Rules - Turn Sequences

I've recently been working on some wargame rules of my own (yet again), and I seem to have developed a bee in my bonnet about building them around the turn sequence from the old WRG 1685-1845 rules, which in the past impressed me greatly. It is (or was, at the time I was impressed), unusual in that moving is the last thing you do, including the declaration of the first half of any charges to contact you wish to make. Thereafter, reaction to those charges, defensive retaliation, the completion of the charges and the actual melees take place in your opponent's turn.

I thought that was clever - I confess I never used the full rules as written, because I found them tricky to get the hang of, and there were far too many lists and reaction tests for my liking. Anyway, since the spark had now glowed again, I thought I should make a more serious job of understanding them properly, so that I could maybe use the turn structure in my new game - I have to say that the WRG's rules sometimes rely heavily on your spotting the subjunctive verb in Paragraph 417 to appreciate the full beauty of the logic. [Also, over the years I have skipped past "jezails" in the combat factor lists more times than I could estimate, and I still don't know what a jezail is.]

This, of course, is a jezail

Again, I have found this quite tricky. My new rules were suddenly full of morale tests that I hadn't wanted, there were coloured counters all over the place, to show where you were up to with keeping track of routing units, and, since the game would collapse in a heap if you did anything out of the correct order, I had written out the turn sequence as a checklist.

In a recent email exchange with a fellow bloggist - a game designer of some repute, let it be said - he offered the view that the turn sequence has to be capable of being carried in your head - if you need a chart then there may be something seriously wrong. He is right - I guess I knew this, but I needed someone else to say it.

Lightbulb.

I have - all right, regretfully - dropped the WRG bits, and my new game is looking slimmer and more like my idea of a recreation immediately.

What is capable of being carried in the head, of course, also depends heavily on how the old head is performing, and I am aware that the passing years have made me less patient in this area, but I prefer to think that I have become more fussy about how a game should be, rather than simply more stupid. Other opinions probably abound.

I was joking about this with another friend (I am showing off here, since this means I must have at least two friends), and we agreed that a wallchart for the turn sequence in chess would be

(1) White moves
(2) Black moves
(3) go to (1)

I could probably post that as a download on boardgamegeek - now there's fame.

Keeping in Step - Movement in IGO-UGO Wargames

When I started dabbling in wargaming, longer ago than you might believe possible, first of all I digested a couple of the Featherstone books, and I got the hang of the basic idea of a game cycle comprising the “Three M’s” – Movement, Missiles and Melees (in that order), and the alternate-moves approach which those books embraced.

I also visited a local club, and found they had their own rules, typed up as a leaflet, but what they played was still, recognisably, a branch of the same family.

Round about the same time, I read somewhere that it was a lot more authentic militarily (and thus better, more serious, more grown-up) to employ a simultaneous-movement system, using written orders for each unit. I was interested enough to try this, and found that – more authentic or not – the overhead of writing, checking and managing the orders was extremely tedious, and any increase in accuracy or compliance with the rules was negligible. There were sheets of paper everywhere, the orders invariably degenerated into unreadable, ambiguous wiggly lines and curved arrows, or abbreviations which could mean almost anything, and the actual game moves which followed had only a very slight connection with what the orders might have said. That crooked arrow curving to left would be interpreted to suit whatever the player felt was in his best interests from moment to moment. The amount of cheating in the game actually increased, likewise the amount of argument. I recall a player claiming that a solitary exclamation mark against a unit on his sheet meant “charge, straight ahead” – what else, he protested, could it mean?

Simultaneous moves didn’t do it for me at all. Of course, my old chum George Jeffrey would have claimed that it worked perfectly for him and his club members (because they were all gentlemen), and that if you couldn’t trust the people you played with then you shouldn’t play with them. And I would have replied, as I would reply now, “wuff wuff”. I never heard such bitter arguments over a supposed pastime as I heard at George’s club nights.

