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| The gentlemen of the Sealed Knot being unpleasant at close quarters |
This is going to be one of my ruminating sessions,
I think, so if you don't fancy the prospect you have at least been forewarned.
In response to my post yesterday, David sent a comment that touches on some of
the key issues in the problem of how we try to represent warfare as a game we can
play on the kitchen table. [When pressed,
ruminate. That is the house rule here.]
So David is my guest writer for the
morning. His comment included the following:
"...it is fascinating to think about
how they actually went about the business of organised combat in the pike and
shot era. Now I admit I have not downloaded your rules, so you may rightly
ignore all I say. But one thing that always strikes me is how short a range
they would be firing their muskets at (ignoring ill-disciplined premature
popping-off by inexperienced troops); I get the feeling this would often be 100
yards or less. Which must have been terrifying, by the way. Now this makes me
wonder, what is the 'range' of musketry in C&C, in hexes? And what distance
does a hex represent? And how does that relate to movement distances?
Another thing that only now strikes me is,
if taking up a firing position at 100 yards from the enemy and then using 'fire
by introduction', it can't take long to close the range quite considerably; how
much discipline did it take to maintain that measured fire and reloading, and
how tempting was it to just give all that up and get stuck in to a melee?..."
I'd like
to take a couple of detours before attempting to respond to this.
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| This doesn't look like rolling fire to me - it looks like a big Salvee |
Firstly,
since we are all shaped by our experiences, and since this includes the
development of my own views on war gaming, I'd like to share with you a tale of
a game I was once involved in. I would say this was about 1974. [I used to keep a huge file with notes and
jottings and OOBs from all my war games - going way back - but alas I lost it
during a house move 19 years ago, so approximate memory will have to serve now].
The main things are that this game certainly wasn't yesterday, and that it was
from a period when we were all striving to make our miniature battles as
realistic as possible. That seems like a very sad joke now, but I was as keen
as anyone else.
The event
was a very large bash at Quatre Bras - lots of borrowed troops on display - I
can't remember how many, but there were a lot, and we used the WRG rules of the
day. There were a lot of people involved, though, since the game lasted all day
Saturday, all day Sunday and some of Monday evening, players were coming in to
relieve each other, so there was never a time when everyone was present
together, and some of the visits were brief and intended to show willing rather
than make any major contribution. I recall that Phil Maugham, Alan Low, Dave
Hoskins, Allan Gallacher (our host), John Ramsay, Dave Thomson, Keith Spragg
and Forbes Hannah were all present at some point - a true marathon relay
effort. I am less clear about the outcome - I think it was a sort of draw,
though the Allies claimed they were leading at the end - you may recognise that
kind of conclusion. Another, rather darker recollection is that only about 3 of
the assembly are still alive, which just goes to show something or other (it
probably shows that I was one of the younger participants!).
It took
a long time afterwards to clear up the mess and sort out the paperwork, and two
big messages feature most strongly in my memory. Firstly, none of us ever
wanted to do anything like that again - in fact this was around the time that I
first started looking seriously at what could be learned from board games, and
trying to find ways to simplify my own miniatures games. Secondly, we were
horrified (not to say incredulous) to learn that the total elapsed "battle
time" amounted to around 35 minutes - that's all. Something like 22 hours
had been spent "fighting" a battle which must have lasted a few hours
historically, and the mathematical basis of the game accounted for only 35
minutes. So what else was going on at Quatre Bras? Were our rules incompetent?
- well, possibly, though, like the players, the rules were well-intentioned.
Did battles involve a lot of other stuff - waiting around, perhaps - which
padded out this skeletonic 35 minutes? Is there something else at work here?
I've
thought about this problem, off and on, ever since. There was something else at
work. For one thing, there is something strangely elastic and subjective about
the passage of time - Einstein said something to the effect that an hour spent
conversing with a pretty girl was but a fleeting instant, but a minute spent
sitting on a very hot stove was a long time indeed (stovists please don't
bother complaining - get in touch with Einstein) - this is not something you
can measure on a clock. I have read about this, but don't have much of a handle
on it. More importantly, there are huge problems with our assumptions of
realism in any kind of stochastic simulation.
I wrote
a rather lengthy post on the concept of ludic
fallacies on this blog - it seems it was 6 and a bit years ago. Goodness
me. I was a windbag even in those days. If you wish to risk that old post then
good for you - it's here - I haven't
changed my mind since then, and I doubt if I could express it better now (more
concisely, maybe...). The idea is that any kind of mathematical model of a real
system is fundamentally flawed, unless the system is itself very simple and mathematically
based. Thus, for example, we can analyse fully a game based on rolling dice -
provided, of course, that the dice are "honest dice" and that the
players don't do anything underhand (and these may be significant doubts, if
there's a lot of money at stake!). Anything more complex and we very quickly
find that the elements we can measure and understand and estimate (or think we
can) are swamped by the things we do not understand, the things we have not
thought of, and the interactions between these. [The original target of ridicule for the ludic fallacy was the world of
finance, in which fund management and investment strategies are driven by
mathematical models which are not only unreliable but dangerous if they are
trusted beyond the bounds of validity (please supply your own examples...)]
