Polemarch

Painting and Psychology

2012-02-11T02:00:00.000-08:00

Just to prove that I do some normal wargamer type things, as well as apply Wittgenstein to the hobby, I have been painting so toy soldiers recently. Greek hoplites, as it happens, some of Mr Berry’s finest. It has raised a few questions for me, which I thought I’d share (or witter on about anyway), at least as a change from talking about models and metaphors.

Although toy soldiers are, of course, scale models.

I suppose that I’m not alone in struggling with painting. After all, if painting was easy, none of us would have those piles of unpainted lead that any brief surf around the internet can find many wargamers bemoaning. I suspect that, concealed in most wargamer’s cupboards there is at least one unpainted army.

Neither my inner critic, nor my external ones, is happy with me playing with what we might call ‘grey armies’. Ever since I got my first proper wargame army, 15 mm Peter Laing ECW, as it happens, at a Christmas long, long ago, using grey, unpainted, armies has been frowned upon. Mind you, I did rope my sister in to helping me paint them then.

This year, Santa delivered again, and I am now the proud possessor of a 15 mm ground scale, 6 mm DBA Classical Greek army. For those of you for whom that is gibberish, the idea is to crowd as many 6 mm figures as possible onto a DBA base, so even a 12 base force looks like a proper army; try it, it works.

Now, I’m not a good painter, I know that, and I’m also slow. So I have to go with my line of least resistance, which means for me a 40 mm base frontage and the minimal number of figures per base I can get away with, in my case, for Greek hoplites, that means 8, or 2 strips of toy soldiers.

This is not the strongest selling point of 6 mm figures, I have to admit. I did try putting four strips on a base, once, for my Pontic pikemen. I confess, they do look quite nice, but painting that many figures for that few bases nearly killed me. You can see them in the middle of the photograph.

Painting, for me at least, is thus a very psychological process. I look at a set of 20 strips of unpainted soldiers on lollipop sticks and get depressed. In fact, with the Greeks I only managed 10 strips, or 5 bases, which is a quarter of the army I want to produce. That in itself is a bit demoralising, so I struggle to find the motivation to actually do any painting at all.

The idea of painting 6 mm figures is a little different from other figures. It is impossible that someone would pick up and examine an individual figure for its correct cuff colour, which can be done with a 15 mm or 25 mm figure. So the painting to achieve an impression of rightness, not rightness itself.

This is supposed to be achieved, according to the Baccus painting guide, by dry brushing. Now, I’m sure that this is very successful for some people, but I do not seem to be one of them. It may just be that I’m too heavy handed, or too light handed, I’m not sure, but I can never get the coverage right. I land up just painting, because that is all I can manage.

Another problem I have is with detail. Some people manage to paint the white stripe around the tricorn hats of 6 mm eighteenth century soldiers. If I try that, I get white hats. It is a similar issue with shield designs on ancients figures.

In this case, I think I have a good excuse. I’m an asthmatic, and the drugs used to treat asthma these days actually impart a slight tremble to your hands (and, indeed, other muscles). No one believed me when I explained this, but then I met someone who was a GP who said ‘Yes, that is a well-known side effect’. So, that is my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

I suppose that all this is working up to the question of what our toy soldiers really are. In some cases, mine for example, they are counters in a game. I like my counters to be representative and nicely presented, and I do the best I can, but they are still counters.

For other people, they are miniature works of art, beautifully painted and based and even, with 6 mm folk, based as little dioramas with skirmishers to the front, officers conferring and scrubby bushes all on the base. Wonderful, but very labour intensive, I should imagine. And it must be a wee bit frustrating if such a work of art is removed from the fray by a random cannon shot first move.

So, for all the pondering the imponderables of wargaming, I’m not very good at painting; indirectly, of course, that explains the lack of ‘eye candy’ on this blog, which may itself explain the relative lack of popularity of the blog compared to some out there. It is a good excuse, anyway, and means that my lack of marketing of it can be quietly left to one side….

Game Mechanics, Models and Metaphors

2012-02-04T02:00:00.000-08:00

One of the things which most opinion is agreed upon is that metaphors are irreducible. By this is meant that a metaphor cannot be reduced to some ordinary language.

For example, the metaphor ‘war is a game of chess’ cannot be reduced to something like ‘war is a thing with two sides and different pieces with different capabilities lined up against each other…’

The attempt at reducing the metaphor to ordinary language (if there is such a thing) does not capture the resonances, links and differences between war and chess in the same way that the metaphor itself does. Metaphor is not simply a rhetorical flourish; meaning is added.

If this is the case for metaphor, it must also be the case for models, only more so. I mentioned before that multiple models are useful for capturing the full picture of a real thing or process.

The most obvious example is in physics, with wave-particle duality. One way to model photons is to describe them as waves; another way to model them is to describe them as particles. Which is correct? Actually, the question is meaningless – photons are both, and neither.

Modelling photons in these different ways helps us to understand, to predict physical behaviour, but does not give us an ontological commitment to them being waves or particles. The underlying reality is closed off to us and we cannot tell what a photon ‘really’ is.

Now, consider a set of wargame rules. They will need, say, some system of command and control, otherwise the toy soldiers will simply respond to every whim of a wargame general’s mood. The command and control mechanism, be it DBA PiPs, or Polemos Tempo points, or written orders or whatever, is a model. It is also a game mechanic.

Now, someone had a mild go at the PM: SPQR tempo points command system a while ago. As I understand the point, it was that the tempo points system is just a game mechanic and that it penalised unnecessarily ‘unformed’ troops. Now, in PM: SPQR terms, unformed troops are those not formed in ranks and with less clear command structures. The person in question argued that Germans, in the Roman period could have been ‘formed’, we just do not know. The rules, however, penalise them for being unformed.

Now, there are a number of points I could make here about epistemology (i.e. we don’t know how German troops behaved) and about the flexibility of the rules in question (which I know ‘cos I wrote them). On the latter point, they do actually say somewhere that German tribes can consist of formed foot (the reference is to a slightly obscure sentence in Tacitus), but that is not the point I’d really like to make here.

The tempo bidding process and use to move troop bases in PM is, admittedly, a game mechanic. It is also a hallmark of the Polemos rules sets. If it was not there, I would not have been writing a Polemos rule set. But I do not think it is ‘just’ a game mechanic.

The tempo use actually is an attempt to model the command and control processes in a battle. This is not to argue that the tempo processes reflect real battlefield processes. In order to do that, we would have to dress the wargamer in armour, create a large amount of noise and convince them that the other side were out to kill them. But we can attempt to model some of the aspects of the overall outcomes of the command process.

Now, actually, the tempo process consists of two parts: you bid to control the tempo of the battle, and then you use the rest of your allocation to order units about. The second part is, I admit, reasonably conventional – DBA uses its PiPs for a similar purpose, although I submit that DBA bases are too dependent on PiPs; if you haven’t got the points, the bases stop.

The tempo bidding phase is, however, a bit more subtle, and aims to capture the overall generalship processes. Here is some skulduggery, attempting to outthink and outwit the opponent. The balance has to be struck between seizing the initiative and being able to order troops about.

This, I think, is the irreducible part of the Polemos command process and this, therefore, raises it a little above the ‘mere game mechanic’ category.

Now, I do need to be careful here not to start any special pleading. If I had started out with a completely blank slate for the rules, I would probably not have had a similar sort of command system. Nevertheless, I do think that the tempo system attempts to model something in reality.

Now, as discussed above, just because we model something in a certain way, it does not mean that we have an ontological commitment to that thing being there in reality. Photons are modelled as waves but are not thought to be waves.

In a similar way, tempo points model command commitments and generalship, but they are not the reality. The reality was almost certainly messier and more fluid than any model could capture. What the tempo points model does add to, say, a PiP or orders based system is the interaction of the two commanders in trying to control the pace and location of the battle.

Now, it could be argued that the tempo system tries to do too much, in both reflecting the initiative control in the battle and the command and control system. Perhaps that is true, but it does, I think, reflect the resource allocation problems that generals might have had, at least in some senses. Again, this is an attempt to model this aspect – in model or metaphor terms it is and is isn’t a reflection of the reality.

Overall, then, I don’t think that any part of a rule set, a model of a certain reality, can be dismissed as just a game mechanic. However abstract, the parts of the rule sets are trying to model some sort of underlying reality. Whether they do that successfully or not is another matter, and that is why we need multiple models, multiple rule sets.

More on Models

2012-01-28T02:00:00.000-08:00

Not being one to not beat a dead horse if at all possible, I’m going to talk a bit more about models this time.

Models, as I’ve said, are terribly useful sorts of things. In fact, they pervade much of our lives, even though we do not often notice them.

It is noted by some philosophers of language that, in fact, a lot of language is dead metaphor. The word ‘tradition’, for example, is a metaphor for ‘that which is handed down’, but we do not notice, or indeed know that about the word, while we do understand the meaning of tradition.

Models, in fact, capture the salient points of what we are trying to discuss across subjects. In science, social sciences and the arts, models, or their simpler cousins, metaphors, permeate our language and thinking. To learn something new we often (or, according to some, usually) use a model or metaphor to compare and contrast the new thing with something we do know and understand.

I’m sure you must realise by now that there is a ‘but’, here. In fact, more than one.

The first but is that, in most cases, a single model is inadequate. Models capture some aspects of the thing to be studied. A model cannot be the thing itself. This is for two reasons. Firstly, if the model were the thing itself it would not be a model, it would be a replica. Secondly, the whole aim of modelling is to simplify things sufficiently to understand them. A model which is a complex as the original would be of no use in that direction.

Therefore, multiple models are necessary to capture the different aspects of the reality we are interested in studying. In terms of a battle and a set of wargame rules for that period, the rules, probably, already contain different models: there are models for movement, command, combat and morale. But the single set of models (or, if you like, the single extended model covering all these things) is insufficient to represent the real event.

The upshot of this seems to be that we do need different sets of wargame rules to cover a single period, because the choices and models, or sets of models chosen by the authors will vary, and hence will capture different aspects of the original, assuming that the authors do their homework.

The result is that we should be very wary of any rule set that ‘rules the roost’ in terms of dominating the market. No single model is adequate to representing a battle in its entire nuance, even in the fairly limited set of things we wish to represent in a set of wargame rules. A single paradigm is insufficient to represent reality, and we should not expect it to do so.

The second issue there is with modelling is to look at the dark side of models. I noted above that much of our language is dead metaphor. But our models can die too, and not give us the insight that we should expect.

To an extent, this is related to the point made just above of dominant rule sets. If there is a dominant rule set, then we have a tendency to read back from that into history or reality. In effect, we make an ontological commitment to the model, and claim that the objects in the model are those in real life.

A non-wargaming example would be Maxwell’s equations for the wave motion of light. These worked really very nicely, and the model of light as waves accounted for an awful lot of observed phenomena. The catch was that waves need a medium to travel through, so the model contained this stuff called ‘ether’ for light to behave in.

As you might know, physicists at the end of the nineteenth century spent quite a long time looking for the ether, and failing to find it. Ultimately, Michelson and Morely conducted an experiment to show that it didn’t exist, and eventually, Einstein came along to explain how and why this could happen.

The model contained an ontological commitment: that ether existed. The model actually works without such a commitment, but it implies it strongly, and so ether was presumed to exist.

I think this sort of ontological commitment can also happen when we have dominant paradigm wargame rules. For example, in ancients wargaming, the DB* paradigm is still very much in people’s minds. Now, I’m not one to slate DB* (at least, not in its ancients forms) because it was a breakthrough in terms of wargaming, but that very success can lead to problems.

For example, I was somewhat nin-plussed when a review of Polemos: SPQR commented that ‘there are no warbands in the rules’. My first reaction was ‘why should there be?’ but I think what is going on is a hardening of the DB* model of ancient battles into an expectation. In short, there could be an ontological commitment to the existence of warbands, because the paradigm model is being read back into the history underlying it.

The problem here is that people might look at a new rule set and think ‘it doesn’t have warbands in it, but I know warbands existed, therefore it is a bad rule set’. The model has been substituted for the reality.

So far as I know, no ancient source referred to foot soldiers as ‘warbands’. Warbands are, simply, an element of one model of ancient warfare. Even the name is, I think, somewhat misleading. The foot of tribal armies were not all well trained and well-armed, or committed to the cause. Those who were, were the chiefs comitatus, and they were relatively few in number.

The main bulk of the foot of tribal armies are described in PM:SPQR as ‘tribal foot’, which is, in my view, a more defensible description of them.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that PM:SPQR is the correct paradigm for us to use for ancients wargaming; it is just another model. But perhaps this example does indicate the pitfalls of dominant models, all pervasive rule sets.

Wargame Models

2012-01-21T02:00:00.000-08:00

If we want to be a bit pretentious about our hobby, we can claim that wargaming models a real world battle. We can argue that through participation in a wargame, the player can learn something about the history of the time it is set in, the possibilities, the reasons why some things happened and some didn’t.

This is all well and good, and highly educational, and therefore, acceptable in polite society (if such a thing exists any more). Wargaming becomes a vital part of anyone’s life experience. Without a wargame, we are condemned to relive the more violent parts of history. Wargaming is thus part of the moral fabric of our society; to spread the word or the wargame is to engage in a moral crusade, a battle to inform our children of the evils of conflict before it is too late….

I’m sorry. I quite forgot myself.

The problem is, of course, that wargames which set out to educate often land up as rubbish games which no-one wants to play. It is a bit like modern children’s TV, or at least the bits that I see or hear about. Children’s TV used to be about telling stories and singing songs (think Bagpuss). There was no explicit educational agenda. These days, a lot of children’s TV seems to be pushing an agenda, for example telling the children to eat 5 a day fruit and vegetables. This makes for poor viewing (or maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon), aside from the fact that 5 a day has no basis in scientific fact…

But I digress.

The point I am working my way towards is that, yes, in a sense wargames do bear some reality to history, but we do have to recognise in what sense.

We can recognise two sorts of models: a scale model and a ‘disclosure’ model. A scale model is, simply, a reduced version of the original. A miniature car, or a working steam engine are scale models. Our toy soldiers are, as well. The thing about scale models is that you do not learn anything very much about the original by look at them; certainly nothing more than you would learn from looking at the original.

A disclosure model is, in a sense, a metaphor, or at least an extended one. We draw an analogy between the model and the real thing, recognising that the model is and is not the original. By this I mean that we keep in mind that the model is limited in some, fairly well defined ways.

Let’s try an example. Chess is often used as a metaphor or model for war. In chess we have various pieces with different capabilities, a battle field and a fair bit of skulduggery between the players. In this sense, then, chess is a model of a battle. We can talk about strategy and tactics, subterfuge and manoeuvre, and many of the things which war and battles involve.

Now, we also recognise that chess is not a battle. People in armies do not come in such a range of different sizes; conflict is not so simple as landing on another piece’s square and removing them from play. The aim is not always checkmate of the opposing king, even if that is possible on a battle field.

So, in these senses, chess is and is not like a battle. It is sufficiently close to allow us to use the analogy to obtain some understanding of an otherwise closed experience to us, but is also sufficiently different to persuade us to work at the model, to understand the differences that there are.

Now, wargames have occasionally been described as ‘chess with a thousand pieces’, but if I start talking about wargames as a model for chess I’ll get confused. Anyway, I do not think that wargames and chess are particularly analogous, but I do think that wargames and war should be, otherwise we shoud just pack up our toys and slink off into the distance.

The point is that wargmaes, if they are to model some reality, have to be a disclosure model. A scale model of a real battle is ultimately, boring. While are toys may be scale models of the real ones, our battlefields models of the real ones, our command structures the same and so on, a scale model of the battle itself would mean that everything would have to follow from the real one. And this means that no disclosure, no understanding, is possible.

This is where the skill, or craft, or art, or whatever, of writing rules comes in. The aim is provide a model, an extended metaphor, of what happens in a battle. We can only model some aspects of a battle, and so we have to choose them carefully. A rule set that exhaustively covered every aspect would be a scale model, not a disclosure one.

So the aim of, say, refighting the battle of Hastings, or Waterloo, is to provide a set of rules which can aid the understanding, and are also simple and fun to use. For example, a rule set for Hastings should, in some way, allow for the strength of the Saxon position and the attrition of their forces on the hill. That may then permit the Norman player to discover why the battle plan of William was what it was. Other, perhaps more scenario specific details, such as the approach of dusk, will focus the mind more on the problem the Normans actually faced on the day, in a way that a pure scale model of the battle would not manage.

