Scenario Design Notes: Delay on Tiger Route (Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy - Commonwealth Forces)

TWC Delay on Tiger Route was uploaded to the Battlefront.com Repository on 6 November 2012; this author was also the scenario designer. There were limited Designer's Notes appended to the scenario file. For those interested, a more detailed description of the genesis of this scenario is offered for review and, if desired, further discussion below.

Inspiration

The current evolution of the Combat Mission game engine favours smaller scale battles, and appeals by at least some in public venues, such as the official game forum, for small (i.e. company-strength or smaller) forces have been conspicuous. The author's interest has always been with historical situations (as opposed to obviously fictional engagements drawn up from whole cloth). 

There is a tradition among Combat Mission scenario designers in pushing the boundaries of what is available in the editor, to depict actions strictly outside the historical bounds set out by the program. For that reason, research into small-unit engagements taking place during Operation MARKET-GARDEN in September 1944 have been of interest to the author. Equipment, terrain, weather and order of battle information is adequately represented by that which is present in the editor, and scenarios set in that time-frame will hopefully whet the appetite for the promised official offering currently - it is said - under development.

Research

As the author discussed in detail in another venue1, there is some utility in reviewing the work of others before embarking on one's own design work. Not only is it a good idea to check on scenarios done for the same game/title to prevent duplication (though nothing says that multiple scenarios depicting the same action can't be widely different in design yet equally entertaining), but looking at scenarios in other game systems can also yield dividends as far as suggesting scenario design ideas, from basic idea inspiration to more detailed data such as force composition or suggested victory conditions.

Such was the case here. The scenario Delayed on Tiger Route (note the slight difference in the first word) was published by a third party publisher2, for the Advanced Squad Leader game system in 1996, accompanied by detailed designer's notes in the accompanying magazine.

Design

As with most ASL "conversions", major design changes had to be made to get this to work properly in Combat Mission.

Terrain

The most notable change was terrain; the wide open spaces of the Squad Leader boards are geared for a board game scaled at 40 metres per hex and contain large tracts of open ground. The boards are generic in nature and "woods" features are considered impenetrable at ranges past 40 metres, by either weapons or line of sight - though a type of "light woods" similar to the foliage in CM:BN is present in the form of "orchard" terrain. Line of sight is merely "hindered" through this terrain and represents less dense concentrations of trees.

The ASL map layout is featured at the ASL Scenario Archive (linked above) and appears as follows:

Michael Faulkner modified the "stock" ASL maps heavily (in addition to careful selection from among the 40+ extant geomorphic maps) to approximate the battlefield, suggesting he had done his homework on the actual terrain. Among the modifications were the removal of Level 1 hills, and addition of five overlays to increase the amount of buildings and woods hexes.

A modern Google Earth map of the battle zone, coupled with period photos and descriptions from a historical blog3, suggested a lay of the land quite close to what the ASL maps portrayed. The exact spot described in the historical snippet was only surmised; a thorough search of unit war diaries from archival sources, or even a better search of second-hand accounts in histories may have turned up better data, but the author was satisfied that a representative sample of terrain was found that would produce a workable scenario. 

Google View

 There were several key elements key to the terrain that needed to be captured on the map:

1. The main road to Oosterbeek (actually the Heelsum-Arnhem road), which British forces were attempting to travel down, the main purpose of their presence in the area,
2. A "side road", as mentioned in the source, from which opposing German forces were able to launch an attack,
3. Woods, part of the forested area west of Oosterbeek conspicuous on period maps and photos,
4. Fences; in actuality four-foot chain-link fences, mentioned as having influenced ASL scenario designer Faulkner's design choices (specifically, forbidding the use by players of a rule known as 'infantry bypass movement', restricting the mobility of infantry),
5. Limited elevation changes/contour, consistent with the unique nature of the Netherlands.

Delay on Tiger Route map, looking towards the north-east

Other clues to the terrain were garnered from the book Retake Arnhem Bridge, which also includes a full-colour reproduction of a wartime 1:50,000 contour and terrain map of the Arnhem area.

Building the map was relatively straight-forward; the desire from the start was to permit interesting LOS combinations diagonally across the map, and so taller trees with limited underbrush were selected for the most part.

Wire fences were used to simulated the chain-link fences mentioned by Faulkner (and visible in contemporary photos, such as that below:)

On the road to Arnhem, September 1944. Note the chain link fence.

Forces

Forces appropriate to the map size were an obvious concern, part of the balancing act of any design where time/forces/victory conditions have to be coordinated to provide the player with something workable. As stated in the introduction, there is a perception, at least among some, that the new CM game engine is at its best in depicting smaller scale actions. The source ASL scenario was notable for only pitting 3.5 squad-equivalents against 6. 

The command, control and leadership models of CM purport to be more sophisticated than ASL's more primitive modelling, so a straight-across transfer of forces was never contemplated. The flexibility of options in the editor, however permitted the variability of the German order of battle to be better portrayed. The forces present in the actual engagement consisted of a Panzer Grenadier Training and Replacement Battalion. To reflect this, wildly varying Motivation, Fitness, and Experience levels were selected. 

Faulkner's design included two platoons of British paratroopers, and the original CM scenario featured this as well, with a more homogenous set of characteristics, selected from the upper range of options. While the 1st Airborne Division was a well-trained formation, it was relatively inexperienced, despite the earlier deployment of some of its component formations to North Africa, Sicily, etc. Nonetheless, in order that the relatively brittle infantry might be able to use the light anti-tank weaponry on which the scenario might hinge, higher than normal experience and motivation levels were granted as a balancing measure.

Victory Conditions

The most difficult part of getting a Combat Mission scenario design playable is working out a set of victory conditions (in the CM editor, this is a complex combination of "Parameters", "Terrain Objectives", "Unit Objectives" for each side). The second generation Combat Mission game engine has increased in sophistication as far as the types of interwoven factors that decide victory or defeat, though being hard-coded, the designer is still constrained to operate within those parameters.

Again, the designer could not simply ape what was done in the ASL scenario, given the more flexible VC of that system (permissible because of the manual nature of the system). Faulkner's scenario granted points for exiting British forces of the eastern side of the map - something the CM allows for - but adds or subtracts from this point total based on the number of forces the German elects to also withdraw from the map (simulating the strategic necessity to redeploy to meet other threats). While CM does allow the scenario designer to alter basic victory point totals with the addition of "bonus" points, they are not conditional - at least, not in the current iteration of the game engine. One hopes this might be considered for future developments.

Another consideration when designing "exit" scenarios is that units marked for exit must exit or the points awarded for their exit are lost. This is different than in games, such as ASL, where the player is not penalized for failure to exit, other than not receiving the points (i.e. units not exited count as zero, not a negative number as in CM). For that reason, a bonus of 100 points is assigned to the British player to offset an estimated "acceptable" loss of units in a typical scenario. This seemed to work out well in playtesting. Given a choice, however, another suggested change to the engine would be to give the designer the option between the two models of handling points for non-exiting units (i.e. either deducting their value from the point total, or permiting them to remain on map without penalty).

Comparison

Faulkner describes his ASL scenario as "a short, fast paced scenario that forces the British player (to) take some chances, the German player to be dogged in his defense, and for both players to use every advantage their nationality gives them." In ASL, nationality factors weigh more heavily than in CM, where nationality is not explicity modelled (British troops in ASL are immune to a "Cowering" rule, for example, where "doubles" on the dice reduces firepower, for just one example). Otherwise, in playtest, the CM scenario played rather quickly, given the small area, and the conspicuousness of key weapons systems means that the game can be decided quickly if not careful or a lucky hit is achieved. But, both sides have the tools to win the scenario if handled properly.

In reality, the Germans hit quickly and withdrew in a hurry, taking prisoners then pulling back down the same side road that they struck from. This was the thrust of the ASL design. Many ASL designs came down, in my opinion, to factor counting and last-turn mathematics, which are hard to replicate in CM, and perhaps rightfully so. It was for that reason that the VC permitted Geman exit points to count against British exit points in the original design. Since the CM scenario was being designed primarily from the British perspective, it was felt there was little reason to include this option for the Germans, and the VC didn't permit this kind of conditional VC in any event.

My Question To You

Any feedback on the scenario is welcome, though I'd be most interested in your thoughts on Victory Conditions, whether in CM or tactical games in general, and the kinds of additional parameters or improvements (or deletions) you would like to see. What works well, what would you like to see more of?

