apparent performance of the systems in it, and managers are deeply unwilling to pay good green cash money to get simulation models that show performance to be worse than it was in the previous simulation model. And that, kiddies, is why a lot of the advantages touted for military comms and combat ID gear is based on hand-waving assertions and pretty graphics, rather than credible modelling.

[Paint it Pink]

Mike Headden wrote:

Paint it Pink wrote:

PS: Funny you should ask, as I’m noodling this for the rules I’m working on, a near future SF game based on Chain-of-Command. I think I’ve already upset Rich by declaring that I threw out the buckets of D6 in favour of paired dice to determine hit and effect in a clever little mechanism, even if I say so myself.

Colour me intrigued!

I will post something when it is ready. It could be some time…

One is good, more is better
http://panther6actual.blogspot.co.uk/
http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/

[Mike Headden]

Paint it Pink wrote:

I will post something when it is ready. It could be some time…

I’m in no position to comment, glaciers look at my work rate on rules writing and painting and wonder why I’m so slow!!

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

[Paint it Pink]

John D Salt wrote:

I find it hard to see why any special rules should be needed to cover drones. What makes a drone a drone is the fact that it does not carry a pilot (either it is piloted remotely, or it is autonomous and does without altogether). [big snip]

Other than those marginal cases, I don’t see how dronitude is interesting.

List:

• Recce drones are just like recce aircraft, because they are recce aircraft. [snip]
• Observation drones are just like AOPs [snip]
• Armed drones are just like armed aircraft [snip]
• Suicide drones are just like guided missiles [snip]
• Airborne relay drones are just like other airborne relays [snip]

Drones may come in smaller sizes than other aircraft, because you don’t need to fit a pilot in, so they may be harder to spot, and issued at lower tactical levels.

John.

A late reply to this post, as I had thoughts, and as I write near future SF stories with drones etc, I thought this gave me a good enough excuse to to spout some nonsense!?

I mostly agree with John’s assessment, but only mostly.

I think drones are proving that dronitude is interesting, without wanting to get into it in deptht while the Ukraine thing is ongoing.

It’s at the smaller end of the scale where I think the fun and excitement begins, where fun and excitement is, “Look up, incoming drones, oh my god, oh my god, we’re all going to die!”

The US Marines are testing micro drones, which are small like birds and DARPA has played with insect sized drones too. Now, the problem with small drones is that they are:

1. Small and easily buffeted by wind.
2. Small with a limited range.
3. Only only carry a small payload.

But there very small size is also an advantage. Especially when deployed as autonomous swarms using a targeting algorithm.

Here’s a link to a YouTube, and yes I know, but think outside the box, not ready now, but in the near future.

I mention autonomous combat drones in my first novel Bad Dog, first book in the Gate Walker trilogy, as an event that occurs during the 2nd American Civil War that leads to banning fully autonomous drones.

The second book has another event arising from unintended consequences of updating algorithms to do more things.

The third book features drones being used to ambush an attacker.

So yes, I have opinions. They’re probably wrong, but they are at least interesting. Trying to tie them all into the rules I’m working on is also interesting, as in how to make the game fun to play.

One is good, more is better
http://panther6actual.blogspot.co.uk/
http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/

[John D Salt]

Paint it Pink wrote:

I mostly agree with John’s assessment, but only mostly.

I will grudgingly concede that there might be a good deal of interest in modelling the autonomy aspect of drones. A lot of wargamers will hate being deprived of control over assets that behave autonomously. Real generals seem to think the same way, which is why the campaign against killer robots (to the surprise of the campaign’s founders) enjoys (or enjoyed last time I looked) considerable support from the military.

As an historical wargamer, I would be interested in ways of making elements under command behave autonomously, as a way of modelling Auftragstaktik (“mission command”) as against Befehlstaktik (“orders is orders”) approaches to command. Game mechanisms developed to do that would I think also be useful in animating enemy forces in solitaire games. The problem is that, whereas players of solitaire games might be happy for enemy forces to behave fairly stupidly, it is generally accepted that Auftragstaktik produces better decisions than Befehlstaktik.