So, maybe, the next time you are tempted to cry out ‘That wouldn’t happen’ when something unexpected on the table does occur, pause for a moment and consider: why not? The rules might be trying to tell you something.

Problems of Interpretation

2012-01-14T02:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve mentioned, probably many times before, issues that there are with historical sources. The sources we have from the ancient period (and that is what I’m going to talk about, even though the comments apply more widely) are scarce and, almost certainly, biased.

They also use conventions that we may not understand, and certainly have a relationship with the ‘truth’ (to use a tendentious word) which is not the same as modern historiography would allow.

I’ve been reading the Landmark Arrian, which is a very nice book, well produced, with handy maps, notes and pictures. As you probably know, Arrian chronicled the campaigns of Alexander III of Macedon, commonly known as ‘the Great’. So far I’ve just about got beyond the Battle of Issus, but even at this relatively early stage, problems are becoming clear.

What sort of problems am I talking about? Well, there are problems of interpretation, and these are multi-layered.

For example: Why did Alexander invade Asia?

Arrian’s answer to this question is that Alexander invaded Asia to punish the Persian Empire for invading Greece. Now, Alexander was, of course, a politician, and he knew that such an answer would play well in Greece and the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Indeed, as he captured the Greek cities he generally granted them their freedom, although exactly what that meant is not clear. Mostly, he seems to have restored the Greek version of democracy to them, and ensured that they allied with Macedonia.
Now, Arrian details Alexander’s march from Greece (he had to capture Thebes before invading Asia) to the Hellespont. His list of cities and rivers crossed is a perfectly reasonable one, so far as anyone can tell. However, it is also notable that his route is the exact opposite of that detailed by Herodotus in his Histories, when he is describing the invasion of Greece by Xerxes.

What are we to make of this?

Clearly, Arrian is trying to make a point here about the invasion. Alexander’s claim to be avenging the invasion of Greece is made later in the book than the actual invasion itself. The itinerary, then, is actually making the same point in advance; foreshadowing, if you like, Alexander’s explicit argument for invasion.

What, then does this do to our interpretation of Arrian’s account of events? Do we believe that Alexander did take this route, or is it a literary trope? If Alexander did not take this route, how did he get from Thebes to the Hellespont? If he did, then did he do it consciously to make a political and diplomatic point, or was it just the best route available?

Now, as wargamers, this may not be a major problem to us, but it does affect how we view the reliability of our author. We have to recall that Arrian, although reliant of now lost sources written nearer the time, wrote in the second century AD. His sources were also probably biased, in favour of the Macedonians. So we are only getting at Alexander as an interpretation (Arrian’s) of an interpretation (his sources) of the events; and that assumes that the sources had clear accounts themselves.

The problem is if, for example, we take seriously the parallelism between Alexander’s invasion of Asia Minor and Xerxes’ of Greece, we land up with a sceptical position about a fair amount of what we read.

For example, if the first encounter of the Persians and Greeks was at Thermopylae, then what does that make of Arrians account of the action on the River Granicus? After all, Granicus was, simply a victory over local Persian forces, defending a river line. But these same forces had been able to ward off the Greeks in Asia Minor for a century or so.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that Granicus did not take place, nor that either Arrian or his sources are making stuff up, but the parallelism seems to me to be a bit suggestive that, perhaps, other work aside from his sources, informed Arrian’s account.

It does get a bit worse, too. Arrian, by his own account, is out to lionise Alexander. He thus presents him in a certain way, describing his abilities in battle (he is always at the front, the vital point) as well as his gracious diplomacy.
But took at a map of the manoeuvers before the Battle of Issus. Who let whom get across their lines of communication? Darius was not cut off from his base, while Alexander seems to have managed that, and not to have command of the sea at the same time. Who now looks like the better general?

Now, as everyone knows, the Macedonian led army won at Issus. It wouldn’t be the first or the last battle when the army in the worst strategic position has fought itself out of it. But the general acclaim of Alexander’s generalship does look a little flaky about here. He may well have been confident of the fighting abilities of his troops, but he probably should not have left them in such a dubious strategic position.

Now, Arrian tries to defend his hero by claiming that Darius should have stayed where he was, on a plain at Sochoi where he could use his numbers. This idea is presented to Darius, on Arrian’s account, by a renegade Greek, who Darius ignores, going with advice from his Persian advisors who Arrian is quite rude about (2.6.3-7).

I think we can see what could be going on here. Darius did not make a mistake but the blame is placed on non-Greeks and Darius himself by Arrian (who also suggests a god had a hand in it), while what actually seems to be the case is that the Macedonian – Greek army simply had to fight its way back along its line of communications. Arrian’s account of the battle also suggests cowardice on Darius’ part, by the way, as he was the first to flee.

This, then, leaves us with an account of Issus which has a slightly dubious relationship with the battle itself. But it is the account which we have to work with. Bother.

Attrition

2012-01-07T02:00:00.000-08:00

It is a known fact in warfare that units, slowly, lose capability. This might be through loss of cohesion, loss of command capability, dispersal across terrain or casualties. However it happens, we have to find some way of modelling it.

We immediately have a wargaming problem with cohesion. Our little men are stuck to bases, and it is hard to show that they are wavering, disrupted, reforming or whatever. Our symbols (for that is what our toy soldiers are) cannot take all the attitudes of the originals they represent.

In a sense, this is inevitable. Even if we consider that our miniature battles are, in some sense, a model or simulation of the real thing, a model is never exactly the real thing. If it were, then it would be a duplicate of the real battle, and I’m not sure, however much we may appreciate re-enactment that a re-run of say, the Battle of Kursk would go down too well.

This, then, is one of the choices we have to make when writing wargame rules or playing with toy soldiers. Presuming that attrition is sufficiently important for us to model, how, within the limitations of our simulation and our symbols, do we manage it?

Over the years, a number of methods have been tried. The “Old School” wargames, which are coming back into vogue a bit these days, worked by treating each model as an individual. These individuals were shot and removed, or not, on an individual basis. Thus, at a glance, the general could see the status of a unit and its casualty level. Also included were officers, who could also become casualties and, if I recall the Charles Grant rules correctly, this had an effect on the morale of the unit.

This sort of ‘bang, you’re dead’ model is still quite widespread, I think. For example, while I’m not a 20^th century wargamer, the games I’ve seen, particularly relating to tank warfare, seem to fit fairly well into this category. Tanks, in effect, duel, and the loser gets a puff of cotton wool to show the fact.

A slightly more sophisticated method of modelling attrition started, I think, with some of the early WRG rules. Here, a toy soldier was 20 ‘real’ men, and the casualties were worked out in ‘real’ men. Thus, if I had five musketeer toy soldiers shooting at you I could inflict 19 real men casualties on your five. You still had five figures to shoot back, but one of them was actually only one real man.

The upshot of this, of course, was a lot of book-keeping and, as I suspect I’ve mentioned before, an unrealistically high casualty rate. While some of the casualties could be rationalised as wounded, cowards running away and so on, comparison with real world battles still suggested that the rate was far too high. In early modern battles, at least, the bulk of the casualties occurred when one side or the other fled and was chased.

More recently, the DB* series removed the basis of attrition from the model almost entirely. A unit was a single base of toy soldiers and it either fought or fled. The only compromise with attrition at all was that units could be pushed back in combat, and suffered a penalty in the next round if that were the case. Units could be rallied from the rout in some circumstances, and could return to the fray as before.

Now, writing wargame rules is hard work, and it is not my intention to criticise anyone who has undertaken so to do. What I’ve described is a variety of ways of modelling attrition, each valid in its own way, but none of which capture the full extent of the concept. Indeed, given the nature of models, it is probably impossible to do so.

This is not to say that models cannot be improved, or that innovation is impossible. We can, by developing better and different models, try to obtain a better grip on the underlying reality, in this case, of a body of trained men under extreme stress.

What, then, might be a way forward? We need, it seems to me, some sort of double model. Units get both worn down by combat, and, under some circumstances, suddenly collapse. In fact, a number of the methods of modelling attrition had both models. By removing figures we show the direct effect of attrition, while the impact that has on morale (if unit strength is counted in morale, and it usually is) as well as other factors like being unsupported and outflanked can cause the unit to rout.

We could argue that having both methods included in the behaviour of units is accurate, and the best we can do, but those of you who have used such rules will be aware that constant calculating and recalculating of morale tests slows the game considerably. A single system, like DB* but perhaps a little more sophisticated, would be useful.

As you probably know, board wargames can use a ‘stepped’ approach, so a unit counter is flipped to show a degraded performance once it has been attrited a little. It is this sort of approach which we have adopted in the Polemos rules I have had a hand in. The problem is that it can reintroduce book keeping into the rules, which is a nuisance and can detract from the visual impact of the game.

My own solution, which I am slowly and painfully introducing, is to have casualty markers. For each level of attrition, (called ‘shaken-ness’), a marker is placed behind the unit until it is either rallied away or flees in rout. It is neat, simple and visually acceptable, even though the level of casualties depicted is probably still too high. Nevertheless, it works and can be rationalised by claiming that it shows the confusion that the rear areas of a unit can become when it does take casualties.

As I said, no model is perfect, but that is one way of modelling attrition without excessive amounts of paperwork.

Morale in Wargames

2011-12-31T02:00:00.000-08:00

What, if anything, do we make of the concept of morale in a wargame? Morale is a slightly odd concept, when you come to think of it. The morale of a unit is determined by the mindset and current worldview of the members of that unit and, in wargame terms, can cause the unit to fight on, recoil, run away or whatever.

Even odder, perhaps, are morale rules in skirmish games. I’ve seen some where the attitude of a single figure is determined by a set of complex rules with modifiers, die rolls and all, just to determine whether the individual charges suicidally or sensibly stays put.

When you come to the level of role playing games, of course, the concept of morale is largely abandoned. In most role playing games, the player characters are the heroes, and do not run away at the drop of a hat or cower in cover.

Mind you, I have seen some games where the player party has done precisely that because the ‘morale’ of the actual players has sunk, or they think they’ve made a mistake and taken the wrong turning. As an umpire there is always a sense of amusement when a simple trick makes the players scarper. In one Call of Cthulhu game, a NPC brandishing a machete was enough to get the PCs to leg it quick time, even though the NPC was not actually going to hit them, just scare them (he succeeded).

In older rules, the concept of morale, in its effects, at least, were clear enough. A unit took casualties, it made a morale check. A unit was ordered to charge, it took a morale check, and so on. Now, I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad idea, but it did rather slow the flow of the game down and also led to some odd situations. I think I’ve mentioned before the uncontrolled charge of a skirmish unit leading to the routing of a third of the opposing army. OK, bad rules, you can argue, but it is how it happened.

In DB* based rules, morale sort of disappears. There are army or ‘command’ break points, so that is a third (or whatever it is) of the army or command is routed then the whole performs less well. This is a hard cut off, though, and makes no account of those times when units or wings fought on effectively.

For example, I suspect under DBR Edgehill would be impossible. The Parliamentary army lost both wings of cavalry, but the infantry fought on and obtained at least a draw, if not a winning one. I’ve not done the numbers, but I think that the battle would be declared lost under DBR when they lost the second wing of cavalry: two out of three commands broken and a significant chunk of bases routed would, I think, spell defeat.

Another feature of the DB* system is that unit morale has vanished. This, I think, is a good thing (© Sellars & Yeateman). Checking a unit’s morale every time it is shot at or tries to move is a pain, and, in some senses, irrelevant. If we assume that a unit will follow orders, and that the base area of the unit covers more than the footprint of the soldiers themselves, then our combat rolls become, in part at least, morale rolls.

Now, combining the combat rolls and unit morale rolls is a good idea, and certainly speeds up the game. What it does not cover, however, is the sense of panic which can suddenly infect large bodies of people when something seems to go wrong. We see in the news that stampedes and such like are all to frequent in the world, often fatally, when crowds become stressed, often with fatal results to some people.

The Polemos rules I’ve been involved in try to model this using an ‘army morale’ method. What this is trying to get at is the overall ‘feeling’ of the army. Are things going well, OK, or badly? Is it time to run away yet, or will just one more push see us looting the enemy camp?

It is often said, (I think Napoleon said it, so it must be true) that morale to the physical is three to one. What is true, or seems to be, is that the number of casualties actually in combat was relatively low.

It used to be quite fashionable to ignore reports that, say, Montrose’s men had suffered only a single fatality while the enemy had suffered hundreds. More recent historical work, started by Charles Coulson in ‘Going to the Wars’, suggests that the reports are quite accurate. The majority of casualties were caused during the rout of the enemy forces; actual, face to face combat, caused comparatively few.

Of course, applying this idea to ancient (or any other period) rules is generalising wildly, but it would seem that the threat of injury or death is more potent in persuading a soldier to run away or fight on is more potent than the reality of people dying around them. This may not be true in modern warfare with its much longer ranges, of course, but I suspect that it might be so up to, say, the nineteenth century.

So, morale would seem to be one of those primadonna concepts in wargaming, that we do need to try to model in rules, but struggle to find an articulation of in them. It would probably stand further analysis than I’ve managed here, so it might get returned to sometime in the future.

Can You Wargame Anything?

2011-12-24T02:00:00.000-08:00

While attempting to honour the upcoming festivities (and a happy Christmas to all our readers!) I’d like to ponder something a little more off the wall this time.

Can you wargame anything?

This though arises because companies, for example, run business wargames where the participants are placed in a crisis situation and have to get out of it. In many ways it is very like a conventional wargame, at least at a strategic level. There are players, umpires, rules, imagination, creativity, stories and so on all involved.

But could anything be wargamed. In honour of those involved in retail, perhaps we should consider the retail wars, attempting to part hard pressed consumers from their cash. The players, or perhaps each player, would be the owners of shops, and would have to design windows, decide on stock, run the supply chain and hope to make enough money by the evening of Christmas Eve to be able to re-open in the New Year.

Is that wargamable? I guess it is, as a sort of role playing game. Random factors, such as consumer confidence could be included, although as umpire I might draw the line at trashing each other’s shops.

I also recall, incidentally, a game in, I think, an early White Dwarf, of a Christmas present delivery. Fortunately, I cannot remember the details, but the conclusion of the article was along the lines of ‘No responsibility for any loss of sanity attained by playing this game will be accepted. We all know there ain’t no sanity clause.’

Of course, that was back in the days when White dwarf published articles on other games than just Games Workshop’; the implicit reference is to Call of Cthulhu.

By the looks of things, more or less any conflict situation could be turned into a wargame, with suitable rules, scenarios and umpires. At this time of year, perhaps we should ponder the game of the ‘family Christmas’. Players could take on different characters: the harassed mother trying to cook dinner; the obscure aunt whom no-one likes; the small children trying to get a sneak look at their presents, and so on.

Each would have different victory conditions which would conflict, and, I suppose, a CoC like SAN level which gets reduced as things unfold. Instead of going mad, though, those who get to zero SAN simply start shouting at the other players. The game ends when everyone is doing this, sometime around 4 PM on the 25^th December.

And with that, I’ll wish you all a very Happy Christmas, and promise something a bit more conventionally wargame-like next time.

History and Coherence

2011-12-17T02:00:00.000-08:00

It is an interesting fact that battles are one off events, contingent and unrepeatable. Unlike wargamers, generals were forced to give battle with what they have at the time, not some perfect balanced force. They have to put up with uncooperative allies, insubordinate subordinates, enemies who are trying very hard to kill them and their troops, and a probably lack of support from their governments who, in most ages, worry about the cost of the whole thing and cannot see why the war is not won already.

Even at a campaign level, generals tend to spend more time worrying about food and fodder than about strategy and tactics. A starving army is one which is already beaten before battle is joined. In some ages, and places in the world the most successful generals are those who win without joining battle. Indeed, it can be argued that the quest for the decisive military encounter is one of the oddities of western culture.

It can also be argued that decisive battles are not that decisive. Professional historians, even today, rather ignore the battle. They prefer, in many ages, at least, to ferret about in archives looking at pay documents and muster lists, without ever really considering what the point of all this bureaucracy is. That is not to say archival work is unimportant, far from it. We do know a great deal more than we did about the armies of the past from this work. But the work has generally been presented as giving insight into the society of the time, rather than the men who actually fought the battles.

