Compromise in Wargames - (2) Time: Wellington, Wallace & Gromit

The more I thought about issues connected with time in wargames, the more I started to think that maybe there wasn’t much to say. There are some key decisions to be made when designing a game. Since it will not run, smoothly, by itself in real time (like a model railway), we have a practical need to replace continuous action/movement with a series of step turns, each representing an interval of time; perhaps these will be alternate turns, perhaps (if someone finds a way to do it) the intervals may be of varying length to suit the situation, the intensity of the action – however this is done, the compromise is similar. The shorter the intervals, the more closely we approximate to continuous action (like the stop-frame animation techniques used in Wallace & Gromit, my very favourite pieces of Plasticene). Very short turns will also reduce the problem of determining the exact timing of events (volleys etc) during the bound, but will also give a laborious, fiddly game. That is all pretty clear, but very short turns will also accentuate one of the great philosophical mysteries of wargaming – why doesn’t the real time represented by the elapsed turns add up to something realistic?

Here’s a quote from the Wargames Research Group’s then-shiny new Wargames Rules 1685-1845, published April 1977; bear in mind that these represented something of a change of direction for WRG, switching (correctly, in the cause of playability) to alternate turns, and abandoning their trend-setting combat factor table system:

Time Scale - Each bound can include action comparable with that possible in 80 seconds in real life. However, the bound overlaps both the preceding and succeeding enemy bounds, so that one friendly plus one enemy bound also equals 80 seconds. As this, multiplied by the likely number of double bounds in a game, gives an unrealistic duration for a real battle, we assume that each bound also includes a variable amount of delay. We therefore recommend assuming for campaign purposes that a pair of bounds represents half an hour.

Eh?

This, remember, is from game designers and rule writers who were not noted for ambiguity or mincing their words – the same booklet specifies exactly how big a marsh is allowed to be, for example. If the WRG, no less, were as woolly as this about how time elapsed adds up in the game, then this is very serious recognition that the matter is not straightforward.

I’ve referred to this before in this blog, and the discussion generated a comment from Ross Mac which has played on my mind ever since. With a grateful doff of the hat to Ross, and with my own rather clumsy paraphrasing super-imposed, the observation refers to the Battle of Waterloo: something like a quarter of a million men spent a long summer’s day within a few miles of each other; any one of the infantry units could have marched right across the field in a couple of hours – so what the blazes were they doing all day?

To an extent, this demonstrates how little intuitive understanding I have of what a real battle was like. The only reasonable answer is that, by and large, most of them must have spent most of the day hanging around, doing very little other than being in position, implying a threat. Very obviously, all over the field, lots was going on, but any one of the participants in the ranks must have spent most of the day waiting – waiting for the ground to dry, waiting for the other lot to do something, waiting for orders, just waiting.

Another thing which I find difficult to fathom – though I enjoy trying to unravel it – is the widespread disagreement we find in accounts of what happened, even to the extent of published exchanges of umbrella-rattling letters between colleagues who were within a few hundred yards of each other. I am writing about the Napoleonic Wars here, remember, one of the best documented periods of history – an astonishing proportion of the survivors left eye-witness accounts, and yet there is still huge debate about what order events occurred in, who did what, exactly where they were and so on. There must be many examples we could pick on, but one which has always intrigued me in particular is my old chum Marmont’s career-spoilingly bad afternoon at Salamanca on 22nd July 1812.

Realising that the brigades on his left have got themselves out of order and left some gaps, Marmont calls for his horse, with the intention of heading out there in person and sorting them out, when he is wounded by a shell, which spoils his concentration more than somewhat. In his memoirs, Marmont (who has a little dignified ass-covering to do on the subject of his performance that day) estimates it was 3pm when he was wounded. Foy, who was less than a mile away, estimates it was between 3 and 4. Wellington, however, is said to have spotted this over-extension of the French left while he was at lunch, around 1pm, and sent orders to Pakenham accordingly, which makes it unlikely that it would have taken Marmont a further two hours to spot the problem. Basically, we don’t know. This seems almost impossibly strange to a 21st Century reader – in a modern context the exact moment the C-in-C was struck down would be known without doubt – order sheets would all be headed up with the date and correct time, there would be a paper trail a mile wide from which to reconstruct events, if need be.

This was not the case then. There was no satellite transmission of accurate time, no time signal on the radio – the pocket watches of the day would also add a little inaccuracy. Most importantly, the mindset was different. People thought in terms of a day’s march, “about midday”, “late afternoon” – they would not have understood our modern-day obsession with spurious accuracy of time-keeping. So there is plenty of scope for disagreement between witnesses, in the midst of so much confusion. But there is something more – the confusion itself appears to be related to a certain subjectivity in people’s perception of the passage of time.

Here’s another, more famous quote:

The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.

Arthur, Duke of Wellington, from a letter to John Croker (8 August 1815), as quoted in The Waterloo Letters (1891) edited by H. T. Sibome

So what is he on about? Surely it is a straightforward matter to assemble an accurate account of a battle, even if it is complicated? There are a finite number of events, and each must have occurred at a known time. Time, very conveniently, travels only in one direction, there is only one of it, and it is the same for everyone. Is this true? [In what follows, I am not trying to labour a pun on the word “ball” – it’s just a coincidence!]

I had a long think about this. You can watch, or produce a decent written report of, a football match, for example, because there is only one ball, and the ball is the central point of focus of the game. If you asked each of the players involved to relate exactly what he had done during the match, none of the accounts would be the same as the report of the game, and this is because much of what they describe will have happened “off the ball” – running into spaces, making dummy runs, positioning themselves for a pass which did not come, and so on.

Further, the inter-relation between the individual events in these personal histories would be complex, and might only be apparent in retrospect. This is becoming more like a battle – radio commentators can make a very nice job of describing a live football match; commentating on a developing riot is a different challenge – it is impossible to identify the significant moments without knowing what is going to happen later – and there are too many balls in play at the same time.

Even if you can reconstruct everything that happened, and the timing, building a single, linear narrative of the whole thing is probably impossible, and we have already established that the individuals involved will have different recollections.

Considering my initial doubts, I seem – once again – to have expounded very little at great length. Last time we discussed this problem of tabletop time vs real time, we touched on the subject of Command Activation rules; one of the traditional things which go wrong in a wargame is that we waste an awful lot of time shunting all the units around, including the ones which aren’t actually doing anything. Activation rules are useful because they push you back to focusing on key areas, which removes a lot of the spaghetti from the Western.

CCN - My Local Rules - (1) Peninsular War tweaks

I am very pleased with my experience to date of the application of the Commands & Colors:Napoleonics (CCN) rules to miniatures battles. It looks very promising indeed, and for the time being will form the basis of most of my wargaming.

I have made a conscious effort to leave the rules alone - as far as possible. This does not follow my instinct, nor the habit of constant tweaking which I have followed for many years. Leaving them alone has some worthwhile advantages - it keeps me on common ground with the many other users of CCN, it keeps me positioned to take advantage of subsequent extensions to the published game as they appear, and it avoids damaging a game system which works and has been extensively tested by people who know what they are doing and have a good track record of game design. However, there are a few issues to be resolved when applying CCN to my own games, so I've set out some thoughts and some possible modifications. I have numbered them just to impose some structure on this exercise, not to imply any priority ranking or reference to sections of the rules.

(1) CCN seems to work best for battles involving 20-30 units & leaders per side, which is a fair tabletop-full for my size of table. I am aware that the Grande Battle or Epic extension will appear in due course, but it appears that this will introduce a double-width table, probably using teams to handle the bigger commands. I still have a need to be able to fight big battles on a grand tactical level, with (preferably) units which correspond to brigades - this may still be 20-30 units, but the scale issues are different - I'll come back to this in the next instalment of this post.

(2) There is now an accepted web forum and an array of support tools to enable CCN players to develop their own scenarios. I have a slight suspicion of this being pursued, at least in part, to enhance the fame of the contributors, but the concept is good and is useful. However, I need to get beyond the idea of being limited to approved scenarios - even if there is a growing library of them - I need a more general approach where a one-off game, or a battle from a campaign, can be set up and fought using the CCN rules without the blessing of a GMT proprietary scenario. This is not likely to be a problem, but it presents the immediate issue of the need for some rules-of-thumb to determine, for any ad hoc action, the numbers of Command Cards allowed to each commander and the number of victory flags needed for a result. All this can be assessed on the spot, but I would be interested in views on this, authorised or not.