Notes

1. Scenario Designer's Handbook, pp. XXX -XXX
2. Schwerpunkt, issue 1, 1996 Scenario Designer:Michael Faulkner
3. http://runningdutch.blogspot.ca/2012/08/run-through-history-of-battle-of-arnhem.html

Scenario Design, Historical Accuracy, and Rediscovering Stanley Hollis’ Sunken Lane

Whenever a new scenario-based tactical game depicting ground combat comes out, designers began anew in their quest to find situations to depict. Tastes vary, and while the quests may be different, for such things as balanced match-ups, armour-heavy battles, scenarios that highlight specific equipment, favourite (often ‘elite’) units, etc., the struggle for new inspiration is a constant.

The quest leads scenario designers to mine a variety of sources; I don’t know how common it is for designers in one medium to review scenarios in another, but I wonder if it isn’t more common than some may let on (a review of the extant designer’s notes for games like ASL, Combat Mission, Panzer Command, etc., leads one to believe that inspiration comes from either the heavens or the sacred scrolls of the Library of Congress, not “ripping off” a Flames of War booklet they bought second-hand on ebay).

Plagiarism would come most readily to mind as the most obvious hazard of this practice. Not just because of the taint of the accusation, which in reality is probably more harsh than any possible harm of actual legal repercussion. Some may recall the “ASL2CM” website which was a proponent of replicating ASL in Combat Mission. Rumours had swirled of legal action, particularly when the site closed down, though this thread on the CM forums seems to indicate nothing so drastic, and that the decision was simple time constraints on the webmaster. Before the end, though, the site developed into a detailed primer on translating the venerable boardgame's terrain into Combat Mission maps, and gave advice on reproducing force match-ups, leadership values, game lengths and other “conversions”. The end results, as far as the CMx1 game engine went, were mixed for the most part, as some scenarios really didn’t translate well, particularly the terrain, which was highly stylized to match John Hill’s concept of “Design for Effect” in the original Squad Leader board game. (For just one example, urban streets in SL/ASL were laid out in an abstract system 40 to 80 metres across while CM had a 20 metre terrain grid - directly translating the maps meant that crossing a street was unrealistically dangerous.) So the largest hazard of “plagiarism” was that in the end scenarios directly translated were often not all that good because of the differing natures of the games themselves.

Strange collision of two worlds; the "ASL Interface" seemed like a good idea at the time.
So did the terrain mods. "Fusion" is often better in theory than practice.

As inspiration, though, a scenario designer is missing out on a lot of opportunity by simply refusing to look at the work of others, with tens of thousands of tactical-level wargame scenarios set in the Second World War now in print for various game systems, probably at minimum 5,500 for Advanced Squad Leader alone. (As of this writing, The Scenario Archive has tracked 5,647, including one-offs and self-published works.) While not suitable for a straight conversion into a game system, like Combat Mission, that uses realistic terrain, order of battle, and command and control systems (ASL in its basic form has none of these), those printed scenario cards that the ASL community cranks out do have the stamp of historical verisimilitude on them and if nothing else provide the start point for one’s own historical research. Some designers, such as Evan Sherry of Schwerpunkt magazine, even go so far as to provide their historical source material references right on the cards.

And when you find a scenario design by a fellow like the late Ian Daglish, who has published bona fide and well-respected volumes on military history in addition to taking those scenario designs to the next level with “historical modules” based on actual terrain, you get the comforting feeling the historical background you’re holding in your hands is probably going to be pretty accurate even if the scenario itself is stylized for playability.

All of which presupposes that historical accuracy (as opposed to pure fiction) is a precondition for a good scenario, which is certainly not the case. More on this later on.

First Cristot

The more recent ASL products are based on more stringent historical research; the Normandy 1944 product is an example, and Ian Daglish's name looms large in the credits.

The scenario FIRST CRISTOT jumps out immediately; aside from the "hook" of involving Stanley Hollis, it had a unique proposition, or sub-plot if you will, presented alongside the main story-line. The basic story, or objective, was familiar - a British unit with little support was to attack across bocage and farm land up a hill and take heavy punishment from SS troops in the process. Daglish went further in modelling the lack of tank-infantry co-operation by permitting either infantry, or armour, to move in each player turn - but not both.

Scenario design for Combat Mission now involves story-telling as much as simply researching order of battle, and so the scenario was something of an inspiration. My initial design for FIRST CRACK AT CRISTOT revolved around exploring this theme; it was impossible to place restrictions on command and control in the abstract manner of the board game, so the solution was to widely divide the tanks from the infantry, but testing showed that the scenario didn't seem to go anywhere, and besides, it wasn't as interesting as historical source information that was uncovered, which gave fairly specific information regarding the location of German positions. To that end, the map was reworked, lines of sight re-tooled, and positions re-arranged. The ASL scenario included a single company of British infantry, and reviewing the historical notes, it seemed prudent to make use of the entire historical arena:

Reproduced from The Creully Club newsletter.

The map in "First Crack at Cristot"

The final scenario is much larger - beyond the company-sized comfort level that by consensus seems to be "just right" for squad-based tactical games. Given the limited tactical options that individual companies had on the actual day, the scenario designer is hard pressed to split off individual actions into anything playable. In the actual event, The Green Howards lost 250 men, which would represent over half of the fighting strength of the battalion when one considers just the rifle companies. The challenge for the player of FIRST CRACK AT CRISTOT is to better utilize the resources at hand, or perhaps see if his luck is any better, than his historical counter-parts.

Bil Hardenberger’s Sunken Road

It occurred to me a week into the project that it might be wasted effort if someone else had already published something on the topic. A search on “Combat Mission Cristot” led me to a thread on an existing scenario, but to my surprise, it referred to one on the release disc for the original Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord from 2000.

I had not been involved in the CM community until well after release; however, one of the pre-release highlights had been a publicly disseminated battle between scenario designer Bil Hardenberger and beta tester Fionn Kelly.1 The original scenario had garnered much attention.

Bil Hardenberger's THE SUNKEN LANE from the original CM:BO release disc.
Forgotten now is the fact that this may have been the first CM scenario to orient the battle at 45 degrees to the map edges.

Map Design

There is nothing new to the idea that books often get judged by their covers; in CM a scenario's worth is determined in part by its map design. Not just whether the map is an appropriate size for the forces involved, or offers interesting tactical choices to both sides (criterion on which it naturally deserves to be judged), but also on aesthetics. This too is natural, and there is something visceral about the notion that a pleasant looking map is more fun to play on. The map from THE SUNKEN LANE was particularly unique in that the action was oriented at 45 degrees to the playing surface, helping prevent unrealistic use of the map edge as a secure flank, and widening the possible avenues of maneuver for the attacker.

In CMx1, good designers came up with different methods of providing visual interest to their maps; mixing up terrain types in unexpected combinations or choosing well-known historical locations to emulate. Going over maps with an eye for detail was the best way to cement the notion that the designer had done his homework; roads were smoothed out and straightened, buildings not allowed to overlap other terrain, slopes were smoothed off and made to look natural, billiard-flat terrain altered for relief, foliage arranged with the appearance of randomness, as it would in nature, etc.

In CMx2, the increased palette available to map designers gives greater power to provide convincing terrain. The cynical might note it gives greater ability to disguise poor scenario designs. The designer also faces more labour in his efforts; while the new elevation shaping tools have assisted in levelling the ground, other details have to be added painstakingly, such as road tiles, individual trees and bushes, and "flavor objects" which add verisimilitude, as well as the personalization of buildings by altering details of windowsill ornamentation, balconies, numbers of windows and doors, etc.



The 3-D terrain depictions in CM have come a long way. The inset shows the actual "Sunken Lane" south of Cristot, the colour screenshot comes from the CM:BN scenario. Second inset are the unit insignia of forces participating in the battle.

Game Designer as Story Teller

As alluded to above, the (good) CM scenario designer is now a story teller. Certainly when designing for solo play, the creation of AI plans almost requires a script of the action beforehand. The strategic AI requires the scenario designer to plan moves in advance, and in effect, to anticipate the actions of scenario players. It's a difficult proposition, and the ability to make the Tac AI appear to be operating randomly is to provide multiple plans to select from, none of which are chosen by the Strat AI according to the evolving tactical situation. It's not a complaint, but a truism that the scenario designer now must be able to script these AI plans and predict well what a reasonable player might do when playing solo. It may be fair to say that the CM player today has to be a better player himself, when designing for the new game engine, than in the past, or at the very least, a poor player had a better likelihood of sneaking a good design into publication and past the discerning eyes of those who would play it.