However, alternate-moves did not always result in calm perfection, either. One snag which was always troublesome in IGO-UGO games was that some unit or other would get out of step with the rest of the battle – one move ahead or one move behind – wrong, anyway. As long as everyone moved only during their side’s movement phase, everything was fine, but things became complicated when someone retreated during the enemy’s fire phase, or ran away from a melee which might be during their own turn or the other side’s, or even if someone wished to countercharge when being attacked. Suddenly you would have a unit which was one move ahead of everyone else, and there would then be a discussion of whether they should miss their next official movement opportunity (since they had already moved), views of which frequently varied according to what particular disaster might befall them if they now stood still. This was one area, even of fairly well developed and stable rules, which regularly caused confusion and disagreement.

Now then, although I found them too fussy and too prescriptive to use in their entirety, the publication of the Wargames Research Group’s “Wargames Rules 1685-1845” in 1977 introduced me to a variation on the Three M’s which I found logical and pleasing – in very broad terms, the move now became Missiles, Melees, Movement and – in particular – a (charge) move to contact would now be declared but only partially carried out during the movement phase, the chargers stopping some distance short of their target at the end of their turn, to wait for fire and other enemy reaction before attempting to complete the charge during the opponent’s turn. Of course, the full details of the turn sequence were more fiddly than this, but they hung together well enough if you kept your eye on that nippy old problem of who had moved out of turn, and what should be done about it.

My personal approach to this made use of some coloured counters – red “Attack” arrows, black “Hold” markers and brown “Withdraw” arrows. In a later refinement, I got some custom, plastic versions made up for me by Litko, but the game system worked well enough for years before I added that extra level of elegance.

I’ll skip over the matter of activation – exactly which units (and how many) might do something in a given turn; broadly speaking, units moved only when it was their side’s movement phase, but there were some oddball groups: 

• Units which, as the result of reaction to a morale test – possibly following combat – were stuck, unable to move, or else were forced to retreat for a single move and were then stuck. These units would be given a black “Hold” marker.
• Units which, as the result of such a test, had just routed – they were required to run away for a move, and would then be tested in each subsequent turn to see if they rallied or continued to run. These units, in the turn in which they broke, would get a black “Hold” AND a brown “Withdraw”.
• Units which were already running, and needed to be tested to see if they rallied – these would be identifiable by the presence of a brown “Withdraw” – the black “Hold” would not be present if they were in a continuing rout.
• Units which were charging to contact (or countercharging) – these would have a red “Attack” marker, which also served to remind the players that they were eligible for an impetus bonus (or whatever the rules allowed in this situation).

In what follows, note that all the references to “Test” (as in “Test morale”) may be addressed in whatever level of detail is required by your preferred rules – at times I have used detailed morale tests (sometimes far too many of them), at other times I have taken little trouble over them; it makes no difference – the point at which such testing would be done (if any…) is quite clear in the sequence; the emphasis here is on movement – who has moved and who has not, and the procedure with the markers is to keep things in order (and it’s surprising how confusing this can get, especially in a solo game).

Phases in a player’s turn (player’s own actions are in a black font – anything which is an enemy action is in red; anything which involved both players is in brown): 