Any ideas on how to model autonomic decision-making, whether by drones, solitaire enemy, or subordinates fulfilling an Auftrag, gratefully accepted.

I notice that it’s now seventy years since Robert Sheckley wrote “Watchbird”:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579/29579-h/29579-h.htm

All the best,

John.

[Guy Farrish]

I’m left with a sense of wonder (and possibly dread) that somewhere in MIT a team is designing (or has designed?) its way to producing one of the more unlikely types of AI to control (or not) autonomous drones in Auftragstaktik.

Artificial Narrow Intelligence may not be so bad I suppose, but perhaps not well suited to mission oriented decision making. AGI and ASI (Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Super Intelligence) sound much more likely to succeed in that, but probably also intelligent enough to say ‘I don’t think so, I’ve got a better idea.’

Fortunately those appear to be a very long way off.

But if Auftragstaktik is to be more than the US tendency to mangle the concept into a more efficient set of orders rather than a more cultural approach to mission solving, that means an intelligent AI driving autonomous drones also appears to be a long way off.

Someone will bring out a version (some people say it is already being used) that looks as if it might teach itself how to fulfil its missions and may simulate some ability to learn what the mission might be. It very probably will be fooling some of the people some of the time and will fail spectacularly when left to its own devices. I think I prefer that to a genuinely autonomous drone that can be told to defeat the enemy in a certain area and go and successfully work out how to do that.

If we did achieve that, it sounds as if it might be much better at playing a wargame as well and perhaps the only answer is as Dr Falken’s Joshua works out, the way to win is not to play. I’m not sure I’m ready to give up wargaming just yet.

[Paint it Pink]

John D Salt wrote:

I will grudgingly concede that there might be a good deal of interest in modelling the autonomy aspect of drones. A lot of wargamers will hate being deprived of control over assets that behave autonomously. Real generals seem to think the same way, which is why the campaign against killer robots (to the surprise of the campaign’s founders) enjoys (or enjoyed last time I looked) considerable support from the military.  [big snip]

I notice that it’s now seventy years since Robert Sheckley wrote “Watchbird”: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579/29579-h/29579-h.htm All the best, John.

Classic story. I agree, but with caveats.

Sheckley doesn’t take into account entropy. His birds are not only fully autonomous, but can work for unfeasibly long periods without refueling and maintenance.

This is a problem that one can see in lots of SF. Travel to the stars at slower than light speeds takes years, and yes I know Voyager has been going for forty odd years and is still transmitting, but it’s on its last legs. Nothing works forever.

But back to wargaming.

Yes, the trick is replicating AI as a set of rules that are fun to play. It’s the latter problem that is the killer.

One is good, more is better
http://panther6actual.blogspot.co.uk/
http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/

[Guy Farrish]

People (San Jose State University for one, KTH Royal Institute of Technology  – many others in less publicised institutions) are thinking about  and working on long loiter solar powered UAV which can soar high and slowly lose height during the night and power up again during the day, theoretically indefinitely (as recce at the moment – obviously you’d have to rearm them if you ever got them efficient enough to carry weapons).

 

[Jim Webster]

Guy Farrish wrote:

People (San Jose State University for one, KTH Royal Institute of Technology – many others in less publicised institutions) are thinking about and working on long loiter solar powered UAV which can soar high and slowly lose height during the night and power up again during the day, theoretically indefinitely (as recce at the moment – obviously you’d have to rearm them if you ever got them efficient enough to carry weapons).

For a recce drone, solar powered might be enough. But for an assassin drone, if you used energy to kill the target (be it a person or an IT system) that might be enough as well

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[willz]

Be careful the government is watching, people in blacked out range rovers will turn up and shut down your wargame 😁😎

[kyoteblue]

Love all the replies all,willz hopefully that wouldn’t happen.

[irishserb]

Regarding playing AI, is playing AI inherently different than playing any other intelligence?

I mean, if you endeaver to play different armies based on historical cultural and doctrinal charactistics, then isn’t playng AI conceptually the same thing?   The player just steps into a diffrent “culture” and doctrine.  No?

Or if the AI resorces/weapons/elements function autonamously on the table, then isn’t the player simply playing at higher command level,  acting at whatever level real humans would act to direct the AI.