Changing Appetites?
If there ever was an appetite for strictly historical scenarios - and I'm not positive there really ever has been a huge following for such things - it is clearly diminishing as Combat Mission matures, perhaps in inverse proportion to the average age of its followers. It would be interesting to see what the new CM: Touch and other Apple applications will do to the demographics. Sadly, BFC may jealously guard these details as closely as they guard their sales figures, which is their prerogative as entrepreneurs. But the appeal of wargaming has always seemed to be more of a 'war is fun' approach than a strict retelling of history. The most successful games seem to have taken that approach - Advanced Squad Leader, for all its pretend gravitas, and those 5,500 deathly serious scenario cards, is about as realistic as Rick Jason ordering Vic Morrow around on a Hollywood backlot. Boardgames like Ambush! are still fondly recalled for their homage to war-as-fantasy/adventure, and even CM's designers seem to have cut their ties to reality firstly with the unique (for its setting and backstory) Shock Force project in its entirety, but also by indulging their scenario designers on the release disc of CM:BN, with a number of fictional and "semi-historical" scenarios. The community has responded in kind, with the most popular user-submitted download on their Repository to date being a unique, story-driven campaign which improves on CMX2's linear structure by introducing decision trees and a character-driven narrative of a kind lacking in the official release fare. Devil's Descent seems purposefully reminiscent of Ubisoft's Brothers in Arms, which isn't such a bad thing. The most successful scenarios seem to be those that engage the desire for action-adventure rather than just a sense of reliving history.

My Final Word
Panzer Command:Ostfront, with its attention to historical fidelity (3D terrain models of historical locations like the Stalingrad Train Station trump even Combat Mission for "you are there" immersion), came and went with little fanfare. Is it the scale - company-level, squad-based tactics set in the Second World War - that is starting to seem 'done to death'? New game systems seem to be appearing in bunches; Fighting Formations and Band of Brothers are relative newcomers now in the boardgaming world. New miniatures sets appear with some regularity also - James Day's rework of his venerable Panzer rules is still highly sought. And on the computer, Tigers Unleashed and a number of other board-game like treatments have come along while Combat Mission continues to feel its way into new territory.

And in the meantime, first person shooters and massively-multi-player online role-playing games rake in the disposable cash of the mainstream, eager for action and adventure.

Perhaps we're just not getting it, but having tried World of Tanks, I can't get excited about resource gathering and treating tanks as if they were elves.

But I am getting the feeling that the strict history stuff is quickly going the way of the Dodo.

My Question to You
Whither next? I'm having trouble getting excited about iOS games if only because, from my limited perspective, they don't seem to offer much opportunity for community input, which is where traditionally the best scenario designers have come from, regardless of which game system one cares to name. Perhaps that will or is changing, but the PC communities have a lively feel right now. Can that be replicated if tactical wargaming makes a major shift to tablets as the platform of choice?

Notes

1. My only experience playing Fionn was in the so-called "CMBO Invitational Tourney of the Stars", which was a series of 1500-point purchase scenarios, all meeting engagements, on custom maps by Treeburst155 (Mike M.)  Fionn's stardom was assured by his known skill at the game; mine definitely not any great skill at playing CM. His reputation preceded him and his paratroopers drove me off the field in an 81-19 rout whose score probably doesn't reflect accurately the nature of the beat-down I was given. He gave some generous pointers on tactics after the game in a debrief though the exact conversation is now lost to memory and does not appear in my files.

Eight Thoughts About Combat Mission: Touch

Some people confessed to be stunned by the announcement of the release of Combat Mission: Touch, but there were signs that something like this was going to happen. Battlefront.com (“BFC” hereafter) has hinted about some unspecified “big news” for a long time – one presumes this has to be it. Anyone following the rise in popularity of devices and games, and the conversations among wargamers who are now clamouring for wargame-themed apps, may have even predicted this.

I would not have guessed nor am I in the camp of those desiring such things, but the news is nonetheless a thought-provoking one. Here are eight such thoughts of mine after having had a day to process the news:

The Timing – BFC has had a consistently inconsistent relationship with its own consumer base. When the first major change to the PC-based game engine was initially discussed (the passing from so-called "CMX1" that powered their first three releases circa 2000-2003 to "CMX2" in 2007), the developers announced, in advance and with candidness, that they were prepared to exchange some of their older customers/fans for new ones as a result of the new direction they wanted to take with their vision. In business, it’s a practical approach to adopt (not necessarily to admit), though the forum signature tag line of one of their customer service reps from the period still stands out in memory - “Battlefront.com – your best friend, your worst enemy” – if only as an indicator of what can be interpreted as an ambivalence towards those that support them.

Things have changed in many ways since then. Their most aggressive customer rep has moved on, and their public relations efforts have been improving. A case can be made that the rollout of the latest CM module was skilfully handled, with informative public videos, after-action reports (i.e. public replays) in advance of release, and generally much slicker pre-release material than that which preceded earlier CM titles – such as one memorable preview posted to their YouTube feed in which unedited footage of an outclassed enemy being shot to pieces (narrated in a matter-of-fact monotone) was used to sell the game. It’s one thing to note that playing Shermans against Tigers is a tactical challenge that nonetheless happened with historical regularity in the Normandy bocage; quite another to post a movie of the massacre of a third world opponent by American Strykers and then think it is going to act as an incentive to rush out and buy your game. However, they’ve come a long way since then, albeit not without the occasional glitch. The Commonwealth Module logo depicting a P17 rifle was quickly replaced on their website when the inappropriateness of same was pointed out by multiple parties.

The announcement of CM: Touch should have been an easy hit out of the park; tablet/iOS games are all the rage now, and wargame treatments for same are in high demand, as for example a recent and relatively popular thread at boardgamegeek demonstrated. How do you mess up the announcement of something highly anticipated, and completely unexpected?

Answer: make it look like an April Fool’s joke. Just about every bit of positive feedback on release day was tempered with caveats starting with words to the effect of “Highly suspect this isn't real, but…”

The lack of belief was understandable, given that BFC has not made a tangible peep about this specific product, and the screenshots and videos were just “alien” enough to BFC’s existing project line to lack conviction. But BFC didn’t help matters by replying on their official forums with characteristic “hey, if you don’t want it, don’t buy it” aloofness.

The Business Model – I’ve thrown in these thoughts in a couple of other places but will collate them here. Micro-transactions seem to be the way of the future, though as far as wargaming goes, aren’t really anything new, either. Multi-Man Publishing has made a killing in recent years selling scenario packs to die-hard fans of their Advanced Squad Leader board game empire, often selling out their pre-order lists in a single weekend. If it works for hex and cardboard gear, it’s far easier to institute in the digital domain, and companies like Turbine, who are using it to make MMORPGs such as Lord of the Rings Online lucrative even in a free-to-play model, are doing quite well at it. BFC had mentioned a similar scheme for micro-transactions once before, when their Repository went online in support of their PC-based games, as an online file-sharing site for scenarios and mods. There was an immediate backlash against the notion that some sort of fee schedule be instituted for the site, probably because there were already fan/community sites providing a similar service that were well-established. However, this brings us to:

The Content Providers – Combat Mission on the PC has always had the advantage of shipping with a powerful map and scenario editor; additional content for the games was instantly provided via the fan and community base. Outstanding effort was rewarded within the community by name recognition (compare to the ASL community, for example, where it took decades before scenario designers were ever recognized by having their names attached to their designs) and word of mouth. Often, community-produced designs exceeded the quality of those that came with the original games, since those that produced them had the advantage of spending far more time with the products than the beta testers who had deadlines and the disadvantage of working in a closed environment, rather than the open feedback of the entire community to draw on.

The financial success of the new micro-transaction model would appear to rely on a proprietary scenario format and the necessity for BFC (or their agents) to be the sole creators of same. But this is debatable, too; despite the lawsuit between Critical Hit and the publishers of ASL, the latter have survived the growing number of third party scenario designs published for sale, mostly because most aficionados will buy “official” scenarios before those of the so-called Third Party Publishers (TPP) that are held in lower regard.

At any rate, it is confirmed that CM: Touch will not have an editor, so the question is raised as to who will provide the new content. Given the surprise raised by some of BFC’s own regular Combat Mission beta testers on the official forums regarding the very existence of the new game, another question that comes up is – who has provided the content that is already there?

Duration of Interest – The last point begs another question though, which is ultimately how many scenarios does a 5 or 6 dollar “time-waster” really require. The game itself apparently has a time cap of 15 minutes (30 turns of 30 seconds each). The game is obviously limited by the hardware, and the interface (just your “war fingers”). None of which is a criticism, but an observation without even having seen the actual product personally. Will it be the kind of game one plays over and over? Will new scenarios really feel all that different? Will the intent be to sell new games every six months with different theatres of war to make up for that?

I would not be surprised by the latter, particularly given the interest expressed on the forums for the PC game in theatres such as the Pacific, the Eastern Front, or even France 1940 or NATO vs. Warsaw Pact circa the 1970s. (Though how alienated would the PC crowd feel if Touch went to France and the PC game never got there? Probably a bit, but BFC would survive it just as they survived when the Australian Army got a custom edition of CM:AK and the “paying customers” had to wait. I think by now the remaining BFC fans have something akin to battered wife syndrome; there wasn’t as much as a cross word on the official forums at the lack of prior discussion about CM: Touch. Surprise announcements are now just the order of the day in the tight-knit community there.)