1. Test units being charged (if they break and run, give them a “Hold” marker and a “Withdraw”, if they are to retire in an orderly manner then move them back and give only the “Hold” marker; if they are able to countercharge, advance them to meeting point, mark them with an “Attack” marker – melee is formed).
2. Test routers who have been running since at least the previous turn – i.e. any units which just have a “Withdraw” marker (no “Hold”) – if they rally, replace the “Withdraw” with a “Hold”, and turn them as appropriate; if they continue to run, they keep their “Withdraw” marker, and they remain one move ahead of the game – move them back another rout move.
3. Fire artillery. When all artillery fire is complete, enemy player removes losses, checks for staff casualties and tests morale reaction as appropriate – as before, any unit which is halted or retires gets a “Hold” marker, and any which breaks and runs gets both a “Hold” and a “Withdraw”, and any retirals or routs are carried out now – out of sequence.
4. Fire musketry. When all musketry fire is complete, enemy player checks for losses and reaction as for artillery fire.
5. Enemy chargers who are still able to continue their attack now press home the charge, retaining their red “Attack” marker – melees are formed.
6. Both players now work out melee outcomes (including losses, staff casualties and reaction) in accordance with rules – if the melee continues into a further turn, leave it formed but remove “Attack” markers so no-one gets inappropriate impetus bonus. Any melee losers who retire in good order are pulled back, and get a black “Hold”; if they rout they get both a “Hold” and a “Withdraw” and are turned around and moved back one rout move.
7. Now is the Movement phase – the player may move (activated) units which are not in a formed melee and which do not have “Hold” and/or “Withdraw” markers. Charges may be declared (subject to necessary morale tests), and charging units are moved part of the way to the target unit, and given a red “Attack” marker (they will have the opportunity to complete the charge at the beginning of the enemy player’s next turn).
8. When movement is complete, remove all black “Hold” markers from your own units – they have now (correctly) missed out on the movement phase, and are back in step with the rest of the game. Units which still have a brown “Withdraw” are still running, and will be tested for rally/rout in the player’s next turn.

That’s the end of the player’s turn; now the other player goes through the same sequence.

So, to summarise, units which retire or are pinned for a single turn are given a black “Hold” marker which will stop them moving again when it is their normal time to do so, and routers will keep testing, out of sequence, until they are rallied, at which point they are held for a move to get them back into step.

I fear I may appear to have explained something relatively simple in a complicated way, and the plastic markers may seem like overkill, but in a large battle I found this marker system works very well, and avoids confusion in the very areas where the most critical pieces of action are taking place.

                                                                                   

  

Compromise in Wargames - (3) Probability: the Ludic Fallacy and Other Stuff

This is the last of my three posts considering the basic assumptions on which wargames depend, and the need for a commonsense approach when applying them. This one will concern itself with the gamer’s need for convenient mechanisms to simulate chance events, or events which are subject to the laws of probability. The obvious areas of focus – maybe the only important ones, are casualty rates and the maintenance of some measure of combat effectiveness during a battle. To protect my sanity a little, and save some typing, let’s call this effectiveness CE, for short, and let’s not fuss too much about how it is assessed – let’s just assume that there is such a thing.

I don’t know what the Very Beginning is, in absolute terms, but Young & Lawford’s excellent Charge! seems a Very Good Place to Start. In the opening chapter, the authors discuss the introduction of random events into wargames, mentioning topics such as Military Chess, a variant of the noble game in which a determined pawn may occasionally fight off an attack from a knight, for example. Random events – simulators of battlefield probabilities – are introduced as a characteristic of wargames.

In the basic game of Charge!, infantry fire requires the player to throw 1 normal dice for every 8 figures firing. The score on the dice gives the basic number of hits. For long range (over 3”) halve the dice score. For incomplete volleys (4 to 7 odd men), halve the dice score. Hits on gunners, cavalry are halved; for troops in cover, hits are halved. All these halves are cumulative, and adjusted hits less than ½ a man are ignored.

This is a practical, standard approach to the problem – some contemporary rule writers allowed saving throws in addition, but this was the state of the art in the 1960s. The implied theory is fine – circumstances which reduce the probability of a hit (range, cover, type of target, etc) are allowed for by reducing the number of hits. Whether the numbers which result are reasonable or correct might be a very subjective judgement – we could compare the results with known recorded events from history, but the main criteria are whether the game works, and whether the players are happy with it. Charge! gives a good, rollicking game which is easy to understand, though the arithmetic can still become troublesome at 2am after a bottle of wine.

