DIY and the Decline of Community Standards

This is a mirror of an article original appearing at this link: http://forums.gamesquad.com/blog.php?b=688

The self-publishing revolution has had tremendous impacts on the wargaming “industry”, if one wants to refer to the hobby with that term. In 1997, the editor of The General noted the growing rise of Desk Top Publishers (DTP) and had the following to say:
 

So what if DTP games are skimming sales from a fixed layer of existing consumer demand? Is this so bad? ...This is where the issue of the traditional game company comes back to us front and center. The boardgame company doesn't simply print and ship a paper product. Production isn't really limited by a lack of designs. For the most part, the boardgame company is selling the “finish.” By that I don't mean chrome or unnecessary details, polish and packaging. I mean that the traditional boardgame company sells you a finished product which it believes cannot be affordably improved. It is selling the development work and the artistic and functional rendering of the design. God knows I could create an ASL scenario in less than an hour. Would it be publishable within the standards of the ASL gaming community? Absolutely not. The ASL players have come to expect their scenarios to meet certain criteria that revolve around historical accuracy, playability and competitive play balance (let's applaud MMP for all that they do to keep up the quality of ASL products).

For fans of the ASL game system, the third party publishers (as MMP was at the time the above was written) who were pushing out those ASL scenarios were seen as saviors, rescuing their favourite game system from oblivion. The point Tucker was making, however, was that large companies like Avalon Hill had the resources to do it all – playtest, design, research, yes, but also put the physical refinements into the finished product that desktop publishers could not. (Avalon Hill was also leagues ahead of other mainstream publishers in having its own printing services on-call, being a subsidiary of Monarch Avalon.) At the time he was writing (1997), dot-matrix and tractor-feed printers were still in common use, and storage of data was done on floppy discs. There was no widespread internet access to acquire images or research data.

The situation today is a trade-off; researchers can quickly glean information on obscure battles to create tactical scenarios for their favourite game, and even recreate reasonable facsimiles of the terrain using modern mapping tools like GoogleEarth. What has been surrendered, however, is a tangible decline in physical quality and a lowering of professional standards in such things as periodicals and graphic design elements of physical components of games. Classic graphic designers such as Rodger MacGowan and Redmond Simonsen, whose work was ubiquitous throughout the industry (at a time when that appellation truly applied), set high standards for others to maintain, and the inability of others to measure up was always made obvious by direct comparisons to the current state of the art.

The falling off of the current state of the art has been such a gradual process, perhaps the change has been imperceptible, or perhaps even it is something gamers are willing to accept in the understanding that a niche hobby is fighting a battle for existence against a growing number of other pastimes and distractions. Simply put, there are other battles to fight. It was not hard for a bookcase-style box stuffed with photo-realistic, hard-mounted geomorphic maps to compete for the hobby dollars of teenage boys in the 1970s, since their dads or uncles or granddads may very well have been Second World War veterans, the war was still immediate thanks to countless prime time TV depictions and comic book heroes still fighting the war, and the number of ways to refight the battles were few, with video games just a gleam in the eye of the guy about to invent “Pong.” Spending more money on quality wasn’t a hardship.

Today, however, editors and publishers have either forgotten how to put together products with elegance and sense of design, or lack the will to do so. A look at some contemporary products will illustrate what is meant.

Fire & Movement
 

This is a sample page from the latest issue of F&M magazine; this old industry standard began in 1976 under the stewardship of graphic design artist Rodger MacGowan, who has long since headed for greener pastures with GMT and his own magazine c3i. What may pass unnoticed to most stands out like a sore thumb to those in the know; note the tiny margins on the page (the printing goes almost the very edges of the paper), and the poor quality of the photos. Rare industry standards like The General came out on a fairly rigorous schedule and actually adhered to them; lesser lights like Grenadier tried to come out as regularly as possible but could at least be counted on to produce ‘x’ number of issues in the span of a year. Current magazines like Operations or F&M are unapologetic about being printed haphazardly, and the editors – who are not full time employees – cite real world concerns beyond their control as an excuse for missed deadlines – or no deadlines at all.

 

Operations Special Edition #2

After lauding the first SE in a previous article, I happily sent in my money to MMP for the second annual installment. What shortcomings I’ve found are no doubt forgivable by true fans; I personally don’t find them truly heinous, but they go to illustrate the kinds of deteriorating standards I am talking about across the hobby. Low-resolution graphics have been used in several images, with large pixelation in the translation to print – a very large problem in today’s desktop-to-doorstop publishing world.
 

My own publishing works have suffered as well in this regard so I can’t in good conscience scream too loudly about it. But other aspects of layout and design make the magazine seem like amateur-hour, certainly in comparison to older works, that we just know for a fact were done by more expensive and time consuming processes rather than cut-and-paste from easily transposed digital files.

Relative Worth

In short – it’s all too easy in this day and age to throw something together, publish it, and have others purchase it. With desktop publishing tools, print-on-demand services, online payment services, and direct-to-download marketing, you could theoretically decide to create a book at the breakfast table and have it in the hands of a paying audience that afternoon. But as Stuart Tucker might have asked – would it be any good?

Sometimes the community has no choice but to subsidize poorer physical quality; after decades of having hard-mounted mapboards as standard, ASL changed to thinner cardstock maps for its modules, for example. Many fans have applauded the decision as it permits easier storage of the maps in sheet protectors, and makes them more air-transportable for distance travel to far-off tournaments. Sometimes change is good. MMP, who took over ASL from Avalon Hill, no longer has access to on demand printing services and contracts out. They collate large print runs in-house, often with the help of local volunteers from the community, and have been known to worry publicly about warehouse space – a far cry from the glory years of AH who boasted at least two vibrant locations in Baltimore for playtesting (Read Street) and production (Harford Road). The quality of the maps has further been altered by the usage of computer-generated artwork rather than hand-painted art – there is no consensus on which is “better” but there is no denying that something unique has been lost.

