Topsy Turvy Wargames – why not?

This will be another of my more ruminating posts – asking a pile of questions, and offering very little in the way of answers. There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on – definitely some idea which is just out of reach. You might well be able to explain it to me, or even convince me that the matter can be safely forgotten about. This is not going to be a competent review of the Huzzah! wargames rules, though it might encourage you to have a look at them.

There were quite a few starting points this time – some probably more obviously significant than others:

(1) I was telling someone about one of my favourite daft moments in a military book – in Frederick E Smith’s screenplay paperback of Waterloo (from the 1970 Bondarchuk movie) there is an episode during the Battle of Ligny where Smith states that “suddenly a shot rang out”, and – of course – Blücher’s horse is hit, and the old bugger is pinned underneath. History notwithstanding, think about it for a moment – suddenly a shot rang out? – and, presumably, it broke the complete silence in which the Battle of Ligny had been enacted prior to that point? Yes, this is silly, but somehow it encapsulates what we expect military dramas to say – more significantly, there is maybe something here which reflects the way we think of battles.

Certainly, my wargames are a bit like this. Because of the tricks we play with time and activation to make the game playable, the tabletop action consists of a series of isolated volleys, separated by periods of measuring and calculation (and whatever else it is you do during your games). Sad person that I am, I sometimes play a background soundtrack of a horse-&-musket battle during my wargames, which is fun, but it is very obvious that the activity on the audio is not very like my battle, which seems much more like a series of shots suddenly ringing out, as it were, in an otherwise silent and mathematical context, in a style which Frederick E Smith would recognize immediately.

(2) In a comment about a recent blog post, I mentioned that I suspected that – certainly at the time of the ECW – the proportion of people killed by an aimed shot intended for them was small. If someone dispatched you while holding the other end of a sword, or if he fired at short range to stop you attacking him, then there was some personal malice involved, but otherwise casualties must have been men who were hit by a passing ball – if there are enough bullets flying about, someone is definitely going to get hurt. It’s like running with scissors – you just know it’s going to happen.

(3) I remembered a minor (low wattage) lightbulb moment I had a couple of years ago when working on Grand Tactical rules; I realized that the tedium of answering the same, repetitious questions about the tactical situation of an artillery target fired on by more than one battery in the same turn could be simplified by considering the total effect on the target unit in one go, rather than as a series of separate shots from the firers. In other words, turn the thing back to front and think about it from the target’s viewpoint. Topsy Turvy, in fact.

(4) As part of an ongoing pastime I have of reading wargames rules, I recently came back to Huzzah!, published by Oozlum Games, which is a ruleset I have never really played with, but which interests me greatly. It is, so to speak, back-to-front in that it focuses on the risks to, and demoralization of, a unit in a combat situation rather than studying individual volleys and the reaction to them.

(5) (This is the last one, I promise) – I was reading someone else’s ECW rules, and was surprised at how effective musketry at long range (100 to 200 paces) was. I can see that someone coming within 200 paces of a musket-armed unit is getting into a stressful situation, but somehow the risk doesn’t seem to me to be simply that of being hit by an aimed volley at such long range.

OK – that’s all the inputs. This left me thinking: what is it that a musket armed ECW unit does to an enemy unit 200 paces away? I think what they do mostly is they frighten them. The potential damage and pain that is implied is more significant than the loss occasioned by the aimed balls at this range. How the recipient unit reacts to this is dependant on a familiar list of things such as their training, fatigue level and so on – the Morale shopping list.

The important point here is that a battlefield is an appalling place, filled with noise, horror and flying metal. Any unit coming within firing range of the enemy is, first and foremost, entering a very dangerous place – an area of high risk. The Huzzah! approach seems appropriate. A commander’s view of one his regiments is not how many have been killed, it is are they still in action, and can they still hurt the enemy? Inability to hurt the enemy any longer could certainly be explained by their all being struck down, but I think there is a general agreement now that what mostly happened was that the effects (physical and mental) of being in a very dangerous and stressful place for a period reduced the effectiveness of a unit to a point where they no longer contributed to the army’s effort.