Much would depend on how the revenue streams go, and of course – BFC doesn’t discuss that. Ever. In the meantime:

Development Stream – …the question raised by at least a couple of nervous fans in a couple of venues, is what impact this new game has had on the development of the current BFC flagship, the PC version of Combat Mission. What we do know is that the new game engine – CMX2 – premiered in 2007 to a rocky start but has maintained a loyal fan base. CMX2 has seemingly split into two development streams – Shock Force, a game about near-future combat in Syria (or perhaps “near-past” circa 2008, I’m not sure anymore), and Battle for Normandy (CM:BN), which apparently has one more module on the slate, to include, if I am reading things correctly, terrain and forces circa Operation MARKET-GARDEN in the autumn of 1944. The plan was then to create more games – which may or may not have been compatible with CM:BN (i.e. they may have been standalones), to cover the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, and eventually the Eastern Front of World War II (in an ambitious scheme that would split the war into three or four games (1 per year) and each game into modules, or something like 9 or 12 products in total).

What hasn’t been discussed publicly is just how much manpower BFC has devoted to CM:Touch. They have partnered with a company whose specialty is producing apps for Apple. Any number of scenarios are possible, including the notion that BFC has simply licensed their trademark CM name and some of their in-game artwork (notably the disc-shaped icons) and let a fresh set of programmers do the heavy lifting in exchange for a share of the rewards. Perhaps they’ve hired more programmers to work behind the scene. Or, perhaps their already busy, and small, programming and development staff is hard at work shaping the future of CM: Touch. The latter would not be happy news for fans of CM for the PC, I think, given the want/feature lists for CMX2 that keep appearing on the official forums, alongside a sprinkling of nagging bug reports and/or requests for explanation of current features that just don’t seem to sit right with the existing community (things like World War II tanks firing on the move with Abrams-like accuracy, which have been officially explained as “abstractions”.)

The Splintered Community – There may be a debate in some circles as to whether CM: Touch is a wargame, presuming enough people are interested enough to engage in public discussion about it. Those discussions tend to take place when “popular” games hit the mainstream, so perhaps such a debate is premature. Twilight Struggle is the classic example from the boardgame world. These debates probably shouldn’t concern fans of BFC or even fans of the game; they’re just so much noise in discussion circles. What may be of more concern is how the developers themselves relate to their own creations, and where the CM series as a whole goes a year from now should one form of CM prove vastly more popular than the other. For those with an investment in the “serious” side of wargaming, there is more at stake.

Reaction among the fans at the official forums seems to indicate there does not need to be a schism; those fans of the PC game that also happen to own an iPad seem happy to pick up CM: Touch as an augment to their gaming library. A reasonable proposition that has been noted in the past is that games of a given genre usually appeal collectively. When it was suggested that Panzer Command was a “competitor” of Combat Mission, I added my voice to the chorus of those who said it was nonsense – anyone interested in Second World War tactical combat games was likely to pick up both games for their library. (Again, from the boardgaming world, when the Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kits hit the market as a “gateway” to the venerable tactical gaming system, some of the most ardent consumers of the new kits – were the oldest veterans of the system, some who introduced new players with the kits, others who just wanted to collect them, still others who genuinely just enjoyed the new feel of the ASLSKs and wanted something different to play.)

With this game, however, one wonders if BFC isn’t more interested in appealing to casual or non-wargamers than in engaging their existing hardcore wargaming fanbase. I seem to recall the same being said about much more hardcore products such as CM:SF. The best case scenario – perhaps optimistically, from BFC’s perspective – is that Touch serves as a gateway, so instead of just selling $1 scenario packs, you eventually hook people on $40 CMX2 games.

Any real “threat” to the PC Combat Mission community would come from a splintering of resources among the developers, but if the plan is to use Touch as a gateway, BFC would be foolish to let that happen. Despite their occasional marketing glitch, the fact remains they are still in business and doing what they need to do to produce what their fans apparently want.

The Right Decision – wargamers tend to think that the companies who make these games are charities who make these games for the love of the hobby. BFC wrote a manifesto in 1999 and appeared to their fans to be a little company that was different from the big bad corporations, but they’ve (perhaps sensibly) moved away from that. Their decisions, too, will be made by the bottom line. There would be no way for an outside commentator to observe accurately whether or not CM: Touch was a bold decision, or even a good decision, without access to BFC’s balance sheets. Time will tell. For now, the consumer simply wins by having a new product in their hands. It will all, ultimately, come down to how much money BFC can make off of it. That’s the reality of the wargaming industry (I don’t call it a hobby), no different than any other.

Staying Focused – But per the last point, one does note BFC’s track record of being side-tracked into unprofitable territory. They have burned through a number of ventures with other developers, and games have come and gone from their website with some regularity over the years as they’ve struggled to find relevant ventures to augment their flagship titles. CM:SF got off to its aforementioned rocky start by an unfortunate partnership with a retailer that forced a premature product release. Panther Games came and went with Airborne Assault, Histwar: Les Grognards was a non-starter, and some less-mainstream projects such as T-72 (a Balkans Wars tank simulator) passed through to little fanfare. Some stories were heart-breaking, such as Combat Mission: Campaigns, which apparently nearly bankrupted independent designer Bruce Poon of Hunting Tank Software as they struggled with BFC to design an operational-level interface for the flagship. Others were too strange to be believed, such as the notion that Drop Ship, the science fiction game, was being developed into a World War II tactics game (would there really have been a need for this alongside BFCs other two World War II tactics titles, Theatre of War and Combat Mission?)

Not as crazy as it sounds; Dropship had a realistic physics engine and 3-D modelling. At least one fellow saw the logic in a World War II version.

 A lot of these projects fall under the “sounded great at the time” category, though naturally it is very easy to criticize in hindsight. I’d still love to see a product like Combat Mission: Campaigns. As a member of the beta team, while not directly involved with the coding of CM:C, I was certainly witness to the enthusiastic support it received from the scenario/campaign designers. I am certain its failure was not due to a lack of effort.

No one will know whether or not CM: Touch will represent a drain on BFC’s resources or not; to speculate on a company stretching their resources against their better interests is probably foolish, especially with no inside information to back up any such assertion. The only lesson to be drawn here, however, is a general lack of success among a number of “side-projects” (which probably cost them little or nothing in terms of resources such as capital or manpower), which one can attribute as easily in the absence of any detailed information to bad luck. I know I wouldn’t want to try and gauge in advance what sells or what does not in something as volatile as the videogame market, in a niche as small as wargaming.

If I was in that position, I would never have guessed that Theatre of War would have been a success, and probably would have jettisoned it for being too much like Combat Mission. Yet there it remains, with its sequels, apparently none the worse for wear for its similarity in scope and theme to CM. So perhaps the smart money is to just figure BFC knows what its doing based on the successes it does continue to enjoy.

Conclusion

Most have said all along that if BFC does well – I suppose to mean remains solvent while producing games – it is good for the wargaming industry. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully agreed with that. Good games are what are best for the wargaming industry. Anyone that proves to be capable of doing that is by extension good for the industry.

This gets more than a little complicated. If CM: Touch fills Battlefront’s coffers, but takes away development time from the PC flagship, those who are fans of the latter but not the former will no doubt fail to see any benefit from BFC’s success, for themselves or the industry. But as noted, if managed well, the Touch has the ability to be a lucrative venture. It’s all in the hands of the consumer.

And, apparently, a small “chosen few” of scenario designers.

Or, thinking larger, other game producers, who may see a BFC success as a gateway of their own. Perhaps, for example, the most detailed, fully realized Sherman tank simulator to hit the market in the 21st Century will not be a PC game at all – but an app?

My Question to You

Should wargamers embrace this as the future of wargaming? The potential is for widespread, mainstream acceptance of this game, with its cute sprites and easy to use interface coupled with deeper gameplay. At best, it would augment CM for the PC for those that own it, and act as a gateway for those that have not yet experienced it.

Or should wargamers shun this as “not a wargame” and reject it as a threat to the hobby, for fear it will simply eat up production time better spent on “real wargames”, promote a further dumbing down of games and interfaces to the lowest common denominator, and add more fuel to the exodus away from games like CM, Close Combat and Steel Panthers and back towards Panzer Claws?