(3) Since I am fighting non-GMT battles using my own Peninsular War armies, I need to be able to cope with some nationalities and a few troop types which are outside the scope of the National Reference Cards as published to date. I've done a bit of work on this, which I'll describe in a moment, and I've produced an expanded version of my CCN crib sheet (player aid - my original version is here) to cover this. To cut down the bulk of the thing, I've also excluded troop types which I do not have (they can always be added back in when necessary). I've also changed the unit sizes a little where I felt strongly that they were inappropriate. Now I do realise that GMT will be releasing game expansions to cover more nations (the Spanish army is expected in August, I believe), so I look forward to seeing what the official versions are like - in the meantime, this is the revised crib sheet for my entirely unofficial version, for my own use.

Notes:

(a) French - I've dropped various troop types which I'm unlikely to have involved; I've fought against my instinct to make so-called Light Infantry into Line, and left them as was; since the French cavalry was critically short of horses and not very numerous for most of the Peninsular War, I've reduced cavalry unit strengths to 3 blocks/bases (same as the British, in fact)

(b) British - I've dropped the Guard Heavy Cavalry class, since as far as I can see they were the same as the non-Guard; I've reduced all Light & Rifle unit strengths to 3 blocks, and Guard Inf to 4

(c) Portuguese - as published, but I've omitted the non-existent Heavy Cav & Horse Art categories

(d) Italian & Confederation (German) Allies for the French - I've dropped redundant troop classes (for my purposes), otherwise they are like the French except (i) the infantry don't get the +1 dice bonus in melee vs infantry, and (ii) the "half-blocks" calculation is rounded down (like the Portuguese) for ranged combat when moving - this last bit may seem harsh, but I can't believe they were superior to the Portuguese in this theatre

(e) King Joseph's (JN) Spanish - the Guard & the artillery are the same as French Line troops; non-Guard troops get the half rounded down when firing while moving, and infantry & cavalry troops suffer double (x2) retreats. I justified this because I felt they would fight satisfactorily, but might tend to collapse if things went against them

(f) Nationalist Spanish - I am fighting 1811-12 period, so have not adopted a Guard category (they had nominal Guards units, but probably no better than Line troops); they are the same as JN's Spanish otherwise, including double retreat rule; militia are the same as Portuguese militia (incl 3x retreats); new categories are Guerrilleros - (i) Guerrilla Cavalry may not retire & reform, but otherwise fight as Lt Cav (ii) Guerrilla Infantry have max strength of 2 blocks, may not form square, may move freely through Forests & Towns/Mills, may move 2 hexes & still battle, fight like line infantry (sabres count as hits in melee) (iii) important rule for guerrillas of all types is that one (non-disregarded) retreat eliminates them

This is all provisional, "beta test" stuff while I try it out for a while. As and when GMT publish more nations and more game extensions, I'll be pleased to bring my own efforts into line with the authorised version as appropriate - this is all just to get me up and running!

Hooptedoodle #21 - Demons Revisited

In a fairly lengthy and very busy life, I have been told many things by many people, some in person, some through the medium of the written or broadcast word. This, I suppose, is how we all acquire wisdom, but there seems to be a quirk in my own particular wiring diagram which means that the things I have learned are not necessarily stored in any sort of useful priority order. The things which are most readily retrieved are such treasures as odd football results from English League Division Two in 1960, or some stupid proverb a long-dead relative used to misquote when the weather was cold, or a radio advertising jingle which annoyed the bejesus out of me when I was nine. There is some useful stuff in there as well, I suppose, but it seems to be buried somewhere in the gaps.

Here's an example of a memorable-but-not-very-useful thing I have stored away. Someone - can't remember who - once said to me, "If you loved a place, you must never go back there, because the magic will be lost, but if there is a place you fear then you must revisit it, to lay the demon to rest". Of course, I have never really had the faintest idea what it means, though I can appreciate that it sounds kind of wise in a folksy sort of way. I sometimes feel that I have almost understood it, but then it slips away again.

Well, I have had a very busy week - that old Real Life thing has really been playing up again, and my priorities all got skewed. However, I did manage to get some units cleaned up and shipped off to the painter. Some more Spanish militia and irregulars, and some more of my mythical Pommeranians. I am saddened to have to report that two of the Pommeranian battalions were pulled out of the shipment, old Scruby figures - I found (when I got close up to them with a razor saw and some needle files) that the castings were so poor that I shall have to make arrangements to get replacement figures of appropriate Old School style. What a pity that L S Lowry never turned his hand to sculpting 20mm wargame figures, come to think of it.

And then, this morning, the postie brought me a personal demon. I have managed to obtain a slightly battered copy of George W Jeffrey's The Napoleonic Wargame, and I am pleased to have it. It surprises me to find that I should have come to be interested in such a thing, and it gives some satisfaction to note that I can now read it without becoming depressed. I must have moved on. It is, moreover, a proper, archetypal wargames book, with a picture of the classic OPC Hinton Hunt lancers on the front. Excellent. I am looking forward to reading George's book, after all these years, just for a glimpse through someone else's windows.

At this point I should carefully point out that I once knew GWJ - he was not a close friend, but he was a personable enough fellow, if rather intimidating, and I knew him through his activities with my local wargaming club. I should also point out that, as is right and proper, I cherish the fact that wargamers can each pursue the hobby in their own way, so that they get what they want from it. The breadth of the church is all part of the richness of the tradition. I also have no wish whatsoever to be disrespectful or to rattle any cages, but in my view GWJ was one of a select number of individuals who came close to killing off the hobby of miniatures gaming. I don't just mean that they alienated me - I mean that they developed a school of thought within the hobby which ultimately threatened to make the games unplayable, and probably drove a lot of enthusiasts away from historical gaming (or into fantasy gaming, which is sort of the same thing). I am referring to the dreaded Myth of Realism. That is the demon. I never had a particular problem with George, but in his day he was one of the high priests of realism.

The first and most important point about realism is the obvious one that, since we do not normally play these games up to our necks in freezing mud, suffering from dysentery and festering bullet wounds, there is some major gap in the realism thing. The second point which occurs to me is that a sense of proportion is essential. George's book is a goldmine of facts - it tells you, for example, the exact dimensions of a deployed French horse artillery battery, in 5mm, 15mm or 25mm figure scales, and he goes on at considerable length about the use of templates to get the distance travelled by the outer edges of a wheeling unit. This is familiar - George was always a stickler for wheeling distances - he was obsessed by π.

I have always been a fan of the commonsense approach which I found in the writings of Paddy Griffith and Charlie Wesencraft, in which it was suggested that if (for example) rifles could shoot further than muskets, and if it mattered (i.e. if it affected anything), then it was a good idea to make the rules give the rifles a slight edge, but it didn't matter exactly how much, as long as it gave reasonable results. Because, to tell the truth, chaps, no-one actually knows exactly how much the advantage was. There are people who will claim to know, but that is mainly because they are too obtuse to perceive the shortcomings of the scientific data. I used to read regularly how such-and-such a set of rules had revamped their fire effect in line with Maj.Gen B P Hughes' (excellent) Firepower, omitting to notice that Hughes was mainly writing about test firings under experimental conditions, which have as much relevance in a true battlefield situation - especially with conscripted troops - as the price of onions.

I have witnessed, with my own ears, a lengthy argument at one of George's wargames about exactly how many rounds the Imperial Guard could fire before they needed to be resupplied from the caissons. The argument then moved on to the capacity of the caissons. The battle did not finish. I never saw a big Napoleonic battle finish at that club. There were holes in the melee rules that you could have driven, well, a caisson through, yet they argued about marching distances and the capacity of a cartridge pouch. George also used to be very interested in which particular figures in a unit were hit, though I never really understood why.