My battlefield soundtrack seems to portray complete mayhem – a whole pile of firing going on throughout – yet we know that units would try to conserve their ammunition, and that there would be little point in firing blind at distant targets. The Topsy-Turvy approach (courtesy of Huzzah!) is that we consider the situation of a unit which is such-and-such a distance from various threats, and is thus stressed by the sum of the various hazards – as currently experienced and also the expectation of what could happen next. There is a whole pile of lethal material flying about – the nearer you are to the source of the firing, the more discouraging (and damaging) this will be.

The emphasis shifts to examining each unit’s exposure – how far are they from each potential threat? Never mind the individual firers and their activity, assume they will be keeping busy, making things unpleasant, and consider instead the state of each unit exposed to fire.

I have no draft rules to sum this up, and no firm ideas yet, other than an itch which needs scratching, though you might be interested to read the Huzzah! rules.

Topsy Turvy. Interesting. Maybe?

The Scales of Injustice? – figure sizes, yet again

This is going to get me dangerously close to obscure worlds such as railway modelling, of which I know nothing, and where I am likely to get slapped down mightily if I use the wrong terminology, or offend the international standards (whether they are universally obeyed or not).

I’ve always been puzzled by the mapping of modelling scales like 20mm, 25mm, 28mm, 40mm and so on against  the more intuitively scientific (and understandable) concepts like 1/72, 1/64, 1/300 and similar. I have moaned on about this at some length before, so will try not to waste too much time going over the same ground.

Basic problem is that figure manufacturers call visibly unequal figure scales by the same name. If we discount the possibility of different sized millimetres being in use simultaneously (although it might happen), the matter boils down to

(a) which bit of the man do you measure? – there are disciples of soles-to-scalp (i.e. how high is a figure), sole-to-eye (which sounds like a convention, but which generates a lot of passionate support – most of the lectures I get from the bearers of wisdom seem to follow this doctrine) and even bottom-of-base-to-eye (which just seems plain daft).

(b) (and this makes a bit of a nonsense of (a)) how tall is this man anyway?  

In response to a previous post, I was directed to this diagram from Jack Scruby, no less, which would appear to be authoritative unless you happen to disagree with it.

What has brought this to mind of late is that I have been involved in purchasing and studying some of the old Hinchliffe 20mm equipment range – the non-WW2 bits of which vanished without trace many years ago. It says on the packet that these are manufactured to a scale of 4mm to the foot, which is near enough 1/76 scale, which is the OO model railway scale. I’m not sure, but I think this scale is widely used for WW2 models. 4mm to the foot would make a 6-foot man 24mm tall, and a 5-foot man 20mm, so where does the “20mm” nomenclature come in?

As far as Hinchliffe are/were concerned, I also have some of their 25mm artillery range, and in there is an information sheet, which explains that their 25mm range uses a scale of 4.75mm to a foot (which I reckon is 1/64), and goes on to state that the human figures in this range are designed to represent men 5 foot 8 inches tall, which means that (assuming Hinchliffe’s manufacturing standards complied with their own house rules), those strange ectomorphic soldiers that turned the wargaming market upside down in the early 1970s must have been 27mm from sole to scalp. Does this mean 25mm to the eye? – whatever it means, this is the official lowdown on how Hinchliffe interpreted “25mm”, and we know for a fact that this is different from what Miniature Figurines and Les Higgins were doing. The information sheet I have, by the way, appears to date from September 1971 – I’m not sure if it is still the same sheet which goes out with the 25mm equipment today – this range, of course, is still in production.

OK – back to Hinchliffe’s 1/76 “20mm” men – assuming the same logic applied, a 5 foot 8 man would be around 22.5mm tall – which is consistent with Hinton Hunt and current Kennington figures – would he be 20mm to the eye? Could it be that the eye-measurers have been right all along?

I don’t buy many plastics – I’m not at all hostile to them, but I have grown accustomed to not buying them, to being concerned about paint-shedding, and discouraged by the proportion of useable wargame poses in a box, considering these are no longer the pocket-money option they once were. At this point someone may feel urged to miss the point of my post, and put me straight about the merits of plastics – please don’t bother – I’ll take your word for it. Honestly, I will.