Other times, the community does itself in. Using unique marketing on ebay and name recognition, Wild Bill Wilder racked up over $7000.00 in sales with his ASL variant modules in 2009. The physical quality varied from fair to poor. The counters were pre-cut (not die-cut) but sported good artwork and were probably the most attractive element of the modules. The scenario cards, oddly, did not feature the unique counter art (nor did they include vital information such as sniper activation number). The cover sheet of the module I purchased for review, Glory & Grief 2, had an obvious typo. The rules were poorly formatted, and the table of contents listed one method of pagination that was completely different from the actual pages, rendering it useless as a finding tool. There was no index. There were also no “Chapter H” notes explaining the vital statistics of the vehicle counters.

The artwork on the counters isn't so bad, but if you want to know the TO KILL numbers for an 82L RCL, your guess is as good as anyone's; this vital information wasn't included in the game's rules. Even "owndership" (sic) of the ASL Rulebook doesn't help out with that.

Where the community did itself no favours was in buying into the marketing plan – the items were offered up one at a time via online auction, while eager collectors routinely bid on the modules to prices well in excess of the cost of comparable products from other publishers; prices of over 300 dollars were not uncommon for modules that contained on average less than two dozen loosely-written pages of rules, fewer than ten scenarios (at least one based on a Hollywood movie rather than real life events), a couple hundred counters, and a pair of overlays.

Shouting to be Heard

There are, or course, small magazines that are matching and exceeding the established periodicals in terms of quality. The ASL community again yields examples; Le Franc Tireur comes most immediately to mind, having risen from an average fanzine to a first class magazine with world-class graphic design as well as cutting edge game variants. They released their first box-set ASL variant in 2009 and have promised more.
 

But without the hook of game pieces and mapboards, is there a “need” for periodicals? With the advent of the BBS and now blogs, internet forums and social networking, aren’t there enough ways to communicate online that paper communications are irrelevant? I would argue that here, too, community standards are easy to let slip. More is not always more. A site like boardgamegeek.com can be an enormous tool for finding lists of raw data and in communicating with others, but the noise-to-signal ratio of a poorly moderated chat room or mailing list or message board can make such a venture seem not worth the effort in the end. For a game company or publisher especially, more time can actually be spent in fighting malicious messages by dissatisfied consumers than in working constructively on product. A magazine slows down the rate of conversation and puts the control back in the hands of the publisher. Sober second thought is allowed to dominate the proceedings, even if exchanges take place between opposing sides in a debate. Witness the discussion between Hal Hock and John Hill/Don Greenwood over the direction of tactical games in the pages of The General in 1977 after Squad Leader made its debut, and Hock defended his technocrat’s vision of Tobruk against the more fanciful but popular SL.

The administrators of battlefront.com’s forum – in particular, their Combat Mission games – have apparently tired so much of the “noise” that they have admitted to moderating in favour of “pro” postings only. It’s not that different than the editor of house organs of old picking and choosing with deliberation which letters they would print in their mail columns. Other forums, such as Matrix’s Panzer Command forum, have run the gamut from being over-run by disruptive posters with nothing constructive to add but mayhem, to becoming dead as doornails as ardor for the game cooled post-release and enthusiasts found little to talk about.

My Final Word

The Do-It-Yourself community has brought down standards in all areas; that third parties who publish scenarios for favourite tactical games may have their own lower standards is obvious, but if they are rushing the mainstream publishers into getting “more product” onto market to compete, standards across the board are dropped. Community discussion, once directed if not controlled by the publishers, is now firmly in the hands of the consumer, who can create Do It Yourself sounding boards for opinions – fair or not.

My Question to You

Can there really be no need at all for quality printed magazines on board, miniature or computer games any more? If the answer is yes, what does that say about us? If the answer is no, are we doing enough to create them?

Experiential Game Players

This is a mirror of an article original appearing at this link: http://forums.gamesquad.com/blog.php?b=654

There is a need in certain quarters to categorize game players, whether it is to gather demographics for advertising, or to attempt to predict future sales, or to better enable fellow gamers to talk to one another. MOVES Magazine printed an article in 1975, breaking down board wargamers into the following:

• The Military Establishment
• The Military Historians
• The Military Buffs
• The Avengers
• The Social Wargamers
• The Mathematicians
• The Supercompetitors
• The Accidental Converts
• The Shut-Ins
• The Limited Interest Minority
• The Wishful Thinkers
• The Reluctant Gift-Receivers
• The Elite Capitalists
• The Reluctant Opponents

The categories, author Phil Kosnett admitted, overlapped. What he didn't admit in print was that the piece was probably meant as much as humorous filler as a serious attempt to define the wargaming community. As with all good humour, there was much truth in his descriptions. I recall turning a friend of the family into a Reluctant Opponent in a game of Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora during a stay at his home. I think most of my early Squad Leader opponents were probably Reluctant Opponents, come to think of it.¹

Twenty-five years later, Curt Schilling described the Advanced Squad Leader community as "cliques", breaking them down as "Competitor. Simulator. Historian. Socializer. Many of you may have seen wargaming broken down like this before."²

Somewhere during the intervening quarter century, however, it became possible to introduce a new dynamic into the mix; that of the Experiential Wargamer. The introduction of tactical level wargames, first person shooters, and legitimate solitaire gaming all helped develop that new category.