He is regarded as the inventor of Variable-Length Bounds, or VLB as the initiated call it. A great idea, in principle, to facilitate those dead periods at the start of a battle when not much happens. Advancing an entire army 2 kilometres in 30-second bounds is a certain cure for insomnia, in my experience. I've had several goes at reading about VLB, and I still can't understand it. Perhaps some worthy soul will respond to this post to sort me out. I read somewhere that George had a lot of good ideas, which were hamstrung by the fact that his approach was bottom-up - too many musket ball counts and not enough strategic movement.

I would like to stress that this was never intended to be any kind of personal attack on George Jeffrey, though I'm sure that someone will see it as such. George's book dates from 1974, which is three years before the appearance of another classic for detailed realism disciples, Bruce Quarrie's Napoleon's Campaigns in Miniature. I am very fond of this - it is packed full of so much extrapolated trivia that it is a book which had to be written. I believe George would have liked to have written a book like this. It is absolutely full of numbers - some of them numbers about things which you wouldn't think you could measure - and is an interesting read, if you do it in very short bursts. I'm confident that most readers of this blog will be familiar with Quarrie's masterpiece, but here is a section from one of my favourite bits, as a sampler.

And if that doesn't get you rushing to rewrite your in-house wargame rules then you should be ashamed.

CCN - thoughts on a Grand Tactical Variant

I find myself most of the way through a 7-day Cabbage Soup de-tox. For the uninitiated, or the non-believer, this is a no-coffee, no-tea, no-booze, hardly-any-carbohydrate, very-little-fat regime which will leave me feeling terrific and ready for a large coffee, a big steak with fries and onions and half a bottle of Montepulciano on Day Eight. In the meantime, I am existing on what feels like a single figure allowance of Kcals per day, which is disorienting. This has no relevance at all to the subject matter, but it may help to explain things if I suddenly lose the plot, or end a sentence with the wrong artichoke.

It must be the time of the year or something, but everyone seems to be writing or revising wargame rules. Not wishing to be left out, and (temporarily) not having the mental resources to think of anything more original, I am joining in with the trend. My particular angle on this came after my recent stocktake of in-hand projects (and I forgot to mention the translation of Max Foy's "Vie Militaire", which is making rather halting progress). The particular food for thought came from comparing my recently tested, home brewed MEP rules for Grand Tactical Napoleonic battles, with my experiences with Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (hence CCN) to date.

Interesting. The main contrast - immediately - is the order-of-magnitude difference in ease and speed of play. CCN plays like a game, rather than a post-graduate research project. It does not suffer from being bogged down in all the convoluted extra cleverness which it has taken me years to build into my own game. Some of the things which it does not have are a source of minor regret, since I have grown to be very attached to them (skirmishing, for example), but the negative side is pretty substantially swept away by the playability and the logical flow. I find that having CCN available (and I play it as a miniatures game, remember) means that I can regard my cupboard full of soldiers and the rest of the paraphernalia as a game which I can play whenever I wish, with the certain expectation of finishing, and finishing, moreover, while still in a physical shape to appreciate it. Previously, there has always been an element of my wargames - and I have always tried to simplify them as much as possible - of having a cupboard full of equipment with which I may once again attempt to wrestle with the problem of striking an enjoyable balance between fun and my personal finicky views on military tactics.

I am, understandably, not going to scrap my MEP game, or any of my other games, but at some hungry moment or other during the last few days it occurred to me that I could produce a slight variant on CCN which would handle most of the aspects of MEP yet still move with the swing of CCN itself. If the changes were minor enough, it could almost be viewed as a kind of scenario amendment to CCN. So let's regard this as a possible new game, not as a replacement for anything, and toss some ideas around. [Bear in mind that this is not as heretical as it might seem - study of the published CCN Scenarios makes it obvious that Waterloo, for example, must use a different unit size and implied ground scale than Rolica.]

These are a first-cut list of changes to the standard CCN game:

(1) The Command Cards mechanism from CCN - in fact just about all rules from CCN - will be adopted as a starting point, and adjusted as necessary. The actual pack of Command Cards will need to be checked - some of the cards will require some new definitions, or may need to be excluded (I haven't looked at this in detail yet).

(2) The scaling and grouping from MEP will be introduced. This means that, in general, a unit will be a brigade, and the number of "blocks" (bases in a miniatures game) will indicate the numerical strength, the identity of the blocks representing the historical units present - typically, a block will be a battalion or cavalry regiment. This immediately introduces the idea of mixed units, so some commonsense rules will be required to average this out where necessary. A couple of examples here: (a) my view of French Light Infantry in the Peninsula is that they were pretty much indistinguishable from Line, so a brigade of mixed Light and Line units will be Line; (b) the Anglo/Portuguese Light Division will have brigades which are entirely Light Infantry, with some Rifles blocks present; (c) divisional artillery attached to a brigade will be present at a strength of 1 block, and will not affect the troop class of the brigade (artillery may also be formed into massed or reserve batteries of up to 3 blocks in strength); (d) a 4-block unit which has 3 Guard blocks and 1 Line will normally be taken as Guard (etc).

(3) There will be some implied change in the ground scale. Movement will be as normal, but artillery ranges will be reduced to 3 hexes for horse artillery and 4 for foot artillery. Ranged combat will not be allowed for infantry other than Rifles. Rifles will be allowed ranged combat at a range of 2 hexes. I still have to think about all this, including drawing up new Combat Dice numbers for artillery. Bonuses and deduction for Combat should remain unchanged, though the number of blocks counting for dice should be limited to 4, to stop a large, poor quality brigade becoming unstoppable.

(4) The rule whereby a single-block horse artillery unit cannot move and fire is suspended - typically, batteries will have a single-block strength.

(5) I have no idea how to decide which block in a mixed unit (brigade) is hit - maybe the owner can choose? If the dice shows an artillery symbol, the battery must go if there is one. Needs work.

(6) Leaders/Generals will normally be deployed at Divisional level and higher – it might be that a detached brigade might justify having its own Leader. This will give a higher proportion of Leaders to combat units – to compensate, there is a change to the rules: you may attach a Leader to any unit you like, but he only allows them to ignore a Retreat result if he is in their chain of command. Also, it may be necessary to add 1 to the victory flag requirements to allow for the greater number of potential Leader casualties.

That's my very first thoughts on this. My current assumption is that the rest of the CCN rules stay as unchanged as possible.

More soon. I would kill for a cheese sandwich.

Computers in Wargaming - 4 - Fit for Purpose

Computers. I've been around them for years - I worked with them throughout my professional career, and I've always been interested in what can be done with them, though they don't really excite me in their own right. I don’t build them, I don’t properly understand the engineering and, though I can do (and have done a good deal of) relatively simple programming, I definitely regard myself as a user rather than a techie.

[When I was considering how best to structure this post, I found a comment I had added to a previous posting, which gets across a few of the messages well enough for me to re-use it as a starting point, albeit in smartened-up form.]

Computerisation of my wargames has worked pretty well for me, but not through the use of anything that I bought or that someone developed for me. I am the proud owner of 2 commercially available computer-managed Napoleonic games for use with miniatures, and I don't use either of them. I have Follow the Eagles - Tactical (I think), which is quite thorough, though I don’t care much for its playability, and I also have Iron Duke which is far cheaper, more tweakable and generally more friendly - yet I haven't really used that very much either. It’s OK – I paid for them, so I am entitled to an opinion.

Apart from the inflexibility (and implied threat) of a sealed "black box" system, there is a common mistake that designers make: because they can't help it, because they were trained that way, because this is how computer applications look nowadays, they write nice, Windows-style GUI (Graphical User Interface) systems in Visual Basic or similar, which require a dedicated, mouse-wielding operator to read a screen full of nice coloured text, select things from drop-down menus, set radio buttons, click on defined areas of the screen for choices and actions etc. For a miniatures game, I believe this is wrong. Too much distraction - first off, the classy interface between the operator and the machine is completely cancelled out by the totally useless spoken/misheard interface between the players and the operator; secondly, this is a miniatures game - everyone is supposed to be looking at the action on the table - the computer is, almost certainly, a major nuisance. My own home-built systems are very simple data-capture programs which run on a very small, battery powered net-book which can be handed from player to player as necessary. The only entries are single key-touch (e.g. y/n) type responses to direct questions, plus unit numbers where necessary. That's all. This is a conscious attempt to simplify the user interface to the lowest possible workload.