Possibly as a reaction to what had become the establishment method, some dissatisfaction began to appear among gamers who felt this was too crude, that it was not “scientific” enough. Charge! uses large units – about 60 figures to a battalion, so the relatively large numbers of dice in use would cause some averaging of the results, but people with 20-man units would be throwing 2 or 3 dice, which gives greater volatility. I can imagine some disgruntled player whose grenadier battalion had just rolled two 1s at long range, feeling this was unreasonable, that he had been cheated by the rules. He might point out that the 20 figures represent 750-odd men, who could get off something like 1500 shots in a 1 minute bound. If we know the probability of a single shot finding its target, we should really be throwing 1500 dice (or similar), which would give a much more predictable, much more even result. I would be prepared to bet that some hero, somewhere, did attempt to throw a dice for each musket shot. However, “if we know the probability” is the key phrase – in fact we don’t really, but we’ll come back to this point later.

The Wargames Research Group produced their famous table – you worked out the combat factor for the kind of weapon and the circumstances, threw a dice or two, and looked up the table, and it would tell you that the target unit had lost, say, 27 men (not figures) which at 20:1 figure scale meant you’d lost 1 figure plus 7/20 of a figure. You kept a note of all the bits, and removed complete figures when appropriate, and this was widely accepted as a step forward – it was now pretty much impossible for your grenadiers to miss – they just hit very small parts of a figure, which would eventually accumulate to something which represented discernible damage. There were those of us, admittedly, who considered the extra record-keeping something of a nuisance, but progress can often have a small cost.

Combat losses still had some variability, but using this approach they were generally closer to expectation. An extreme case of this was developed in Arthur Taylor’s Rules for War Gaming, published by Shire Publications in 1971, which set out diceless rules; in a given situation, the casualties inflicted are always the same. I am not proposing to dismiss this approach – it was regarded as returning something of a chess-like precision and dignity to the wargames, but in its way it is just as daft as completely random results. [I used to have this book, but don’t seem to have it now – entirely out of idle curiosity, did anyone ever fight battles using Taylor’s rules?]

A big problem is that we do not actually know what the probability of a hit is – we do not know what it is in general terms, and we certainly do not understand the variations from man to man, from moment to moment. I remember that, like a lot of other gamers, I used to search for some clues which might give some evidence of what hit rates really were in history – just something factual to hang a hat on.

Contemporary diarists like George Simmons (95th Rifles) would occasionally give a tantalising glimpse of the reality – he might say that in a smart skirmish with the French outposts his company lost, say, 5 men wounded and 1 killed, which was considered light in view of the severity of the fighting. Very clearly, Simmons had some view of what sort of casualties you might suffer on such an occasion – it would not be a probability calculation or a dice throw, it would be what his experience led him to expect, and he probably could not tell you what the expected number was, just when it seemed heavy or light to him. That’s entirely subjective, but at least he knew what he was talking about, which most of us patently do not.

I was thrilled to bits when Bill Leeson translated and published Von Reisswitz’ Kriegspiel in the early 1980s. I was fascinated by a number of aspects of the game and the book, but in particular I spent many hours poring over the tables – here, at last, was something entirely relevant to horse and musket warfare, written by serving soldiers in the Prussian Army, no less – guys who would certainly know what was what. I confess I was surprised that the hit rates were so high – I would be reluctant to say I viewed them with suspicion, but Kriegspiel was bloodier than I had expected. That was when I first started to have doubts about how helpful actual casualty returns are when constructing wargame rules. [It’s appropriate to remind ourselves that Kriegspiel is alive and well, and nurtured these days by the splendid chaps at TooFatLardies.]