We could, then, argue, that modern military history (with a few exceptions) is rather lopsided, and has a single angle view of warfare, mostly relating to the raising and financing of the armies, and their impacts on society and the state.

As Austin Woolrych wrote a few years ago, he thought that the important thing about wars was who won and how. In his view, explaining the English Civil war in terms of the rise of the gentry, or the fall of the gentry, or the rise of the merchant class, or the fall of the noble class, or whatever the current popular theory of the day was, it was actually more important, and more interesting, to examine the reasons why the New Model Army won.

Unfortunately, professional historians do not seem to have heeded that comment.

On the other hand, wargamers are, if anything worse. They peruse texts, usually in translated form – guilty!) , picking out occasional bits and pieces of comments about military hardware or tactics, and present them as ‘the truth’ of ‘how it happened’. I’ve mentioned before the problems over bow range which Tacitus refers to, and it is not the only such comment which has dominated our wargame rules.

The interminable threads which crop up occasionally on email fora such as Ancmed, about (to quote a recent example) whether Caesar’s legionaries used their swords or not, is a case in point. I confess, after the first dozen or so posts on the topic I rather lost the will to live, but essentially quote is being traded against quote, Livy against Caesar and so on, in an essentially unsolvable argument about whether pila or swords were decisive in battle.

The problem is that the evidence is simply insufficient to answer the question. We do not know, we cannot know in the absence of significant archaeological evidence from battle site how those participants who died met their ends. If someone were to dig up the site of Boudicca’s last battle, and most of the British bodies found had pilum wounds, then we might be able to say something a bit more useful than quoting chunks of Latin at each other.

But even if this were to happen, it would only show one thing, and that is that at that particular battle, the pilum was decisive, probably. It is not, in fact, a generalizable truth that, therefore, in all battles the pilum was king.

In this circumstance, we have to say the Hume’s inductive scepticism is correct. The observed case does not give the answer to all cases. Even if we had the evidence for Boudicca’s last stand, we would not have evidence for anything except that battle. Without finding and digging up the evidence for every chronicled battle and analysing it in such a way, we cannot say anything in general about the interaction between legionary and Celtic warrior.

The problem is, of course, as a wargame writer, we do have to say something coherent and complete. It is not enough to say ‘sorry, don’t know, so no legion vs. Briton bashes, please because we don’t have the evidence’. A rule set like that would sell even worse than the ones I write.

The problem is thus that we are stuck, and have to synthesise some model for battle without sufficient evidence. In computational language, the problem is under constrained, underspecified and thus, unsolvable. So we have to guess.

The issue with such guesswork is that it can quickly fail under any sort of scrutiny. A different interpretation of a literary source, or even just a different translation, can mean that an otherwise solid appearing rule set is regarded as a failure.

The only way to tackle this, so far as I can see, is by an internal coherence to the rules. This is what I’ve tried to do with PM: SPQR. It is not for me to say if I was successful or not, but the idea is to present something where the interpretation is clear and the assumptions made are exposed. Then, if someone disagrees with my interpretation, they can at least find the source of it and see for themselves.

On the other hand, it does seem to make the writing of rule sets rewarding, in that people can use what you think and even, if they wish, modify it to conform to their view of history. And I suppose that is why I’m starting writing the Greeks set.

Morality, Models and Rules

2011-12-10T02:00:00.000-08:00

My two lines of thought, about ethics in wargaming and how wargames actually work, are starting to come dangerously close together.

The last ethics articles, on virtue and contractual ethics, seem to indicate, to me at any rate, that the morality or otherwise of a wargame comes down, more or less, to what is modelled in the wargame rules. If you want to have rules for atrocities, you can (but don’t expect me to agree that they are an ethical rule set). So the question which arises is that of ‘what do we model in a rule set?’

The other line of enquiry has become a bit more pointed recently, given that I’ve actually made some progress on writing rules for classical Greek warfare. The bones of the rules are laid out, but the question arises now is 'what does this set of rules need to add the colour and spice of the original period?’

Now, in my mind, these two questions tend to collapse into each other. The overall question is what do we model in wargames rules and how do we choose?

To start from the question of the Greeks, the first job is to read the literary sources and note the general impressions of how the battles were conducted. This gives you the basic troop types and some answers to outcome questions.

It is not too difficult to take these basic empirical data and create a combat table, and from there to get some basic rules for a wargame. The question which arises is to wonder how close this is to what really happened. It is here that a degree of skill, or art, or something like that (ingenuity, perhaps) needs to come into play.

Now, looked at from the moral angle, all we want to do is model the combat and its outcomes. For example, in Xenophon’s Anabasis, the Ten Thousand spend quite a lot of their time moving into untouched areas, killing or driving off the inhabitants and looting the food and other items, including, on some occasions, selling women and children into slavery, or keeping them as slaves, concubines or servants themselves.

According to our lights this is immoral behaviour. But the Ten Thousand were not alone in doing this. Even the much vaunted Alexander III of Macedon, (sometimes called ‘the Great’), in the opening few pages of Arrian’s Alexandrus Anabasis is reported, in his campaign against the Thracians:

“Nearly fifteen hundred of them [Thracians} perished. Few of those who fled were taken alive, on account of their speed and knowledge of the country, though all the women who had accompanied them were captured with their young children and all the property they were carrying.

Alexander sent the plunder back to the cities at the coast, appointing Lysanias and Philotas to dispose of i.t’ (Arrian, 1.1.13 – 1.2.1, Landmark Arrian).

The word plunder in this passage presumably means the women and children too. Hardly the sort of behaviour we expect of a demi-God, perhaps, but it was a part of warfare of the time, and a neat way of making sure your troops had money.

The point is that we, as rule writers and users, have to choose what to model. Do we want to model the selling of women and children into slavery? Probably not, so we exclude that from our rule considerations, although it is probably harder to do this in the context of a campaign game than a free standing wargame.

On the other hand, the interaction between hoplites and peltasts in combat is a significant factor in warfare of the period. The Ten Thousand seem to have formed the hoplites into various bands of different age groups, and it is sometimes reported that for example, all the hoplites under thirty were sent to chase off the peltasts.

We probably do want to model the latter example, while ignoring the first, but why? On what basis do we make that choice?

I think this comes back to what I’ve said before about our western traditions of warfare. Like it or not, we do have a ‘just war’ tradition, and that tradition determines that, for example, non-combatants are not to be harmed. Thus, on the basis of keeping our wargames within the culturally acceptable terms of our times, we have to exclude selling women and children into slavery and similar things which we would define today as war crimes.

On the other hand, the interaction of hoplites and peltasts is a legitimate point to model in a wargame rule set. The two elements in the conflict are there (more or less) by their own choice and thus this bit of the warfare can be legitimately modelled.

I think the point I’m trying to make here is that, in general, we do not consciously make these decisions, they just happen. We have a pool of general assumptions about warfare, wargames and rules which we do not, actually, question, or even think about in any detail.

It may well be that you are thinking that we obviously do not play wargames centred about atrocities, while obviously modelling the interaction of hoplite and peltast on a battlefield is an entirely acceptable focus for a rule writer.

I’d agree, but what I would like to add is that these ‘obvious’ choices are not quite as obvious as we might like to think. Supposing a different culture had come up with wargaming at a different time, we would probably have a very different sort of hobby. What is ruled in and ruled out is a matter of choice, albeit choice heavily influenced by our culture.

In the end, we have a hobby which is part of our culture and is heavily influenced by it. Wargames focus on specific bits of warfare in whatever age. Principally, we focus on the actual battle, which if Victor Davis Hansen is to be believed, is simply how western culture views warfare.

Greek Report

2011-12-03T02:00:00.000-08:00

The world, at least at the time of writing, seems to be fascinated as never before by what is going on in Greece. I doubt if there have been so many foreign correspondents in Athens since St. Paul spoke in the Aeropagia. It is quite possible, I suppose, that this post will attract huge numbers of hits, simply because Greece is mentioned in the title.

Then again, perhaps not.

This blog, for those of you who remember so far back, is supposed to be about me writing some rules in the Polemos range in the period which can generally be classified as ‘Classical Greece’ and ‘The age of Alexander’.

Up until a couple of months ago, all I was really doing was reading. I’ve got through Herodotus, Thucydides, and, more recently, two volumes of Xenophon. So far as I’m aware, these are the major literary sources for Greek warfare before Alexander; if you know different please do let me know.

After all that reading, it was time for some writing. I intend that these rules will cover from Marathon to the era of the early successors, but the wars of classical Greece clearly have a flavour of their own, and I think it is best to try to capture that without distorting it by input from later times.

The definition of troop types is fairly simply. Most wargamers know, for example, what a hoplite is, and what peltasts do. It is important, however, in my view that we do try to define the troops and capabilities carefully.

Again, in terms of formation, we need to decide exactly what we mean by the terms used. In my case, at the moment, I’ve gone with the Polemos: SPQR definition of troops are ‘formed’ (lined up in ranks) and unformed. So far as I can tell, no other option was available to ancient commanders.

Having defined the main troop types, at least (I keep having to add another one to cover types met in the narratives) we can start to think about command. I’ve mentioned before my relatively low opinion of the early Greek commanders, and the Persians do not seem to be a huge amount better. However, commanders the armies did have, and so they must have some influence on the game.

It does seem to me that the main role of army commanders was to get the troops to the battlefield, preferably fed and in some sort of order, and then deploy them in a reasonable manner. Once that is done, and the ‘attack’ is declared, early commanders seem to have had fairly little influence. Note that here I’m talking about larger battles. Xenophon’s narrative of the 10,000 suggests that commanders were more important in running skirmishes than in big confrontations.

The key to winning a wargame, therefore, should be in the commander’s deployment of his resources. Actual ability to influence things after starting the battle should be reasonably limited. Occasionally, Greek commanders did change things during the battle, such as at Plataea, but there were comparatively rare events.

Even commanders of the imputed brilliance of Alexander III of Macedon had to set up a good deployment of his troops before getting on with the battle. This, I suspect, is really what marks out the good commanders from the ones who could get their troops to the battlefield. The eye for the ground and the idea of how the strengths and weaknesses of the two sides can be used is key to victory in most battles.

Early Greek battles were fairly straightforward, line them up and charge type engagements, for example at Marathon the commanders had little to do once the initial charge was made. We could argue that the wings turning in and attacking the hitherto successful Persian centre was a command decision, but we do not actually know. An equally convincing explanation could be that the Greeks on the wings were pleased to see their own opponents flee, and turned spontaneously to help their colleagues and fellow citizens in the centre. While we may hope or suspect that there were command decisions about, we cannot show it to be the case; we do not have the evidence to tell.

The problem now is, as I’ve mentioned before, the players need something to do as commanders after deployment. I suppose if I was writing an umpire led game, I could separate the generals off and let them fight their own battles with whichever forces they had placed themselves with, and then inform them of the overall result. That would be a lot of work for the umpire, however, although it may well be realistic.

The flip side of this is that the rules have to keep the wargamers as commanders from changing their plans too easily. All armies, I suspect, take a little time to react to things going on in the battle. Most rules do not address this very easily. For example, DMR allows units to react instantly, if the wargamer has the PiPs to allow it. Whatever the unit was doing before do not affect their ability to turn and face, say, a flank march.

In Polemos: SPQR the idea was to make things a bit slower to react to untoward events, and I think the same is necessary (perhaps even more so) with the Greeks. Whether I’ve succeeded in this with SPQR I’m not sure, and it may not be for me to say, but there have been one or two comments that the system of orders adopted may even persuade wargamers to keep a reserve under the general’s immediate and direct command. If that is so, I claim a result!

Be that as it may, the Greeks were not as good as commanders as the Romans may have been, so I do think that the command and order systems will have to be different. The problem is how to make it hard to command armies without boring the players during the game.

Orders and Actions

2011-11-26T02:00:00.000-08:00

There has been a little discussion over my ‘Chains of Command’ post from a few weeks ago, and also a question about orders in the Polemos: SPQR system, so I thought I’d try to expand on these points.

Essentially, the question boils down to the effect of generals on battles. I argued in the original post that the New Model Army generals at the battle of Naseby took, between them, less than half a dozen decisions during the whole action.

For those of you not familiar with Polemos: SPQR, the command system distinguishes between general orders, such as ‘advance’ and unit orders such as ‘open fire because the enemy are in range’. The general orders require resources from the commander of the army to start, while the unit orders are ‘free’, in the sense that the unit commander issues them.

Someone raised the question of how much a unit with ‘advance’ orders has to advance. There is no minimum in the rules, and I did not expect there to have to be one. But, my correspondent pointed out, there is nothing to exclude ‘cheesy’ moves such as advancing by one millimetre. Presumably this sort of thing is used so the unit can ‘wait’ for a suitable opportunity and then pounce of a convenient enemy flank or something of the case.

Now, I proposed previously that it was just as well that rules give wargamers command at various levels, as general and also as assorted unit commanders. The command and control system within a wargame is thus to prevent wargamers as generals having too much power and influence directly over their units, while at the same time permitting wargamers as unit commanders some flexibility and input, if only to keep interest in the game between the big decisions.

The upshot of this, however, is that the determination of an individual unit’s moves is still undertaken by the army commander, as these people are the same wargamer.

My initial reaction when this issue was pointed out was along the lines of ‘well, if people insist on playing like that, don’t play with them’. Perhaps that is a bit harsh, however.

The historical issue is a live one, though. Units did lag; commanders did drag their feet. This was not usually to gain some tactical advantage (although it did happen; think of Nelson) but through cowardice, political intrigue, incompetence and so on.

In a historical scenario, the offending commander would probably be relieved of his command on the spot and, in some cases, executed either on the field or shortly afterwards. Some, of course, may well commit suicide first; this was the honourable way out for Roman commanders accused of cowardice, such as the commander of the Second legion in Britain in the aftermath of Boudicca’s revolt, Poenius Posthumus. This, the honour school of warfare, is not covered by the normal run of wargame rules.

There is another issue here, as indicated in a comment by Timeshadows. There is a reception period for the orders from high command, before the unit commander can react, and then, indeed another one before the unit acts. It was suggested that there should be a dice for reception, interpretation and implementation of the orders. Our wargame units react almost immediately to the reception of new orders; it was not so historically.

So, how on earth can we try to get out of this maze? We need to allow some unit commander flexibility without permitting the misuse of this for cheesy gamesmanship. Furthermore, we need to build in some delay due to the reception and interpretation of orders, and also some mechanism to account for the fact that orders could be lost, or misinterpreted. And, on top of that, the system we adopt needs to be fool proof, simple and transparent.

Various systems have been adopted that I have seen. One is Piquet, where the movement of units and resolution of combats is determined by the use of a card deck. This seems to work OK, but the construction of the card deck simply shifts the problem elsewhere, if you ask me, aside from the fact that all this special production of components pushes the price of the rules up to that of a decent meal out for two.

Another system is the use of courier cards, which is suggested at least in Featherstone’s ‘Solo Wargames’. This does allow for the orders to be delayed or go missing, but as Don himself admits, it seems a little unlikely that the courier will be waylaid by bandits in the rear areas of a major army. The system also does not allow for misinterpretations, although something could be done, I’m sure, with the option of the courier arriving early and the unit moving too soon, but the wargamer would probably prevent that from happening.

The only realistic and feasible system I can think of is a combination of a mild set of courier cards with some sort of unit commander personalisation, which yields a probability of him understanding the orders and carrying them out. This requires a degree of pre-game preparation, in deciding on the characterisation of each of the commanders and recording them all, and then making the rolls during the game. This is probably too much effort for a straightforward “pick up” game, but may well be worthwhile for a campaign or series of connected wargames.

So, what do you do if you play against someone who issues ‘advance’ orders but hardly advances at all? Firstly, as I said, you can threaten not to play against them again. Secondly, you can remove his officer figures for disobeying orders. Thirdly, people who engage in this level of detail often get engrossed in one small part of the overall picture and lose anyway, so perhaps it simply isn’t worth worrying about.

Finally, you could incorporate a personalisation system into your officer characteristics and roll for reception of orders and implementation. That would require us, as wargamers, to have a more hands off approach to our units, and I’m not sure how happy most of us would be with that.