OK – that is a suitable point at which to introduce the subject of Fitness for Purpose. Let’s take a fanciful example.

If you have to write (say) an automated inspection inventory system for some hazardous environment, where the staff will be working in cold, or damp, or toxic conditions, where they may be climbing on observation gantries, or wearing protective clothing (big gloves, say), it would be a major error to design a desktop type application which requires constant use of a mouse, or a lot of free typing, or which generally looks like the sort of package which accounts clerks spend their days with. The hardware is going to have to be compact and tough and convenient – maybe even specially built – and the input is going to have to be a real lumpen data-capture arrangement, such that they can hit big buttons with their gloves on, do the absolute minimum of tinkering, and read the big numbers without difficulty and without mistakes. They will not want to wait for McAfee to finish downloading an update in mid-job. They will probably not wish to be offered the chance to chat online, unless it is to set off an alarm. It would be a good idea, very early in the design, to brainstorm exactly what the intended users require of their system, so that the builders do not simply default to something they prepared earlier. [Factual digression: I recall a team of very expensive external contractors coming into an insurance office to design a client-server system to support the customer helpdesk. Since they did not understand the business, nor the processes involved in insurance, and since they were in a hurry, they immediately set about producing a re-hash of a system they had previously built for a police force in New Zealand, with some changes in the wording. It wasn’t a success, the business users were upset, and they had to start again.]

If we take a small leap to what we hope is a slightly less hazardous environment – that of the miniatures wargame – the same principles still hold true. As far as possible, we should aim to use the computer only for what it can advantageously do for us. We do not wish it to divert the players’ attention from the tabletop more than is strictly necessary, and we certainly wish to design the input arrangements so that they can be handled on the fly by the players, without burdening them with an unacceptable extra workload, without requiring them to sit down at a side table, without slowing everything down, and without confusing anyone, or making them fed up. There will be some trade-off, naturally – any tasks that the computer requires us to do will obviously take a measurable time – the aim must be that the extra time taken is justified by the convenience or labour-saving which the computer achieves.

The first viable home computers were sold with the BASIC programming language installed. It can be argued that the use of BASIC - a relatively high-level language - was a major step towards making home computers work. It was now possible for a member of the public to purchase a branded box off the shelf of a high street store, take it home and start writing simple executable programs straight away. BASIC was excellent - it read very like structured English, was simple to learn, and yet had a fairly sophisticated command set. It was greeted with great sniffiness by the grognards of computing of the day, since it wasn't "proper" programming. A great deal of commercial programming on mainframes at that time was still carried out in low-level, numeric languages such as IBM Assembler, which were labour intensive and difficult to master, but which produced software which ran very quickly and efficiently. The real practical disadvantages of BASIC (as opposed to the prejudices) were two-fold:

(1) The English-like instructions, though compact and easy to use, are not compiled into a stored set of machine instructions; this means that each time the computer reads your BASIC program, however many times it has run it before, it has to interpret it as it goes along, and create machine-code type instructions for execution. The interpretive process was very slow indeed in 1981 - remember that the chip speeds of these early machines were very low. Thus BASIC programs which required a very large amount of reiterative mathematical processing could run so slowly as to be useless. One way around this was to embed chunks of machine code into the BASIC programs, which would run much faster. Machine code was much nearer to the concept of traditional computing, and was specific to the processor chip in your particular machine, but there was a learning overhead.

(2) There is a maximum size of 64 Kilobytes for the program listing. In the days when programs were stored/saved on audio cassettes, and home-brewed programs tended to be small, this wasn’t really a problem. More sophisticated stuff, like video games, was always written in machine code anyway, so that it would run fast enough to be acceptable.

Fine. I bought a Spectrum in the early 1980s, I started writing software for my wargames, and I wrote it in BASIC, since that is pretty much all there was. In places where the processing was too slow, and sometimes if I needed to save some space, I used some machine code routines (PEEK and POKE – ah, nostalgia). The way this progressed has already been described sufficiently in section 2 of this series of posts. It’s worth observing that, though there were a number of people experimenting and producing software for their own wargames (like me) at this time, I am unaware of anyone who attempted to market anything like this then. Two possible reasons present themselves without much thought – firstly, there was no common view of which rules the game should follow, and, secondly, although the Spectrum was probably a market leader, there was a great variety of makes and models of computer available, and no two could share software.

Then everything to do with wargames went on hold for me for a period of about 15 years. When I restarted, one of my earliest jobs was to transfer the old BASIC programs (I had printed out the listings) onto a modern IBM PC. It made sense to start with a close approximation to what had been working on the Spectrum before the Intermission. Getting the BASIC written, with equivalent function, and debugging it all was enough of a chore without learning a new programming language or rewriting the game rules at the same time. I could start improving/tinkering later.

I got my Ancients game (Camulos) up and running and, since the Napoleonic game used large chunks of the same logic, I spent some time sorting out the Ancients. Since the world had moved on, I started to teach myself Visual Basic, and prepared to rewrite the wargame programs in a smarter, more modern Windows environment. At this point I also started looking at some of the available commercial offerings, and discovered that I was really very unconvinced about the classic Windows GUI front-end, and its suitability for a miniatures game. After buying some examples of games, going down some blind alleys and, really, confirming what I had suspected, I decided to stick with BASIC, though by this time it was called QBASIC. I am aware that this decision may be considered laughable, but if I had rewritten them in another language, I would still have been looking for something that behaved like the QBASIC programs, so I could not see the point of migrating the software just for the sake of it. I improved the programs a lot, designed them to work more efficiently and split them into functional modules. They are still written in QBASIC to this day – and, of course, like all rule sets, they are still being improved!

OK, so what happened to the 2 great problems of BASIC which I noted earlier? Good question.

(1) The processing speed of modern computers is so high that even interpretive, clunky old QBASIC executes with blinding speed. No longer a problem – not even a little bit.

(2) The 64K ceiling is still a constraint. The answer is to split big programs into functional chunks which can call each other and pass data to each other. When one of my battles reaches a decision point, my main Battle Manager program will store all the relevant current information about the battle and all units, and will call the Result Assessor, which starts off by looking for the handover file and loading the saved data.

Note that I am not suggesting that anyone starting now should necessarily use BASIC – my point here is that what appears to me to be the optimal input arrangement for a miniatures wargame management system is handled quite adequately by QBASIC, though the choice of language is obviously up to the programmer!

Here is a screen shot from the Iron Duke game – note that it is a conventional Windows GUI, mouse-driven application.

Here are a series of screen shots from my own QBASIC game – some examples of how the computer directs the progress of the game, stepping through the turn sequence and cueing the action, reporting on events as they occur.

It was a bad day for the 16th Light Dragoons, and especially for General Anson.

Weather checking is a good example of the sort of background task which a computer handles well.

That is really as much as I wanted to say. In my experience, once you are used to the convenience of an automated system (provided it is, in fact, convenient), all the memory work and mental arithmetic of a complex dice game can seem exhausting. My 8-year-old son became interested in my games recently, and so I put together a very simple dice-driven game for him, to get him some experience. When we were an hour into it, he asked if we could play the computerised game instead, since he found the dice a distraction. Now there’s heresy. It is possible, of course, that my simplified dice game was dreadful...

Lastly, to repeat the message which overrides all of this – computers have been useful because they have allowed me to use fairly complex rules without losing the will to live. The option would have been to cut back drastically on the complexity. If the Commands & Colors rules – straightforward as they are - provide games which run crisply, I shall be very happy to leave the computer on the shelf. It is, and always has been, just a tool, just a means to an end.

Computers in Wargaming - 3 - What Makes a "Good" Game?

I received an email from Matriculus in response to the second part of this series of posts on computers. It was very affable in tone, and made a couple of very useful points, but it also asked a question which bothered me a little. It bothered me to the point where I wish to take a brief timeout to reconsider what it was we were trying to provide a solution for - just where is the swamp we came to drain?

Why, asked Matriculus, are you trying to sell the idea of using computers in wargames? Remember that many people have to use computers every day in their work, and many people do not enjoy their work, so the idea is bound to be unattractive to many.

Ah.