My impression is that if players are playing the AI, the “magic” of the game is to be able to step into the “character” of the AI, and executing action consistent with the AI behavior, rather than just watching as if a spectator at a sporting event.

The trick is in defining the parameters of AI behavior, if particularly different than a human, but that would be generally the same as establiching how a human player, would play ants, a Tyranosaurus, or any truly alien species, would it not?

[madman]

I do not like having orders in a game. Unless you are playing double blind with a (few) umpires to whom you give your orders. Then THEY run your units as they interpret your written orders, it is nonsensical to me. However, if using an AI then orders would be great. Make them as specific as possible, and possibly depending on the intelligence of the AI, so no interpretation is possible. If in doubt reveal your programming (orders) to your opponent and unless they agree with what you want the AI driven unit to do the unit sits doing nothing until given new (better) orders.

 

[Guy Farrish]

Representing AI on the battlefield in a wargame is one set of problems. Using AI to play the C3 in a wargame is a whole other bag of spanners.

Computers were loudly touted in some quarters in the late eighties/early 90s as the way to ‘assist’ tabletop wargame rules and take the agony out of chart and factor flipping. Of course the computer could do the arithmetic faster and give you combat results in killed/wounded/shocked/incapacitate/frozen/run away detail for any size unit you cared to programme should you wish. You just spent ten times as long inputting the situation and what was happening on the table into the computer. Once you’d worked out a spatial reference for the units as well as their characteristics everyone jumped into the screen and never bothered coming back to the table. I know of at least one gamer who resisted that trend and still uses an assistance programme and swears it works well for him.

Those who stuck with toy soldiers mostly did the obvious and binned the charts and factors – sometimes binning the baby along with the soapy water, but producing slicker game play at least.

So AI for orders. Big old steam hammer to crack a smallish nut. If you are playing solo it might have a possible use I suppose. Given my interactions with Chat GPT and Bard so far I wouldn’t be seeking to replace Davout with either. Maybe not even Grouchy. Possibly Mack. Not sure the effort of training the AI model to your needs is worth the outcome.

AI might in fact be perfect for C3 rules in wargames given they are to limit Command and Control not facilitate it.

[Jim Webster]

Thinking about it, for the solo player you often have to create some sort of ‘AI’ to power your opponent. Obviously this can be very simple.
But surely, given that drones are controlled by an AI, modelling them should be even simpler than modelling a ‘human opponent’?

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[John D Salt]

Guy Farrish wrote:

Representing AI on the battlefield in a wargame is one set of problems. Using AI to play the C3 in a wargame is a whole other bag of spanners.

I don’t agree. Autonomy is autonomy, whether the autonomous behaviour is human or machine. One of the big things a commander has to do in real life — and this is the difference between extremes of Auftragstaktik and Befehlstaktik and all the possibilities in between — is to decide how much autonomy to grant to subordinates. In some cases the limits of communications technology mean that autonomy has to be granted whether the commander likes the idea or not, as for example to masters of cruising ships in the Napoleonic era, who received dispatches with considerable delays, or U-boat captains in the Atlantic WW2, who could only intermittently receive signals from Kerneval. In some cases a subordinate might show autonomy to the extent of disregarding instructions from higher, as for example Nelson putting the telescope to his blind eye, or the commanders of the Kwantung Army deciding to start a small war with Russia without permission from Tokyo.

Given the importance of levels of autonomy in real life, I find it disappointing that no wargame I have ever met makes any attempt to portray them, to the extent that

madman wrote:

I do not like having orders in a game.

is probably not an uncommon attitude. I find it weird, as I would have thought that giving orders is the essential function of whatever commander the wargamer is pretending to be; but I suppose not everyone holds the “commander’s boots” view of how wargaming should work.

The traditional wargame mechanism for modelling behaviour beyond the control of the commander is the reaction test. These are no longer fashionable, and were limited to the question of limiting a player’s options as to what an element could do when driven to consider the problem of self-preservation.

