The Manchurian War

Del et (Part One).

General Principle: Wargame rules are like wine; one will know what they like when they taste it. 

I felt it is important for readers of my blog to have a sense of what I like in a set of rules as that will color my comments made during AARs or other blog posts. I offer them so my discussions are placed within that context and any thoughts/opinions that run counter to mine can also be set within that context.

I like to wargame large battles, those which often comprise multiple corps/armies fighting for an entire day or more. Ideally these battles are generated by a campaign system which allows the practice of operational art. Given the challenges of group membership and the travails of daily life, campaign games with their accompanying tactical battles are a rarity in the wargaming world. 

Regardless whether part of a campaign game or just fighting a single historical battle, finding time, place, and people to fight a battle can impose limitations. If I am lucky, playing a complete Saturday (~8 hours) is generally the upper limit to game play. I prefer having multiple players on a side, each handling a significant force. This adds a bit of uncertainty/friction which is completely historical and no rules are required. So the rules must allow a large battle to be completed in that amount of time. 

Tenet 1: Player decision must causal to the outcome of the game. IBWs luck shouldn’t be what determines the outcome of game. 

As I taught my students at the staff college: 1) If the plan is capable of defeating the enemy; 2) if the friendly units execute the plan to standard; 3) if the enemy does what the plan predicts; then the last decision the commander will make is to approve the plan. What the commander is looking for during execution is if any of those three things aren’t happening. If they aren’t, then the commander must make decisions. This is what players who are placed in command on the wargame table should be looking for. 

I prefer a game to be a glass of deterministic. Players should be able to decide upon and execute a plan to see if it works. Will the plan actually generate success? Sometimes friendly units will not execute to standard. The opponent can introduce decision points that will force players to either follow the plan or to change the plan. The plans and the player decisions that follow should determine the eventual winner of the contest. 

Here I need to remind readers that I prefer to play large battles/campaigns. When planning and executing the movement of large forces, these in the main can be highly predictable. In most cases, these are professional armies with a level of training. They know how to march, change formation, etc. The large number of units/size of units involved help mitigate any individual training/experience/equipment problems. Absent outside influences/changes, they will normally execute assigned orders within the standards set by that army. 

Now some reading this post is thinking ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’. Well, yes and no. I never cared for that statement because it is incomplete. I agree that no plan will ever be executed step by step without any changes. But a good plan can be adjusted and that plan can still garner success. The assault on Fort Ében-Émael saw several things go wrong, so did the plan fail because some bits didn’t go right? The point here is that many plans worked although they were adjusted during execution because of lower level things went wrong. A good plan focuses on what needs to be done, not how it is to be done. The Japanese siege of Port Arthur initially failed because it focused on capturing the port. Once it was changed to the destruction of the Russian squadron, it finally succeeded. As I explained to my students “there are many ways to capture a hill, the trick is knowing which hill is the right one to capture.” 

I am not saying luck shouldn’t be in a game, just that its inclusion is such that is historical and understandable. Luck for the sake of uncertainty is poor game design. Like everything in life, there are exceptions. 

Gaming at the individual/squad level is an exception. Individuals are highly unpredictable and their individual level of training/experience/equipment are causal to their actions. These rules should be more stochastic as leadership at that level is mainly handling individuals. A sniper will not stop a corps but it will stop a squad. Here luck is attempting to replicate the challenges of individualism in a simple manner. Its purpose is clear and any results will be judged within that context.

So when does a rule set at the higher level need a shot of stochastic? If it uses dice, then there is already a degree of stochastic already present. Most adjudication (results) charts, whether firing, movement, etc. use a form of bell curve where the steepness of the curve and the separation of the start and end points determine the range of outcomes. Charts that are steep and narrow are more deterministic, while those which are flat and wide are more stochastic. Modifiers move the start point of the curve to reflect the situation under which the adjudication is happening. More positive modifiers make a positive outcome more likely, while the reverse is also true. At some point, a large enough number of positive modifiers should eliminate any negative outcome, with the reverse also being true. 

Given my level of gaming, a stochastic factor needs to be introduced any time one unit on a side can affect a unit on the other side. There is always a degree of uncertainty when units interact with each other. Does that volley go wide, is it devastating, or somewhere in-between? The odds for the extreme outcomes should be quite limited while the norm should be, well the norm. Not every die roll should offer the chance for a Horatius at the Bridge. 

There is significantly less need for introducing a stochastic factor outside the range of any enemy ability to affect a unit. A unit marching outside this range should pretty much execute the movement ‘to standard’. What is there to cause performance to be less than standard? The most common retort is that the unit didn’t receive its orders. 

First how often did this happen in a particular battle or in all battles of the period in general? The number is actually quite low and how many of these instances occurred away from the battlefield? In other words, those units failed to get the order to march to the battlefield rather than executing orders which were received on the battlefield. This off battlefield situation is better modeled by scenario rules that roll for the turn of arrival. 

If the on-battlefield movement chart has a no move option, it introduces a new problem: why would a later roll cause a moving unit to stop (remember this is outside any enemy ability to affect)? There aren’t any good responses to this and reflects the randomness of the chart. To say a unit simply stops movement without a cause is uncertainty for the sake of uncertainty. 

Another answer I have read is that the movement chart reflects morale. This is a very nebulous concept and again doesn’t address the randomness of the result. What caused a change in morale? Was morale that uncertain during battle without a change in the situation? If the unit begins the battle with poor morale, then its rating should reflect the possibility of order failure and the player should account for this possibility in his planning. When any unit in a player’s army can fail (even the best) for no reason other than a bad die roll, what has been accomplished in the rule design? S**t happens often for a reason, it just doesn’t magically happen. 

One can make up numerous reasons, but how often did any of these happen in history? If poor die rolls happen enough times to enough units, then a player’s plan is upset due to nothing but bad die rolls. If the odds of rolling no move is 20%, then rolling for ten units should result in two no-moves. If there is also a 30% of a half move, then 5 units will fail to move to standard in a turn. I must again state that this is when there is no change to the unit’s situation. 

To Be Continued….