Let’s go back to my nice new CE acronym – if I find that the 50th Foot have a casualty return of 74 all ranks at some battle or other, out of a morning strength of 428, does that mean that their CE was reduced to 82.7% of what they started with? Well, 74 and 428 are definitely real, official looking numbers, and it’s tempting to use them in this way, but it doesn’t seem very likely, does it? We’ve had some discussion of this in this blog before – when a unit is fired on, over and above the initial problem that we don’t fully understand the maths which would give us the likely number of hits, what happens to the target’s CE, as I have chosen to call it? Some of the men will be physically disabled – some permanently – and some slightly hurt; some of them will be shocked into a state of reduced capability, some will be discouraged – some may even be discouraged enough to seek a change of location to somewhere less stressful. A unit of Prussian guard might be so outraged by the insult that their performance is actually enhanced; a unit of Napoleon’s 16-year-old Marie-Louises might suffer no loss at all, but be so upset by being fired at that they take no further part. Almost anything is possible – as we have discussed before, the concept of morale is central to this, the level of optimism in the army, the fact that they may be fighting on home soil for their liberty, the inspirational qualities of their leaders, the level of training and experience of the troops, their physical state, the weather (probably) – and so on.

So if Von Reisswitz reckons that a combat will result in a number of losses, probably what he means – or should mean – is that the effect of the combat is a reduction in CE equivalent to the loss of this number of men. Whether or not this number of men actually make it into the casualty returns is of no interest at all until we work out strengths at the end of the day to feed back into our campaign. Separate issue.

To those of us who have ever felt a temptation to snort at Little Wars’ simple blood-bath melees, in which equal sized units simply eliminate each other, just think – what are the chances of an evenly matched melee leaving the winners in a position to do much else for the remainder of the day? They are not dead, they are merely resting.

The big godsend to everyone with this sort of appetite for numbers was Maj-Gen BP Hughes’ Firepower, which was published in 1974. The timing was spot-on, and it presented a lot of fascinating and authoritative material in a readable and understandable way. I still think this is a great book, though I am a little saddened by the fact that some writers have used it subsequently to justify some pretty crazy extrapolations from the factual bits.

Hughes describes field trials of artillery pieces, and I would love to see contemporary pictures of the trials being carried out. Case shot, for example, was fired at a number of ranges at a large (battalion-sized) canvas screen, to estimate numbers of hits at various ranges. Brilliant. I have a lovely vision of gentlemen with large moustaches, solemnly marking off the holes in the sheet with the official crayon, to avoid double counting, and presenting a double-checked return to the officer in charge (lots of saluting and stamping boots). The Army would be in its element, ordering some poor grunt to count holes.

Hughes reports similar trials with various kinds of artillery projectile and small arms volleys, and painstakingly tabulates and explains the results. He also spends some time discussing the shortcomings of the data, and he examines Albuera, Talavera and a couple of other battles by analysing losses and the estimated effect of fire. Excellent.

One of the parts which most of the wilder enthusiasts did not read was Chapter 3 – Inefficiencies of the battlefield. In this he points out that the trials were designed to examine the optimal capabilities of the weapons, not to estimate their effectiveness in battle. The test circumstances were abstract, artificial, calm. Everyone would be on his best behaviour, the best gunners would be selected, all distractions would be eliminated, and anything which did not work would, presumably, be repeated. In a real battle, Hughes says, other elements would come into play which would change the situation out of all recognition:

1. The “animate” target – not only would they be moving and taking shelter, but the beggars might even shoot back

2. Technical failures – this includes routine misfires as well as more dramatic failures

3. Human error – now you’re talking – the sergeant can try to make you fire, but he can’t make you hit anything

4. The nature of the ground – unfavourable slopes, hidden areas, cover, variable bounce

5. Ammunition – the need to conserve it, and the variable quality of its manufacture and condition

6. Smoke – we think they’re out there somewhere...

What relevance do the battlefield trials have when applied to actual battle experience, then? Probably not very much, in truth.

While we are on this topic of the hopelessness of estimating probabilities of a hit, it seems appropriate to introduce a gentleman named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He is a writer, quite a celebrity, in fact, and variously regarded as anything from a guru to one of the most irritating men around. I cannot claim to be an expert on his work, though what I know of him suggests that he has the rare gift of being able to present a limited number of important ideas in sufficient different ways, with different wording, to allow him to publish a surprising number of books featuring them. I recall that Edward De Bono used to be adept at the same strategy, but that was some years ago, and is, in any case, a digression. This is not to say, of course, that the ideas are incorrect – merely that over-exposure does not seem to improve their level of general acceptance.