I dream of having a set of rules that has something like reaction tests to produce the decision behaviour of commanders at different levels of the command hierarchy, considering all sorts of stimuli rather than just those related to self-preservation. These could be used to run the whole game without player intervention, or any number of players could be slotted in on either side at any level of command to provide their own decisions instead. This would be a big bugger to design for a battalion-level land game, but I think might be doable for, say, a section attack game or a squadron-a-side fighter game, with players taking some soldiers/pilots and the others (NPCs) being controlled by the rules.

Has anyone ever seen anything like that?

All the best,

John.

[Whirlwind]

John D Salt wrote:

I dream of having a set of rules that has something like reaction tests to produce the decision behaviour of commanders at different levels of the command hierarchy, considering all sorts of stimuli rather than just those related to self-preservation. These could be used to run the whole game without player intervention, or any number of players could be slotted in on either side at any level of command to provide their own decisions instead.

I don’t think it hits it on the ‘command heirarchy’ level (which is TBF the hardest part), but I think that the reaction tests in Pony Wars (and perhaps to a lesser extent, the reaction tests in Nuts! & the game logic in ‘Ambush’) do make a stab at the second.  I was just wondering in the light of reading about Norm Smith’s latest campaign (Wavre), whether there could be a way of combining that with objective/VP markers to provide that kind of heirarchical element. So the idea would be something like:

Imagine a game with a Blue battalion attacking a Red reinforced company

The overall objective(s) would be fixed for both sides (to simulate orders from 1-up)

Each player would assign objectives to sub-units (Blue companies and independent platoons; Red platoons and independent sections/atts&dets)

Each player can (if desired) give a fixed written order to each sub-unit prescribing method; this can only be changed by a subsequent O Group or when the sub-unit fails a morale test. [Some armies might insist on this doctrinally; others might forbid it entirely].

Otherwise, order changes by radio or messenger can only change the objective, not method*.

All other actions (by Blue platoons or sections of independent companies & red sections) are entirely handled by reaction tests.

A F2F game might have objective markers (say 3/sub-unit) with ‘True’ & ‘False’ on the underside; an umpire could obviously dispense with that entirely.

(*a more advanced game might allow changes to ROBOT rather than just the objective).

anyway, just a few random thoughts over the morning coffee!

[Chris Pringle]

Mechanisms for an uncontrolled advance or attack that might be contrary to the player’s wishes are by no means unprecedented. Thinking of Sam Mustafa’s Grande Armee, which had such things both at the basic brigade unit level and at the corps commander level (if he was defined as Rash); and of Black Powder‘s ‘Blunders’; and of the Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte scenarios for Bloody Big Battles.

[Guy Farrish]

John D Salt wrote:

I don’t agree. Autonomy is autonomy, whether the autonomous behaviour is human or machine. One of the big things a commander has to do in real life — and this is the difference between extremes of Auftragstaktik and Befehlstaktik and all the possibilities in between — is to decide how much autonomy to grant to subordinates. .

Autonomy may be autonomy but in my first case of modelling drones’ actions in a manual wargame we are reducing complex, and possibly complicated, control of the drone to a simple mechanism like a card draw or a die roll. Unless the drone’s actions are our game focus, the most abstracted method possible is best to avoid buggering up the rest of the game. Does it attack? Does it press home in the face of return fire/EW suppression, does it hit/survive.

All of the complexities are rolled up into a usable if possibly erroneous model, much as electrical engineers do when they use a lumped element model to work with circuits rather than go through Maxwell’s field equations each time. The description doesn’t actually reflect what is really happening but the model produces a workable outcome near enough for jazz or wiring a car.

Using machine AI to model all the other actors in a command chain and their perceptions which act upon them to produce their actions is coming at the thing from the opposite end. Rather than using a die throw with a few modifiers to reflect situation – pinned, suppressed etc AI is being used to open up all those decision nodes at each level of command and fill them with many inputs. We are putting the complexity back in and using a million dollar answer to a ten cent question. Rather than representing the autonomy (or lack of it in Madman’s description) of the subordinates by rolling together all the inputs; cultural, formal command chain and situational into a simple output, it examine each and every input.

It feels like some of the games in the seventies which sought to track the path of every round fired.