Early Roots and Shameful Pursuits

The first board wargames were intended to portray operational level clashes where the gamer filled the role of a general in command of an army group, army or corps commander. Tactical-level games didn't arrive on the scene until later - though miniature players had been recreating low-level tactical battles for decades by the time PanzerBlitz hit the scene in 1970. The "dirty little secret" among wargamers, however, was that the majority of gamers had always played solo. SPI began surveying its customers in the late 1960s with reader feedback cards and found in excess of 50 percent of those surveyed played alone - before the invention of board wargames specifically designed for solo play. "In the 1990s, the number of games played solitaire exceeds sixty percent."³ SPI recognized this phenomenon early on; in the very first issue of their "house organ", MOVES Magazine, they published a "how to" article on maximizing solitaire play.⁴

As the focus of wargames decreased in scope, however, the ability to picture one's self in the role of the commanders increased. It became possible to become personally involved in the events on the game board. It had been possible to picture yourself as the generalissimo of the Red Army in Tactics II, of course, but it was still a somewhat abstract experience to push entire divisions from square to square.

You Command The Action

In 1977, Squad Leader not only put the player into the role of a company commander, in charge of 100 or so men engaged in desperate battle, but with a unique Campaign Game and a set of blank "leader" counters, permitted the player to lend his own name and personality to the proceedings. For the first time, the 1/2-inch cardboard square represented one person - the player - and his skill at arms would have repercussions not just in the current game, but in a series of games, with the ability to rise in rank and ability.

Playing for Experience

What the Squad Leader campaign game permitted was the creation of another category of "casual" game player - the Experiential Player. Like the other categories that have been created (and none of these are set in stone, as they are creations of convenience for the specific purposes of those that create them) they freely overlap. They can be the bane of the Serious Competitor who wants to play him, or the Stolid Historian who wants to debate him. He might even be highly sought after by the Crass Commercialist who wants to sell extra historical modules to him because he knows he can "hook" him based on new "flavours" alone.

What the Experiential Player could do was actually relive some of the excitement the ad copy on the back of the box promised, which proclaimed "YOU are the Squad Leader." The game became less a function of calculating the chance of a 2:1 odds attack with three regiments at Quatre Bras, and more about whether or not he had the guts to order his last five men into close combat against that tank around the next block. Imagination became part of the game. The following was recently posted in an ASL-themed blog, and illustrates the imaginative approach still taken to Squad Leader's offspring:

If there's one hallmark that makes a good wargame it's the narrative generated from the game. This is something you're just not going to get out of a Euro like Agricola or Puerto Rico or whatever. For example, take the case of the Cursed MMG.

Early in the game, around turn 2, the Russians who would have been manning a MMG...ran off after taking fire. They left a perfectly good support weapon lying around and in the next rally phase I rolled a SIX -- what the HELL?! Pick the damn thing up you scrubs!

I should have known then that the MMG was cursed. Slick with the blood of the Russian who last held it, the MMG was to be an albatross on the neck of every German squad who managed to pick it up... By game's end, its bad mojo extended into the full hex and even squads who didn't pick it up were gunned down...⁵

Rise of the Individual

While SPI recognized early on the proclivity to play games solitaire, it did not result in a great number of solitaire titles, and of those released, success has been mixed. Games like Iwo Jima and B-17: Queen of the Skies were mainly exercises in dice rolling. Tokyo Express received greater attention, and the title most germaine to this article, Ambush!, was perhaps the most successful, spawning several sequels, including three follow-ups, a companion game with sequel, a two-player version, and a tank-based variant as well as a number of third-party variants and scenarios. Ambush! was perhaps the most intense expression of the notion that players sat down with wargames solely for the Experience - that is to say, to engage their imagination and to indulge in escapism, rather than emphasis on the other often-cited historical, educational or competitive aspects to wargaming which had often been used to "legitimize" the hobby in the early days when escapism was really not possible given the limited physical components and interactivity of the games themselves. Not coincidentally, Ambush! was a man-to-man level game, with each game piece representing a single soldier, and the player was given free reign to name each member of his squad as he saw fit. Like the SL Campaign Game, each "character" had the opportunity to advance in skills, rank and ability over time as the player campaigned his squad through several missions.

The rise of role playing games in the early 1970s must surely have had an impact on legitimizing how wargamers approached the experience also. The first military themed RPG was published in 1979 - SPI once again led the way, with Commando - followed by almost a dozen other titles in the 1980s, none of which came anywhere close to the popularity of the fantasy or science fiction RPGs. But it may have been a simple matter of technology.

In 1992 Wolfenstein 3D was released and began appearing on home computers; it popularized the First Person Shooter genre, had a tinge of history to it (there were "Nazis" in an underground cavern and the Horst Wesel song was accurate, if not slightly offensive to the sensitive), and there was no need to pull out cardboard pieces and paper maps. By 1997, Muzzle Velocity was offering something much more historical - accurate 3D models of historical equipment in camouflage paint jobs, first person tank crew and infantryman views, the ability to switch between the 3D world and a 2D map; not all that remarkable, given that M-1 Tank Platoon had done many of the same things in 1989, but with vector graphics and without the infantry. The games weren't about counting firepower factors, they were about being there on the battlefield and experiencing it. Just like role playing games, first person shooters and 3D battle games were letting wargamers set foot in other worlds.

 

 Knocked out Sherman tank in Muzzle Velocity (1997)

Trends

The focus on solitaire play and on individual achievement/campaign play would seem to have been influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the fantasy and role playing worlds. Real militaries emphasize teamwork and the necessity to work together to overcome obstacles. Basic training is an ordeal that takes weeks to accomplish. Divisions are commanded not by single commanders, but by staffs of officers trained in administration and logistics who wrestle with problems well beyond the ken of the uninitiated. The trend in military gaming is towards games such as Brothers in Arms which, while touting its "realism" because it occasionally asks the player to maneuver riflemen to a flanking position, still manages to ignore most of the realities of modern combat, specifically but not restricted to the complexities of command and control.