Wargaming as Boxing

2011-11-19T02:00:00.000-08:00

In boxing, two adult humans enter a ring where they know that someone will be waiting who will attempt to do them harm. While there are some rules, even a referee, to ensure that the harm attempted to be delivered is limited, nevertheless the boxers, by climbing into the ring, have given their informed consent to the possibility of physical harm, even brain damage or death.

Boxing is an occasionally fairly controversial subject, both in terms of the spectacle, the violence and the possibility of physical harm. However, the usual defence of boxing is that the participants have consented to the rules and to the possibility of harm befalling them. In a sense, then, there is a mutual, implied agreement or contract between the boxers to engage in the activity, accepting the possibility of harm.

It is this aspect which makes boxing a possibly useful analogy for wargaming, rather than strict parallels between the spectacle and the violence. In wargaming, the violence is abstracted away and implied (this might be an issue for wargaming, but that is not the focus here), and the spectacle may or may not be an issue, but the contractual aspect could be a useful one.

In a wargame, two players agree on a set of rules, models, and so on, that they will use. As in boxing, there are two defined areas. One is the ring, or table top, the other is the rest of the world. The rules are different in each of them. In a sense, then, wargamers in agreeing to the parameters of a game, agree to the suspension of real world rules on the table, for one in which violence, even abstracted, is determinant of outcomes.

This can be used for a contractarian defence of wargaming. As an ethical theory, contractarianism has a venerable history, starting with Rousseau and Hume and continuing today is modern theories of justice such as those of John Rawls. However, contractarianism is not straightforward.

The idea that the boxers, or wargamers, enter into a contract is, mostly, an implied one. When this is used at a social or political level, as in a ‘social contract’, of course, a counterargument can be made that no-one has any choice about signing up to it or not. You are party to the social contract whether you like it or not. In the case of a boxing match or wargame this is not the case, clearly. You can choose whether to fight or play, or not.

This is not enough, however. A boxer may feel, against his free choice, that he has to fight. Perhaps he feels he needs to fight for his honour, or for the money, or because of obligations to his trainers or agents or other actors. Thus, it could be argued that the boxer has less of a free choice than the implied contract suggests.

This could also apply to wargaming. Suppose you arrive at your game with your Hittite army and meet your opponent. He is dressed as an Assyrian king and, as the armies are unpacked he shows you that he has many bases depicting Hittites being tortured, executing and lying on the ground, dismembered. “Casualty bases for you”, he says.

Now, clearly, your opponent has gone to a lot of effort for the game, but do you still wish to play it? Indeed, are you under a contractual obligation to play it? You might feel offended by your opponent’s attitude, uneasy at their approach, but is that sufficient to breach the implied contract to play a wargame? If you do feel that it is, of course, there is no wargame to play.

Now, suppose the scenario were replaced by one where your opponent was the US Cavalry, and you were an AmerIndian tribe. The casualty bases are now depicting women and children, as well as warriors. How would you fell then? Has the implied contract been broken? If so, why?

The important point is, I think, that while normal rules are suspended in the boxing ring, not all the rules are, and some are replaced by other, similar, rules relating to boxing specifically. Outside the ring, gouging people’s eyes and biting them is against the rules of society; in the ring, there are specific rules against this behaviour, while punching is forbidden outside, but positively encouraged inside the ring.

Thus, while you might have entered into a specific, implied contract with your opponent, not all the rules of the outside (off table) world are suspended. There is some sort of rule of acceptable behaviour. The depiction of prisoners being tortured, non-combatants being murdered, and so on, makes us uneasy, no matter how accurate the historical representation might be. Somehow, we do not want to know that the US Cavalry killed civilians, or the Assyrians tortured, enslaved and executed prisoners.

The problem, it seems to me, revolves around the non-explicit nature of the contract. The rules of boxing are fairly clear and penalties are imposed for breaking them. In wargaming, the rules for conducting the game are clear, what can be fuzzy is the overlap between these rules and those of normal ‘polite society’, that is the rest of the world and the combat being depicted.

We could argue, again with boxing, that ‘what happens on the table stays on the table’. Thus we still get our battle with the Assyrians, accepting the casualty bases as weird, but arguing that the game itself is more important.

But then what if your opponent, instead of giving you a casualty base each time you lose one, removes the base and smashes it with a hammer, while replacing it with one of his casualty bases. To be fair, let him to the same with his bases.

Somewhere between the unpleasant casualty bases and the smashing of losing bases a line has, I think, been crossed. Unfortunately, due to the implied contract to play a game, it is a bit difficult to say exactly where that line is. Maybe it simply depends on the participants.

Polemos: SPQR Q & A Part II

2011-11-12T02:00:00.000-08:00

Some more Polemos: SPQR questions and answers this time. Normal service will be resumed next week, but I’m trying to keep all the Polemos stuff together. Hopefully, the rest of the rules are so well written that there won’t be any more questions!

Q1 I'm having difficulty finding the suggested small/medium/large sizes for each army. The closest I've found is for the two scenarios. Can someone please point me to where these are?

A1 I'm not sure they are there; they do refer to the scenarios. The original had a lot more very short scenarios with S/M/L armies, but they didn't make it to the final edition.

Q2 Just got my copy of SPQR, and am also just getting into 6mm historicals. I would like to use my 6mm figs for 25mm based DBA as well, but am curious how the variant base depth would impact the game.

A2 So long as the bases are all similar and you work on a 2:1 aspect ratio, there should not be a problem, I think. Sabot bases or a measuring stick should sort out any problems.

Q3 I had two forces facing off against each other, each of three bases of cavalry. There was an overlap on each sides right flank. The Gauls had the tempo and were in charge range of the Roman allied cav. Both Gallic cavalry bases got a 'charge home result', but what does the 'overlap cavalry base do? Does it do its own RC charge die roll even though it will only contact the corner of the Roman cavalry?

A3 It may not be terribly clear in the rules (it was supposed to be) but charges are resolved per group if the bases are in a group. So all would move into contact, but only on the result of one of your dice rolls.

Q3.1 So if the group charging gets a 3+ result all of the target bases get the same result? Eg 4 frontage base group of tribal infantry charge a 6 frontage base group of legionaries. Dice are rolled with a 4 result in favour of the tribal infantry charging, does that mean that all 6 bases of legionaries get a Target shaken result?

A3.1 Yes.

Q4 The Move Sequence shows 8. Make compulsory moves (both players). What does this mean? It states later in the rules that routers move in their next movement turn?

A4 It is a sweep up to make sure that everything has been done at the end of the turn - the recoil before a rout, recoils, halts and so on.

Q5 Infantry that fight 2 or more bases deep get a +1 support bonus (up to+3) for each base behind the front base, Can't see the same for cavalry is this an omission, is there a reason behind this or has this been factored in to the charge?

A5 So far as I know, cavalry didn't fight in depth, so they wouldn't get a bonus from doing so. I imagine that cavalry in depth could quite easily get disordered. If anyone has any evidence that I'm wrong, do let me know.

Q6 Why -1 to the firing side per additional unit firing and not to the target (page 27 Ranged attack table '-1 "Each extra base shooting at same target" ')?

A6 This is a bit ambiguous, but the intention is that -1 is applied to the target for each base over the first shooting at it.

Q7 In the example on page 36 (Brigantians v Romans) I notice that there is a -1 modifier for unformed in the first round of combat. This is at odds with the modifier list on p 31 and the reference sheet at the back of the book where Unshaken unformed in first round of combat get +1. In each of the combats on p 36 the -1 modifier is applied.

A7 The rules are right; B1 should get a score of 10, making the difference 4 and thus the recoil shaken result.

Q 7.1 Also the second combat on p 36 (B2 v R2) has a final result being a difference of 1. The outcome in the example is that "Neither side has gained an advantage and both bases must continue in combat fir the next phase", while the table on p32 shows that a difference of 1-2 would be a recoil.

A7.1 Actually, B2 should be on 10 again, so R2 recoils.

Q8 On p32 (risk to Generals and Officers) it states that "...close combat produces a 0-1 result (a draw)..." yet in the results table you have 0 = no effect (a draw?) with 1-2 a recoil

A8 The idea is that generals are at most risk when close combat bogs down – they are quick enough to get away if things go pear shaped and bright enough not to go charging off in pursuit and get isolated (not strictly true, of course, but near enough).

So I'd leave that as a 0-1 result and delete the bracketed phrase.

Virtue Wargaming

2011-11-05T02:00:00.000-07:00

Some of you are probably aware by now that I do some worrying about the ethics of wargaming. I’ve written a bit about utilitarianism and wargames, and somewhere in the system I’ve got a somewhat incoherent discussion about contractarian considerations.

In this piece, however, I’m going to consider an aspect of virtue ethics. This came about in a serendipitous way, while reading a book called ‘Working Virtue’ edited by P. L. Walker and P.J. Ivanhoe, which I got cheap a while ago. Anyway, within that is an essay by Nancy Sherman called ‘Virtue and a warrior’s anger’, which got me thinking a bit.

Now, Sherman argues that, often, soldiers in battle are, or get, angry. They are angry at seeing their comrades killed; angry at the political machinations which have meant that they have had to leave their homes and families to go into battle and, in some cases (e.g. peacekeeping) angry that they cannot intervene at some events. So there is a fair bit of anger flying around on the battlefield.

The Stoics argued that it was virtuous to abstain from anger. Their ideal sage was not angry; nothing should be able to anger him (they didn’t, I think, do ‘hers’). Anger inhibits reason, and the stoics prized reason above everything else. They also argued that if only external things anger us, and external things are only passing phenomena which will fade away, we shouldn’t let them upset us. There is quite a lot about that in Marcus Aurelius, by the way.

So, anger gets a thumbs down from the stoics. Indeed, Seneca argues that the horrors of war, both just and unjust conflict, are the work of unconstrained anger. Anger makes us irrational, and, while in an irrational state we can do things which, when returned to rationality, we regret or cannot believe we have done. These, then, are the states where real life atrocities occur.

Now, our toy soldiers are the perfect stoic warriors. They never get angry or carry out atrocities. They cannot behave in an irrational or dangerous manner. Thus, according to the stoics, they are, in some sense, the sages of the warrior world.

Further than this, our rules, in general, do not allow for our models to carry out atrocities. Most atrocities, after all, occur after the battle or off the battlefield. Many of the horrific things which have occurred in our world, such as the massacres on the Eastern Front in World War II, or those in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars have been carried out by rear echelon troops. That is not to say that front line troops have not carried out atrocities, but usually, in battle at least, they have other things to worry about.

Moving on a little further, then, atrocities and the situations which give rise to them are not modelled by our wargame rules. It is true that occasionally you might get rule sets with ‘unconditional advance’, but in general they are towards enemy troops or baggage trains which are deemed to be legitimate targets. Civilians are not involved unless in scenario specific terms.

Another factor to be considered is that our model soldiers are the perfect, chivalric, knights. They do not, as I’ve said, get angry, nor do they go looting or any other of the awful things that can happen in warfare. There are no violations of the codes of chivalry in our games; we do not wish to model them, and so they are put to one side.

Furthermore, there are no violations of the Western just war tradition in wargames. If we lay aside the Ius ad bellum criteria (requiring a just cause; it is a bit late for that when the armies are on the table), we can see that the Ius in bello (just means) criteria are adhered to. Our wargames have no hatred, greed or brutality in them. The games and actions in them are proportional to winning and avoid unnecessary suffering. The rules and conventions of war are followed and, as just discussed, violence to non-combatants is avoided.

So our wargames follow both the stoic ideal of non-anger and the Ius in bello criteria of the Western just war tradition. This is what we choose to model in our games. It does not have to be like that, of course. We could choose to model other aspects of conflict, such as the looting of the Royal baggage train after Naseby, including the murder of a load of ‘Irish’ (more probably Welsh speaking) women. But we choose not to.

Now, why do we choose to model only some aspects of warfare and not others? We could argue that what we do model are the important aspects of warfare: the battles themselves. It is here that the decisions are made and wars are won and lost. We could even suggest that, in history, most casualties from battles themselves have been during the pursuit, when one side has lost. Some rules (perhaps most, I’m not sure) stop at the point when the battle has clearly been lost and do not model the subsequent slaughter. I suppose that campaign games go down this route, and so a claim could be made that they are more realistic but less moral than standalone games.

However, the point is that from this stoic-virtue ethic point of view, what we model is perfectly moral and acceptable. The only slight problem remaining is the question of how we choose what we do model. That, perhaps, is where the true moral choices of wargaming are made, but that will have to wait for another time.

Why do we wargame that which we do wargame?

2011-10-29T02:00:00.000-07:00

Now, there is a clumsy title, but what I want to explore is why we chose to wargame the periods we wargame. This sort of follows on from last time’s comments on why we wargame at all, so in a sense I’m trying to drill down to the bedrock of an individual’s hobby (in this case mine; I can’t speak for any other individual).

In another sense I am also trying to explore the culture of wargaming, and whether what we choose to wargame is, in any sense, culturally conditions. Put another way, we can ask if wargaming is totally an escapist fantasy which only bears a passing resemblance to real life, or if what we choose to game has anything to do with what is going on in our world.

I used films of Shakespeare’s Henry V last time to try to illustrate what I mean. Another possible cultural icon is, as I’ve mentioned before, the Battle of Marathon. Moving on a few years chronologically we have, of course, the film 300. Now, I’ve not seen the film, but I do wonder if the choice of Thermopylae was, at least in part, culturally conditioned. I’m thinking along the lines of a few brave men (western, of course) against a horde, betrayed but fighting to the last, and so on. This is orientalism, as I’ve mentioned before, and it goes back to the Greek historians, but I cannot help but wonder if, somewhere in the background are recent events in Iraq and similar places. Perhaps, however, I’m being too cynical.

Anyway, the question of interest is whether those sorts of cultural and socio-political events influence our choices of wargaming topic. In the 1970’s, Paddy Griffiths caused a ripple in some wargaming circles by suggesting that there were ‘gray’ wargames, or what we might term forbidden subjects. Among his candidates were the 16^th and 17^th century struggles in Ireland and the 1939-40 campaigns in Poland and France.

In the first place, he suggested that the Irish campaigns were unpopular because they still had relevance to modern politics. A wargame which showed the Irish and English in mortal combat would, he suggested, make us feel uncomfortable, and so we wouldn’t wargame it. The 1939-40 campaigns show, of course, the “bad guys” winning, and that too makes us dubious of playing the wargames.

I could not honestly say the Griffiths raised a storm with his comments, but he did provoke a bit of debate. Some argued that his list of grey wargame periods was not grey at all, but simply too boring or one sided to make a good game. The Irish campaigns of the sixteenth century were classified in this camp. It was also argued that there was too little information around about some campaigns to actually be able to set up a wargame based on it. The Polish campaign of 1939 was placed in this category; there was also the problem of the lack of figures and models for the battles.

Now I’ve noted before that wargaming is an individualistic thing, and the choices we make are, broadly speaking, unconditioned by anything outside our own moral world (for want of a better expression). While there may be some who would be happy playing, say, a game set in the ‘Wild West’ which included killing American Indian women and children, many of us might get uncomfortable with that.

The point I’m drifting towards here is to wonder how we choose which periods we wargame. Now, of course, you might argue that ‘I wargame Napoleonic British because Fred collects Napoleonic French’, and Fred is your normal wargame opponent. But even if that is the case, Napoleon had more opponents than just the British, so why choose them?

There are, I think some constraints on our choices. Firstly, there is the availability of information and models for our games. Lots of people are interested in Napoleonics and World War Two (not just wargamers) and so there are vast quantities of books, DVDs, model soldiers and so on about these topics. I would suggest that this interest, at least in Britain, is because these were ‘heroic’ times for our country, where “Britain stood alone against the tyrant” and so on. Even if, as our reading of history and understanding of the period nuances these claims, we are still, somehow, joining in this narrative.

We also have the counter-cultural, as well. I recall someone telling me that he played Napoleonic Turkish because they were rubbish and everyone knew they were rubbish, so it did not matter if he won or not. In fact, if he did win, he could make bigger claims about the fact. But, perhaps, that is a little unusual.

Another response I’ve seen, I think on the old DBM-list run out of Stanford, was to advise the choice of an army you could love, even when it had lost. This was quite widespread advice when someone came asking for a suggestion for an army, and all the odder because of the way it was phrased. Perhaps it is just me, or that I’m particularly sensitive to language use, but to suggest that an army of model soldiers can be lovable seems to me to be a little strange.