The relevance of plastic figures here is that 1/72 is the universal standard – how well it is observed and how the manufacturers compare is not the point. No-one can argue about what 1/72 means in mathematical terms, and thus, over the years, I have got used to regarding my Napoleonic collection as being “approximately 1/72” – some  of my figures are described by the makers as 20mm (Hinton Hunt, Kennington, early Lammings, early Garrison, very early Minifigs), some of them are old 25mm (Higgins, Scruby, some S-Range), from before the world got bigger, and some of them are explicitly 1/72 (NapoleoN, Falcata and Art Miniaturen). My in-house rule is that if the hats match, they are the same size. Ideally, my chaps should be around 22-23mm tall (without headgear), though a taller man might be OK if his hat looks right!

25mm Soldiers, as purveyed by Hinchliffe (L) and Scruby

I have now confirmed that the much sought-after 1/76 Hinchliffe artillery are a tad underscale for plastic figures, while their 1/64 cousins are visibly too big. Confusingly, considering the precision which went into the research and sculpting, Hinton Hunt artillery appear to be even smaller than the Hinch 20s, so maybe there was an internal inconsistency there too.

I’ve always tended to avoid Newline 20mm figures – too small for me, though they are lovely – I have no idea what the official scale is, but I have it on good authority that some of their artillery pieces are a good fit with Hinton Hunt, for example, which is useful, but, again, a bit confusing. RSM and Irregular have an even smaller interpretation of 20mm, but at this point I am getting well outside my area of knowledge.

It looks as though my target Napoleonic recruit is somewhere in a ball park between 1/72 and 1/76, with guns and wagons to match. And the devil take the decimal places.

ECW - Updated C&C-based Rules Available Again

Since I have now managed to arrange for a proper PDF Editor on my Mac, I have been able to update my Commands & Colors-based ECW rules, which for file-storage purposes go by the snappy name of CC_ECW, and thus I have re-inserted the section in the top right-hand corner of this window where, if you are interested, you can (or should be able to) access the latest versions from Google Docs, or whatever it is called these days.

I am now up to Version 2_64 of the test rules, which implies a lot more activity than has been the case – my numbering system is too pathetic to explain. Death by Version Control - the legacy of a life in IT. I have dropped the summary of changes (from C&CN) sheet, since it was just one more thing to maintain, and I have revised QRS sheets and a nice new Stand of Pikes tracker, similar to the Squares tracker in C&CN.

Changes in the rules since the last available version are based on my own playtesting and feedback from friends. The significant ones are:

Foot - foot may now move a bit quicker - they may stand still (and carry out either melee or ranged combat), move 1 hex (and carry out melee combat) or move 2 hexes (and then may not combat at all). They may not make a double move if it starts, or at any point brings them within, 2 hexes of the enemy. This is subject to normal terrain rules, and seems to work well.

Horse - this has been a bit trickier - the advantages for Gallopers over Trotters (and Trotters includes Cuirassiers) were too generous - with lucky dice, Galloper cavalry could become unstoppable. Revised version of the rules are:

Gallopers fighting Trotters will get first blow in a melee, regardless of who is the attacker, and may follow up and carry out cavalry breakthrough in a successful fight even if they are not the attacker (i.e. if it is not their player's turn). Trotters attacking will still get to carry out follow-up and breakthrough if they win and a hex is vacated. Other changes here - bonus die for attacking Gallopers is scrapped (they have enough advantages already), and the number of breakthroughs and bonus melees is limited to 1 (the open-ended series of bonus melees can give a crazy game, so I've dropped that).

Rash Gallopers - and these are strictly limited to 1 or 2 units in a game - are like other Gallopers, but they also get a bonus die in melee against non-Galloper horse, and they MUST follow up and carry out breakthrough and bonus melee if they are able to (which simulates their getting out of control). Again, only 1 such bonus melee. Veteran Rash Gallopers fighting Raw Trotters is not a pretty sight…

One further change – because the Chance Cards occurred so infrequently as to have little effect, I’ve doubled the number of Hazzard a Chaunce cards in the Command pack from 2 to 4, so, if you download them, print p8 of the Command Cards twice to give you the extra cards.

Any problems with the links, and/or anything crazy in the documentation, please let me know.