6-6-6: The American Soldier

In 2009, I posted the following in response to some threads on another website that discussed the depiction of American soldiers in ASL, most particularly the 1st line U.S. Army squad that saw combat in Europe. I didn't intend to crawl into the thought processes of the original designers of the game - I wasn't one of them nor do I know any of them personally - but as I review and revise the material for presentation here, I still feel perhaps a historical discussion of some of the characteristics of the American infantryman and a little compare/contrast with the Germans might be of interest to those unfamiliar with him, and offer a brief look at the depiction of the G.I. in the evolution of the Advanced Squad Leader game system. The comments are really applicable to any tactical game system, though references to firepower factors and morale are obviously peculiar to ASL.

Squad Leader to G.I.

A brief description of the evolution of the portrayal of the G.I. in ASL is easily achieved; in Squad Leader, there were two types of squads for the three nationalities. The Russians and Germans had 4-firepower squads to represent the fact they were predominantly armed with bolt action rifles. The Americans had an advantage in men (by 1944, a 12-man squad as opposed to the 9-man squad of the Germans) and raw firepower (the semi-automatic M-1 Garand rifle, described by General Patton as the best battle implement ever devised, supplemented by a the M-1 and M-2 carbines in semi- and full- automatic intended as a replacement for the .45 automatic pistol in front-line units). "Engineer" squads received 8 firepower and represented units armed with submachine guns, the Germans 8-3-8s and the Americans 8-4-7s. The American 6-6-6 squad, with its ominous ratings, was competitive because the GIs were also immune to Desperation Morale (DM) status. They were also automatically granted captured weapon use beyond what the Germans were permitted, representing the American fascination - so the designers told us - with "gadgets."

Cross of Iron introduced new unit types for the Germans; the 6-5-8 SS squad, armed with assault rifles, and the 5-4-8 "cavalry" squad which in ASL is often used to depict paratroopers armed with the FG42 assault rifle. G.I.: Anvil of Victory saw an expansion of the Americans to include "Green" and "2nd Line" units, as well as "Elite" 6-6-7 squads a cut above the 6-6-6s, and the downgrade of the "Airborne" squad to a 7-4-7. The ability to repair broken support weapons on a "1" or "2" was not trivial (33% chance of success, double that of other nationalities), increased smoke grenade capability, WP availability and the retention of DM-lessness.

ASL saw minor changes to the American order of battle, though the elimination of the DM bonus was not trivial. However, the broken side morale of the 6-6-6 squad was increased to 8 - a "bonus" of 2, something not granted to other squads of other nationalities at that scale.

Morale
So why does the G.I. rate a 6 morale? The observation is often made that the American fighting man is rated lower than the worst of the European armies. The Italians, who lost Hitler's war in Russia, the Balkans, and North Africa, who surrendered in pitiful mobs at the first opportunity, have a 1st line squad superior to the G.I. The Romanians, who collapsed on the flanks of the 6th Army, have a squad superior to those that stormed ashore on OMAHA Beach. Why?

Quantifying factors for a game is no simple task; armour values are a relatively simple matter (the late Lorrin Bird would no doubt argue it is not, and he'd be right, but at the least, it is more a matter of mathematics than such intangibles as morale) compared to capturing the likelihood of a group of 12 men to stand and fight, or go to ground, or even surrender - or try and devise a game system in which you can depict a squad doing all those things in the same turn.

Conscription and military training
The majority of American soldiers were (relatively) short-term soldiers; many were volunteers, some were draftees. Almost all intended to leave the military at the conclusion of hostilities. This was not different from the European militaries, though military life was certainly different in the European militaries. In the German Army, pre-military training might start before the age of 12 in the youth services; after high school, mandatory service in the Reich Labour Service beckoned, which was highly militarized and included drill, field camps and marching in addition to labour tasks. Mandatory military service followed. By the time he was in the Army, the German male had been fully indoctrinated in a military outlook and rarely had problems adjusting to discipline and authority. The average U.S. recruit encountered considerably more culture shock, particularly the urban recruit not used to long days or physical labour. Like all soldiers, though, he quickly adapted because he had to.

Raw material, though, was often wanting. Other armies also noted a tendency for the best officer and junior leader candidates to join the air service or the navy; there was no glamour in the infantry, though the paratroops (and in the U.S., the Marines) did draw eager volunteers - the jump pay of the former was a nice incentive as well. The U.S. Army only had one category of general service into which physical abilities were graded, compared to the German or British armies which had a wider series of grades, meaning that American infantry units received fewer suitable candidates. Education and intelligence was also a problem.

Craig F. Posey discussed this in his excellent article "A Nation of Workers: Utlization of American Manpower and Material in ASL" in ASL Annual '89. According to him:

Field commanders in 1942 complained repeatedly that they were receiving men of so low a mental capability to be trained. One commander stated that the hardest problem in finding competent enlisted peronnel to be instructors was because "everybody higher than a moron" had already been pulled out...An Army Ground Forces observer with the Fifth Army in Italy (obviously in 1943 or later) reported, "Squad leaders and patrol leaders with initiative were scarce...the assignment of Grade V men to infantry is murder." In essence, competent leaders were scarcest where the fighting was the thickest.

No one can criticize them for not being perfect, but it sometimes seemed like they didn't even try. What is clear is that the AGF had a problem in that by the time the "specialists" (which, oddly to us today, didn't include the infantry) skimmed off the higher graded candidates, the U.S. Army found that the average intelligence level was "well below the national average." The U.S. Army Infantry did score at least one coup over the other services in their quest to predict who would stand up best to the crucible of combat. A skinny Texas farm kid named Murphy was turned down for both the paratroopers and the Marines before becoming America's most decorated soldier of World War II.

Rank and Authority
The German Army was ironically more egalitarian than the U.S. Army; German officers were often considered "good comrades" by their men, exposed themselves to front line conditions, and enjoyed relatively few comforts. There were also far fewer officers in a front line infantry company in the Wehrmacht; platoons were almost always led by battle-hardened NCOs in the German Army. In the U.S. Army, platoon commanders had to be commissioned officers, and by 1945 they were inexperienced - "90-day wonders" from an Officer Candidate School. Those few "mustangs" who were commissioned from the ranks were not permitted to serve in the same units in which they cut their teeth out of fear their former comrades would not respect their new-found authority. Casualty rates among officers was also high, meaning many did not live long enough to gain the experience they needed to command with the authority and respect their German counterparts earned by advancing through the ranks, usually for months, sometimes for years. The officer candidate system in the German Army required the soldier to serve in the ranks of a field unit as an offizieranwärter, something U.S. OCS candidates were not necessarily required to do. Robert S. Rush commented in his book "G.I.: The U.S. Infantryman in World War II":

Later in 1944, the OCS policy changed to accept soldiers directly from the RTCs, which because of the younger draft ages, lowered the average age of candidates to something less than the mid-20s. The popular image of the beardless 90-day wonder leading other baby-faced soldiers, though partially true in 1945, was not in 1944. Before deploying overseas, officers shipping as replacements spent, by AGF policy, at least three months with company-level tactical units in the U.S.

By contrast, German officer candidates did two months field training with units of the Field Army - combat units, in other words.

Regionalism and Replacements
It is not widely reported in English histories, but the German Army had a regional-based organization very similar to the "county" regiments of the British Army, though individual regimental identities had been phased out after the First World War to place emphasis on divisional identities, a model the U.S. Army strongly emphasized as well. While the Wehrmacht did have official perpetuations of regimental histories, there seems to have been little but lip service paid to these in favour of regional designations of the divisions. They are usually absent in English language histories. Elite units such as Grossdeutschland were notable in that they recruited nationally, but other divisions drew strength from recruiting locally. The U.S. Army drew some strength from this model as well, certainly the National Guard divisions such as the 36th (Texas) Division or the 29th (Blue and Gray). The story of Bedford on D-Day is well known.

The Germans and the U.S. Army both had a system in which wounded men might not be returned to their former unit. The American system of "replacements" however, was notorious. While the Germans fed their divisions by recruiting locally and creating formed units known as "March Battalions" for the trip to the front (often stopping on the way to the Field Training units for indoctrination in the rear areas by way of "partisan hunts" before final advanced training), the Americans treated the need for replacements somewhat different. According to Mark Henry's "The US Army in World War II: Northwest Europe":

The giant olive drab machine needed a constant flow of additional troops to keep up its strength. The AEF in World War I solved this problem by disbanding about every fourth division arriving in France...In World War II the Army refused to allow this, and depended on individuals sent from the US to fill the gaps. Emphasising its machine-like viewpoint, the Army called these men 'replacements'. In 1944 the number of men individually trained for posting as replacement parts rapidly fell short of the needs of the ravenous armies in France. The units based in the USA were soon mercilessly plundered. This weakened these training units, and sent bewildered replacements forward to units with which they had no connection. The semi-trained GIs lurched through the system until they arrived at forward replacement depots...Here combat-experienced GIs, sent forward again after recovering from wounds, mingled with the green replacements for days or even weeks as they awaited new assignments.