Nevertheless, it is clear that people do make choices of armies, campaigns, periods or whatever that they can ‘love’, whatever than term might mean. For myself, I rarely wargame anything post-1700, as those of you who have read these witterings for a while might have deduced. Why that should be the case I am not sure, but it is probably due to starting out with the English Civil War and being able to visit some of the battlefields and other associated places, plus the fact that the source material is mainly in English and widely available.

But what about you? Why did you choose the periods in which you wargame? Answers on the comments button, please!

Wide Boys and Heroes

2011-10-22T02:00:00.000-07:00

Why do we wargame?

As I’ve probably written far too often on this blog, wargaming can have a wide variety of responses, ranging from mild interest to derision to implications that it supports violent activities. But that does not actually answer the question of why we, as normal (so far as anyone is normal) healthy adults spend a lot of time wargaming.

Firstly, I suppose the answer is ‘because we can’. Some people hang glide, some play golf, and some wargame. Our society is such that we do not have to struggle to survive; every waking minute does not have to be spent in backbreaking agricultural work which was the lot of most of our ancestors. If, as Josef Pieper argues, Leisure is the basis for Culture, then all of these things contribute to a diverse and vibrant culture in which ordinary people can do things that their great-grandparents could only have dreamt about.

Secondly, as has been mentioned a few times before, there is a basic interest in battles. This shows itself in a variety of manifestations in society, from war films to wargames to video games, books, DVDs and so on. Indeed, to look at the bookshelves of many libraries or bookshops one would start believing that military history started with World War 1, peaked in World War 2 and has continued at a lower level ever since. It is also true that publishing books about World War 2 is about as lucrative as book publishing gets these days.

Now, battles are intensely dramatic and emotional events. I’ve just read Juliet Baker’s excellent book on Agincourt. Discussing the killing of the French prisoners towards the end of the battle, she remarks that probably Henry V, who gave the order, had little choice because his men were emotionally and physically exhausted by what had gone before. He had to protect his army from the possibility of being attacked by both fresh enemy forces and escaped prisoners, rearmed by weapons picked up on the field.

Films, too, tend to have a climax with a battle, unless they are about the battle as a whole (think ‘The Longest Day’). Books too, if set against a background of war, tend to have battles as dramatic plot forcers. If the film or book is a decent one it does not tend to get accused of encouraging war. I suppose the question here is ‘why not?’

Often, films present war in considerable nastiness, although they do have to stay within some limits. On the other hand, they also present war as an opportunity for ordinary people to do extraordinary things. The representation of on screen of courage, self-sacrifice, team spirit and so on more than makes up for the inevitable depiction, if only in long shot, of the carnage that is battle.

So where does this leave wargaming? To some extent, as has been mentioned in the comments recently, wargaming represents the heroic ideal of battle. We abstract away most of the gory, nasty bits, and focus on the courage, the strategy and tactics, and the pageantry in a convivial social atmosphere with like-minded people. The games are mildly competitive but not particularly addictive, and are normally played for bragging rights, as opposed to the perfectly socially acceptable occupation of, say, poker playing.

We can also say that wargamers know, perhaps, more history than many in general society, and also probably know more about the consequences of war than many. One of the slightly depressing things to do as a wargamer is to go through the magazine articles and note how frequently certain parts of the world have been the arena for battles. At Agincourt, again, the route of the English army takes the traveller across the front line trenches of World War I near Amiens; indeed, there was a story of Agincourt archers, in ghostly form, joining in the battle of Mons. But then we can start to reflect that none of these battles actually seem to have solved anything in particular.

We wargame, perhaps, to give us some connection with the past, however tenuous and remote it may seem to be. This is not so obvious as it is in more popular culture, however. The films of Shakespeare’s Henry V are an interesting case in point. Olivier’s Henry V, of World War II vintage, was aimed at a world about to invade France in the cause of liberty. Interestingly, Churchill asked that the Southampton plot was removed; the country needed to appear to be united. Kenneth Branagh’s version was anti-war and produced after the Falkland’s War, while a stage version with a black actor in the title role came after the invasion of Iraq. I’m not sure we can detect such political views in our wargames.

So wargames seem to link us to the glory and pageantry of battles, but do not, on the whole, make any particular political point. Is wargaming then, simply a pastime, of value only to its participants? Is it undertaken so unthinkingly as to be amoral and apolitical? It is rather hard to suppose that it is, being, as I said above, part of a wide band of social and cultural activities. There must be some link with modern politics or wargaming becomes mere fantasy and escapism.

Now, there is nothing wrong with fantasy and escapism per se, but to ignore the other currents that might be swirling around our hobby might be foolish. At least, we probably have to accept that most of our wargaming is based on the easy availability of decent texts on the campaigns and battles that we play. Thus, through that link if no other, wargaming represents some aspect of the society in which it is embedded. Perhaps this does explain why increasingly exotic (from our point of view) wargames are promoted such as the Chinese Civil war of the 1920’s. From our western point of view it is (to misquote Neville Chamberlain) a war among people of whom we know nothing, and thus is ‘safe’ compared to say the Black and Tans campaigns of the same sort of era.

Anyway, why do you wargame?

Polemos: SPQR Questions and Answers

2011-10-15T02:00:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be aware that the Polemos: SPQR rules were published recently. As they were written by my own fair hand (or rather, typed by my own fair fingers, but that doesn’t sound quite so poetic), I thought that, for the benefit of the world and my own sanity, I would occasionally post the answers to questions that people have asked me about them here. The first few are below, but don’t worry, the usual outpourings will be back next week.

Q1. Charging. Under Unit Orders on p17 a charge is one of the orders that does not require TPs to be allocated. On p 21, however, it states at the 2nd bullet point "The Active player announces all charges, expends TPs for charges and marks but does not move the charging bases". Does this mean that TPs are required for charges contrary to p17?

A1. Charging is a move, so unless the bases are already advancing, the TPs have to be paid. If the bases are advancing (which, in play testing, was the normal situation), then the charge does not cost TPs, as charging to contact is contained within the Advance order..

Q2. Changing formation. Does it cost TP to change formation? p21 simply states that a move may involve the base(s) moving forward or changing facing within a group.

A2. Yes, it does cost TPs, I think, because it is a change of order, not a continuation of the order. I'm open to argument on this one, though...

Q3. Flank or Rear attacks. How does a base or group qualify for these? Other Polemos rule sets have the attacking base with the greater part behind the target's front line.

A3. There is always something that gets through, isn't there?

Yes, extend the lines of the base edges in the BD direction. If the greater part of the attacking base is outside these, count as flank attack.

Q4. Routing. Is it OK to simply remove the routing base(s) once the initial rout move is done?

A4. Mostly it is, yes, unless the army is really deployed in depth.
I, however, prefer the morale effect of looking at all the fleeing bases, then into my opponents eyes, and smiling, gently and slightly sadly at him, so I leave them on until they get to the table edge.

Q5. Is the "Composition Table" designed to give a sample/stereotyped 20-base army for each of the forces covered as an alternative to rolling for each separately?

A5. The tables give a standard 20 base army (in fact the play testing was based on these) although the bases are without a training value.

Q6. Are the rules suitable for solo play? If so, how?

A6. Yes, they work quite well solo, I think (but then I would, being mainly a solo player AND the author). The way I’ve played solo is to choose one side and run that for the tempo bidding. You must roll for tempo points first and decide your bid. Then choose an appropriately sized dice and roll for your enemy’s tempo bid. The winner is the tempo player, and everything else flows from that in a fairly straightforward way.

Alternatively, you can roll randomly for the TP bid for both sides, and see what happens. This can land up with some peculiar results, though, but then, ancient battles tended to be a bit odd, anyway.

I’ve found it a slightly strange experience, having these rules published. This may well be because production was dogged by assorted problems. When Mr Berry refers to freezes and flood delaying things, he really is not exaggerating. Although I’ve had rule sets published before, they have been collaborative efforts, while this one was written by myself, alone. Perhaps that is it.

On the other hand, I’ve always disliked reading what I’ve written and got published, be it professionally, articles in magazines or, I suppose, rule sets. So maybe it is simply normal rejection anxiety. I do wonder, however, if this is quite common and stops a lot of good ideas that must be out there reaching the public domain. The nagging doubt ‘what if people don’t like it’ is a real fear and does stop some from setting finger to keyboard.

Still, having got Polemos: SPQR out into the public domain, what you, the public, make of it is really not my problem. I’ll try to answer questions and listen to comments and advice about how it should have been, and, if there is ever a second edition, take those things into account.

In the meantime, I’ll try to concentrate on writing rules for classical Greeks (reading about Agincourt, Naseby and the Thirty Years War notwithstanding, of course). The biggest difficulty I’ve encountered so far is trying not to simply copy large chunks of the Romans rules over and say ‘that’ll do’. Quite aside from the fact that I’ve criticised such behaviour here before, I am trying to keep in mind the fact that warfare was different between these two ages, even if we bung them all into the same ‘ancient wargames’ category, of refer to the whole period as ‘classics’ in terms of the academy.

Keeping it all Together

2011-10-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to explore some of the implications of Bennett’s taxonomy of levels of the organisation of conflict, referred to a few weeks ago, I thought I’d have a go at outlining what the implications of some of them might be for us, as wargamers.

This also relates somewhat to the discussion of a bit ago about whether the Academy and the work it produces was of any use to us as wargamers; indeed, whether the outcomes of academic studies ever reach beyond the ivory towers of universities.

I still think that answer to that question is, largely, no, or at least that academic studies often are not useful to wargamers and are frequently kept within academe anyway. However, I have referred here to a few academic works over the last year, so I thought I’d bring another one to your attention this time, while also trying to discuss the top level of Bennett’s analysis, that of the diplomatic and political organisation of war.

The paper in question is a fairly recent on: William Bulman, The Practice Of Politics: The English Civil War And The ‘Resolution’ Of Henrietta Maria And Charles I, Past & Present, 206, 43-79.

This immediately shows up a few problems with academic works. Firstly, they have boring titles, secondly, that they tend to the lengthy side and thirdly, you really need to be in a university to have ready access to the work. Be that as it may, I’ll now try to extract something interesting from the above for us as wargamers.

Anyone who knows anything about the English Civil War knows that on 14^th June 1645 the royalist cause committed both military and political suicide at Naseby. Military suicide because the King’s Oxford army way defeated and the experienced infantry backbone scattered, killed or captured. Political suicide was caused by the capture of the royalist baggage, including a whole load of letters from the Queen, Henrietta Maria of France, to Charles I, and from him to her.

These letters were political dynamite, showing Charles to have been in negotiation with the Irish, French, Catholic and other dubious powers. They were rapidly published and, for many people, destroyed the idea that Charles could negotiate honestly. The rapid disintegration of the royal cause followed, at least in part, from this publication.

Now, obviously these letters are a source of information at a political and diplomatic level. Before the war broke out in 1642 Henrietta Maria had gone abroad to raise cash and buy arms for the royal cause. Before she left, the King and her decided on their policy for the war. Charles was to go to York, seize the munitions dump at Hull and raise an army, while the Queen was in the Netherlands pawning the crown jewels and buying arms.

This process, Bulman argues, was what the Queen meant when she referred to the ‘resolutions’ that the King had. This, he argues, was the manner of making political decisions when communications were poor. The overall policy was decided, at least in terms of its outcomes and immediate processes.

The actors on the ground then had to frame their activity in accordance with these resolutions, or they would firstly cause confusion, as other, remote, actors would not know of the change of plans and would act in accordance with the original resolutions in mind.

Secondly, and from the Queens perspective more importantly, the actor changing their minds would appear, and be represented in diplomatic correspondence and in the newsbooks as being unreliable and vacillating. From her perspective, trying to raise money, she needed the news from England to be consistent with the policy she was putting forward in trying to obtain loans. If it looked like the King was about to settle, or change his mind over some bit of policy, that action or perception of the action would make her job much more difficult.

Now, the King and Queen were in a bit of a difficult and unusual position in their correspondence. As the navy supported Parliament, they could not be sure that their letters would reach their destination, nor that they would not be deciphered when they were. Therefore, they could not change policy on the fly, as it were.

Thus, we see the importance of these resolutions. Policy was set, pretty well, until the parties could meet in council, face to face, and change them. Communications were too unreliable and vulnerable to interception to discuss policy and possible changes to it. Thus, royal policy was set, more or less, from the point at which Henrietta Maria left England in February 1642 until she met him again in July 1643, and again from 1644 onwards.

While Charles and Henrietta Maria were in perhaps a more awkward position than many, the outline above does point, I think, to something that we, in our communication rich world perhaps fail to take into account. It was very difficult to change policy when it had been set in motion. This is true, I think of all ages, but particularly before the advent of the turnpike roads in the eighteenth century.

Communications were slow and unreliable even over relatively limited areas of Europe. While newsbooks could be in Amsterdam in a week or so, private communications were more subject to loss or severe delay than a package of newsprint. The idea of resolution makes sense against that background.

As wargamers this means that we do need to be a bit careful. If a single mind is controlling everything, then adjustments to this force can immediately be taken into account by that one, even though no message could possibly have passed between them in that time. Our armies, and our campaigns and diplomacy, can become ahistorically well informed, with swift and uninterruptable communications.

I suppose, too, that this is what marks out an excellent general from the good ones. The excellent generals could read the land and the enemy and strike, while the good or average generals were still figuring out how to react to this even or that.

Chains of Command

2011-10-01T02:00:00.000-07:00

It is often said (so it must be true) that the task of a command system in a wargame is the opposite of that in real armies.

In real armies, the chain of command, command, control and communications (C3) or whatever you want to call it is aimed at ensuring the ability of a general to get the units to do what he wants. A unit commander has enough problems engaging the enemy without worrying about the bigger picture. He needs direction from above if his unit is to take the enemy in flank, or exploit that gap, of whatever.

In modern armies, with modern communication systems, it is quite possible for a general to give orders directly to a single vehicle or a company commander (or even, potentially, a platoon or section). However, they do not, for the very good reason that the unit commanders would go ballistic if that happened, or at least wonder what their subunits were up to. The potential for confusion, disruption and chaos is simply too great.

In a wargame, of course, there is just one individual to act as both general and unit (and, possibly, subunit) commanders. What I mean is that the player has to act as the overall commander, but also move the subunits in accordance with the ‘orders’ given by the general, that is, himself acting with another hat on.

Put like this it is fairly clear how accusations of gamesmanship or over-elastic interpretation of those orders can occur. Looking at the situation as a unit commander, the player can quickly re-assess the situation and mentally adjust the orders the general has given; in extreme cases he might simply do something else.

So the problem the wargame rules writer is faced with is different from those which a real life general has to deal with. The general can issue his orders, and expect someone else to carry them out. The wargamer issues orders (how this happens differs in different rules) but then has to execute them. The real life sub commander might misunderstand the orders, ignore them, do something else either disastrous or brilliant, or he might carry his orders out. In a wargame, the sub unit will do what the ‘general’ wants, because the general is also the unit commander.

There are a number of responses to this sort of problem. Firstly, there are the options of multi-player and committee games. Here, the commander is isolated from the action in some way, and can only issue orders to the next level of the chain of command, which can do likewise to their next level and so on. This is fine, but in my view often lands up verifying the old adage that war is 90% boredom. One of the lessons of committee games is that doing something as an army takes time.

Another response to this problem, and the most usual among wargamers, I suspect, is to ignore the problem. Most reasonably modern rule sets have some way of limiting the moves a general can make. DBA PiPs or Polemos Tempo Points put a calliper on the number of bases that can be moved at any one time. This is a bit unpredictable, and the number of moves is moderated by a random dice roll, but actually allows for a fair amount of planning in advance. Most wargamers will happily accept this as ‘realistic’, and enjoy the challenge of adjusting their plans to account for the odd bad dice roll, either in command points or in combat.

I’ve sort of mentioned this problem before, when I suggested that the wargamer should, in fact, only issue orders to the top level of his command. In terms of the English Civil War, these would be the commanders of the wings and the centre. For example, at Naseby, Fairfax would issue commands to Ireton, left wing cavalry commander, Skippon, infantry commander in the centre, and Cromwell, right wing commander of cavalry.

The issuing of commands would, in fact, be done at the senior commander’s conference before the battle. Naseby is interesting in this respect because the Parliamentary army moved backwards after its initial deployment because Cromwell judged that the ground was too wet in the initial position. This problem went back to Fairfax who decided to change the location of the army, and the army was redeployed.