In actual fact, first person shooters are so unlike military practice, they are usually not considered "wargames"; but a new category has slipped in - "tactical shooters." These are man-to-man games set in the first person with a level of realism and fidelity superior to the "first person shooters." The differences are apparent; tactical shooters have no "health packs" or ability to magically heal, for one. Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault have been assigned to this category. They also claim to have actual restrictions on command and control, in both single- and multi-player mode. Kill ratios are way down in the tactical shooters, and just seeing the enemy is a real accomplishment - as it usually is in real life.

As the games increase in scale, to squad- and platoon- level, the level of abstraction also increases, to simulate command and control problems and various types of "friction." The Experiential Player becomes drawn out of the game, and makes decisions not just for one person, but represents in reality a syndicate of commanders. It's possible to lose one's self in the experience, but it doesn't become the entire point of the game. An example is the initial iteration of Combat Mission where watching the 3D "movie" is necessary to plan strategy each turn. Another is in ASL, where smaller "narratives" get naturally built around individual vignettes, as we saw illustrated above with the Russian MMG.

 

My Final Word

At the most basic level, every wargamer is an Experiential Player, given that the point of playing a game is to have fun or be entertained. The point of the article is to describe a player who plays for escapism above all else. Anyone who has fired up Panzer Commander just to maneuver the camera around one of the maps will relate to him. So will anyone who has used a map editor to recreate their own childhood neighbourhood.

My Question To You

Is it possible to sub-divide the Experiential Player class?

Notes

1. Kosnett, Phil "What is a Wargamer?" Moves Magazine (Issue Nr. 19 Feb-Mar 1975)
2. Schilling, Kurt "Can You Ever Be Sure? Historical Research and ASL" (ASL Journal 2)
3. Dunnigan, James F. Wargames Handbook, Third Edition (Writers Club Press, Lincoln, NE, 2000) p.304 ISBN 0-595-15546-4
4. Richardson, Jay "Solitaire Wargaming" Moves Magazine (Issue Nr. 1 Feb 1972)
5. http://triplepbf.blogspot.com/2009/06/d1-aar-part-one-things-always-start.html

The Question of Battle Doctrine and National Mythology in the Second World War

This is a mirror of an article original appearing at this link: http://forums.gamesquad.com/blog.php?b=600

The first commercially successful tactical wargames rules were actually based on miniatures, and indeed, the first true tactical wargames were heavily influenced by, and even marketed to, miniatures players. Certainly comparisons to miniatures were rife in articles on PanzerBlitz, and not long after its publication, Strategy & Tactics published its own miniatures rules called T-34, now long forgotten. When Squad Leader hit the scene in 1977, advertising appealed directly to miniatures players by name.

There has been a resurgence in recent years in the popularity of miniatures systems, though one can safely say that the miniatures players never really went away. Popular systems have always been part of the wargaming scene, from the earliest efforts of men like Donald Grant who published “do it yourself” type books, to the publication of Tractics, to more sophisticated rules sets too numerous to mention in the 1970s and 80s, yet never have they occupied the mainstream popularity or commercial success of role playing fantasy titles such as Dungeons & Dragons or board games such as Advanced Squad Leader.

The miniaturists are making efforts at catching up commercially, with slick new products today like Flames of War or Axis and Allies; there is the use of “big industry names” in other cases, and in all, an attempt to win wide market appeal. I recently picked up a recent publication with the name Frank Chadwick attached to it, and was struck by the production values. (Chadwick’s name is well known in the annals of board wargaming.) The book – Honour of the Regiment - was an overview of a rules set for British Commonwealth forces in the Second World War, with detailed unit values and the usual bits of history and regimental trivia thrown into the mix, as part of the reboot of Command Decision/Test of Battle. What struck me, however, was Chadwick’s attempt to riff on an old myth:

A few years ago I was part of a symposium on offensive tactical doctrine of World War II. Each panel member had a single country for which they made a presentation - mine happened to be Germany. Once the four or five of us had all made our presentations, someone in the audience pointed out that there had been no panelist presentation for British offensive tactical doctrine. (This was, as you might imagine, in the United States.) The moderator was apologetic, but explained that he had been unable to find a panelist to give a position briefing on the British, but wondered if any of the panelists would now like to give an improvised talk. After we looked at each other for a few seconds, and it became clear that no one else was about to do so, I stood up and gave a short presentation on British Army Offensive Doctrine in World War II.

"We didn't have any," I said, and sat down. After the inevitable laughter, I stood up again and elaborated. (1)

It struck me as not particularly funny, not because I had heard it or jokes like it many times before (there was an old saw pasted up in my Reserve Army regiment’s orderly room for many years by an unattributed and probably apocryphal Red Army officer of the Cold War era who was reputed to have said “the problem with training to fight against Canadian Army doctrine is that the Canadian Army has no doctrine”) but because it was so patently untrue.

Commonwealth Doctrine – 1944

The term doctrine is simply defined as an established set of procedures to solving complex problems; in the military sense, it refers to a standard set of maneuvers, kinds of troops and weapons and the way in which they are employed as a default approach to a kind of operation.

In February 1944, Lieutenant-General Guy G. Simonds, the commander of 2^nd Canadian Corps, gave a detailed series of tactical notes to commanders preparing for the invasion of Europe, based on his battle experience in Italy as commander of the 1^st Canadian Infantry Division. The notes are remarkable for their clarity and in describing so well the course of tactical battles to come in Normandy, the breakout across northern France and Belgium, the fighting in the Netherlands, the Rhineland, the Rhine crossings, and the final battles in Germany. (2)