War games
are less scary in their implications than fund management, but an example I
used 6-and-a-half years ago was the way rules all over the planet were suddenly
"improved" after the publication of Maj. Gen. BP Hughes' famous Firepower, a semi-scientific study of
the power and effectiveness of weapons. Hughes himself was very sensible and
forthright about the limitations of both the data and reasoning in his
fascinating book, but the guys who adopted it for rule writing almost all
missed the point by some miles. Idealised 19th Century experiments to measure
the power and hitting capability of (for example) canister fire are interesting
as an assessment of the weapons themselves, but the official-looking analysis tables
from Hughes have as much to do with the likely results of these weapons' use in
real battle conditions by real soldiers - with real emotions and limited
training - as the proverbial price of onions, so basing a game on them was more
than a little naive. Sorry, chaps.
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| One of the misunderstood charts from Firepower |
I can't
be bothered checking for actual references, but a few of the earlier war games
writers - notably Peter Young and Paddy Griffith, I think - made the point that
game scales and exact measurements were all very well, but the most important
thing was to have a game which works. If rifles are supposed to fire a bit
further than muskets, let them fire a bit further in your game - exactly how
much further is less important, within the limits of commonsense; in truth,
no-one really knows exactly how much further it should be, anyway. Same with
march distances and all that. If anyone tells you differently then he's
bluffing, or he hasn't thought about it. Or both. The 1970s push for
time-and-motion-study re-engineering of war games produced very little
improvement in the observed realism of outcomes, and, as far as I am concerned,
produced a colossal reduction in the enjoyment of the games themselves.
It will
rattle some teacups, but I would contend that one of the attractions of the newfangled,
non-Old-School, board game-style Commands
& Colors game is that it is closer in spirit to the creed of Messrs
Young and Griffith than much of the pseudo-science and detail that we have seen
in the time in between.
I impose
a ground scale on C&C to make sense of modelling battlefields, and
especially for setting out fortresses, but some of the equivalences don't stand
up to close scrutiny. If I assume 200 paces for a hex, then a unit in a hex 2
hexes away is somewhere between 200 and 600 paces distant. 400 seems a logical
figure to use. 400 paces as an effective musket range is pretty optimistic in
the Napoleonic Wars - the captain would not be pleased if his chaps started
firing at such a range - and is certainly just plain silly in the ECW. And yet
I've adopted a 2-hex musket range for the ECW game - why?
Well, to
be honest, I'd be more comfortable if musketry were not handled explicitly in these
games. I've already abstracted cavalry firing their pistols into the bit of the
game that comes under the heading Melee Combat. Pistol fire was just one of the
unpleasant things that cavalry did to each other when they were in reasonably
close contact. It would make sense to do the same with musket fire - simply
regard it as a close-range matter, in terms of the ground scale, and include it
into Melee, in the same way I've already done for the Horse.
This
would certainly not be very revolutionary. Long before C&C appeared, I used
home-brewed Napoleonic rules which were very influenced by Doc Monaghan's Big Battalions, which originated with
the Guernsey Wargames Club. This was most definitely a miniatures game, but it
used a very neat melee system, which was very clearly board game-like in style,
and there was no musketry. What? That's right - cannons fired at people, and
there was some skirmisher activity ("harassing fire") which was
carried out around the same time as the "Bombardment Phase", but
volleyed musketry by close-order infantry was something that happened in a
close combat situation, so it was covered by the board game-style melee rules.
It
worked nicely - it took a bit of getting used to, and it would certainly
alienate the chaps who don't like C&C because it denies you the opportunity
to form lines or columns, or fiddle with skirmishers. I think that if the game
scale is big enough, abstracting musketry is logical and reasonable.
So why
have I persisted with a distinct rule for musket fire for the ECW, which is, to
say the least, not well supported by our understanding of the facts? Why not take
the obvious step of making artillery fire the only kind of Ranged Combat
permitted? Hmmm.
First
thing to say is that musketry is kind of fun - the game would feel poorer
without it, and in this game it is not very effective anyway. Next, the same
arguments could be applied to the Napoleonic game - which is a board game, let
us remember - yet the very experienced and knowledgeable authors of that game
decided to feature it as part of ranged combat.
That
whiff of board game is quite an important aspect of this. In a traditional
board war game, cardboard counters move next to each other on the board, and
bad things happen. It isn't a series of individual musket volleys or charges,
it's almost like some kind of force-field thing - the units interact in some
manner, and one of them prevails, or is eliminated, or whatever - as the game
scale increases, our view of the details starts to disappear. It is the sort of
thing that turns off the Old School enthusiasts.
Thus I
have left musketry in my ECW game at present, because it feels more like a
miniatures war game if it is left in, but my feelings on the matter are pretty marginal. There are strong arguments to make it part of the Melee, and the game
would be tidier (and probably more correct) without it, but it would feel less
like a "proper" war game. Peter Young would have been horrified not
to get a chance to fire his muskets, so that'll do for the time being.