The Headless Horseman

…and other mysterious goings-on.

Well you see, Clive was interested in mounted colonels for some of his British infantry, and one of the possibilities was the fellow I have pictured at the top of this post, who had been in my Napoleonic Command spares box for a few years.

I’d never quite identified this figure. At first glance it looks like a Hinton Hunt OPC, but there’s nothing like this in the catalogue. Disregarding oddities such as Der Kriegsspieler, my personal rule-of-thumb for this sort of thing is that if it looks like Hinton Hunt (especially in the horse department), then there is a good chance that it is actually a very early Minifigs 20mm piece. In fact someone had, I think, told me that this was a Minifig, and by deduction it was probably BNC5 – “Line Infantry Mounted Colonel”. Thus I had assumed this was what it was, and it lived in the spares box in this unofficial role.

I was never very taken with the paint job, and I was suspicious about the unconvincing epaulettes, so I decided to clean it up a bit and see what it was. Into the bleach it went, but bleach couldn’t handle a very thick coat of red undercoat, so it required a Nitromors bath. That shifted the red paint all right, but I was a bit shaken to find that it also shifted his head.

It was a conversion.

I should have thought of that – the Nitromors had simply taken out the glue which held his head on. At this point I was actually laughing out loud – there is something very silly about an elderly fellow like me looking so closely at epaulettes on a 20mm tin soldier, and missing the blindingly obvious. I really must get out more.

Having had a quick look around, I think it is actually a Hinton Hunt OPC Austrian General (AN102 – picture borrowed from the Hinton Hunter), with a British infantry head attached. If anyone recognizes the figure, or if you did the conversion, or if you disagree with my ideas about it, please shout.

Hinton Hunt AN102 - thanks to The Hinton Hunter blog

Good fun. Not sure what to do with him. The lack of epaulettes might make him suitable for a Spanish general, but the single-breasted jacket might not work – I’ll think about it.

Subject 2 – On Being Dead

I was happily reading Pierre le Poillu’s account of his visit to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, when I suddenly remembered that I am buried there. There are, of course, some 1 million other people buried there, so I can’t feel too bad about it if he did not visit my tomb. Out of idle curiosity I had a look in Wikipedia to see which famous people share my final resting place, and was a little upset to find I am not listed.

It would be ungracious to make too much of a fuss about this, but I would remind the reader that I was a prominent general in the Napoleonic Wars (rising to the rank of General of Division – I would have risen higher if I hadn’t blotted my record by being a Jacobin and a Republican, opposed to the Empire), I was wounded 15 times during those wars – the last time being outside the walls of Hougoumont at Waterloo, and I subsequently retired from military service to become leader of the liberal opposition in the French Chamber of Deputies. I became a noted orator before succumbing to apoplexy at the tender age of 50.

Naturally I would not wish to talk myself up here, but there are some pretty cheesy C-List celebs on the official tour of Père Lachaise – actresses and such. If you are in Paris, I hope you have the opportunity to drop in and say hello. My tomb is a bit overdone for my own taste, but it is easily spotted, and I appreciate the sentiment that created it. As you will see, they did not wish me to get out of here in a hurry.

Hi-ho, hi-ho – plus Stephen and Buddy

…it's off to work we go

The prospect of getting back to some siege gaming (an activity which – strangely – was actually discouraged by my Peninsular War campaign) has got me sifting through the boxes of not-quite projects to get some more engineering and supply units finished off.

First hit was an easy one – a little group of British infantry pioneers, individually based. Right away, I have to admit that these are not really a siege-type unit – there will be proper sappers and miners for that later on, with the regulation brown bases. These fellows exist primarily because it seems like a good idea, and there is already in existence a French equivalent. Next admission is that I don’t actually have any rules to allow the pioneers to influence the game, but now that I have a unit for each side I am more likely to do something about that.

They are, as you will see, from Minifigs “interim” range – the one after the S-Range and before the current range of clinically obese chaps. There isn’t much available in metal in this scale. My French sapeurs are a mixture of Kennington and Falcata castings, which gives some variety of poses. I had intended to use S-Range Brits for the pioneers, but the S-Range pioneer is a disappointingly weedy looking sculpt, who looks as if he is struggling with his axe, and might have trouble sharpening a pencil. So it’s the intermediates – these are BN55, vintage circa 1974?