Once the battle started, the key commanders lost a fair bit of their ability to control events. Ireton was wounded and his wing was beaten. The Parliamentary foot was soon under pressure from the more experienced Royalists. Cromwell’s horse was victorious, but this took some time, partly due to poor going for cavalry.

So far, the second level commanders had done comparatively little except lead their men into combat, or at least watch them while they won or lost. Now, Cromwell took the initiative, and led part of his wing onto the flank of the Royalist foot. Fairfax, who as army commander had pretty well finished his job, called up the unengaged so far forces (his own foot, horse and lifeguard) and led the assault on the now beleaguered Royalist foot. And that, more or less, was that.

Now here is the problem for wargaming. If a set of rules only allowed that level of decision making, it might get lauded as being nicely historically accurate, but it would probably be described as being dead boring. After the initial deployment, Ireton’s only decision was to support some foot, for which he got wounded and captured. Cromwell’s only decision was to turn in on the foot, which was hardly a taxing one in the circumstances, while Fairfax’s decision was made at a point where the battle was more or less won.

So I suppose the point here is that, in order to be interesting, the wargame and the wargamer have to operate at these different levels. We need to stories of the first line Parliamentary foot units being beaten back, to engage us in the overall narrative of the battle.

So maybe I am wrong. Having a wargame where the player is the overall general only is not such a good idea.

Wargame Levels

2011-09-24T02:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading an essay by Matthew Bennett, entitled ‘The Development of Battle Tactics’ in Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred years War, edited by Anne Curry and Michael Hughes. This is quite a good book to read if you are interested in the Hundred Years War, which I am.

Anyway, at the start of the essay, Bennett tried to define what battle tactics are. He suggests that often the actual tactics get lost in issues of strategy and organisation, particularly among historians.

In pursuit of his argument, he defines seven levels of military activity. These are:
1. The level of diplomacy, political manoeuvring
2. The organisation, raising and financing of forces
3. Logistics; the movement and supply of the forces
4. Strategy, both overall and theatre specific
5. Operational or campaign strategy, involving chevauchee, sieges and battle seeking or avoiding courses of action
6. Tactics, close range manoeuvring of troops and weapons
7. Individual acts of bravery (the chronicler’s favourite).

So, at what level do we want our wargames to be at? Most wargames, are, I suppose, at level 6, tactical, close range manoeuvring and use of weapons. This is where army level, or battalion level or whatever we like to define them as, rules are usually found. Polemos fits into this area, self-consciously defining itself as a ‘big battle’ rule set.

Not all rules are at this level, of course. Skirmish and role playing games cluster around level 7. In my role playing game days Most of the fights the player character party got into were, essentially, scrums. The player character charged in, relying on decent weapons, high level skills and the player advantage to win.

I recall two honourable exceptions to the above. The first was Call of Cthulhu, where any sort of fighting was usually bad news for the players. The second was a Paranoia scenario where, after being badly beaten by cleaning robots in a dark corridor, the party actually sorted out some cross fire and mutual support tactics to at least get us to the objective. This we did, and the tactics (I suppose you could call them small unit tactics) worked. Of course, this being Paranoia, we got wiped out anyway, and the Game Master told us afterwards we were not really supposed to get that far. But it does show that there are relations between the different levels of military activity described above.

Now, what level do we want our wargames to be at?

Most people seem to wish for wargaming to be at levels 6 and 7, tactics and individual acts. I suppose this is because this is where the stories lie; the story of a unit in action, the story of an individual succeeding against the odds, or at least being a heroic failure.

Some wargames do rise above these levels. Some campaign games, for example, do consider operational strategy, at least. Some wargames, such as those described in ‘Setting Up a Wargames Campaign’ by tony Bath go even higher, with considerations of income, recruitment, logistics, diplomacy and all manner of issues. It has to be said, however, that this comes at a cost of massively increased complexity and these systems do tend to collapse under their own weight.

We run into a second problem at this point. Historians are not interested, in particular, in battles and tactics. This is despite the fact that most people (even non-wargamers) are, and that books about battles sell well.

I recently undertook a course in undergraduate history, by distance learning. At the start of the module on the English Civil war, we were directed to read an article by Austin Woolrych, an eminent historian of the period. In it he bemoaned the fact that, as he put it (I paraphrase), wars were won by battles, but few historians were interested in battles. He considered that few undergraduates who took a course on the English Civil War would be able to name more than two battles of the war.

As the module unfolded, it became clear that this was going to be the case. The only battle mentioned by name was Naseby (which was itself in a quote from Woolrych’s book). There was no discussion or description of how the war was fought. All we got was a balance sheet from a garrison, which showed how much cheese they ate in a week.

I don’t mean to single that course out in particular; I suspect that most history courses are like that. Historian prefer to analyse administrative records and the passage of laws, or, if they want to look ‘from below’ they start trying to find out about the lives of women, children, homosexuals and criminals. There is very little about armies, soldiers and tactics., unless, as is the case with the Roman army, the army is the only organisation in a society about which significant records remain.

Bennett suggests that military history, in particular the history of tactics, is largely ignored because of the above and also because it was for a long time the preserve of former military men. In particular, he has in mind Sir Charles Oman and A. H. Burne, both of whom wrote a lot about the battles of the Hundred Years War.

Both Oman and Burne are getting a little dated, now, but historians are only just beginning to question their accounts of tactics. This seems to be because historiography, after the second world war at least, has decided that wars are not good subjects for history, probably because they are too violent.

Even modern military history suffers from this. Modern history of wars and armies tends to be more interested in financing and the effects of the wars on the state, specifically state formation. In Bennett’s terms, this is the second level of military activity, and is not much use to us as wargamers.

So this is what I mean when I say that the academy is of little use to us, and the trickle down of information from it to the public domain is usually not very helpful. There are a few glimpse of light, but they are sparse and far between.

Are We Supposed to Enjoy This?

2011-09-17T02:00:00.000-07:00

On a shelf on my bookcase there is a book of Bloom County cartoons. Somewhere in this there is a cartoon where three characters are watching the television.

‘Is this a war movie?’ says one.

‘I think it is the news,’ says another. ‘Those guns look real’

‘I’m sure it’s a movie,’ the first responds, ‘Go on, Kerpow! Boom!’

The third character then speaks: ‘Could someone tell me if I’m supposed to be enjoying this?’

Here, I think, is, in some part, the dilemma posed by wargaming. If the programme the characters are watching is the news, then it cannot be termed ‘entertainment’ (even by some news channels, which do their best to show everything as entertainment). If, on the other hand it is a film, it is supposed to be entertainment, and the violence can be enjoyed.

Now, there is a very odd thing about enjoying violence. It is part of the human experience, and, I should think unusual among the animal kingdom. Most animals do not appear to enjoy violence. Even some of the more violent creatures, those who fight for domination such a lions or stags, do not go out of their way to watch it. But we do. And we enjoy it.

We also draw a distinction between real violence and representations of that violence. We can enjoy a war film, but not a report from some God-forsaken battlefront somewhere. We can read and enjoy military history, but might feel a little uncomfortable if it is too modern.

Similarly, we can enjoy a good wargame, but get uncomfortable if our brief is to kill civilians or engage in wanton destruction of agricultural products or urban environments. If these things happen as a part of the game, we can call that realism, but if that destruction is our aim we regard that with at least a little moral discomfort.

Strange, then, that many military expeditions set out with that idea of wanton destruction in mind. I’ve mentioned before the English raids across France during the Hundred Years wars. There are also the activities of the armies of both sides during the Peloponnesian wars, as chronicled by Thucydides. The examples multiply throughout history, I’m sure. But we do not game them, on the whole.

There are I imagine a variety of reasons for this. Firstly, burning stuff is a fairly boring activity, at least as a game or simulation. Battles are far more interesting and dramatic. The same argument applies, I think to sieges. While you do occasionally see siege wargames in progress at shows, and they can be spectacular, they also can make fairly boring wargames. Most sieges were determined, let us face it, by supplies and diseases, rather than decisive military action.

Secondly, we see on our TV screens too easily these days the effects of crop failures. It may well be that we shy away from reproducing that on the wargames table. We know that the consequences are dire for people, and we can see what that means on the screen with small children lying practically comatose in front of the camera. Wargaming by devastation links us, in some way, in our imagination to such scenes.

In history, this devastation tends to get tidied away. For example, the destruction of much of Germany during the Thirty years War gets limited to a few maps, and maybe a quotation or two from contemporary sources. The individual tragedy is hidden from us; we cannot imagine it. The brush with death of a child on TV news engages us with horror far more easily than the depopulation of Germany 350 years ago. Maybe we just cannot cope with the numbers.

Thirdly, I suspect that unless the scenario is specifically designed for it, resource destruction in a wargame is pointless. The only circumstances wereby it could be a useful use of the forces available is during a campaign game. In a normal, one off, wargame it is far better to concentrate those forces on the battle. Defeating the enemy is of far greater import than destroying their resources.

In real life, of course, this may not be quite the same. Battles were not as decisive as we may like to believe, although they were much more important than most historians seem to think. In the English Civil war, for example, there were lots of battles, but only (roughly speaking) three or four of them were truly decisive. The winners tended to dissipate their strength into new garrisons, while the losers recouped theirs from garrisons. The actual domination of the ground altered a bit, but the battle was certainly not a knock out blow.

Even some of the decisive battles were not that decisive. At Poitiers the English even managed to capture the French king, but endless wrangling ensued and the final outcome was not what someone regarding the political situation in 1357 would have expected. Similarly, after Agincourt, the English appeared to hold all the aces, but some aspects of French society simply refused to accept the results of battle and treaty and, eventually, won.

So where have we landed up. The relationship between table top battles and real life ones is, fortunately, rather tenuous. Thus we can regard wargames as entertainment, in much the same ways as war movies are. Perhaps the difficulties really occur during wargame campaigns where it is important to attack the enemy resources, not just their forces. But of course, we can abstract that away and supress the human suffering this would cause in real life because it is only a game.

Wargames and Symbolism

2011-09-10T02:00:00.000-07:00

What are we doing when we wargame? There are, I suppose, as many answers to that question as there are wargamers. But we can surely try to abstract some of the common threads and see what they might be.

Of course, common threads are there, and are not that obscure. I cannot think of a wargame that does not have a representation of a fighting unit. What the representation represents varies widely. It could be a space ship, a naval vessel, an army unit or an individual. The form of representation varies as well. The representation could be an individual model, a set of models, a cardboard or wood counter, or a bunch of pixels on a screen. Whichever way is chosen, the wargame piece is a representation of a ‘real agent’ on the battlefield.

A second common thread is randomisation. This is normally generated by dice. There are two reasons for including a random factor in wargames. Firstly, some things are random, or nearly so. “Every bullet has its billet” as the First World War slogan had it. Really, we can trace a causal relationship. If I move my head there, then a bullet fired just then, at that angle and direction, will hit me. This is not random, but it is unpredictable. And of course, we cannot trace the causal relationships on all our wargame interactions, so a random factor for this will have to do.

Secondly, there is another layer of unpredictability. Fallible human beings, in situations of great stress, make mistakes or fail to perform as expected. This is not actually random either, although I doubt if the state of psychology at present would enable modelling of it. Add in the complexities of humans acting in a crowd, and the dimension of discipline and its breakdown and you have a very hard to understand situation.

So as common threads we have randomisation representing the unpredictability of the battlefield, and we have representations of battlefield agents, at some level (individual, subunit, unit, and so on). Thirdly, of course, we have a set of rules that the players have agreed to use.

As I’ve said before, the rules mediate between the table top ‘action’ and the world of the players. In the player’s world, no battle takes place, just a (hopefully) enjoyable game or social interaction. On the table top a representation of a battle is taking place. The representative agents are moved and removed in accordance with the players wishes (and the random factor) as mediated through the rules. The outcomes are similarly transmitted though the random factors, the rules and the player choices.

Now, I like to argue that our ‘agent representations’, the toy soldiers, are, in fact, symbols. I do not think that this is a particularly large leap in logic; we are used to reading battlefield maps, or counters in boardgames. These have symbolic meanings which vary according to use. So too do model soldiers; they symbolise an agent with certain capabilities.

The thing about symbols is that they need interpreting. If you do not believe me, try taking your favourite wargame unit and showing it to a non-wargaming friend or colleague. Ask ‘What is this?’

The chances are that you will get an answer along the lines of ‘little men’, or ‘toy soldiers’, rather than “B Platoon, 21st Lancers, Sudan, 1898”, which is what you might have been expecting. But why could you have been expecting that?

Your interlocutor is, in many respects, as correct as you are. In a sense, in fact, they are more correct, as what you have shown them is not a unit of lancers, but a representation or symbol of a unit of lancers, no matter how accurate. And that symbol, as just demonstrated, needs interpreting or its meaning is lost.

To see what I mean, consider an ancient monument such as Stonehenge. At midsummer the sun shines in a certain way on the stones. We sense that this event, is, in some way, deeply symbolic; but what is it symbolic of?

Actually, what it meant to the designers of Stonehenge is lost in the mists of prehistory. While some people do go to Stonehenge on midsummer morning to do assorted ritual stuff, at the very best they give a modern interpretation of the stones. The symbol, the sun on the stones at midsummer, has lost connection with its meaning

The upshot of this is that a base of lancers of the late British Empire is a symbol (a representation of the real thing), but that symbol must be interpreted in order to keep connection with that real thing. In fact, I think there may be two levels of interpretation.

Firstly, I can interpret the base historically. I can look at the figures, their arms, uniforms, disposition on the base and so on, and compare that with other representations I have seen. Hopefully I will come to the same conclusion that the owner of the base has, that indeed this is a symbol of a unit of lancers from a given time and place.

The second interpretation of the base comes via the set of wargame rules. This interprets the base as a symbol of an agent. The base is treated as an agent in the rules with certain capabilities to move (be moved) and to fight (be made active). The rules, then, do not just interpret the table top, they give the symbols we manipulate a sort of make believe agency to act on that table top.

These two strands of interpretation do not have to hold together. I’ve always been a wargamer, not a military modeller; that is, I’ve focussed on the second interpretation, not the first. I’ve never really understood why people engage in military modelling, nor why there is such a divide between them and wargamers.

Maybe, now, I’ve found something of an answer.

Wargame Categories

2011-09-03T02:00:00.000-07:00

Man is a categorizing animal. It is what we do, how we understand and make sense of the world. This tabby creature before me is a cat. She will therefore respond in some ways to some stimuli, like a catnip toy mouse, and not to others, like a stick thrown in a game of fetch. My understanding of her behaviour is based on my understanding of the nature of the species ‘cat’. Of course, as this cat she may show some variation, but always within the broad parameters of the term cat.

Categorization is an ancient form of thinking. Aristotle, for example, categorized frantically in order to understand the world. He divided everything into a given genus and species. By everything, I mean everything; even emotions and thoughts were categorized. His legacy is with us still.

Now, clearly, as humanity is a very successful species, categorizing is a useful thing to do. I imagine that a hunter-gatherer finds it quite useful to decide if a new sort of animal falls into the ‘food’ or ‘flee from’ category, or this different sort of fruit is in the ‘poison’ or ‘eat’ category, and so on.

Categorisation has a close cousin called reductionism. Reductionism lies towards the heart of modern scientific method. If an aspect of the universe is too difficult and complex to understand as it is, we chop it up into smaller conceptual bits, until we are able to understand them. Then, we can try to put the bits back together and see how the whole thing works.

Quite a lot of technology works like this,. Computer software, for example, is (supposed to be) designed like this. Individual objects are created to do a given job, and then they are joined together with other bits to achieve an overall task, and so on up a hierarchy until you get, say, a word processor.

Similar things happen with hardware. Different boards in a personal computer do different things. If the PC fails, the board can be changed. Each does its thing, and they are not interchangeable, but one can be replaced by a board of the same type. The boundaries of the categories are not flexible in this case.

There are some things that are not reducible to individual components. Take a crowd, for example. Now, commentators may well say ‘the mood of the crowd is turning ugly’. What do they mean by this?