He is, of course, absolutely right, but I fear that my interest in the subject has been interpreted as evangelism, and that is bothering - I never meant to sell anything of the sort. My standpoint here is that a game (of any type) needs a certain number of characteristics to make it "good" for me. For a number of reasons, miniatures wargames can become so complex and require so much off-line information that it is hard to keep them "good" without some additional help or equipment. A computer is one of the things which might help - I'm sure there are others - but I fear that computers are, in general, viewed unfavourably or "not fancied", not least because inappropriately designed game-management programs have given them a bit of a bad press in the past. A number of people have mentioned to me that they have seen, or taken part in, a wargame with computer support, and thought it was distracting. At best it caused delay, at worst it spoiled the game.

So I think I should back right up at this point, and re-examine what it is that makes a game "good". As always, this is going to be very subjective. I like games which are simple enough to allow you to carry all the rules in your head (with, maybe, some minimal additional reference for special occasions). I like the game to be compact and self-contained, and to have nice, high quality equipment. Green baize is good, shiny crystallite components that feel right and make exotic clicking noises are good. The game should also offer a strategic challenge, and a bit of luck to spice things up and balance the form book is fine. Not least important, the game must be capable of being played to a conclusion within a sensible timeframe, and the conclusion must be understood by the players.

Chess is a good game - it looks and feels terrific, its rules are self-contained, though the player will require an encyclopaedic knowledge of moves and strategies to progress to a decent level. It is a bit heavy to be classed as pure fun, and (as discussed before) it contains no luck at all, which can be severe - humiliating - for weak players like me.

Draughts (checkers) is a less threatening relative of chess.

Backgammon is good, though I never really understood the use of the doubling cube(!), and our infrequent games always have to start with a rules refresher course. Backgammon is a game which really benefits from high quality, box-style equipment. Throwing the pieces effortlessly into the corner point makes you feel like Omar Sharif. Playing on the backside of the kids' folding draughts board is just not the same.

I'm very fond of dominoes. My son (he is 8) and I play a lot of dominoes, including its noble Sebastopol variant, and it always goes well. The rules are simple, and it is especially enjoyable played with our best Jaques domino set (look, feel, sound). If the game goes well and you win, then you are a genius. If it goes badly then you were unlucky with the draw of the dominoes. Perfect.

Scrabble is a pretty good game, but it has irritating interruptions when someone has to break off to consult the dictionary. It's OK, and it's necessary, but it spoils the flow of the game.

Monopoly doesn't do it for me. The equipment is fun, even pleasantly surreal, and the rules are OK. Personally, I find all the counting of money tedious, and the game invariably reaches a point where some of the players have no chance of winning, and really only keep playing at all out of decency, to allow the potential winners to check out. Losing a game of Monopoly is not necessarily a stimulating use of time.

Snakes & Ladders is a terrible game (fortunately my son has now grown out of it), simply because the games are interminable and it contains no skill at all.

My earliest, shambolic ACW wargames were excellent - the equipment, including the troops, was fun, and the rules were simple, though even at that stage there was a lot to remember. The main problem was dissatisfaction with the poor simulation of real warfare, and with elements of the rules which gave paradoxical results, or required improvisation to cover holes. You don't expect holes in the logic of a good game. But the spirit of the battles was spot-on - all the points of attention, everything you needed to look at, including the tape measures and the dice, was right under your nose. The social heart of the occasion was right on the table. When, as proved increasingly necessary, we had to break off for a moment to consult a wall chart (or, even worse, the rule book) the game dipped a little - momentum was lost, the collective vibe was lost, and the less involved players might start to discuss football or their holidays during the interruption. These things are fragile - as often as not, the excitement did not recover from this point.

As my miniatures games got bigger and more ambitious, the interruptions to the spirit of the game became lengthier and more unsettling - especially as we got more frequently into the classic Death Position of arguing over what the rules meant.

I've already expressed my dislike of sheets of paper on the table. On the face of it, the presence of a computer seems like an extremely bad case of rule book. If we have to stop looking at the soldiers, and break off to look at, or do something to, that machine over there, the flow is spoiled. Not only that but it is often hard, when you go back, to find the piece of action on the table which you were considering before you broke off. Dice are fine - if you can avoid wrecking too many bayonets, you can resolve the action right where the combat is taking place. This preserves continuity, makes the outcome seem more natural and more immediately relevant, and - for anyone with short-term memory problems - makes it easier to remember where you were up to! Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere, dice are tactile, fun things to use.

In an ideal world, my miniatures wargames would be simple and compact enough not to need computers or any other sort of support devices or paperwork. I believe that my interest in the new Commands & Colors game is exactly attributable to the hope that it may get me closer to what I enjoyed in my earliest wargaming, with those exotic Battle Dice, and without a sheet of paper or a damned computer anywhere in sight. That is the key point here - if I have got into the habit of using computers over the years in my wargames, it is not because I was looking for another excuse to use the computer, nor because I am especially deranged. It is because they have helped to simplify the games I used them with.

Since this has been something of a stock-take rather than development of my main themes, I'll go on to consider design and (a little) technology, and what I describe as "fitness for purpose" in the concluding fourth part of this trilogy of postings. If Matriculus emails me again, the trilogy may go up to five parts - we'll see.

Computers in Wargaming - 2 - From Basic Principles

You've almost certainly seen this poster before. It has a nostalgic charm for me, since a version of this used to hang on the wall in the software engineers' office at our local IBM office, around 1978. The point, I think, is that it is easy to get so absorbed in the tactical requirements of a solution that you lose sight of what it was you were trying to solve. When I used to work with a bunch of systems analysts, we had a house rule that you had to start every piece of work by writing, on half a sheet of A4, what your objective was, and then keep the paper safely in your drawer. After that, you were supposed to take out the document once a week and check that that was still what you were doing. If it wasn't, you had to call a project meeting straight away.

I've been using microcomputers (as we used to call them) in wargames for so long now that I thought it would be a useful sanity check to try to reconstruct how I got where I am, and why. As anyone who has read my stuff before will expect, this is likely to require a lengthy ramble through my personal history, but - be fair, chaps - who else's experience was I ever likely to learn from?

In the beginning, the first wargames I actually organised and played (rather than watching from a distance at my local wargames club) were very simple ACW-based games, with relatively few troops and (almost certainly) the rules from Featherstone's Battles with Model Soldiers. They were fantastic - hilarious fun. In the company of some equally daft friends, I staged some of the least realistic wargames ever seen. Units of badly-painted Airfix soldiers whizzed around the table at motor-cycle speed, armfuls of dice rolled about the place, and the evenings passed amid a lot of laughter and a great deal of genuine (if rather childish) excitement. Every time, no-one would be able to believe that it was 1am already. There would - even at this early stage - be many occasions when we would forget to do something - usually, but not invariably, something fairly obscure, but sometimes something which completely derailed the flow of the game. One fairly common error was that, in the general excitement, one side would start fighting back or moving before the opponent had finished his turn. The resulting confusion could normally be rescued if spotted early enough, but it was sufficient of a problem to result in the drawing-up of some wall-charts to keep the play sequence organised.

Then, of course, my primitive ACW armies were replaced, first by Ancients, later by Napoleonics, and further reading and new rule sets (especially the preachings of the WRG) resulted in much thickening of the rules, more detail, and bigger and more impressive armies. The spectacle, of course, was improved, but the snags and minor irritations increased roughly as the square of the number of "improvements" we added. We tried to fix things, we placed more and more small print in the Commandments on the wallcharts, and, though we were still committed and positive, the games were never quite the same amount of fun again. We tried using a commercial rule set (WRG) exactly as published - soup to nuts - in the belief that it would hang together nicely, that 20 million flies could not all be wrong in their choice of diet. It helped a bit, but there was still a disappointing number of elements in the games which were - to put it bluntly - clunky, and it was far too easy to make mistakes which escaped immediate detection, spoilt the game and (for the first time) generated some resentment. That is probably an identifiable landmark - much of my devotion to the hobby ever since has had a lot to do with searching for the magic tweaks which might restore the joy of my earliest efforts.