Since this is an informal collective (pool?) of bods from various regiments, they have mixed facings. If you want someone to lose that gate for you, or to help with building a bridge, these could be just the fellows. I regret that there are no beards on show, but the castings have no beards. I tried painting a beard on, but the effect was funnier than I had hoped.

Subject 2: Stephen Fry

Of late, I have given up trying to paint soldiers with the TV on. Wearing my painting glasses, I cannot see the TV, never mind work out what is on the screen, so these days I listen to music while painting. This weekend it has been the usual mixed bag – Mississippi John Hurt (brilliant, but after 20 minutes it all sounds the same, and is always in the same key, which doesn’t help), Buffalo Springfield (disappointingly dated, and not as good as I remembered), Herbie Hancock (excellent – I played River, which is an album of Joni Mitchell’s music, with guest vocals provided by numerous worthies, including Leonard Cohen and – erm – Joni Mitchell), Cassandra Wilson (terrific, and sexy in a slightly weird way), and a boxed set of Mendelssohn’s symphonies. Intuitively, it seems odd that Buffalo Springfield seemed more dated than Mendelssohn, but hey.

One of the things I did not watch on the TV was Stephen Fry’s QI show, which makes me decidedly uncomfortable. If you haven’t seen it, it consists of a sort of bogus panel game, which is entirely designed to perpetuate the legend that SF is the cleverest fellow on the planet. The panel members do not always sit easily in their role as stooges, but the show can be very amusing nonetheless.

It’s hard to put my finger on why Stephen’s public image grates with me. I actually quite like him – he is unpredictable and witty and frequently endearing. I just get very fed up with the constant force-feeding of his TV packaging as a National Treasure – fed up in the same way that I became fed up with the constant overexposure of David Jason and the late John Thaw (great talents, both) on British TV in past years.

No amount of TV is going to make me accept that Mr Fry is an intellectual, or a great scholar, or Oscar Wilde, or Dr Johnson. My attention is limited – I will find it more convenient if he remains a comedian, an occasional writer and – to be brutal – a TV personality. I am happy with him in that more digestible role.

I hasten to add that I have huge affection for the old Jeeves & Wooster series he did with Hugh Lawrie, which remains one of the very brightest gems of British television in my humble opinion. In fact, now I come to remember that I have an Amazon gift voucher which someone very kindly sent me for Christmas, I must have a look to see what boxed sets of DVDs are available for that series. While I’m at it, I should check out what there is of the old black-and-white Tony Hancock shows. You have to be careful with this – it would be awful to be confronted with the fact that – like Buffalo Springfield on Saturday – these shows are not as good as I think they were. Tricky stuff, nostalgia.

One of the very strangest bits of Stephen Fry was when they sent him on a trip to America – touring in a London cab. His visit to Chicago included an interview – in the cab, naturally – with Buddy Guy, the great urban blues legend. The idea of Fry empathizing with Buddy’s recollection of what life was like for an impoverished black musician in 1950s Chicago is bizarre. I suspect that they could have achieved a comparable amount of empathy by getting Stephen to travel round Chicago in his taxi with a grizzly bear – he is affable and enthusiastic and correct, but these worlds never quite collided, did they?

Hooptedoodle #121 – Black Agnes

Recently, I got a friendly leg-pull via email from Louis, who jokingly noted that my various Hooptedoodle efforts appear to be generated by a formula. I complimented him on his good taste in reading such material, and on consideration I have to say that there may be some substance in his theory.

Something current in my life, says Louis – an argument with the bank, non-delivery of a parcel, disappointment over the performance of a virus-checker, a tasteless banana, whatever – will remind me, often via some oblique (or incomprehensible) link, of some remote event in my lengthy past. I shall somehow mix the whole lot up into a yarn of some sort, arrive at some unlikely conclusion and – bingo – another Hooptedoodle is born.

There are times when a glimpse of the truth is uncomfortable. I have to say that I do not fully agree with him; I admit I might recognize a process by which I am led to ponder certain subjects. I cannot claim to have supernatural levels of wisdom or insight to apply to such matters but – like everyone – my views are coloured by my personal experience, and I certainly have a great deal of that. Of course, my ponderings sometimes generate Hooptedoodles, so in the end he probably is on to something.