• For attacks on prepared positions, adequate reconnaissance was emphasized, with assaults to take place on a limited front with "all available" artillery so that "really heavy support may be given." A Commonwealth division of nine infantry battalions had three field regiments of 25-pounder guns (24 guns in each), while each infantry battalion had six 3-inch mortars of its own. The divisional support battalion had a company of 4.2-inch mortars. The corps artillery had additional fire support available in 4.5”, 5.5” and 7.2” gun regiments, and for large scale operations, tactical air support was available ranging from fighter-bombers to medium and even four-engine heavy bomber support. Naval gunfire was also used while in Normandy.
• Initial objectives had to penetrate to beyond the normal range of German mortars, or else those mortars had to be dislodged by counter-battery fire (difficult to do owing to the ease with which they could be deployed in cover and concealment).
• Consideration was to be given in large-scale operations as to when to move friendly artillery forward, and when to schedule friendly air power, possibly as a substitute.
• Simonds also impressed on his commanders the value of friendly tanks and anti-tank guns being forward with the infantry, as well as the use of artillery against enemy tanks, directed by Forward Observation Officers of field artillery batteries travelling with the leading infantry.
• Anti-tank obstacles and thick minefields were common and initial attacks were to be made by the infantry to secure gaps or breach obstacles

These tactical points were raised in reaction to German defensive battle doctrine, which stressed the following:

• Forward positions were defended lightly, thinly held with small groups of men strong in automatic weapons.
• Stronger infantry forces were held in reserve, ready to counter-attack where necessary.
• Forward positions were strongly supported by mortars, usually located 3,000 to 4,000 yards to the rear, capable of firing ahead of or anywhere within the defended zone. The Germans pre-registered their own positions and immediately and heavily shelled and mortared them once they were known to be lost.
• Tanks and self-propelled guns were held in reserve and when enemy infantry had broken into friendly positions, would move in and deliver direct fire at very close range.

While a Canadian assault, properly planned and supported, might easily break the crust of such a defensive set-up, the German policy of counter-attacking with fresh reserves and armour meant that the real battle was one of defeating the follow on forces, which would also include any mortars not over-run in the initial assault. For this reason, Simonds insisted that planning had to consider the German counter-attacks as a routine part of the initial battle.

Did It Work?

The drawback in practice was that the “set-piece” approach was often applied, in fact, piecemeal. Operations that should have been assigned to divisions were sometimes assigned to brigades. Such was the case in Operation WINDSOR in early July 1944, when four battalions of the 3^rd Canadian Infantry Division were ordered to assault Carpiquet and the adjacent airport. While the village fell – it was defended by just 50 fanatic SS men – the assault over open ground against the south hangars and control towers was stopped cold by automatic weapons fire and tanks. During Operation CHARNWOOD a few days later, the three divisions of British and Canadians again met stiff resistance, but managed to batter their way into Caen. The Highland Light Infantry of Canada did everything right at Buron during CHARNWOOD; they fought a textbook operation according to doctrine: (3)

• They cleared the enemy mines before zero hour
• They laid on an extensive opening barrage
• They attacked with a squadron of tanks, as well as mine-clearing tanks and troops of M-10 tank-destroyers
• Their reconnaissance included a prisoner taken only days before who provided intelligence of the identity of the defenders and the location of weapons, in addition to aerial reconnaissance and other patrol data; the battalion even built a scale model of the terrain to rehearse the operation on
• The unit had occupied the ground opposite Buron for four weeks and was intimately familiar with the ground
  
   Canadian Army Intelligence Information Sheet dated 2 July 1944
  showing the HLI's deployment for the Buron Assault on 8 July.

Unfortunately, the Germans also fought according to their own doctrine, and the 3^rd Battalion, SS Panzergrenadier Regiment 25 held on to the village grimly. They held the forward edge of the town lightly, with automatic weapons sited in an anti-tank ditch. When they were finally cleared from the ditch and the leading edge of the village, their guns and mortars shelled Buron violently and kept it under constant attack so that the only vehicles able to enter and leave were jeeps and carriers to evacuate the wounded. Of the 15 Canadian tanks supporting the attack, 10 were knocked out. The only departure from doctrine was that no infantry counter-attack was delivered, but a company of Panther tanks did counter-attack after the village fell late in the afternoon, but was beaten back. Even then, some SS troops held out inside the village until the next day. The total cost to the HLI was 262 dead and wounded, of a full strength of about 800 (just under 500 of those being in the rifle companies).

 The village itself was heavily defended with tanks, artillery, mines, automatic weapons, and three rifle companies
supported by a heavy weapons company with machine guns and mortars.

Buron is an extreme case; the SS troops of the Hitler Youth Division had fought unusually fanatically – many refused to surrender, having been told they would be murdered if they did so (their division had been responsible for the murder of over 130 Canadian POWs immediately following D-Day, on the other hand, and so the advice was not entirely unwarranted), and many were teenagers with a high degree of motivation and political indoctrination. Reports of soldiers holding out even in the face of point-blank 75-mm tank fire were made after the battle. It was one of the costliest days for any Canadian battalion in Normandy, and the worst day of the HLI for the entire war. But the doctrine had worked; Buron had fallen, against the toughest of opponents.

 A tank of the Sherbrooke Fusilier Regiment sits abandoned in Buron on 8 July. Buron
had previously been the scene of furious fighting a month earlier, on 7 June, as well, when the
3rd Canadian Division and 12th SS Panzer Division clashed on the day after D-Day.

In other cases, German technical superiority, especially in the case of armour, was overwhelming. In the words of historian Terry Copp:

In theory there was nothing wrong with Simonds' version of Allied battle experience but in practice the thinly armoured, undergunned Sherman tanks were seldom able to accompany the infantry onto the objective, and almost never able to stay to help meet the counterattacks. The self-propelled anti-tank guns stayed well to the rear and it usually took some time to get the towed six-pounder and seventeen-pounder anti-tank guns into position. All too often the infantry had only the artillery to (rely) upon, not only to "shoot" them onto the objective but also to break up the counterattacks with well-directed concentrations. More than one infantry company commander has described his role in North-West Europe as "escorting the artillery Forward Observation Officer (FOO) across France." (4)

My Final Word

It is interesting that historians and especially casual observers have failed so utterly to understand what the doctrines of the various armies really were. The Blitzkrieg Myth has been persistent since the first Allied newspapermen wrote their first hysterical accounts in 1939 and the myth was perpetuated by post-war apologists seeking to explain away why a truly unprepared and in many ways mediocre German Army had gotten the best of larger Allied forces in Norway, then France, then North Africa. The operationally competent Red Army of 1944-45 is very often dismissed in popular culture as having had no abilities whatsoever beyond the artillery barrage and the human wave, and the British Commonwealth armies are generally maligned – as Chadwick did, if only in jest – for bumbling about and only fighting when it suited them, in “set-piece” battles, as if fighting a battle you were prepared to fight was somehow something to be ashamed of.