Stephen Ambrose said of this system that "Had the Germans been given a free hand to devise a replacement system for the ETO, one that would do the Americans most harm and least good, they could not have done a better job."

As a sidebar, both armies were racist and both had an interesting history of social experimentation when manpower crunches began to make themselves felt. All-black combat units began to see action in Italy and the ETO; some, like the 761st Tank Battalion, gave a good account of themselves while others, such as the 92nd Infantry Division, have been painted in much harsher terms. The Nisei units have been painted in much more glowing terms and have a better war record. Both were officered predominantly by "whites". The Germans, for their part, considered themselves racially homogenous due to their bizarre Nuremberg Laws which stressed biological purity, but when the crunch came in the mid-war period, dozens of foreign legions began to appear in uniform, and Ost Bataillonen were in the trenches on the Normandy beaches on D-Day. Other exotic units such as the Free India Legion saw little or no combat but were advertised for propaganda value as taking their place in the anti-Communist, anti-Semetic crusade. The point, perhaps, is that in the all-white combat units that made up the majority of either army, there was less discord of the type that characterized units of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, where strife sometimes existed within units broken down along racial lines, reflecting the same kind of rifts in society back home.

In my Army unit in Vietnam we had a rule that only E5's and above were permitted to enter our NCO Club. However, an E4 was allowed to enter if 'sponsored' and escorted by an E5 or above. To keep black troops out of the club, which displayed a four-by-six foot Confederate battle flag on the wall behind the bar, no black was ever promoted above E4 during my 12 months there, and no black E4 was ever 'sponsored' by a white E5 or above.

Racism in Vietnam was practiced daily by many in Vietnam. But you would never know it today because those who practiced racism against their fellow Americans adamantly deny any form or manner of racism ever existed in Vietnam, or if racism did exist it was rare and islolated. Very few African Americans hold memberships in Vietnam Veteran organizations because of past and ongoing racism. --Otis Willie (Ret.), Military News and Information Editor, The American War Library

Motivation
Perhaps the crux of the morale issue is the least tangible and hardest to source accurately; the GI was the least warlike compared to the Europeans because he had the least to lose. His home was farthest from the fighting. The Italians on Sicily were defending their own soil; the Germans in Normandy were fighting a last ditch defence of what by 1944 had become a way of life to them. The Romanians and Hungarians and various factions of the Yugoslavians all had bitter old scores to settle with each other. The American soldier was for the most part eager to shed his olive coloured clothes and return to the normalcy of civilian life.

Criticisms

The G.I. is often criticized for being a lot of things, but the criticisms don't ring true. Among some of the more popular ones:

The G.I. was too reliant on firepower to win his battles for him.

This one makes little sense on the face of it. The G.I. effectively used his excellent artillery support to good effect to pound the daylights out of the Germans whenever and wherever he found him. No one seems to "criticize" the Germans for using their mortars so effectively in the defence, or whining that they "didn't fight fair" for siting these invisible, near-soundless weapons with wild abandon wherever an infantry battalion stopped to fight and inflicting terrible damage with them (by some accounts, up to 70% of British casualties in Normandy, for example, were a result of German mortars). The G.I. wasn't concerned about fighting fair - he fought smart where and when he could. And there were plenty of bloodbaths to go around regardless; Hürtgen Forest coming to mind.

The G.I. was no match for the German in a one on one battle.

Outside of the Roman Coliseum or an episode of Combat!, there were very few one-on-one battles, so the comparison is meaningless. And even so, the G.I. received a lot of training before embarking for overseas - certainly more training days than the Landser, though admittedly things like close order drill and other Army "chicken" crowded the syllabus long after the German dropped such things from his (by 1944 basic training for German infantrymen might be as little as 7 weeks, and advanced training might include actual combat missions such as "partisan hunts").

Conclusion

The frontline G.I. won the war; without arguing about the importance of the Eastern Front or the Pacific, or the Combined Bomber Offensive, or the North Atlantic Run, all of which was part of a massive team effort by the Allies and the United Nations, the G.I. in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and Italy in 1944-45, along with his allies, guaranteed final victory over the Germans.

The Culin device, one of many implements devised in the bocage to get through the hedgerows.

He didn't do it with bloodless victories such as Operation Desert Storm; it wasn't that kind of war, and the Germans weren't that kind of enemy. The G.I. had to go at him for long months, and devise new ways of doing things, often with equipment not up to the task. And he overcame and adapted. The best example is the Culin hedgerow device; a tactical problem made itself apparent and the U.S. Army responded. (There were others, less famous, such as the "Salad Fork".) When the Sherman proved vulnerable to enemy tanks - a role that doctrine never intended it to take on - tank crews provided local solutions in the form of improvised armor kits, tactics (placing Jumbos in key positions) and eventually new equipment. Individual units simply endured apalling conditions wherever they were; despite a few setbacks on the way - mass surrenders such as the 106th Division in the Bulge were extreme outliers as were mass slaughters such as OMAHA Beach - he was capable of outstanding feats of bravery.

There is no insult in saying that there was nothing European about him. The American is - or was - an individualist with pride in himself. The G.I. eschewed the trappings of the British regimental system, and was derided for having no pride; and forewent the flash of the German uniforms, and was ridiculed for having no style. But by the time he blasted himself out of the bocage, he had something far more important - the self-assuredness of a veteran soldier who could use his equipment, training and bravery to best advantage, and historians can say that after Kasserine Pass, the American soldier never lost a battle.

Does he "deserve" to be treated in ASL the same as those Europeans, with 7 morale? I say he doesn't. He had a unique character that is well reflected in ASL which is itself a unique game system. The replacement problem was not confined to the Americans - the British and Canadians in Northwest Europe also suffered from a "reinforcement crisis" in the autumn of 1944, post-Normandy. And Canadians were just as far from Europe as the GIs were, so the rationale for the "6" morale can't stop there. The other factors all play into it as well; there is also the well documented poor quality of recruits and the leadership aspect - which should extend beyond just the SMC countermix of any given scenario.

Jeffery Williams, a Calgary Highlander serving in a staff position in 1st Canadian Army, wrote after the war about contacts between the 3rd Canadian Division and the American 82nd Airborne in the winter of 1944-45:

It was the first time that General Spry's men had had direct dealings with Americans. They were intrigued by their language which was familiar but seemed non-military - torches were flashlights, petrol was gasoline. They were fascinated by their equipment, their robust 'deuce-and-halfs' and four wheel drive 'threequarters' (2-1/2 and 3/4 ton trucks), their weapons and their rations. They liked the U.S. .30 calibre carbine but they wouldn't swap a Browning automatic rifle for a Bren. In fact, there was little that the Americans had that they envied, certainly not their rations nor their clothing. Everyone shivered in that damp November but the Americans 'looked' colder. As one battalion commander put it, 'They were great guys, good soldiers who had fought well. We gained a great respect for them but their ways were not our ways.'

Famous photo of an 82nd Airborne trooper in the winter of 1944-45 (in fact, it was used on the cover of Close Assault). The Canadians who relieved the 82nd in the Nijmegen Salient thought the Americans "looked cold."

None of which is to take away from the fighting abilities of the U.S. Army soldier - who turned in ferocious fighting performances from Morocco to the Elbe. But he was what he was - mostly just there for the duration, doing things his own way - just like everyone else.

The Machine Gun in Tactical Wargames

Whatever happens

We have got

The Maxim Gun

And they have not

- -Hilaire Belloc

Having not been impressed by my viewing of the film Passchendaele, I am struck by how often the Machine Gun is pressed into service by motion picture screenplay writers, directors, and producers, but how little the role of the MG is understood by those in the entertainment industry. Have tactical wargame designers done any better at understanding or portraying them?

What the MG is not - the Machine Gun in the Movies

Hiram Maxim's machine is not something you stick in a corner of the battlefield and wait for a heroic band of 4 or 8 guys to blunder into. Generally speaking, it's supposed to be something you set up to guard something. That can be an open flank, or it can be an approach route, or a gap in your barbed wire. It can be a supply route or withdrawal lane, and you can set them up to fire indirectly. You employ them best when they fire at greater than point blank range - one of their advantages, to, say, a pistol or a rifle, and in interlocking arcs of fire, using a high rate of fire. So employed, they can mow down a great number of men, or deny them passage. Hollywood films like Legends of the Fall, Saving Private Ryan, and now Passchendaele think that machine guns are simply dropped off at random with 3 or 4 man gun crews, in isolation, and left there to hunt single men or other groups of men - and by "hunt" I mean sit there stupidly with an 80 pound gun and tripod and big metal cans of ammo and wait to be found, sitting behind un-camouflaged sandbags.