In his The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin, 2008), Mr Taleb makes the important point that mathematical models do not work, and are unreliable for anything other than artificially simple games of chance and similar. Basically, what he says is correct, which is faintly disappointing for sad souls like me who spent years working with models to perform stochastic testing on populations, funds, stock markets and the like. He coins the expression Ludic Fallacy to describe what he sees as a practice which is inaccurate and even dangerously misleading – his main target is the world of finance. He identifies that economists, fund managers and investment analysts who grow to trust computer models set themselves up for catastrophic disillusionment and failure, since the model will not cover everything.

The world, says Taleb, is a dirty place, in which the things we do not know, or cannot measure, or (most importantly) just haven’t thought about will swamp the things which we can actually calculate. Tinkering with the decimal places of how many canister balls hit the canvas screen is worse than pointless when trying to simulate real battle action, when the numbers will be changed out of recognition by a whole raft of interacting intangibles, most of which we cannot predict or even fully understand. We may be doing our best with what we can actually get a numerical handle on, but we are – to quote my grandmother yet again – whistling into a gale.

Even the simple world of games is not clean. The odds of a head (or an eagle, or a zarg, or whatever) when tossing a coin is one half – 50% - every schoolboy knows this. If a coin turns up four tails in a row, what is the chance of a head? Again, the theory says it is still 50% - in an infinite series of tosses of our coin, we would expect 50% of the results to be heads, but 4-on-the-trot is a very small sample, and not significant. OK then – what about 99 tails in a row? What then? Well, 99-on-the-trot is not very likely, but it can happen, and the theory reassures us that there is still a 50% chance of a head on the next toss. However, at this point, you or I – or even a statistician – would start to suspect that the coin is dodgy, and tend to bet on another tail next time.

So where does that leave us? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. I was brought up to trust in the purity of mathematics, but I can appreciate that calculating, for example, the effect on a raw battalion of a single volley is beset with all sorts of unknowns and things that can vary wildly from instance to instance. The WRG might expect them to lose an average of 4 figures plus 11/20 of a figure, give or take a few; even Rifles officer Simmons would have had some kind of expectation of that sort, but I suspect the fact of the matter is that a volley of 300 muskets in clear conditions at 100 paces might be expected to injure about 80 men (say), but the standard deviation is high, because of the unstable nature of the underlying probabilities, and the mixture which they present. It was not unknown for such a volley to hit no-one at all, and there must be a very slight chance that 200 men could be laid low.

We need mechanisms which give results which can be seen to be reasonable over extended experience of their use in gaming. The mechanisms should be simple to use, and they should allow a fair amount of variance – maybe more than the scientific wargamers would have claimed. We should give due weight to factors like first volley of the action (perfect loading under the NCO’s eye), and the steadiness and calibre of troops, but what exactly is due weight? Maj-Gen Hughes and our new friend Mr Taleb would agree that the things for which we cannot come up with exact numbers probably overwhelm the things for which we can.

You know what? The game is the most important thing - paramount. The more I think about this, the more attractive are the rules in Charge!, which seems a Very Good Place to End.

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.

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.

Basing

I was asked about bases, and it is a subject I was going to look at anyway. Bear in mind that my approach to basing is deliberately minimalist, so you are not going to find much of a discussion of techniques here!

Foy's Fourth Law is:

Rebasing your wargame armies is a miserable experience, so try very hard not to do it very often.

Some wargamers do not base their troops at all. The classic Old School picture is a black and white photo of Seven Years War Spencer Smiths, arms shouldered, with no movement trays or collective basing of any sort. It looks good, but I have attempted some of that in the past, and, for me, the sheer physical labour of making moves and keeping the lines straight, not to mention making the little beggars stand up, was almost as much of a pain as the paint-and-bayonet handling damage to the figures.