The first serious realisation that something needed fixing came when, one evening, I found I was doing a headcount of the same unit for the 7th time in an hour, that I had once again forgotten to give someone the bonus points for their elite status, that the 28 of a possible 51 melee factor adjustments which I had just identified as relevant for an attack by the chariots on the left flank were exactly the same as they had been in the two previous attacks, and so on. And then came the creeping sophistication of victory condition testing each turn, weather, fatigue levels, progressive morale adjustments (as opposed to random morale throws when necessary), ammunition supply, national characteristics (oh God) - it became obvious that we were going to have to keep written records, so we moved bravely into a new era, in the belief that the hassle of the bookkeeping effort would be justified by a smoother, happier game.

And it didn't work very well. Now I know that many people use rosters to good effect, and swear by them, so this is entirely my view here, but - for me and my friends - it didn't work at all. For a start, the overhead of pre-printing record sheets and filling them in made it more like being at work than playing a game. Next, try as we might, we could not prevent the sheets of paper from cluttering up the battlefield and completely destroying the spectacle (and the spectacle, in hindsight, was one of a decreasing number of things we had left to enjoy) - from that point on, I have always loathed the sight of paper on the battlefield. Most irritating of all, the quality of record-keeping was so bad that it completely defeated the objective of making the game work better; worse, there was even a moral hazard here - if you forgot (or otherwise didn't bother) to update your roster for some loss or other, your unit strengths would be artificially high. Thus the sloppiest record-updaters would actually gain an advantage. Without employing independent auditors (and where has your game gone now, Johnny?), it just didn't work.

At this point some of my collaborators gave up and returned to their former life of visiting the pub, playing darts, even - it is said - spending time with their wives. The proper Old School doctrine would have been to go back to the original ACW games, make a feature of their primitive nature, and enjoy them for what they were. Somehow, life isn't like that. There is a faint echo of apples in Eden somewhere, but there is no going back. You can reconstruct the game and the circumstances, but not the innocence.

I had worked a lot with computers, and the very first affordable home computers were appearing. I commissioned a friend who had a Commodore to program some wargames routines for me, to see how it would work, and it looked promising. We did the game sequence (so that the computer announced each stage of the turn, and told you how many turns had elapsed), and we automated a simplified melee routine (for Ancients). Interesting.

I bought a Sinclair Spectrum, mainly because it was cheap and mainstream, and I started work to write a program which ran the move sequence skeleton, and which was gradually populated with more and more functionality, so that, over a period of time, a greater amount of the game was automated. It was a valuable experience to see it develop like that - you could judge whether each change was an improvement. A lot of it wasn't, and it was surprising how this worked out - something which looked like a sure-fire enhancement would prove to be just a nuisance, while some obscure, minor tweak might accidentally turn out to be a big step forward. We must remember here that these machines were agonisingly slow - I had to develop a good working knowledge of machine code to get some of the routines to work fast enough to be useful. One thing that never seemed a good candidate for automation was the movement phase of the games. To this day, in my computer managed games, the program does not know or care where the units are on the table, though it may know which ones have not arrived yet, or are not yet visible.

Around 1984, my wargaming involvement went on indefinite hold as a result of the pressures of the dreaded Real Life. One of the last things I did before storing everything away was to print out listings of all my Spectrum wargame programs - one of the smarter things I have done over the years. About 15 years later (Real Life having given up on me), I came out of the closet, and recreated the software, this time to run on an IBM PC. Apart from a lot more of the same, that is really where I am up to now.

It's maybe useful at this point to recap on what computers are good at, on what might be relevant and useful to a miniatures game, and on a few criteria and odds-and-ends by which we might judge whether the automation is beneficial. This is off the top of my head, so if you have a better list, please substitute your own.

Computers are good at

Storing and processing information, and reporting on it when you ask. Here is your roster, my Lord - and you don't even need to remove casualties.

Repeating a procedure, faultlessly, forever.

Doing calculations - of almost unlimited complexity - accurately, without forgetting anything and without making mistakes, and (sometimes regrettably) without coming back to tell you if this is a really stupid thing to be doing.

Generating random numbers - in more ways than you would believe.

Doing thankless background tasks - such as regularly testing for something that hardly ever happens - reliably and without complaining, and only telling you when the outcome is significant

They can also usefully do things without telling you about it - examples might be keeping track of the weather, or of concealed units (Blinds) or the arrival of delayed troops, or building a variance into scheduled events to provide an element of Fog of War - in an extended form, they can also go some way to providing support for a solo gamer - not by supplying a fully-functioning opponent, but by randomising things that you thought you knew, or by choosing one of a range of strategies, for example.

They can free you from some of the constraints of a manual game - for example, if your manual game uses a 6-sided dice to decide on some result or other, one obvious way to proceed is to automate it as it stands. In the manual game, a 6-sided dice is simple and readily available. On the other hand, a computer is just as happy with a 27-sided dice as with a normal one, so, if you know the game is to be implemented on a computer, you do not have to restrict yourself to the kind of dice which are convenient in the physical world. [In a business context, one of the most common inefficiencies in computerisation in the 1980s was the over-faithful automation of a clerical process, complete with all the double-checking, paper communication loops and other constraints which were inherent in the original clerical version. Sorry - that was boring.]

They can provide you with a Black Box game, which is especially sexy for a wargame - let's have a look at this:

Wargames, especially as they become more complicated, are hard to learn - there is a lot of stuff about how the troops behave, weapon capabilities, move distances - what we might term the historic aspects of the game, and then there is a whole lot of detail about how many dice to throw in various circumstances, exactly how many morale points to deduct if outflanked, all that kind of thing - the mechanics of the game. I get the horrors when I see a new set of published wargame rules which extends to (real example) 104 pages. Even if we ignore all the irrelevant photos of 54mm soldiers which have been used to brighten it up, there is still far too much in there. The author might understand it all, or at least he will know where to find the tables, but for anyone else this is a huge problem - especially for someone who, like me, regards a wargame as a social exercise rather than a plan to conquer the universe.

I am a big fan of the approach which does not require a newbie to know all the details of the mechanics, or what happens in the dark corners. In an ideal world, a wargamer with some experience and a good working knowledge of how (e.g.) Napoleonic warfare worked should be capable of learning the extra bits he needs to know to play a game in a very short time. The implication, of course, is that someone else - an umpire or a black box - knows the rest of it and makes the game work. Howard Whitehouse's Science versus Pluck rules for Colonial warfare follow this model - there is a very full, detailed manual for the umpire, and the other players only know what they need to know. The umpire obviously has a lot to learn and a lot of responsibility, but the situation for the players is what I would regard as correct. If they work, black boxes are easier to field (and drink less) than umpires.

One characteristic of a black box is that the contents have to be very carefully documented somewhere, and kept up to date as the logic is maintained. The program code contains a lot of wargaming nuts and bolts and expertise, and detailed knowledge of what is in there can dissipate very quickly. There are few less interesting tasks than reverse engineering the code to see what the game does (been there, done it...).

What sort of benefits are we looking for from the use of automation with a wargame? Well, as in every aspect of wargaming, what you are looking for depends on what you happen to like, but there are a few givens which I think few people would argue with:

The computer should not be a distraction, and should not impede, or detract from, the game it is supporting. The important bit of a wargame, after all, is the soldiers-on-the-table bit - the computer should be a help, but is otherwise not interesting in its own right.

The game should be easier with the automation, not harder, nor more irritating.

The means of input should not require a full time operator - even if someone wants the job (and would you invite someone like that to your home?), the constant passing of spoken information backwards and forwards is going to be an irritant, and, almost certainly, a source of fatal misunderstandings.

The program should be as failsafe as possible - for example, confirmation yes/no questions should be inserted as a double check at critical points, to guard against disastrous mis-keying, and (very usefully) a succession of security copies of the entire battle should be automatically saved at the end of each turn, so that the game can be rewound a bit if something goes horribly wrong.

That's probably more than enough for now. Next time I'll say something a bit controversial about user interfaces, and the way commercial games are designed, and I'll say a bit about games (including my own) of which I have some experience. There may be a little technical stuff in there. too, but only a bit, and only in passing. If you are still with me, then thanks, and well done!

If you are generally hostile to the entire subject of computers, there is some relief for you here.

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics - Crib Sheet

Since I found there was a lot to remember in CCN, and since the quick reference material is spread over a number of sheets (which is a real pain if you are trying to play solo), I made myself a crude 'crib sheet', which is probably British slang for a Playing Aid or Cheat Sheet.