Machine Gun in Passchendaele. Still image taken from the official movie site. Passchendaele was the most expensive Canadian movie ever made, with a budget of 20 million dollars. The MG08 behind the stereotypical sandbag bunker was the centre-piece of the film's opening scene.

And of course, the heroes of the story find the MG, and destroy it, but not before losing one or two men, which is the point of the attack and finding the MG in the first place. In the comic books, by the way, Sgt. Rock went through this routine about every other issue.

And despite the fact these machine guns are always dropped off in the middle of nowhere, backed up into hard cover with no escape for the gun crews, our heroes (tactical geniuses, all) find themselves with no alternative but to mount a frontal assault. The true purpose of the attack, of course, is to get a disposable character in the script killed off and provide a plot point. Any sensible squad leader would simply have flanked the MG in Saving Private Ryan and attacked from the top of the hill, using the radar station as hard cover. There were no other Germans for miles around - that is made obvious by the fact our hero has time for a crying scene, a Mexican stand-off between his platoon sergeant and one of his men, and a lengthy burial of the dead, during which no other Germans intervene.

The tactical situation in Passchendaele is more mystifying; the rationale for attacking the gun is even less clear than Captain Miller's - though the book suggests that he is at this point in the war into his third year of service and less than mentally stable. The movie is brave to approach this subject and in many ways does it well; unfortunately, as good as the speeches are about nightmares and guilt, the movie falls apart in the depictions of combat and the clichéd frontal assault on the machine gun (and the use of the term "gun nest") don't do much to add to the pantheon of realistic movie moments. Far better was Robert Blake's assault on Pork Chop Hill (shown below) when he misses a Chinese MG bunker with a grenade - from two feet away - and nearly blows his own arm off. But Pork Chop Hill was more text book than movie. In fact, the screenplay was actually written from one of U.S. Army historian S.L.A. Marshall's texts, and such a film would not be commercially successful today if anyone was crazy enough to try selling it to Hollywood.

What the Machine Gun Is - A Brief History

Automatic firearms date back to the early 1700s, and the first military applications were for naval use. By the time of the American Civil War in 1861, the famous Gatling Gun was in limited use - a hand cranked repeating gun used by land forces as light artillery. In 1881, the Maxim Gun was invented, becoming the first true machine gun - a relatively light, man portable, crew served weapon firing rifle cartridges at a rapid rate of fire. In 1914, they began to shape modern tactics as armies in western Europe sought to maneuver for victory during the German invasion of Belgium and France. Cavalry, infantry and massed artillery - still employed directly in the firing line in many cases - were still operating as they had in the previous century, deploying in thick skirmish lines with the company of 100 to 200 men as the basic maneuver element of the infantry. The British expressed reluctance to introduce great numbers of machine guns, as there was an official fear that it would "unbalance" the delicate firepower organization of the infantry battalion - whatever that meant. Possibly it was a reference to the fact that a great number of men (and animals) were tasked to supporting the guns, for they were heavy, and supplying them with ammunition was a logistical burden that the battalions themselves had to bear to keep them firing.

Scottish troops with a Maxim Gun early in the First World War.

The Germans were not so reluctant, and fielded greater numbers of the weapons. During the Race to the Sea - that period in which the Allies and their enemies both sought an open flank - it became increasingly clear that the defensive would be favoured in this war. Massed riflemen stopped major German attacks at the Marne and at Mons. The grappling armies never found their opponent's open flank and battle lines soon stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel - after which the armies went underground, building first shallow ditches, and soon a system of trenches, dugouts and saps from which they would besiege each other for four years. They wired themselves in and began to deploy new weapons in a technological race to break the deadlock - poison gas (Ypres, 1915), flamethrowers (Hooge, 1915) and tanks (Courcelette, 1916) were among them, but the deadlock was brought about to begin with by the Machine Gun, which made crossing No Man's Land a dangerous experience.

What the Machine Gun Does - How It Works

The Canadians arguably did more with their machine guns than anyone else on the Western Front. They didn't just issue them to infantry battalions, they eventually created an entire combatant corps around them, and if that wasn't enough, they created additional units outside the corps, mounted them on wheels, and protected them with steel plate. At Vimy Ridge, they were used as indirect fire weapons and fired on fixed lines, raining lead down on German reinforcement routes from over hilltops, and the Canadians even planned to use their new armoured cars as breakthrough weapons, replacing the cavalry and beating the Germans to what an Allied newspaper man would call Blitzkrieg in 1939 - Lightning War. It had been a long struggle to get there; in 1915, MGs were allocated just four per battalion, and the Canadians were using unreliable American-made "potato-diggers", as the Colts were known. The British had gone to France with two guns per battalion, and the Germans had six. The Canadian Colts jammed almost as frequently as their Ross rifles, though some battalions used them into 1917, by which time they had been replaced officially with the Lewis, and a new type of gun - the Light Machine Gun - had entered the arsenal, hand in hand with a new concept in military organization: the infantry squad.

Canadian Colt MG crew (Library and Archives Canada photo)

What advantages did the MG have on the Western Front? Rate of fire is the obvious one; the Vickers which eventually came to equip British and Canadian MG units (and remained on inventory into the 1960s virtually unchanged) could fire 450 to 600 rounds per minute, and if equipped with a clean supply of ammunition and enough water to cool the barrel, could fire indefinitely with little problem. It was well made, reliable, and well liked. But it didn't just fire a lot of bullets; it could fire out to 800 yards in a direct fire role.

The basic unit of maneuver in 1914 was the infantry company of 100-200 men; they moved as blocks of soldiery, tasked with common objectives, and while platoons existed nominally, they were for organizational purposes - as a way of feeding or billeting them. To do battle, they lined up in waves and marched not unlike the armies in the Crimea, or at Gettysburg, or under Wellington. Unfortunately, the machine gun made it clear in short order why this was no longer a good idea.

Massed riflemen could still operate effectively - the British proved it at Mons, where the pre-war Regulars, trained in marksmanship and rapid fire on their bolt action rifles turned back German assault troops. The machine gun was a "force multiplier" however, and where one machine gun is good in helping stop such a charge, the MG is really a "support weapon." It doesn't exist to do the job of an infantry company, it supports the infantry. Therefore, multiple machine guns are better than one, and the idea is to create interlocking arcs of fire: to support not just the riflemen, but other machine guns as well, creating ground over which the enemy cannot pass. It does this best set up outside the normal effective battle range of the enemy's rifles - 200 yards or so - and if he can deliver his fire while covered from the enemy's artillery, even better. At Passchendaele in 1917, firing from concrete bunkers and good field works, the Germans were able to make Allied gains costly indeed using machine guns and artillery to good advantage.

Bill Rawling, in his book "Surviving Trench Warfare" (University of Toronto Press, 1992) says the following:

Quote:

Open formations, however, could be defeated by a very unsophisticated technology - barbed wire. Artillery was short of ammunition (early in the war) and lacked a shell fuse sensitive enough to explode within the barrier, and the latter remained essentially untouched, forcing troops to pick their way through clinging, piercing metal as best they could. Caught on the wire, soldiers became targets for machine-gunners, who could not fail to miss men immobilized by the obstacle.

The more subtle lesson here is that machine guns are best employed in conjunction with other weapons; the barbed wire could be used to channel the advance of infantry into killing grounds, created by gaps in the wire, or when enough wire barred the way, effectively slow the advance that the machine guns' effectiveness was increased.

The MG could also be used as a form of artillery, fired not directly at a known target but into the air, with bullets looped on an arcing trajectory to fire over obstacles, using "plunging fire" to descend on the enemy's rear, interdicting trenches and roads and routes of supply, retreat, reinforcement.

The Light Machine Gun

Ironically, one of the solutions to the Machine Gun was another Machine Gun, at least partially. The other solutions to the deadlock of No Man's Land had their disadvantages - poison gas was an abject failure once the initial shock wore off and protective equipment was developed, and relatively few men died because of it, popular culture to the contrary. Flame weapons inspired fear but were not available in large numbers. The tank was mechanically unreliable and expensive to produce. Artillery was being perfected into a truly scientific arm, particularly by Commonwealth troops (at Vimy Ridge, the majority of German batteries had been located and silenced in the days preceding Zero Hour by Allied counter-battery work) but its ability to win battles on its own was negligible.