The rest of us end up with a basing organisation which is mainly a legacy of some rule set we no longer use. In my own case, my starting point was probably the system in Charlie Wesencraft's first book (now available again, I am delighted to say), but I rationalised it to suit the Wargames Research Group's 1685-1845 rules. This first change was dead easy, since originally I used the simple but unpleasant double-sided Selotape approach. Increasing elegance, more permanent and more expensive basing systems make changes much more of a trauma.

A couple of quick digressions, as they occur to me...

(1) does anyone still use double-sided Selotape? - for anything? It is nasty to use, and the real irritation is that very soon the sticky stuff turns yellow and non-sticky. Yet I remember it was everywhere once (well, not exactly everywhere - that would be silly), and we always had rolls and rolls of it in the house. They must have had good marketing people.

(2) why the WRG rules? I did use these rules for a while, but found them over-fussy and tedious - though they were much less so than the previous WRG set, I really can't be doing with casualty tables or sheets of paper on the battlefield, and the flinch rules never seemed very natural to me. I think I stuck (literally) with their base sizes because it was too much of a hassle to change them, because sticking with them might slightly increase my chances of meeting someone else who used a compatible system, because it seemed likely that the authors had worked out frontages with relentless accuracy, and - I admit it - because the WRG always managed to express themselves in such a way that it was obvious that only a complete idiot would do it any other way. [Faint paradox alert: if the WRG had changed their minds about the rules, did that mean that they themselves had previously been complete idiots? - and, if so, why should we trust their latest rules? - I used to worry a bit about this stuff...]

(3) still on the 1685-1845 rules - the cover picture is a strange sketch of a cannonball apparently shattering - I think that is the word - a flag. Two points here. Intuitively, I would have expected the flag to wrap around the cannonball and tear - all in an instant. I'm not sure what it would look like, but the picture provided seems unlikely. Secondly, it reminds me very strongly that this was a period when all wargames rules were adorned with the sort of artwork which you now only see on boxes of Odemars plastic soldiers. I have no idea why - presumably everyone had a strong-minded mate who thought he could draw, or maybe they were the results of a little-known project by Miss Bentham's class at Beaconsfield Primary School. Another of the great mysteries. You might argue that now we have swung the other way - easy access to desktop publishing means that we now have glossy booklets with a famous painting on the cover - Detaille or David or Lady Butler are popular - though the rules themselves may be written by budgerigars.

Back to the plot. Times change. In what I believe is a gradual acceptance of Foy's Fourth Law, modern rule writers usually start off with assurances to the reader that they will be able to use their existing basing system, whatever it is, with the new rules. I guess this increases the chances of someone actually using the things. This is definitely more sensible than the old style, in which the author would go on at some length about how he was very sorry, but you were going to have to rebase everything if you wanted to fight proper tabletop battles.

In passing, it would be interesting to know what proportion of sets of rules which are purchased actually get used - I estimate I have bought (or nicked) upwards of 50 Napoleonic rule sets over the years. I have borrowed bits of, or been influenced by, many of them, but how many have I given a fair trial to, in their unaltered state? - maybe three. How many am I still using? - erm - none. Another marketing success, then.

Then there was the dreaded Our Wargames Are More Realistic Than Yours period, when we got into National Characteristics in a big way. Yes, there was a point to it, but it all went way over the top. If you have your units of French organised and based differently from your Russians then you have my respect and admiration. Personally I use a common vanilla organisation for all nations, though they do behave a little differently in action. This probably has something to do with my preference for large battles - I do not believe that Corps commanders cared an awful lot whether their lines were 2 or 3 deep, as long as they were still there and still fighting. I managed to get through National Characteristics without a rebase, though my vanilla organisation did mean that many of the WRG-sized bases were now stuck on top of little card sabots to ease the handling of the battalions and keep them tidy.