It is not offered as an alternative to reading the rules, but it is more compact than some of the other customer-generated efforts I've seen so, if it is useful to anyone, here it is, in jpg form.

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics - Observations #3

Getting serious now. This evening, I had a bash at one of the published scenarios using miniatures, or at least something very similar to one of the published scenarios. I fought a battle which was strangely similar to Vimiero, though all thoughts of Vimiero vanished as soon as the table was set up.

I'm not going to relate the progress of the battle, this will just be impressions gained during the action. In fact, I called an intermission after about 8 turns, and will resume tomorrow. Bear in mind that these are all aspects of the game as seen by a novice. Tomorrow I'll be less of a novice...







Observation 8 - the battlefield was worryingly busy, from a scenic point of view - since hills have no effect on movement in CCN, this turned out not to be a problem, but I'm not used to having that much terrain on a tabletop. The game mechanisms, the lack of fussiness in the rules and the combat dice system all work quickly and give fast, bloody action, but, because of the command cards, at any moment this action is restricted to small numbers of units and specific areas of the field. The build-up appears slow, but the turns alternate quickly, enabling your hand of cards to change quickly (though, naturally, you seem to collect a lot of cards allowing you to issue orders on the flank which isn't supposed to be doing anything).

Observation 9 - the game is not complicated, but there is a lot to remember. I think I'll make up a one-page crib sheet which covers movement, combat and terrain effects - if it's any good, I might make it available on this blog. The rules should produce a battle which develops quickly and smoothly but, as a rookie, I spent huge amounts of time checking odd situations - can you carry out a Combined Arms attack on a square? (yes - well you can try) - can you do a Combined Arms defence? (no) - what exactly happens when a general is left on his own after a bad melee result? (if he isn't dead, he retreats) - and so on. I read and re-read the rule book so many times that I was starting to flag after a while. All the odd bits in the rules that I glossed over on the first reading - you know the sort of thing? - well, as far as I could see, they all came up! The rule book appears well enough structured, and there is a pleasing lack of ambiguity if you can find the right sections, but finding things when it matters is not always easy. I learned a great deal, but I learned, by and large, by arriving at each situation and playing it through, rather than by remembering details from my preliminary reading. I think a couple of trial actions will be needed before I get anything like up to speed, but what I saw thus far looks very promising. All you guys out there who try a new game every week have my wholehearted admiration - I don't think my brain does that any more. I'll take the rules to bed with me and read them over again, and this time I expect a few more lightbulbs to go on. Ah - yes - so that's what that means....

Observation 10 - the command arrangements are very relaxed – almost casual. Each army is allocated a number of general officers, but there is no implied structure - any general can join or assist any unit. I'm not used to that, but it works OK. Unless the scenario enforces one, there is no higher organisation beyond the unit. You can, of course, be like me and place all battalions from a single brigade together and so on, but there is no need. In fact, a unit does not really have an identity in CCN - only a classification. This is closer to Joe Morschauser than I expected.

Good fun so far - I'll be back to the table tomorrow, I'll know more and I'll be quicker (and make less daft mistakes). The huge advantage of buying a commercial game is that knowledgeable people have put many hours into making sure it works and produces reasonable results, but you do have to trust the system!

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics - Observations #2

Some more of the preliminary stuff...

Observation 6 - this maybe seems a small matter, but it's niggling - once you have removed the contents from the CCN box, put the required stickers on and removed the scenery and so on from the punched cards, it is a fair old challenge to get everything back in there. At least it is if you are being careful not to damage anything, and if you wish to preserve any form of order in the unit blocks. I'll have to get my hands on a tray or shallow box of the correct size to hold the blocks - shoving them all in plastic bags and squeezing them in the original box would mean that a game would require a lot of preliminary sorting and counting - how about 2 hours to sort out the components and 2 hours to play? How would boardgamegeek.com rate that? It is not unknown for boxed games in my house to sprout all sorts of additional boxes, and somehow they refuse to stay in the one place. I believe they crawl away at night.

Observation 7 - Artillery unit sizes - not insoluble, but I do need to come up with an answer. Infantry units can be 4, sometimes 3 or 5 blocks. My minatures battalions have 4 subunits, so this is compatible, not a problem - just depends on the numerical strength. Cavalry doesn't offer a problem, either, though my basing is not absolutely perfect for CCN - I can handle this. Artillery is a different matter - CCN uses 3-block artillery units - the rules require this structure. My miniature armies use 2 crewed guns per battery, and 3 guns side by side would not fit the hex size on my table. So I need something which is not a gun, which can be used to denote the 3rd block. Preferably something which is not stupid(!). I had a great idea - I could use a caisson - unfortunately I don't have any. How about an ammunition chest? - tried this - it's hard to spot. I could, of course, use a dirty great coloured counter, or something, but it seems a bit crude, and doesn't please me as an accessory to the shiny new game. I shall think about it. It has to be something sensible, something which does not require a whole new painting frenzy to arrange, and something which, if possible, maintains the dignity of the game!

Hmmm.

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics - Observations #1

I have to remind myself, right here at the start, that I have bought GMT's new game primarily because I intend to use it with miniatures. I have made up the troop blocks - all the game's own equipment is ready now, to the house's rather rigorous standards (as discussed). The blocks, supplied hex board and scenery tiles will all be useful for gaining a bit of practice, but I confess that I find board games a bit unsatisfactory visually - even though this is rather an attractive one.

The other thing I have to remind myself about, and I'll write this in bold characters, to increase my chances of remembering, is that I will not start changing the rules. At least not until I have some experience of the game as published.

CCN's pocket-sized Waterloo scenario

The scenarios supplied start off with Rolica, and finish with Waterloo, no less. Rolica has about a dozen units a side. At Waterloo, the Allies have 21 units in total, including 3 batteries. Righto. Observation 1 is that there is an obvious amount of implicit scaling of the game to suit the size of the original action. That is certainly one way to fight a big battle with fewer troops (and it is only a game, after all...), but I have some initial misgivings about the distortion this can introduce to the structure of the armies, and the potential for (for example) musket ranges to get out of proportion to the ground scale. Having recently gone through the process of developing Grand Tactical rules of my own, and having consciously rejected the approach of just pretending big battles were smaller, with smaller armies on a smaller field, I'm pretty focused on the areas of potential discomfort. OK - maybe I'll avoid their Waterloo scenario for the time being.

Observation 2 - I quite fancy trying some rather larger actions - not ridiculous, of course, but involving a few more units, on a larger board. I could do with a little more information on how they design the scenarios - in particular how they fix the number of command cards to be used with the armies as deployed, and how they set the victory conditions (which in CCN is "the number of victory flags"). By inspection, it looks as though the number of command cards for each commander is something like a third of the number of units in his army, rounded up. That's fine - I can use that to create my own battles, but an obvious scalability question looms. The command cards are played singly, and allow a number of units to do something - this number is not large, and it may be that for actions involving more than, say, 25 units a side, I may have to alter the game so command cards are played in twos. This is a first guess - I'm not sure how this will work. Initially I will be trying small actions, and it could be that the proposed La Grande Battle extension set will provide command cards capable of rather more extensive orders.

Observation 3 - The troop classifications will need a bit of generalising - units are described as Grenadiers, Guard, Militia etc, and I have no problems with these descriptions, but there will have to be some conventions so that I can remember that, for example, poorly-trained line troops might be classified as "militia" for the purposes of the game, even when they are evidently nothing of the sort.

Militia in trouble

Observation 4 - there are some very nice bits in the game. Naturally, the bits I am most pleased with are the sections in the movement rules which are almost identical with my own hex-based game - sound judgement, GMT! No - this isn't just self-congratulation, it's simply something less I'll need to re-learn! The combat dice bear various symbols, some of which cause casualties and one (a flag symbol) can cause a one-hex retreat. Retreats may be ignored a bit in certain terrain situations, or for good quality troops, but if the rules say a unit must retreat, then retreat they must. If for some reason they are unable to retreat as required then they will lose blocks (subunits), as extra casualties. The Militia are treated specially - they retreat 3 hexes for each flag, which means, if they cannot retreat, they lose 3 blocks for each flag they are forced to ignore. Since an infantry battalion will normally be 4 blocks, this means that the unit is effectively wrecked - retreats for Militia are bad news, they either lose a lot of ground or a lot of men. I like this. It's simple and it's elegant.