As discussed in this article on the development of the infantry squad, small units began to develop from early in the war. By 1917, the British were fielding the Lewis Gun in infantry platoons - a smaller, man portable automatic weapon that could deliver firepower in support of infantrymen moving in small bunches, either firing their rifles, using grenades (hand-thrown Mills bombs or firing rifle grenades), or even bayonets (or more exotic hand-to-hand weapons such as knob-kerries) but above all, maneuvering in close under the weight of fire of the Lewis, with its multi-man crew lugging panniers of ammo. The French and Americans would introduce LMGs/automatic rifles late in the war also, and the Germans experimented with the LMG too, as well as with sub-machine guns, an even more portable weapon firing pistol ammunition - larger bullets with shorter range for true close quarters combat. The best way for infantry to defeat the enemy was to seek him out, in small numbers, and then defeat him locally with overwhelming firepower - using artillery where possible, and the light machine gun. The pattern established in 1917-1918 would remain unchanged in its basic elemental concept to the present day, though individual firepower increased with the creation of the assault rifle during the Second World War and the dissemination of either semi-automatic or fully-automatic battle rifles after 1945.

The Lewis LMG.

But the Machine Gun is still there; it is now known as a GPMG, or General Purpose Machine Gun, the first such true GPMG being the German MG34 and MG42 of the Second World War, so known because it could operate as a light machine gun right in an infantry squad, fitted with a bipod and an assault drum, operated by a single gunner and carried into an attack on an enemy position - or it could be fitted to a tripod, equipped with telescopic sights, given a virtually unlimited supply of linked ammunition, and set to fire on fixed lines, even by remote control, at the touch of a remote trigger, to produce grazing fire along an axis of advance or down a pre-set fire lane to deny an avenue of approach to an enemy, the MG 42 firing up to a mind-numbing 1200 rounds per minute - 20 bullets a second!

These technological marvels are often the key to a company fighting position. They are generally organized into a separate weapons company within a battalion, or perhaps a separate weapons platoon within a company. The British and Canadians pooled them at the Divisional level in the Second World War. Wherever they were kept, the troops knew how important they were - and they were assigned to units and sub-units in recognition of their important role rather than simply cast adrift in the wilderness, as the movies would have you believe.

Exceptions - Movie Silliness in Reality and in Wargames

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, and sometimes, movie silliness is based on reality. That scene in Saving Private Ryan where Miller is throwing 60mm mortar rounds? It was based on the story of Technical Sergeant Beauford T "Andy" Anderson, a Medal of Honor recipient who performed the same deed on Okinawa. Not a bad scene, but freeze frame it and ask yourself why he didn't just use the grenades the prop guy stuck on his web belt instead. Or why the director chose to emulate such a rare event. Medals of Honor are generally given for the uncommon rather than the common. SPR also depicted a blind charge by armour down a narrow corridor into the teeth of Allied infantry resulting in a costly defeat. Critics have pointed at this and said "would never happen." But - never say "never" because strange things happen on battlefields, and at Arnhem, just such a charge occurred. SS-Hauptsturmführer Viktor Graebner mounted an armoured attack over the bridge over the Rhine - as narrow a corridor as the street in Ramelle - and paid the ultimate price for his aggressiveness. The charge was shot to pieces on the northern ramp by the British paratroopers ensconced in buildings at the far end. The charge is depicted in the Advanced Squad Leader module named A Bridge Too Far, and the action can be reasonably simulated in other tactical games.

The aftermath of Graebner's charge; at the top of the image are wrecked German vehicles littering the north ramp of the Arnhem bridge.

The hand-thrown mortar rounds, on the other hand, probably come under the heading of "chrome". Chrome is that grand old term from the old days of wargaming, referring to rules added for historical flavour or to capture individual peculiarity. Coming from the shiny metallic trim once applied to automobiles, the word suggests something eye-catching but having no real practical value.

Chrome sets the old board games apart from the new generation of computer games only in that paper games can be modified at will, restricted in large part only by the imagination of the user. A sophisticated fan base and increasingly open-ended games are changing this. Panzer Command allows for modification of the game's unit data, for example, and for those with the skills to do so, a game like Operation Flashpoint allows almost unrestricted ability to add not only 3D models but scripts and routines to power all sorts of (unofficial) additions to the game.

So this brings us back to that machine gun in the church. Could it have reasonably happened? Never say never, but once you overload your movie with stretches of tactical logic, you've lost the verisimilitude you need to connect with a knowledgeable audience.

The Machine Gun in Tactical Wargames

There are few tactical games dealing with First World War combat; Soldiers and Trenchfoot coming most readily to mind and both date back several decades; newer titles like Landships fight for audiences among the crowd. It is probably more useful to examine all of tactical gaming as a whole (and by tactical gaming, as always, I refer to commercial, board and video wargames dealing with "modern" land combat as my area of focus, a narrow field I make no apologies for restricting my gaze to - and especially not with this subject in mind). We can trace the evolution of the depiction of the MG in tactical wargames, as the problem of how to accurately portray the unique characteristics of the Machine Gun, and the advantages it brought to the battlefield (and the disadvantages inherent in the weapon) are illuminating.

Did You Say Disadvantages?

The first machine gun sections in British and Canadian service in 1914 were composed largely of ammunition bearers. In 1917, even the Light Machine Gun section required several ammo bearers to carry the heavy panniers for the Lewis to keep the gun in action. By 1939, though, LMGs were integrated directly into rifle squads, often firing the same ammunition as the battle rifles carried by the bulk of men in the infantry companies, and few tactical games portray in-battle logistics.

The larger MGs, however, are a different story. Squad Leader created a fairly elegant system of "portage points" for the various weapons and equipment types that an infantry squad might be expected to carry into battle, which factored in the weight of ammunition, tripod, and accessories for the MGs. The expansion "gamettes" created "dismantled" status, which reduced the portage load on infantry, imagining the guns broken down into component parts. When SL was replaced by Advanced Squad Leader, they recognized that the German GPMG, when removed from its tripod, was still a serviceable LMG and allowed it to be fired as a weapon - a nice bow to reality that some might call chrome, though all the information one needed was right on the counter and it required no special or complicated rules.

Logistics reared their ugly head in the development stream of Combat Mission; specifically, the question of whether or not units equipped with heavy machine guns should be permitted to use a fast movement command. "Running" with an HMG became a bone of contention. Equally contentious was the question of whether or not British and Canadian troops ever actually used the tripod for the Bren Light Machine Gun. Sometimes, the research isn't the hard part and neither is the implementation; the hard part is the point of decision in between the two.

Other Myths and Movies

Readers may remember that "silly" scene in the Carentan episode of Band of Brothers, where the Sherman tank commander is riding into battle blasting away with the .50 while standing on the back of his tank. In actuality, it wasn't silly. In fact, standing on the back of the certain models of the Sherman tank was the only way you could fire the .50 at ground troops. There is a misconception that the Browning gun on the turret of the Sherman was there for close protection. It wasn't; it was an anti-aircraft weapon. You had to exit the turret, depending on the mount, in order to use it. Canadian Sherman tanks rarely kept the Browning in 1944-45; in fact, the 4th Canadian Armoured Brigade specifically ordered the guns removed. One source suggests that Brigade headquarters expressed concern that tank commanders would be exposed to hostile aircraft by so doing; the risk of exposure in dismounting the turret to use the gun was considered too great.

Sherman tank in France. The tank commander has dismounted to use the .50 on enemy infantry across a river. (US Army photo)

The AA MG on the Sherman has been contentious in both board and PC games. In ASL, it is a weapon of great power, but there are no special rules depicting the hazards in using it against troops beyond the normal "crew exposed" rules that cover all exposed tank commanders. A Canadian tank commander, trained to expose just the top of his head above the rim of the turret, is given the same advantages of vision and cover as an American tank commander blazing away with the turret Browning, which we know had to be done from outside the turret altogether in certain instances.

In Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord, the AA MG on the Sherman was similarly quite potent and often could be found knocking out enemy armoured vehicles before the main gun. The ballistics are consistent with real life - the .50 round was a potent one and punching through the thin rear armour of a Hetzer or any of the armour on a Sd Kfz 251 halftrack would not have been a problem - but doctrinally it would have been unlikely for a tank commander to leap out and blaze away with the MG rather than "button up" and let the main gun do the work of the tank. The abstract nature of the game's mechanics worked against the realistic portrayal of this doctrine.

My Final Word

While modern combat appears to have changed a lot since 1917, many aspects of it have not; the employment of machine guns is probably one of those things that has stayed relatively constant, at least in principle. While infantry are performing many more different tasks on the battlefield in the modern "Three Block War" environment, when it comes time to employ the Machine Gun in full-intensity conflict, an infantry unit will still use the principles pioneered for it in the trenches, and later developed in the Second World War. Game designers have struggled with how best to capture the effects of this unique weapons system. Film makers have been quick to capitalize on the reputation the MG has gained as a leading causality factor in the infliction of casualties, second only to artillery, even if the depiction of the MG on film has been more sensationalistic than real.

My Question To You

We can examine the MG through this GeekList, but which game do you think has presented an interpretation of the Machine Gun in modern battle that seems to be the closest to being accurate? Is it possible that, like artillery, getting it too close to accurate would simply be a game-killer?