If you took each individual of that crowd, and asked them ‘are you angry?’ you would probably get a wide variety of answers. Some might say ‘yes’, some ‘maybe’, but many would probably say no. Yet the overall mood of the crowd was assessed as ‘ugly’ by the commentator. The individuals might not be angry per se, but the overall, collective effect is one of anger. The overall effect then is different from the sum of the parts. The total mood of the crowd is not the same as the sum of the mood of each individual in it.

So what has this got to do with wargaming?

I think there are two aspects of relevance to me in this. The first is to do with reductionism, and the second to do with irreducibility.

Firstly, then, reductionism. When we write wargame rules, we need to categorize things. We do this fairly naturally, at least initially, and describe things as ‘cavalry’, ‘foot’, artillery’ and so on. This is quite clear, straightforward, natural and uncontroversial. Then, within these categories, we subdivide. Foot becomes ‘archers’, ‘spearmen’ ‘dismounted knights’ ‘rabble’ and so forth. Again, this is fairly straightforward and uncontroversial.

At this point, though, we can hit a problem. We might have a species called, say, ‘spearmen’, but we find spearmen being used in different ways. Perhaps we find spearmen in Anglo-Saxon armies in defensive shield walls, while Swiss pike are attacking Burgundian knights.

Clearly, we can differentiate these folks, classing the Saxons as spearmen and the Swiss as pikemen and allowing the latter to attack, but they have no shields so cannot be spearmen. But what if we find Saxon spearmen charging, or Swiss pike with paviasses?

The danger is that we further sub-categorize and landing up with such wargame species as ‘light heavy medium spear’ facing ‘medium heavy light pike’. OK, I exaggerate, but only a bit.

The trick, therefore, as a rule writer, is to only go so far in reductionism, and there to stop. Or, as in my case, to reduce your historical focus to a point where you can stop worrying about comparisons across centuries and cultures, and call an Auxillia an Auxillia.

The second issue is the group dynamic one. Bodies of people behave differently than individuals. You cannot predicate group movement by seeing how far one person moves in a given length of time, and assuming that the other ninety-nine will do the same in a body. Life does not work like that.

I recall older sets of rules that based their movement on a given time period, and how far a person could walk or run in that time. This tends to be an awful lot further than the distances covered in battles, and this was usually glossed over by the rules. The better ones admitted the problem, but just changed the time scale to cope.

But what is happening here I think is an application of the irreducibility of crowd behaviour. I cannot move forward until the chap in front of me starts, and he can’t until the one in front of him does and so on. Getting a unit moving is harder than it looks. If you don’t believe me, next time you are in a traffic jam try moving forward before the vehicle in front does. I will not be responsible for any insurance claims arising from the experiment, though.

To summarise, categorisation is a good thing, but. And the buts are that too much reductionism lands up in an over complex (and possibly silly) place, and that some things simply cannot be broken down into component parts.

Sticks, Carrots, Method Acting and Wargames

2011-08-27T02:00:00.000-07:00

Some recent comments about how wargame rules should be written has sparked the rather unusual title, anyway. But the question lying behind it is germane: how do you write wargame rules which are, in some way, historical? What rules can force the players to use the forces at their disposal in a more or less historical way?

This is actually a difficult thing to achieve. To take the final method first, the idea behind ‘method acting’ is that the players have a deep understanding of the period and therefore act in character for a general of the time anyway. This is a very attractive idea, but it is rather difficult to see how it can be achieved in practice.

Firstly, most wargamers I know do not focus on one period. One week they could be a Roman general against the Germans, the next they could be commanding the Napoleonic British against the French. Furthermore, historical match ups are not necessarily the norm. How would an Aztec general have reacted if faced with a Thirty Years War Swedish army? I’ve no idea, and I’m fairly sure that no-one else will have either. So we cannot assume deep knowledge of the period for these reasons.

Secondly, as mentioned before, even if we do have a deep understanding of a historic period, we still bring our own eyes to bear on it. I’ve mentioned before the idea that we appropriate history to form our own narratives, and that is as true of a wargamer (or rule writer) that focuses on a narrow period of time as it is of anyone else.

So we cannot assume that a wargamer is going to arrive at the table ready to act in period.

The second method to consider is the ‘carrot’ method. This writes rules to make the player act in period. An example would be to make, in English Civil War rules, musketeers unsupported by pike vulnerable to being ridden down by cavalry. This can be done by, for example, giving musketeers fighting cavalry a bonus if they have a pike base on their flank.

The example just given was used in DBR, and, for such a simple rule, had a surprisingly nasty effect. Instead of forming units of [musket][pike][musket], players did odder things, such as units of [musket][pike] only, or alternating musket and pike bases down the line. Players did not method act as the rules were better for them if they didn’t. It may well be, of course, that the play testers did method act and so the weaknesses were not detected until release. But as a carrot, and given that musketeer bases are quite powerful in DBR, it was a bit of a failure. The carrot led to some odd results.

Another writer’s tactic is to simply abstract away this sort of difficulty. This is what we did in Polemos: ECW. Muskets and pikes are on the same base, just in different rations. This is more ‘stick’ like; it forces the players to conform to historical tactics by not giving any alternative. In my view this does work better, but complaints could be made that it is too constricting, and that it is not possible to split and merge pike and shot during the game.

How, then, can rules be constructed, rewarding historical tactics but without constricting the players too much? This is the most difficult balance to achieve, and I think no given set of rules will actually achieve it perfectly; the best that can be hoped for is a balance between stick and carrot, constraint and reward.

As an example, consider Romans and tribal forces facing each other. When I did this for the Polemos Romans rules I had to consider the fact that Romans fought in lines (OK, with reserves behind, but basically a series of lines) while tribal forces tended to fight in blocks. Evidence from other games suggests quite strongly that most wargamers like to fight in lines, and I’ve seen a number of ancients wargames where the tribal force looks more like Wellington’s army at Waterloo than an ancient force.

What then can be done? What I have done is to fix the movement rules to make it more expensive to move wider tribal forces than narrower, while the Romans can move any width of force at more or less the same cost. So far as I can see, this has worked in play testing. It does not force the tribal player to fight in deep formations; it just makes it much easier so to do.

So is this historical? The sources are not that good for this sort of fighting, but it does seem to be the case that tribal forces aimed to punch a hole in the Roman line, and that this was what the Roman commanders were concerned about. A massed charge across the entire field was doomed to failure (see Boudicca’s last battle for evidence), while a picked spot for assault (e.g. the Germans at Teutourg Wald) might succeed. In order to survive, the Romans have to have a second line to cover the break through spots. Nobody is forced into this, but the rules imply that this might work best and most cheaply.

So, do we go for carrot or stick? A combination seems to be best. If we can manage it, a mix of incentive and dis-incentive can work to balance the wargamer’s natural desire to play the game like the maps in history text books, with nice clean blocks of troops, and to use a-historical tactics to gain an advantage. The problem is, of course, that a-historical tactics, in history, sometimes worked, and were then termed a surprise. So that has to be covered too, because they are not a surprise for us who have all read the same history books.

Method acting would be the best, of course, but that really leads to role playing and re-enacting, both of which are different ball games, really.

Wargaming Beyond Morality

2011-08-20T02:00:00.000-07:00

Supposing that we came up with a theory that wargaming in particular, and leisure activities in general were in some sense beyond moral decisions. How would you feel about that?

Now, first of all, let me give a brief outline of the sort of argument which might lead to leisure activities being beyond morality. It goes something like this:

Moral judgements are made about the outcomes of activities.

Leisure activities have no outcome. This is because the point of a leisure activity is the process of the leisure activity, not the result of that activity. Thus, the point of wargaming is to have a wargame, not to have had one.

Therefore, as leisure activities have no outcome, there can be no moral judgement passed upon them.

Therefore, wargaming is an activity which is beyond, or at least outside the normal range of our moral activities.

Thus, wargaming is beyond morality.

Now, your response to this might vary. Some might say “wonderful! He can stop wittering and worrying about it now on his blog.” Fair comment, perhaps. Another response would be ‘of course it is, because it is something that I do with myself and a group of consenting adults. How can morality possibly come into play?’ Again, that is, as the argument above suggests, a defensible one.

However, I suspect that a number of us might not be too comfortable with the idea that wargaming, or any other activity for that matter is entirely beyond our moral range, so perhaps we need to look a little more closely at the above argument.

Firstly, it is interesting to note that some of the activities that we have worried about here, such as promoting neo-Nazi agendas, are ruled out. To promote a political agenda thought the leisure activity is to slip an outcome into it. The argument then is invalidated, and the outcome ruled out by normal morality being applied. Further than this, it might be that the argument also rules out bragging rights and being able to recall the game. This might be a little harsh, but I suppose it depends on what you regard as being within or outwith the leisure activity.

The second thing to note is that the argument is based on utilitarianism. There is an assumption in the initial statement that the thing of interest is the outcome. Now, utilitarianism argues that the morally correct decision is the one that brings the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It is consequential; the consequences are important. However, the argument above explicitly states that the activity has no consequences. It is the engagement in the activity which matters.

Now, utilitarianism is widespread in our public discourse. Most political decisions which are made are informed, or at least argued over, from utilitarian perspectives. I suppose that in a liberal democracy, this is fairly inevitable.

Utilitarianism does have its problems, however. The most obvious is the impossibility of calculating the ‘goods’ which a particular course of action might entail. For example, I might think it good that the country remains with a high debt to maintain a good public health service. You might well agree that a good public health service is important, but you might argue that if we maintain a huge debt to fund it, our children will not be able to have such a service for themselves. The argument then revolves around who the greatest good applies to: us or future generations?

I don’t want to get into the details of the arguments for and against utilitarianism. In our context, it rules out any application of morality to the game itself. I think the problem with this approach has already been indicated. No activity is actually an activity entirely without outcomes.

Some outcomes are good. For example, figure manufacturers, rule writers and terrain makers will all benefit from your activities, as may metal manufacturers, paint mixers, paintbrush makers and so on. These are all beneficiaries of your wargame, albeit indirectly, but they do make the point that no wargame can be isolated from the rest of the world. As hinted above, even the winning of bragging rights suggests an outcome beyond the activity, and then the argument does not apply.

Therefore, it would seem that while a utilitarian argument that wargaming is beyond morality can be constructed, when the details are examined, it might be that the circumstances under which it would apply are so restrictive that the argument cannot apply to a real world scenario. After all, it rather defeats the object of having a wargame if we cannot recall it pleasure, talk about it to our friends and so on.

The other thing which the utilitarian argument does not deal with is morality within the game. While the above argues that wargaming is not a moral argument per se, it does not tackle the issue of dealing morally within the game. I don’t mean, here, the morality of the game level, of what our symbols of real actors are doing, but at the player level. By this, morality means not cheating, not trying to obtain more than is your due under the rules and so on. Utilitarianism may have some bearing on this behaviour (in fact, I think it does) but it is not included in the above argument.

So where does this leave us?

I think that the utilitarian argument described is quite a useful one for thinking about the morality of wargaming as a leisure exercise. However, I think I have demonstrated that it does not actually get us very far. Perhaps the most useful thing it does is rule out definitively some of the more extreme behaviours which a minority might engage in, to make some sort of political point. But, as we have discussed before, that is a tiny minority of people associated with wargaming. The argument has helped a bit, but still leaves a wide open field for further pondering.

Revolutions in Military Affairs

2011-08-13T02:00:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but modern military theorists, occasional generals and historians are currently debating the revolution in military affairs which is supposed to be happening at the moment. Quite what this is, I’m not sure. I suppose that it is related to the demise of the Cold War, the reduction in the perceived threat of mutual nuclear annihilation and the emergence of the United States as the military superpower, at least in so far a global projection of force is concerned. A few other factors, such as the emergence of global terrorism, the deployment of pilotless aircraft and the huge asymmetry in firepower deployed probably also make an impact.

So why are historians interested and involved? I think it is because they have a role in identifying previous revolutions in military affairs and, thus, are firstly sensitized to them and, secondly, hope to find something useful that may illuminate our current tactical and strategic situation.

When you start to look at the historiography, though, military revolutions proliferate. Leaving aside (probably foolishly) the twentieth century, there are still a fair number. Napoleon, it is said sparked one. So did Frederick the Great, although that is arguable. Gustavus Adolfus of Sweden was the original military revolutionary, with Maurice of Nassau coming up hard behind. Edward III of England is described as another, and, much further in the past, Iphicrates is another.

With so many military revolutions, it is perhaps hardly suprising that some sceptics have emerged, as well. The first issue is to as ‘what makes a military revolution?’ A number of suggestions have been made, such as advances in technology, for example the use of muskets or longbows over what came before, and of tactics, such as charging cavalry rather than caracoling cuirassiers. I’ve tackled the caracole issue before, I think, so I won’t rehash it here.

The problem is that what looks like a revolution from one perspective doesn’t from another. Muskets, for example, had been of increasing use over a century before Gustav Adolf appeared on the scene. I’d guess the Swiss pikemen at Biocca (1522) and Pavia (1525) would probably have conceded that firearms were quite useful. The sudden appearance of successful Swedish armies in the 1630’s seems to be less due to a military revolution and more to do with a funded, disciplined force under a commander of talent appearing in something of a power vacuum.

Another claimant for the title of military revolutionary is Iphicrates. It is claimed that he invented a whole new style of warfare when his peltasts mauled a Spartan more near Corinth in 390 BC. Now, granted, Iphicrates won great fame for this exploit, and based a career as a major military and political figure on it, but it was hardly unprecedented. Peltasts had been around since at least Pylos, according to Thucydides, in 425 BC, where they had proved their worth against Spartan hoplites. Indeed, assorted lighter troops, some of which may well have been peltasts, are often hanging around of the edge of Thucydides’ forces, but he only names peltasts specifically at this point. Did Iphicrates cause a military revolution? It would seem not, on balance.

So, was there ever a military revolution?

I can’t really think of one, and the problem, of course, lies in the definition of the word ‘revolution’. From some perspectives, a decade or so can be revolutionary. But actually, as lived reality, a decade is quite a long time. Things seen from the perspective of a century can make a decade seem rapid, but not to those involved.

I suppose the most obvious candidates for military revolutions are the coming of gunpowder, and the tank. However, the first cannon were around from about the 14th century, but did not really become effective enough, in England at least, to displace the bow until the mid-sixteenth century. 250 years of evolution does not make a revolution.

The tank is perhaps more interesting. There is little doubt that the blitzkrieg tactics of 1939-40 caught everyone by surprise, including the Germans. As you probably know, however, they had been anticipated in military theory of the 1920s, and also tested in battle at Cambari (1917) and in the allied advance in late 1918. While the evolution of tank tactics was more rapid than that of gunpowder, 20 years or so is a fair time, so from the perspective of a single life, it was hardly a revolution.

In fact, the most likely cause of anyone crying ‘military revolution’ is ignorance of what passed before. Histoprians of the 17th century come over all vague when it comes to sixteenth century armies, while those of the sixteenth century are equally bemused by that fifteenth and so on. Therefore, the cry of revolution goes up whenever something that looks new appears on the battlefield. I have little doubt that the users of said technology or tactics would be bemused by the label.

So, as wargamers, where does this leave us? I’ve already grumbled extensively about excessive periodization and trying to pitch thousands of years into one rule set. The above may well sound like an argument to the contrary. I’m not sure it does, but we need not to look for revolutions, but to see how far evolution has gone. The British army in 1914, for example, was very different from that in 1916, and that was different from 1918. The royal army in 1642 was different from that in 1645. So we need to keep an eye on this, and not try to stretch our rule sets too far, while accepting that they can, and must be able to stretch a little as the armies of our period evolve.

Wargame Epistemology

2011-08-06T02:00:00.000-07:00

A few comments by Timeshares (for which thanks – if you don’t make comments I’ll run out of things to say) have reminded me of something I’ve thought about on and off over the years, and that is what is rather grandly called wargame epistemology here. What I mean by this is that a lot of things that happened in history do so because the decision makers have less than full understanding of their own position, or respond in unexpected ways to assorted stimuli.

Let’s take a case in point. In 1644 Prince Rupert brilliantly relieved the besieged Royalist city of York, and then horribly lost the battle of Marston Moor. How did this come about? Rupert, and others, have often been roundly criticised for the decision to fight the combined Parliamentary and Scottish armies at once, or even at all. But what did he know, and how did he decide?

The first piece of evidence we need to call is that of a letter from the King, Charles I to Rupert on June 14th 1644. The key passage reads:

“If York be lost I shall esteem my crown little less…But if York be relieved and you beat the rebels’ army of both Kingdoms which are before it then (but otherwise not) I may possibly make a shift (upon the defensive) to spin out time until you come to assist me.”