It’s probably doable with even current AI but it seems to me the reverse of what modelling drones on a wargame table seeks to do. (unless of course you want to model the whole drone fighting thing in detail in which case you are using game AI to model battlefield AI behaviour and perhaps we can let the machines play wargames about machines and we can go and have a drink).

[Paint it Pink]

John D Salt wrote:

madman wrote:

I do not like having orders in a game.

is probably not an uncommon attitude. I find it weird, as I would have thought that giving orders is the essential function of whatever commander the wargamer is pretending to be; but I suppose not everyone holds the “commander’s boots” view of how wargaming should work. (big snip)

This part of the post bugged me, so I had to go away and think through what that was.

And again I find myself repeating, watch out for your assumptions.

My assumptions for order is very 20&21st Century focused.

So for me, orders mean a five paragraph SMEAC: Situation; Mission; Execution; Administration/Logistics; Command/Signal.

Which in my little world of toy soldiers [madness] would really work well for defining the scenario.

What little world experience I have of leading people in MilSims that once you’re out in the woods, orders are pretty much shouts to do this or that to fulfill the mission.

Examples might include marking an RV point, setting up a base of fire, assaulting a position, or change from column to a patrol wedge or whatever.

So, sitting at a table and writing orders for what would be verbal commands to do rehearsed movements seems a bit too much like taking the fun out of the game.

I realize, that this is my assumptions of what level I’m playing a game, but even in older periods, the amount of orders a commander could effectively issue were rather limited.

Or so I’m led to believe.

Happy to be educated in things I don’t understand.

One is good, more is better
http://panther6actual.blogspot.co.uk/
http://ashleyrpollard.blogspot.co.uk/

[Mike Headden]

I have even less military experience than Paint it Pink, unless you count being the token Dad on primary school trips with my kids’ classes. An activity somewhere on the Venn Diagram of life’s experiences between military operations and cat herding.

So give as much weight as you feel appropriate to the fact that I don’t find written orders, even if funnelled through a competent umpire, a useful mechanism for tabletop wargames. Too slow, too unwieldy and not appropriate to most of the games I play in any case.

I am happy to allow the dice to represent the vagaries of real life combat. If I order a unit to take and hold a hill and it fails to move I don’t need to know if my pre-battle planning was not clear or if the unit commander is not clear which hill he is to attack and is taking a moment to orient himself or indeed if, lacking my thousand-feet-up godlike view, he can’t actually see the hill in question and is sending a few guys forward to find it.

Random chance can decide the flukes and foul-ups that dog real life combat, or so my reading tells me, so I can get on with the game.

I still don’t see drones as intrinsically different from meatbag units.

In my sci-fi background troops are Sents, Synths or AI. Sents – sentient beings like you or I albeit possibly descended from canids or felids or the like rather than hominids – are capable of great heroism or abject cowardice, Synths – vat grown versions of Sents, often with non-organic components – are less prone to panic but also less likely to act heroically. AI are bots, combat drones, cybertanks and the like. They have limited self-preservation protocols so don’t panic but also don’t do heroics. So differences are primarily in morale rather than troop type.

AI’s have also been known to eliminate not only enemy troops but allied, friendly or neutral personnel where they, usually correctly, consider this to increase the chance of mission success. This may be a short term gain but does not endear them to friends or indigenous populations!

As ever, each to their own. It’s only toy soldiers after all.

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

[Guy Farrish]

Mike Headden wrote:

I don’t find written orders, even if funnelled through a competent umpire, a useful mechanism for tabletop wargames. Too slow, too unwieldy and not appropriate to most of the games I play in any case. I am happy to allow the dice to represent the vagaries of real life combat. If I order a unit to

Hang on a tick…you’ve just given them a what? Carry on.

take and hold a hill…

I still don’t see drones as intrinsically different from meatbag units.

Pretty much agree

As ever, each to their own. It’s only toy soldiers after all.

Well, perhaps but some of us like the ‘war’ to be in the ‘wargaming’ as much as the ‘game’. If we make absolutely no attempt for our lead/plastic/resin people to behave a bit like their flesh and blood equivalents – for me that might be a fun game but it probably isn’t a ‘war’game.

 

 

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