But a rebase was coming. The final argument which clinched it came from an unexpected direction. I had always really liked the Grand Manner style pictures of infantry with mounted colonels - especially the colour plates in Charles Grant's "Napoleonic Wargames". I started putting colonels with a few infantry units when 20mm figures became available again (around 2005), and was so pleased with the results that I decided to make it a general standard. Since the card sabots had been working well for a while, I decided a proper re-org was due and set about rebasing all the infantry and artillery.

To flock or not to flock? Current state of the art, I guess, is shaded, highlighted figures on textured, flocked bases, and I regularly see examples which look absolutely fabulous. Humbling. I gave this much thought, and eventually decided to persevere with plain bases. Partly this was to avoid re-doing the cavalry, partly because it made the job a lot easier. Also, I have never been convinced about troops travelling around with their own portable hearthrug of cat-litter and green sand - it is especially hilarious when they are marching along roads. If you like them then, great, they certainly don't look any sillier than my rows of toy soldiers on exposed bases. The Old School view might be that the individual rectangular bases are just part of the fact that they are, in fact, toy soldiers, while flock is an add-on, an attempt to conceal their toysoldierness.

It is just a personal choice, obviously. I think that my final decision had a lot to do with the many disgusting nights I had spent scraping henhouse-green Tetrion off eBay-sourced vintage figures. In many cases the figures themselves had been excellently painted, but a subsequent re-base had resulted in them having this gloop applied with a large brush, sometimes up to their knees. The lesson was learned - Foy 4 in action. It might just be that one day I may change my mind about my basing rules, or - and let's suddenly introduce a chill draught here - some future owner may wish to re-base them (jeez - I wish I hadn't thought of that). The job will be ever so much less heartbreaking if they are not flocked.

So I use plain bases. Sometimes, especially for stuff with a big footprint like crewed artillery, I use 3mm MDF. Otherwise I use 2mm plywood. Since I needed a whole load of bases, I got the nice people at Litko Aerosystems to laser-cut me a load of custom size ones - this has been a terrific boon - well worth the money. A word of caution - if you are in the UK and you purchase from Litko, make sure you buy small amounts at any one time - Litko put a full invoice on the outside of the package, and the jobsworths at Royal Mail will hit you for customs duty plus an outrageous handling charge if your bill is over $18. I think I paid £11 extra charge for 20-something dollars worth of kit last year. I guess the people at Royal Mail who handle international packages don't like their job very much, and wish to punish anyone who has the temerity to buy something from the US, even if no equivalent product is available here.

I stick the troops on with PVA (which will come unstuck again cleanly and without damage if you need it to), and I use a constant brand and shade of green emulsion to match the main battle board. I started off using Robbialac's "Tapestry Green", which is long defunct, but a close match is provided by Dulux's current "Crested Moss #1" - that is the pea-soup shade you see in the photos. It shows up the uniforms nicely, and I'm stuck with it now anyway!

Sizes? In my rules, infantry are mounted 6 to a 50mm x 45mm base (with one base having a mounted colonel and 4 foot figures). Four of these bases make a battalion in my standard game (for which the ground scale works out at 1mm = 1 pace, or 25 paces to the inch). 6 figures represent 200 men (for infantry, anyway). The 4 bases can be positioned to denote line, column by divisions, march column or square, and can be placed higgledy-piggledy to denote "unformed".

My skirmishers are mounted in 3s on 80mm x 30mm bases. My cavalry are based 45mm deep with a 25mm frontage per figure for heavies, and a 30mm frontage for lights - don't ask me why - this is handed down straight from the WRG, so it must be right. The cavalry are mostly based in pairs (which is a cop-out - I probably need to think about this). Artillery are on 60mm wide x 80mm deep bases for each gun - I use 2 gun models for a battery, so the figures-to-men scale is clearly very different from the infantry. But it looks OK, which is an important point.

This post has gone on far longer than I expected. It is not a particularly novel topic, but it is kind of fundamental to the organisation of an army, and there are lots of different approaches. I'd be very pleased to get views on this - I would almost certainly learn something, though I run the risk of having to consider a re-base if your argument is particularly persuasive!