Hooptedoodle #7 - Death by Communication - omg

I've had a Facebook account for a while now, but I only recently started making use of it. I have a friend who insists on using his for just about everything. Some of the things he uses it for surprise me. Some of them, I think he dreamed them up specially to give himself another excuse to use it.

In the month or two that I've been making more use of Facebook, it has been useful on about 3 occasions. To balance that, it irritates me and wastes my time a couple of dozen times each day. That is not a positive balance. OK - I can just close the account, or stop using it. Or maybe I can't - I know it's damned hard to remove a photo - maybe you're not allowed to close an account? - who cares, actually? I have friends who cannot listen to a CD without telling everyone. I have seen enough mobile-phone pics of drunk guys with their tongues hanging out to last me a very long time. Graffitti.

So - yes, I'm a bit hostile, and I'm certainly aware of getting old and grumpy, but I worry a little. I worry about the time and bandwidth that are wasted, the consumer cost and the technology investment that underpins the immense exchange of drivel that passes for useful communication. Facebook exists primarily to make a lot of money for the guy who invented it. Facebook is just another manifestation of something which has already been around and growing for years. Why do we need an infinite number of TV channels when the programme content is almost entirely crud? - who watches this stuff? When you 've paid for your new TV, bear in mind that watching crud in High Definition is hardly a mighty step forward (imho).

How many people do you know who dare not switch their mobile phone off, in case they miss out on something? Perhaps you yourself are in this position? I am fortunate enough to live in a rural area where there is no mobile service. When I am at home, you can ring my mobile all you want - it doesn't work. Sometimes this is a nuisance, but mostly it just means that I have got into the habit of switching the mobile on only when I need to be contactable. That's right - weird, eh?

When I used to commute into Edinburgh on the train, I used to be astounded by the girls from the posh private schools, texting each other - from adjacent seats. I guess their parents were paying for this. I used to pass the time trying to ignore it, trying to be absorbed by my book, but distracted by vague thoughts involving chainsaws. I guess the juvenile texters all grew up to be mainstream Facebook users.

A while ago I heard a man on the radio expressing his theory that the amount of initiative people display is inversely proportional to the speed and ease of communication. It was a lot more interesting than it might sound. The example he used which stuck in my mind was the East India Company, back in the 18th Century. They had their own army, as we know, and they had their own army exactly because it would take maybe 6 months to send a message to London and get a reply. If someone attacked them, there was no point at all trying to ask Head Office what to do about it. Nowadays they would have to convene an electronic conference to decide who they needed to talk to, just to define their Terms of Reference. In the last month, I have been chasing a local (village) committee to get some information to put in the local community journal. Amazing. The whole committee are in endless mobile contact with each other, there is a greater degree of convoluted, tangled misinformation than I would have believed and - since everyone always has to consult everyone else - no-one is empowered to make a decision. I never got my notice for the journal - they missed the deadline. Something wrong here, chaps. If you provide a bunch of weasels each with a Blackberry, you achieve nothing. Weasels could not have managed the East India Company.

So, if anyone was thinking of sending me a message on Facebook to tell me how much you enjoyed your coffee this morning, please don't bother. Unless I hear to the contrary, I'll assume everything is fine.

The Grand Tactical Game - Blinds

Here is another of the optional rules for MEP, which I air for public criticism before incorporating into the draft (probably next weekend, all being well).


Blinds provide an interesting element of "Fog of War" - highly recommended. My solo game has an option where you can shuffle the identity of the blinds for one or both armies, so that one or both commanders has/have no idea who or what is arriving when - that is a decent working definition of chaos. Probably takes the idea a little too far, though it can generate some furious fun.

This draft rule will be identifiable as heavily influenced by TooFatLardies - but who else am I going to borrow ideas on Blinds from?

The Grand Tactical Game - Downloadable Draft

This is an attempt to get organised. You can see or download the latest draft of the MEP rules from Google Docs by clicking here.

In future, so that I only need to maintain a single link, all references to the downloadable draft of the rules will link to this post, and the version you get to from here will be the latest extant version.

*** Very Late Edit ***

Some six years later, I removed the link, since the game is no longer in a maintained, playable state. Apologies if you came here looking for it.

*******************

The Grand Tactical Game - End of the Day

This week, progress with the blog has been upset a bit by events in the Real World - a place I avoid whenever possible. The Combat examples have been a bit delayed, though I have done some re-writing of the MEP rules draft, which will appear shortly in downloadable form.


In the interim, here's a general note about victory conditions, nightfall, what happens at the end of the day - all that stuff - which is to be incorporated into the draft as one of the optional rules.



As ever, I'd be very grateful for any comments or (polite!) suggestions.

The Grand Tactical Game - Morale (or Not)

This week I started doing some detail testing of the Combat mechanisms for MEP, and it became obvious that there are a few more changes needed. Simplifying the actual Combat, and calming down the casualty rates a bit, will be addressed in a forthcoming post – probably next week, in which I also hope to do a couple of walk-throughs of examples of Combats. I’ll make a new draft of the rules available at that time.

But the first surprise, and the most radical (for me) was the realisation that the whole subject of morale needed a rethink.

I remind myself that this is a grand tactical game, and the basic units are brigades. As I have mentioned before, it is spiritually close to being a boardgame. In passing, I must observe that I don’t recall seeing very much in the way of detailed morale rules in boardgames, though I’m sure there are some somewhere. Maybe this is a clue.

In a tactical game, I am used to seeing a battalion routing from contact, subsequently rallied – maybe by the personal intervention of a general officer – then turned round, formed up smartly, and sent back into action, though maybe a bit more circumspectly than before.