My Question To You

Is it not eminently sensible to fight only when you are prepared? Perhaps the only army more sensible than the British in that regard were the Italians who, when it was clear they were on the wrong end of the conflict, had the good sense to capitulate. Sadly, their divisions in Yugoslavia suffered terribly in the process, and many in mainland Italy fared no better. Why, though, do the Germans continue to get the lion’s share of “glory” – if that is what it is – for continuing to surrender the lives not only of millions of their soldiers and citizens, but to continue the suffering of their captives, their slave labourers, and their enemies, all to no apparent purpose – and be praised for their skill at arms while losing battle after battle, usually by mounting costly local counter-attacks both large and small?

1. Chadwick, Frank The Honour of the Regiment: The British and Commonwealth Armies in the West in World War II, 1939-45 (Test of Battle Games, 2008)
2. Lieutenant General Guy Simonds Directive, February 1944, attached to War Diary, 2nd Canadian Corps
3. Snowie, Allan J. Bloody Buron (The Boston Mills Press, Erin, ON, 1984)
4. Copp, Terry. The Brigade (Fortress Publications Inc., Stoney Creek, ON, 1992)

Seeing The Future: Thoughts on Combat Results in Tactical Games

Stephen B. Patrick presented some detailed thoughts on Combat Results Tables (CRT) in the February 1972 issue of Moves magazine that are interesting not only in their ability to briefly summarize their history but in exploring ongoing issues as today's game designers - both board and computer - continue the quest to best marry playability and realism in a single vehicle. I presented some thoughts on the subject in November 2008 on another site, which I'm presenting here in revised form. ("Professor Professorson" just found a link to the entire archive of back issues, incidentally, which Greg Costikyan uploaded to archive.org - read the details here.)

At the time the article in Moves was written, wargaming at the tactical scale in board games was in its infancy though miniatures rules had been promoted by pioneers in the hobby such as Jack Scruby in the U.S. and Charles Grant in the U.K. for many years. While Avalon Hill's PanzerBlitz contained many innovative concepts compared to the standard fare since board wargames first appeared on the market in 1958, such as isomorphic mapboards and a multiple scenario format, the method in which the game produced combat results remained unremarkable. When SPI began producing tactical games - including Soldiers: Tactical Combat in 1914-15, and Grunt, set in Vietnam, the CRT was similarly - speaking purely from hindsight - uninspired.

James F. Dunnigan defines a CRT in the 3rd Edition of his Wargames Handbook as

A Probability Table that shows the possible results of all combats allowed within a particular game. The greater the ratio of attacker to defender strength, the higher the chance of success. Because so many things can go wrong during the combat itself, a die or other random-number generator is used to determine the actual result. These tables are usually calculated based on what information is available on actual historical losses.

Stephen Patrick noted the trend in games in the late 1960s and into the new decade of the '70s was to simply re-use CRTs from game to game. In his article in February 1972 he identified correctly "the touchstones of authenticity and playability" and how the two concepts inter-related:

One can start with full authenticity and back off far enough to gain playability, or start with a purely playable system and work toward realism by adding the elements of historicity to give the right flavor. There will be a gray area where the playable takes on the flavor of war and where the war becomes playable. Moreover, this point will differ depending on the point of origin.

He then contrasted the Avalon Hill approach to games with the SPI approach; he contended that Avalon Hill's "playability" perspective simply produced games with similar rules for every game while SPI produced more historical games with tailor made rules sets. As an example of Avalon Hill's devotion to playability, he cited their CRT, which was a standard in their line of games to that date:

A - Attacker back 2
D - Defender back 2
Elim - Eliminated

When Strategy & Tactics began to publish tactical games (and it produced tactical titles outside of the "modern" genre on which I focus my attention), they similarly retained a common CRT with simple results in the platoon and company level games of the time:

"No result"
"Elim"
"Dispersed"

Patrick's thesis was that this "tactical Combat Results Table is the most archaic element in S&T's bag of tricks - the most playable/non-realistic element currently in use."

What Does It Mean?

Simply put, the CRT delineates the results of combat, and Patrick suggested that any action in which two opposing forces meet can result one of a limited number of results at the end of a fixed period of time.

* Melee (both forces remain locked in battle)
* Attacker repelled
* Defender repelled in good order
* Defender routed

Patrick noted that there were other possibilities; a pyhrric victory in which the attacker was severely damaged in the battle, for example. Tertiary considerations were fatigue levels, whether an attack was an initial action, a continuation of a previous attack, or the end of a battle. His main question, however, was how to transpose the basic CRT results to a game such that it adequately represented the history being portrayed.

The easiest result to simulate, according to Patrick, was the "no result", and a "dispersed" unit he felt was better described as "shaken" - temporarily unable to fight. He felt "eliminated" was draconian, as

...few battles result in an entire unit being destroyed to a man in a given time period, particularly during the brief period of time portrayed in the tactical games. Thus, there must simultaneously be some way to reflect the decline in strength from being in the thick of it and, at the same time, to get units off the board. After all, pasteboard pieces don't really have morale or take losses, so something must be injected to bring the authentic within the realm of playable. The 1914 solution of stepped units is obviously the best way to reflect casualties short of going the bookkeeping routes. But even (this) is viewed with displeasure by some (and) requires the injection of a whole set of pieces. The object here is to consider the requirements of a Combat Results Table which can be inserted in any game without actually having to totally revamp the rules.