To prove the point – here’s the formula at work again (I’m self-conscious, now).

On the radio this morning I was listening to an interview with an elected councillor of the city of Stoke on Trent, no less, who is pleased to represent the British Nationalist Party (BNP). I am certainly not going to get into a debate about the BNP, but I listened to what he had to say. Some of what he said seemed to be based on fear, and in essence the thing that he feared most was the disappearance of the community in which he remembered growing up. The strongest attributes he mentioned were that it was an exclusively white, English community, and the trouble starts right there, with the loss of that situation.

OK – let’s not get into any of that. It occurred to me that any kind of presentation of such views is a mixed bag. Some of what he said made some kind of sense. Some of it seemed to me to be wrong, and I deliberately use a vague word like “wrong” because that covers a whole raft of reasons why it might be wrong. It might be absolutely wrong because (say) it is illegal, or morally indefensible for some reason. It may be wrong (to me) because it does not accord with my own views, or the things which I have learned (or been persuaded to believe) – and that is layered with things like religious views, fashions in society, and the dreaded Political Correctness.

The PC thing is tricky – I’ve never found it intuitively natural, and at times it can be counter-productive (CP?). For example, some of the BNP man’s views are definitely frowned upon from a PC perspective, and in some instances quite correctly so. On the other hand, the gradual wearying of the public at large (well, me, anyway) with the screechings of the PC brigade – especially on issues that do not matter a great deal – can make bits of the BNP view sound relatively calm and pragmatic. Not easy to get a handle on.

Anyway, I was left to ponder the complicated mish-mash of legality, good taste, prejudice, vested interests, inculcation, ignorance and genuine grievance which makes opinions seem right or wrong (whatever that means). And I was reminded (that’s right, Louis) of an embarrassing episode – maybe 20 years ago. I was invited to speak at a dinner organized by a Scottish business group. My subject was the future role of technology in the workplace – I wish it had been something else, but – hey – they were going to feed me.

At dinner, I was placed next to another speaker, who was an executive director of a well-known feminist publishing house. She was Agnes – she was about 6 feet 2 inches tall and she wore black clothes. Terrifying – she reminded me of Maria, the mother out of the old Charles Addams cartoons.

Her first line at dinner was “I notice that all the serving staff are girls – I bet the chef is a man.”

I was aware of the terrible history of discrimination against women in all walks of life – especially the workplace – and was generally positive about feminist initiatives, though I was very uneasy about some of the fashionable terminology, and about most of the extremists. So I just nodded, accepting my share of the inherited guilt.

Then we moved on to “how many of your company directors are women?”, to which – I fear – the answer at that time was “none”. And what proportion of our senior managers were women? – well, a growing number, but I had recently had a bad experience in this area (which I did not tell Agnes about, but it certainly coloured my view).

In my area at work there had been a vacancy for a Senior Manager (let’s not worry about what that means), and there were three excellent candidates, of whom two were men and one was a woman. As it happens, the woman candidate was the weakest of the three – she lacked practical experience, and had an overriding need to avoid blame which was worrying. However, we were instructed by our director to choose the woman, because it was important that our company be seen to be actively promoting female staff.  I protested to my immediate boss, but it was made very clear that it would not be in our best interests to disagree with the board, so (and I still cringe with shame) we did as we were instructed.

Back to Agnes.

I said, “do you actually employ men, then?”

Oh yes, smiled Agnes, men were much better for lifting big boxes and so forth in the dispatch area, and they also employed some tradesmen.

So let me get this straight – she ran a company which published only female authors, on women’s subjects, exclusively targeted at a female audience, and which had a policy of placing women in all senior positions. I have a feeling, I said, that if I were even to suggest the possibility of creating a counterpart enterprise which was exclusively male, I would be in very big trouble. How is this?

Agnes looked at me as though I were something she had scraped off her shoe, and told me – very firmly – that she was very disappointed that I was just another sexist bigot. That was my very last flirtation ever with the glamorous world of feminist publishing.

Got it wrong again.