But this grand tactical game has brigade-sized units comprising Elements which are each a battalion or equivalent. Losses are counted in Elements – a complete battalion is the smallest amount of loss which we bother with. Let’s think about that for a moment – if a 3-Element unit loses an Element as a result of some incident, it does not mean that 750 infantrymen have just been vaporised, it means that the combined effect of actual casualties and demotivation caused by the incident have reduced the combat capability of the unit by an amount which is roughly equivalent to a battalion’s-worth of the soldiers not contributing any more. They may be dead, or hurt, or they may be shocked into uselessness, or they may be legging it to the rear – it doesn’t actually matter. The point is that there are not so many of them taking part - the “loss” is an amalgam of reduction in headcount and loss of morale. The italics are deliberate.

Continuing this theme, when a unit has lost all its Elements it is eliminated. At risk of unnecessary repetition (after all, this is not a difficult concept, though I seem to have some trouble getting the hang of it!), they have not all been wiped out, they have been reduced to a crowd of fugitive survivors, retreating in disorder, probably throwing away all military paraphernalia as they go, to speed their exit. Whatever else, they are not coming back. Again, their elimination is as much – maybe more – to do with morale as it is to do with casualties.

In view of this, I suddenly had a blinding flash of the obvious – having morale tests in addition to this process is too much of the same thing. What if we dropped the stand-alone morale tests altogether? Also, what is the point of having units on the tabletop explicitly marked as Routing when the casualty mechanisms already allow for people running away? A unit which is reduced to zero strength is running away, and won’t come back – that’s probably all we need. OK – we won’t have Routers, so we don’t need to try to rally them, so that’s another morale test scrapped.

The initial draft has morale tests for units which suffer (significant) loss to artillery and skirmisher fire. OK – it is possible to imagine a unit being reduced to zero by continuing fire – they have run away. If they have not run away, and have just been damaged a bit, there is probably a need for some Activation or Command style check to see if they are prepared to follow orders if they are required to advance (or whatever), but the reaction-type morale test as drafted is not necessary.

So I propose to drop the morale tests, and units losing in combat will be pushed back – they will not run away until they are eliminated. There will be no Routers, and no rallying of Routers.

I feel a bit elated at removing a sizeable piece of fiddle-faddle from the game – I am also nervously aware that the morale tests may be back next week, after some more playtesting, so am not going to make too much of a fuss about it!

More soon.

Hooptedoodle #6 - The Three Excuses Rule

Like everyone else, I came into the world knowing nothing, and have only occasionally managed to improve this situation - and always, I believe, by personal experience. Maybe I was never a good listener, but words of received wisdom only ever come back to me when I am trying to strip off curdled varnish, or lying in hospital, or pleading with the bank, or whatever. By and large, I found stuff out the hard way - one day you will see me listed in the Darwin Awards.

Once upon a time I used to go running at lunchtime with a group of colleagues from work. We used to go Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Life being what it is, now and then someone would send a message apologising for absence - popular reasons included:

(1) I have to look for a present for my wife's birthday - you know how it is.

(2) I think I have a cold coming on - I'll give it a miss today.

(3) I am struggling to finish off a presentation I have to make to the Board this afternoon.

No-one could take exception to any of these, obviously, and the runners would look forward to seeing their missing companion next time. Occasionally, someone would come out with a multiple reason:

(1+2) I have to do some urgent shopping, and anyway I'm not feeling too great, so I'll not be running today.

Poor chap - such a strong case for not being there might even generate some sympathetic (if monosyllabic) discussion during the run. But only very rarely did anyone attempt to claim that they had three simultaneous good reasons for absence. At that point it becomes obvious that they are making it up. The chances of anyone having that good a reason not to do anything at all are so remote as to be discounted without further thought.

Foy's Seventh Law is known in our family as the Three Excuses Rule, and states:

If someone has three good, separate excuses for not being able to do something, that person is lying - they just don't want to do it.

This is a very useful rule indeed - you will regularly be able to use it to judge the merits of politicians, and to apply it to discussions with tradesmen, mail-order retailers, your children, all sorts of people, in a great many practical situations. Only yesterday, the phone helpline for my Internet Service Provider had three excellent reasons why we had no broadband for the second time in four days, and the girl appeared mystified when I laughed as she got to the third excuse.

Art Miniaturen

Another manufacturer who is still doing well, but a rather different style of figure. Jorg Schmaeling's super 1/72 metal figures are, in my view, diorama-style, and very nice too - a little pricey, but lovely. Art Miniaturen are also nice, helpful people to deal with. Herr Schmaeling is happy to provide odd figures from his listed sets, and I understand that he will even consider spare parts - hats, pelisses and so on.


Apart from the price (which is not astronomical, by the way), the only other slight snags are

(1) there is occasional flash trouble - these figures are very detailed, but no compromise is made in animation to ease the casting process - some of the older figures can display signs of mould damage, particularly swords and muskets, and horses' legs can require a bit of dremelling to make them perfect

(2) Schmaeling does not accept payment by credit card or PayPal (at least he didn't a couple of months ago) - this is a bit of an issue for UK residents, since the good old British banks still make it very expensive to transfer money internationally. It is not a real stopper, but how you choose to work around the problem is up to you. I would never, of course, advise anyone to send cash euros in a registered letter. Perish the thought.


I have only one unit which is entirely Art Minaturen - my beloved French 3rd Hussars. These cost me a real arm and a leg, since I felt that my painting could not do justice to such fine figures, so I commissioned the very talented Jez Farminer to do the full collector-standard paint job on them. I am very pleased with them, but I cannot afford to follow this route very often!

I have some French voltigeurs, and a good number of command figures. Here are a few pictures, which I hope speak for themselves.




Finally, here's a conversion - I produced this Spanish colonel by grafting a Les Higgins British Light Infantry head on to an Art Miniaturen Belgian officer figure. The width and quality of the range make these figures ideal for conversions.