Another solution was to add an increased dispersion rule, whereby a second retreat caused elimination, and a third option discussed by Patrick was to consider two retreat possibilities - retreat and rout - and have routed units equate to eliminated for purposes of the game.

Patrick also talked about using different CRT for different phases of the battle - for example during the initial phase of a battle when morale of an attacker was high, and again when units were tired during the last phase of a battle. In effect, he felt a battle might need three separate CRT to adequately model the distinct phases of a battle. He felt that not only fatigue, but fanaticism and the effects of good training would make themselves felt in the latter phases of a battle and should be reflected in the game mechanics.

Theory and Practice: Soldiers

Tellingly, in Moves issue 4, in August 1972, detailed articles on the development of the game discuss the history of the development of infantry and artillery, show images of the different drafts of the map, talk about rules development and scenario drafts, but have no discussion of the CRT. It's not known if a non-standard CRT was ever even contemplated.

Predicting the Future

Patrick ended his article with the following:

Returning to the real life situation...if the research is good (the result) should be a Combat Results Table which can complement the accuracy of the rest of the rules in evoking the period in question. The obvious point, though, is that the Combat Results Table now becomes an integral part of game design, rather than a handy plug-in section, such as the initial description of the pieces and the game map, and it is as important to make the Combat Results Table valid as it is to calculate the Attack Strength of a crossbow.

Logical Outgrowths

CRT development stagnated in tactical games at the squad and platoon level; two years later,Tank! still had simple odd-ratios driving the results of the CRT, though there were now panic results. Game development was focusing on whether play should be simultaneous movement or sequential and the CRT was still being viewed, perhaps, as simply a given.

When man-to-man games like Sniper! and Patrol came along, however, their very nature caused further development of the CRT as there were a greater number of weapons systems in play.

Which brings us to John Hill. He viewed the possible combat results in Squad Leader as still a fairly simple proposition. Despite the fact he was contemplating what would be an enormously ambitious and complicated game system in which multiple weapons systems would interact, he argued that it didn't matter if a squad of ten men were machine-gunned in the open, shelled moving through woods, pelted in their foxholes with grenades or burned out of a bunker with a flamethrower, the results would be the same - they would be killed, they would suffer some form of morale loss, or there would be no appreciable impact at all. "Design for Effect" became the mantra for Squad Leader's development, and was used to explain away inconsistencies in the design, wherein European streets became 80 metre wide boulevards, and physically fit men could only move 160 metres in two minutes. He simply "factored in" grenades as part of "close combat" and "point blank fire" and did away with the need for special rules or counters for them altogether.

PC Games

The first Combat Mission titles remained partially faithful to the notion that players wanted to see CRT results; while there were no visible dice rolls or interventions of fate, there was lip service made to such things as "fanaticism", and moreover, firepower stats were presented in unit information screens, and was available in the game via mouseclick during the orders phase, as was cover stats for infantry units, morale and fatigue levels (though not necessarily the explicit effects of same), as well as detailed armour value for AFVs, general penetration capabilities of weapons, blast values for artillery, etc.

Firepower and cover stats were available right in the main game space of Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin.

While there was no longer a CRT for the player to refer to, enterprising players could recreate specific battlefield phenomena in the editor to determine probabilities - if he was curious how often a specific tank type would bog in a particular type of terrain and weather conditions, he could create a sample scenario and run it repeatedly until he had a sample to estimate from. Websites and collections of forum postings with links to just "research" have taken the place of the CRT in some cases. A "Player's Guide" was released for Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin with tables of unit stats, which players could look up. The handbook was not billed as a "scenario designer's guide" - though it did contain interviews with scenario authors as an appendix and the data was likely aimed as much at them as players.

Hidden Outcomes and the Deletion of the CRT:

Given everything that was said in 1972 about the importance of having a valid CRT, there seems to be a trend in video games to keeping game routines hidden from the gamers who play them. The obvious desire is for "realism" and the common argument is that real life commanders "don't count firepower factors." Nonetheless, the player has to have a way to relate to the game, which has to use mathematical equations and logarithms to simulate results. Having access to the data increases understanding of how the data works - and the more "realistic" the simulation, the less likely the player is to have access to the data. In Panzer Command, for example (based on the Panzer War miniature rules), players have the ability to modify unit data if it doesn't fit their perceptions of reality, though the data isn't easily accessible inside the game (altering it is done via editable "xml" files - text documents which are loaded into the "back end" before the game is started). In the second generation Combat Mission game engine, where small arms and tank fire is ostensibly tracked by a real world physics engine, there is very little way for players to anticipate "hit chances" or probabilities beyond very general assumptions regarding terrain and situation - which is exactly what the developers intended. They would argue "CRTs" are a wargame construct, and that their wargame should be devoid of them!

My questions to you:
Patrick starts his proposition with "if the research is good". How much is actually "knowable" about what goes on at the tactical level, that would justify things like firepower factors or combat results to begin with? And must the designer choose between accurately modeling the proceedings (tracking every exchange of gunfire with precision) or the outcomes (10-25% killed in every average engagement, 25-50% wounded)?

This screenshot of Tigers Unleashed was unveiled on another gaming site. Do wargames really have to have hexes and counters in order for players to be able to reasonably access detailed data about their own troops' capabilities?

Addendum: in the comments to my original article, James Lowry noted that Anzio's CRT permitted step-reduction results as early as 1969. Advanced Squad Leader added a form of step-loss results to the CRT as well, an extension of a game function started in the original SL game series.