Observation 5 is from the smart-ass department - one of the supplied troop classes for the blocks is Portuguese heavy cavalry. Naturally, my hand shoots up - please, miss, the Portuguese don't have heavy cavalry. That is correct, comes the answer, but they do when they are pretending to be Dutch Belgians, or whatever, so go and stand in the corner, and try to buck your ideas up.

Commands & Colors - Keeping Things Nice

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I play a game in my head which I call "Memory Walks". In this game, you select a place you know fairly well - or, preferably, once knew well - and are comfortable with. I often use my grannie's house when I was a little boy - a house which, by the way, I haven't seen in 50 years. The technique is to move around the house in your imagination, remembering what was next to the fireplace in the kitchen, visualising the big clock next to the stairs, recalling the smell in the back kitchen (bacon and bleach), and so on. It gives the brain a low-stress workout, and it almost always gets me off to sleep by the second room or so.

The game also gives some insights into how times have changed, and things which were part of growing up and which I haven't thought about for a long time. In my grannie's house, the first door on the left inside the front door was almost always kept shut. It was The Parlour. Last bastion of working class gentility, it was only used at Christmas, or when someone very important visited (which, sadly, was a very short list - the man from Prudential Insurance, collecting his weekly pennies, maybe the occasional church minister). In theory, it was also available for laying out the deceased in times of family tragedy. I did go in there occasionally - probably when my grannie got tired of my prattling about nothing during the school holidays, and sent me to play the most out-of-tune piano I ever heard.

I was intrigued by the atmosphere of The Parlour - by the fact that the curtains were hung inside out so the neighbours could see the pattern, by the swordfish's nose on the wall (all Liverpool families had seafaring relatives), by the heavy-duty, embroidered antimacassars and arm protectors which covered the sofa and armchairs, and by the almost religious dedication to Keeping Things Nice. Nothing must be soiled, nothing must ever wear out or get broken.

Fast forward the film a couple of generations. That parlour sprung a far-flung family who still covered their best dining chairs with tea-towels, to stop them wearing, to Keep Them Nice. For what? For whom? What was the special occasion, who was the celebrity visitor they were being saved for? Did they ever arrive?

By this time we are no longer speaking of post-war austerity - this is just the way people were raised. I'm not in a position to mock, either - I am the man with a glass cupboard full of lovely soldiers which is fitted with blinds so that usually no-one can see them, in case the sun fades the flags.

Dice of Thunder - non-standard issue

And now my set of Commands and Colors has arrived, and of course I am pleased with it, yet slightly worried that some of the components may have a finite duty cycle. I have replaced the supplied dice with a better design, and varnished them carefully to preserve the surface of the stick-on symbols. I have now encased the playing cards (which are, to be honest, rather disappointingly flimsy) with clear plastic sleeves to protect them, and I am laughing out loud at myself. The cards are much tougher now, no doubt, and the sleeves are well made and exactly the correct size, but the cards are quite a lot thicker, and slippy, and handling them in bulk is a bit like trying to shuffle and deal After-Eight Mints. No doubt they will be fine, but I may just remove the sleeves again if I keep dropping the cards on the floor.

And all in the sacred cause of Keeping Things Nice, of making things last forever! At least Grannie would have been proud of me.

Change of subject. While we're on an OCD kick, I note that the rule book for Commands & Colors mentions that there will be a future expansion set to cover very large actions, to be titled La Grande Battle. Pardon? There it is again - the dreaded franglais étranglé. I keep coming across this in wargames. I guess it is because the history of warfare, by definition, keeps turning up the activities of nations who (rather inconveniently) did not speak English. It would be very easy to appear to be trying to be a smart-ass here, but if someone wishes to include some French to add authenticity, or even some romantic colour, it does seem worth the effort to get it right, or at least to avoid awkward mixtures.

I have long grown used to George Nafziger's reference to the 22nd Ligne and similar - in fact I probably do this myself - but what language, pray, is Guard du Corps? I'm also not completely comfortable with John C Candler's Miniature Wargames du Temps de Napoleon (though I am assured that the rules are excellent, and no disrespect to Mr Candler is intended). I recently obtained a copy of the 3rd edition of the Corps Command rules, and I find that one of the possible results of skirmish combat is termed Suave Que Puet. Why? - what's wrong with Run Away?

I can see there is a fair chance that someone will send a comment to take me down a peg or two, and I probably deserve it, but - come on, rule writers - Keep Things Nice!

Sapeurs and Baron Thiébault

A while ago, I was discussing with Clive a Minifigs S-Range Old Guard band which I've had, unpainted, for donkeys' years. Like any non-combat unit, the band have suffered from always being a secondary priority in the painting queue. If it is a choice between painting a fighting battalion or a soppy band, I will pick the fighters every time. Result? - 25 years later, they are still only partly painted. We joked that, to make the band more useful, and raise their ranking in the paint queue, it would be possible to introduce a new rule, such that all units within earshot would get bonuses for morale and so forth.

Now I come to think about it, and joking aside, that sort of thing has been going on in my wargames since I started. I once was out running in the Queen's Park, Edinburgh, when Her Majesty was in residence at Holyrood Palace, and a troop of the Royal Horse Guards were drawn up in line, in the park, in such a way that I had to run along behind the complete line of great, towering, black horses’ backsides to continue my jog. I was so impressed by the experience that when I got home I amended my rules for the effect of cavalry on infantry.

Recently I have added various siege-type units to my Peninsular armies, since I am working to develop rules for sieges. I have some small units of French sappers in full siege gear, with round helmets and cuirasses, and the siege rules will have to give these guys special skills and duties. I also recruited a bunch of French line infantry sapeurs (Falcata and Kennington), which are pleasing, and I have been gently looking for clues as to what such chaps might do, and how they might be organised.

I realise, for example, that your battalion sapeurs would be just the fellows for smashing down doors, or maybe corduroying rough roads, and they could, I guess, be provisionally grouped at brigade or division level for special duties. Looking at various historic OOBs, it is clear that each French division had units of pioneers - i.e. men from the engineering branch of the army - so I assume that if you wanted to construct a bridge or something these would be the people to do it. What role, then, did the regimental sapeurs have? I had a look at various rules, to see how engineering is addressed, and I found that it is pretty haphazard. Some rule writers have dismissed engineering as an aspect of warfare which is too slow and too tedious to take into account. Some - the old WRG and Big Battalions rules among them - have a fair amount of detailed stuff, but it all looks a bit like something borrowed from a scenario.

Interesting. Does anyone have any ideas about obvious, no-brainer duties which sapeurs could carry out on the battlefield? Are there any sets of rules which address this in a particularly coherent way?

As with the band, it would be silly to distort the game just to give my new unit a job to do, but it has made me realise that I have very little idea what they did. All clues welcome.


Completely separate subject. Just before Christmas I managed to obtain a good copy of the 2-volume Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, which, though I owned it in a former life, I never actually read. Officially, I am currently having an 1814 (Defence of France) period, and have the appropriate works by Petre, Houssaye and Uffindell lined up for study, along with the trusty (but very heavy) Elting & Esposito atlas. I had a quick squint at Thiébault, and the 1814 plans are now on hold as a result.

I am aware that the baron does not get a very good press, and I can see why. This is something a bit different. Thiébault was present at some important episodes of the Napoleonic Wars, so he is a major witness anyway, but his personality is unusual. He writes well, with a great eye for detail and excellent recall, even humour, but he is vain, permanently offended, always the victim of injustice, and always the hero of everything he describes. He never loses a witty exchange, his only fault, he believes, has always been excessive humility and honesty. He is, in short, a horror. If you want to know what a complete waste of space all the celebrity generals were, this is where to find your information. Soult, Darmagnac, Dorsenne, Solignac, you-name-it all got a roasting in last night's session. Dreadful people. D'Erlon, it seems, was not completely hopeless, but was ineffective unless Thiébault was around to support him. Anyway, it's been hugely entertaining. There are moments when I wish I had a time machine, to travel back to give him a resounding slap, but it’s a highly recommended read overall.