Special Editions of Wargaming Magazines

There has been some confusion about the release of Operations magazine Special Edition No.1, particularly among fans of Advanced Squad Leader here at gamesquad. Perhaps a look at the history of wargaming magazines might ease some of the tension.

Magazines and House Organs

The first name in wargaming magazines was The General, which went into publication in 1964, as a bi-monthly periodical devoted to supporting Avalon Hill's line of wargames, with articles on game tactics, history, and industry news. Wargaming in the modern recreational sense was in its infancy, and AH had been producing wargames for a mass market for only five years. The General was intended at first as a general interest magazine, but developed into a "house organ" in which discussion was restricted to AH published games.

Strategy & Tactics was founded in 1966 as a wargaming "fanzine", or amateur publication, by US Air Force Staff Sergeant Chris Wagner. It was intended as independent competition with The General. The magazine did not meet with commercial success, and James F. Dunnigan bought it out for a dollar, founding Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) to publish it (it was also published under the name Poultron Press).

The rest, as they say, is history. The General went on until 1998 until AH was sold to Hasbro. SPI was bought out by TSR, and S&T eventually ended up in the hands of Decision Games, who also acquired Fire & Movement, another wargaming magazine started in 1976. F&M was a true hobby (or industry, if you prefer) magazine, whereas SPI was more of a military history magazine with a game in every issue.

Other titles appeared in the early 1970s; Moves was SPI's own house organ, and discussed strategies and published variants for the games published in S&T. Panzerfaust was another fanzine that turned into Campaign when editor Don Greenwood left for Avalon Hill; it folded its tent in 1982. The Wargamer was another magazine that offered a game in each issue between 1977 and 1986, and then was resurrected in a second volume briefly from 1987 to 1990.

Operations
As The General was nearing the end of its run, The Boardgamer was founded by Bruce Monnin. Avalon Hill had been bought out by Hasbro and the future of their games was in doubt. Monnin intended to continue support for Avalon Hill products in the same way The General. The magazine never achieved high circulation and boasted only 200 subscribers although it did manage to survive for nine years. The magazine also lacked color and professional graphics.

The Gamers, under Dean Essig, who had been producing such games as the Tactical Combat Series starting with Bloody 110 in the late 1980s, had their own house organ called Operations which began publication in 1991. Many threads came together when Multi-Man Publications acquired the rights to Advanced Squad Leader as well as The Gamers line of products. Bruce Monnin later, in 2004, became editor of Operations. The stated aim of Multi-Man Publishing was to have Operations be to their line of games what The General was to Avalon Hill's line of products.

Advanced Squad Leader
ASL had been considered by many to be the premier game in the Avalon Hill line; with a dozen modules and a rulebook set in a 3 ring binder representing years of rules development, it occupied a special pride of place. It had its own periodical under Avalon Hill - the ASL Annual - which became so popular it was published twice annually for a brief period. Under MMP, a new periodial, the ASL Journal, was begun.

The development of Advanced Squad Leader into a sophisticated and complex game system made it difficult for newcomers to get into the hobby, and so the Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kits were printed by MMP; additional scenarios were published for these ASLSKs in Operations, but other ASL content was restricted to the Journal.

Operations Special Edition No. 1
In the fall of 2008, the first Special Edition of Operations was announced. For the first time, full ASL content was to be included in the magazine; including a full Historical ASL module with map, campaign game, and two scenarios, as well as a scenario for Valor of the Guards. The magazine also offered a complete mini-game (unrelated to ASL) depicting the battle for Iwo Jima complete with map and mounted counters, as well as a wealth of articles on other products in MMP's line, for the price of $40.

The controversy among some ASL collectors who now have their noses out of joint is that they feel put out by the fact that they were unable to obtain the ASL material except by purchasing the special edition of the magazine.

Special Editions in the History of the Medium

The number of "special editions" that have been produced by other publications has been low and the Operations special issue may in fact represent the most content-rich special issue ever produced for a wargaming magazine in terms of practical content. A complete game and an HASL CG between two covers seems to be something unmatched, especially with the additional scenarios, and articles for a variety of other games.

The "special editions" of Strategy & Tactics were basically historical articles and minor variant rules - they actually had less content than their normal "game in a magazine" regular issues.

The General did a "special" issue for Origins in 1988 that was basically reprints of issues they had previously run, from issues ranging from Volume 8 to Volume 24, on arcane stuff from how to pronounce Japanese ship names to a glossary of fighter pilot terminology. There was no new content.

Moves had at least two special editions, but they weren't printed out of sequence. Issue 71 in Aug-Sep 1992 was simply sub-titled as Special Edition #2. The issue was designed for the beginning wargamer, and featured an introductory mini-game, a "Basic Wargame Library" article, an article index to Moves and S&T by military period, and an article on "Basic Tactics for Beginners" as special content.

In my opinion, Operations presented something truly unique, especially in comparison to what other publications have historically offered up in their own special issues.

The goal
The goals of these special issues seems to have been the same in all cases - to welcome new players to the hobby, to provide "special" content to veteran members of the ranks, and to give a wide view of what the hobby has to offer. The General did it by offering up a broad base of its past articles. Moves did it with a handy index to its past articles and an introductory wargame. Operations hit all the bases by covering many of its popular titles with various articles, as well as appealing to new and older gamers alike with a brand new introductory-level title. It's loyal ASL fans were treated to brand new content as well - though interestingly the Singling situation had been covered in not one but two previous scenarios in "official" ASL and was now being done in "historical" form on the actual terrain.

In short, Operations was doing what all special editions had done in the past, offering broad coverage of what MMP had to offer its customers.

My final word
If Ladies Home Journal has a cover story on Barack Obama that I really want a copy of but nothing else in the magazine interests me, I have the option of either buying the magazine knowing that my money will largely be invested in that single article, or I can simply pass on the issue altogether if I feel my money is poorly spent by doing that.

My question to you
Why should that be different for ASL players?