So, what is going on here and, more importantly, what did Rupert know? The Royal Oxford army was being harassed by Waller’s and Essex’s Parliamentary ones in the Midlands. The strategy was for the King to keep them occupied while Rupert dashed north, collected an army, restored the Royal cause in Lancashire and relieved York. The demoralised tone of the King’s letter would have indicated to Rupert that this was not working out well and he needed to hurry.

In actual fact, the King’s forces were not in that much trouble. Essex had, in fact, marched away to the West Country, while Waller’s forces were demoralised by the desertion of their comrades and the lengthy marching they had already done. The King got back to Oxford, reunited his cavalry with the foot and subsequently had the better of Waller at Cropredy Bridge on June 29th (one of the more confusing actions of the war). Waller’s army subsequently disintegrated while the King pursued Essex to the latter’s defeat at Lostwithiel in August.

Rupert, however, was not to know all that. So far as he knew he had to act, and act quickly. It seems to me that he had decided that he needed to beat the Parliamentary armies, at least, outside York, as that would presumably cause one of the Midland armies to move north to defend the Eastern Association counties and maintain communication with the Scots. Thus he arrived in York ready for battle (which the York garrison was not terribly happy about, but that is another story).

The Parliamentary generals, on the other hand, also decided to fight. They already knew what was going on further south and were concerned that Rupert was going to strike south while their forces in the Midlands were discomforted.

So, for different reasons, and lacking in the full knowledge of the facts, both sides decided to fight. Neither really knew what the concerns on the other side were, or what was going on a hundred miles or so further south, but, based on what they did know, they determined for battle. As we know, Rupert lost, the north was lost to the Royalist cause and the King’s letter to Rupert quoted above started to look prophetic, not panic stricken.

Now, how do we refight this as a wargame?

The classic way, of course, is to set up Marston Moor and let the rules and the two sides have at it. But everyone knows what the outcome should be. This is the other side of wargame epistemology, of course. We, the players, know far too much compared to those on the ground. Even if we wound the clock back a bit and had a campaign based on Rupert’s approach to York, the canny Parliamentarians, knowing in advance what happened historically, would almost certainly defend the crossing at Boroughbridge much more heavily that was the case.

How can we handle this? I’d wager a small amount of money that most historical wargamers, given a map of a historical campaign and a battlefield would know pretty well what happened. Even limiting the information available to that historically known would not be enough, I suspect.

The only way to go, really, is to heavily disguise the whole campaign. Suppose we start with something like this:

You are one of Alexander’s generals. The King is away east, fighting against the odds (as usual). However, his base at Sardis is under siege. The King commands that you march to the relief of Sardis, collecting forces as you go. Having relieved the city, you are to make all speed to reinforce him in the east.

Hopefully, while it should look familiar to readers of this post, it should be sufficiently different from Marston Moor not to raise any suspicions. The King’s letter can be re-written as from a nervous Alexander who needs reinforcements, and the map of the area around York doctored to make it look Persian.

Then, hopefully, the players will not be able to use their prior knowledge of real events to affect the outcome, and their knowledge of what is really going on should be limited, and they will be making decisions based on partial knowledge.

It is a wonderful thing to see how cautious many people become when they don’t really know what is going on. In fact, it makes Rupert’s march to York look much more remarkable, and his decision to fight much more inevitable than the bare campaign history might suggest.

World Views and Wargames

2011-07-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

No-one who has read some of my output to this blog can have missed the idea that is running behind it. That is, in order to write decent wargame rules, you have to have some idea of the world views of the participants. I suppose I had better offer some defence of why I think that to be the case.

Consider the formation of the New Model Army in 1644, during the English Civil War. Now, as a rule writer, I could simply rush off and start assigning values to certain variables, such as training, weaponry, morale and so on. And then that would be the rules and army lists written. Simple and straightforward.

The problem I have with that is that the writer who does that has little idea how such an army would in fact fight. Now obviously, a bunch of men with pointy sticks and bang-tubes can only fight in a certain number of ways, but we need to look to the next levels up, the unit and army commanders, to see what is really going on.

This is, of course, where the New Model stands out from other ECW forces. The generals wanted to win, to force a decisive combat and to be victorious in it. This might sound ridiculous to us as wargamers, as clearly we want to win every battle we fight, but as is so often in this case things are not that simple.

The reason underlying the formation of the New Model Army was that the Parliamentarian and Scots forces had got themselves into a winning position after Marston Moor, but seemed incapable of finishing the King’s armies off. Now, politically there was a lot going within Parliamentary ranks, with arguments over religious organisation also playing a part. However, after Second Newbury, when the army under Manchester and Waller had failed to capitalise on a winning situation, things came to something of a head.

It turned out that there were two sorts of generals. Those who reckoned that only by decisively defeating all of the King’s forces could he be brought to negotiate, and those who feared that if they did that, or if they lost just one battle themselves, then when the King had negotiated back to power, he would destroy them. This led some generals to hold back a bit, so that it wouldn’t be them who utterly defeated the King and opened themselves to charges of treason in the future.

As it happened, the decisive war party won, and the less enthusiastic generals were dismissed. Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton and Skippon were all committed to defeating the King first, and negotiating second. The action of the army in the 1645 campaign showed that the generals were, at least, trying to force a decisive battle, and eventually they got one at Naseby.

After Naseby, the generals showed a good deal of activity in defeating the last shreds of the Royalist cause in the West Country campaign, determined not to allow the King any space to rebuild. In battle, they proved themselves to be aggressive and fairly ruthless, and their troops proved to be capable and enthusiastic. The mind-set of the generals had proved to be the difference between some sort of slow, grinding war of attrition and a decisive and swift victory.

Now clearly, this attitude of the generals to get stuck in should be reflected in a set of wargame rules for the period. If we had not considered the world-view of the generals, we could have problems in determining why the New Model Army (an expression which only came later, incidentally) suddenly changed from being a war weary, semi-defeatist force not capable of decisive action to an army that practically won the war in a summer campaigning season. Without looking at the generals and their attitude, we would probably be left with the old solution: +1 if New Model Army.

What is becoming clear, I think, is that in order to understand what is going on, we have to consider the world view of the generals. This includes not just their ability as generals, but things like education and outlook.

To take another example, Roman generals were generally taught to respond to local incidents with whatever force was available. This could be embarrassing, as Gallus found when he responded to the Jewish revolt in 66 AD, and Legio IX during Boudicca’s revolt in Britannia. Nevertheless, it usually did succeed in putting down a rebellion with minimum inconvenience to everyone (except the rebels, of course). This was not a clearly held politico-military strategy, but a well-worn traditional response to defiance of the might of Rome. I suspect that Roman generals could not imagine not responding thus to a challenge.

Similarly, we encounter world-views with the Greeks. Several times we read something like ‘the omens were not good so the Spartan army did not cross the river’, or there was a delay until the omens were good. This is terribly difficult to reproduce in wargame rules. We want to get on with it, and the mind-set that produces such behaviour is entirely alien to us. Even to those who hold deep religious faith today, this is alien behaviour, and yet it happened.

The upshot of this is, I think, that we need to get an idea of what elite education and outlook was for the period we are trying to model, or we will never understand their decisions. And those decisions affect both strategy and tactics, and that is what we are, as wargamers, interested in, after all.

Appropriating History

2011-07-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

History, it seems, is never absolutely neutral. By this I mean that history itself, the historiography of the writing of history, is never neutral. Each historical event of note gets transformed by the recorders and writers of history to have a significance beyond itself.

What do I mean by this?

Consider Thucydides, considered by many as the true founder of history as a subject in its own right (Herodotus, they claim, mixed too much hearsay and myth into his work to be considered a ‘proper’ historian). Thucydides considered his aim as reporting the wars, yes, but also trying to explain them and, as it happens, show that behaviour got worse and worse as the Peloponnesian war progressed. This framework gives an overall viewpoint of his account of the war and other activities.

Reading Thucydides with a slightly sceptical eye has done nothing for my view of Greek warfare, I’m afraid. Most of the incidents Thucydides described could best be described as nasty little raids on the country, inflicting damage and suffering on the peasants but doing little to actually win the war. Most of the battle were of little note or consequence, except perhaps Delium and Mantinea, and even then the follow up to turn the combat into decisive victory was lacking.

What is interesting is the way that Thucydides has been appropriated for our present age. A quick search on Google Scholar suggests that his work is still alive in the business and international relationships field, with titles such as ‘Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present’, and ‘Thucydides and neorealism’ (and no, I’ve not read them, so I’ve no idea what neo-realism is. I’m almost sure that Thucydides wouldn’t have done either). The point is that Thucydides has been appropriated by scholars and politicians for their own ends, just as we wargamers do.

Now, the Peloponnesian war was quite a long time ago, and it is fairly unlikely that any particular reading of Thucydides either within the academy or outside is really going to upset anyone. Some arguments based on Thucydides may be more controversial than others but, overall, little harm could be considered to be done by them, unless they convince people to take a certain unethical stance or action now.

Things get a little trickier the nearer we get to our own time. The stories we tell of how our nation came to be are important to our sense of being, and can still be, mildly at least, controversial. For example, the Norman Conquest is usually portrayed, in popular history at least, as the victory of ‘us’ over ‘them’ where the ‘us’ are the Normans. More sophisticated readings of the history replace this with a defeat of the ‘us’ by the ‘them’ where the ‘us’ are the Saxons. This complexity in reading allows some elbow room for interpretation.

In the seventeenth century, for example, the ‘Norman yoke’ was a live political issue. The argument was that the Normans had come, disrupted the Saxon freeholding patterns, reduced the farmers to peasants and taken all the land. Small but extremist groups took this to the extremes and tried to reclaim the land. This was associated with a prelapsarian view of the equality of humanity: “When Adam hoed and Eve span, who was then the nobleman?” Naturally, the central government couldn’t and didn’t agree with this and the Diggers and Levellers were brutally put down.

Even then, it is interesting to note that the Leveller mutineers shot at Burford are commemorated in an annual act of remembrance by the English political left. Furthermore, it is the English political left elite who do so, and they are probably not people that the Diggers would have had much sympathy with.

The point is that history is appropriated by the political nation for its own means. We also do this as part of our own story. Thus, in England, we hear much about things like Trafalgar, Waterloo and the Battle of Britain. We don’t talk so much about, say Bannockburn, while this battle is quite a subject in Scotland.

On the other hand, Culloden is commemorated in Scotland (and has a good visitor centre to boot). Perhaps this is because of the national myth of being subjugated by the English. Further, it might not be being played out particularly loudly in Scottish politics at present because it is a lot more complex than that and a lot of the English troops were in fact Lowlanders. An ambivalent myth may be worse than no myth at all.

To swing this piece back towards wargaming, the upshot seems to be that we are often happy to wargame anything, as long as it does not particularly affect our happy national and personal understandings of history. An ACW wargame could probably be quite happily played in Surrey, whatever the outcome. In the Deep South of the USA, that may not be the case, perhaps even depending on who won.

As an aside, when I started as a child to play with toy soldiers, one of the conversations I had with my friends was always ‘who were the goodies?’ The ‘goodies’, of course, always won. Sometimes it was obvious who were the goodies – the British, for example. Sometimes it was not. I recall the confusion we had over the Airfix Romans and Ancient Britons. We knew that the Romans were goodies, but surely the Britons could not be the bad guys, could they?

So, perhaps, some of the ethical difficulties I’ve raised about wargaming boil down to the ability of a well-researched historical wargame to tread on the toes of some national or personal historical appropriation. In which case, of course, provided we have done our research work correctly, the ethical issue becomes one of honesty, integrity and, in some sense, truth.

Cyrus, Cylinders and Confusion.

2011-07-16T02:00:00.000-07:00

A while ago I mentioned that the Hebrew Bible was quite positive about the Persians, as opposed to Greek texts on the subject. Cyrus is seen as something of a liberator. For example, Isaiah 45:1 reads:

Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped,
To subdue the nations before him and ungird the loins of kings,
To open doors before him that gates may not be closed.

That is fairly unequivocally positive about him, particularly when you consider that he was not a Hebrew in any way, shape of form.

The next bit of positive (chronologically, anyway, the book is actually earlier in the Western Bible) is in Ezra 1:2-4:

Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel – he is the God who is in Jerusalem; and let each survivor, in whatever place he sojourns, be assisted by the men of his place with silver and gold, with goods and with beasts, beside freewill offerings for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.

This is more or less repeated in Ezra 6:2-5, under Darius, when the archives were searched and the decree of Cyrus re-discovered.

Now this is all well and good. The story we have is that the people of Judah were defeated by the Babylonians (II Kings 25) and taken off into exile beyond the Euphrates. The Babylonian empire then fell to Cyrus, who released the captives and sent them home to rebuild their temple. While there are arguments over the authenticity of these reports of the decree, nevertheless the overall impression created by the Biblical writers is positive. Cyrus is a good guy, the Lord anointed who let the people go free.

There is other evidence about Cyrus himself. Herodotus presents him as plucky, honourable and entirely lacking in the vicious traits which other rulers have. Furthermore, in 1879 a cylinder was found which referred to Cyrus (now in the British museum – its loan to Iran has been in the news recently). This cylinder refers, in Old Persian, to Cyrus restoring cults after his conquest of Babylon by the help of the god Marduk.

Now, given that it is known (sort of) that the Persian rulers practiced some sort of ethical monotheism (maybe), that Cyrus restored cults around Babylon after he took the city, and that Cyrus is favourably mentioned in the Bible, together with a decree ordering the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, it doesn’t take a genius to put all these things together and come up with a Cyrus who is an early proponent of human rights and freedom of religion.

There are other reasons for supposing that Cyrus was a great liberator. How else could an empire such as Persia hang together unless the people were inspired by the liberal and benevolent ruler? Communications were so poor, after all, that news of rebellion would take months to arrive at court, and then more months would elapse before anything could be done about it.

It also makes sense for Cyrus to pacify Judah, and restoring the cult at Jerusalem would be one method of doing this. Jerusalem, remember, is actually quite a difficult place to capture, being on a rocky outcrop, and it is in the lands between Mesopotamia and Egypt, much disputed in the ancient world until the Romans came along. If, as seems to be the case, there was an understanding that each people had their own god, then restoring the cult and house of the Lord at Jerusalem would be tantamount to strengthening the defences and currying favour with the local deity.

The fact is, actually, that Hebrew theology was moving beyond this at the time to claims that their God was more than just a local deity. He was, in fact, the high God, God of gods. Quite a lot of second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55) has to do with this. However, it is unlikely that Cyrus would be particularly interested or bothered by that.

So, here we have a nice, politically correct story which reflects well on the Persian Empire, and nicely on the accuracy of the Biblical text, it all makes sense and everything comes up roses, as it were.

Given all that, it is a shame I’ve just read something that puts something of a coach and horses through the whole lot. A paper by Amelie Kuhrt (JSOT 25 (1983) 83-97) observes that most of what is going on in the Cyrus cylinder is what good rulers do the garner favour whatever their flavour. Restoring cults, in other words, is what conquerors do. The Assyrians did it, the Babylonians did it and, by gosh, Cyrus was not going to be left out. The fact that, possibly, none of these people actually restored anything is neither here nor there. The closest stylistic parallel to the Cyrus cylinder is, in fact, texts of Assurbanipal relating to his rebuilding of Babylon and restoration of the cult of Marduk. Cyrus acknowledges Assurbanipal as a worthy and respected predecessor on the cylinder itself.

So, Cyrus, it would seem, despite appearances to the contrary, was merely carrying on Assyrian policy. Although both the cylinder and the Biblical texts present him as a saviour and model of benign tolerance, he had no compunction about destroying temples (Herodotus 6.20), nor, in fact did the Achaemenids quail from moving populations into exile, such as the Miletians (Herodotus 6.20 again).

So the assumption that the Persian yoke was better than the Babylonian seems to be based on the experience of the Hebrews in Jerusalem, as documents by Ezra, and a slightly dodgy interpretation of a text which was actually based on an Assyrian model.

Does this make the Persians a particularly evil empire? Not really; they were just doing what came naturally to empires at the time. But perhaps our need to be more even-handed in our view of Persia as filtered by the Greek writers does need to be tempered by the idea that no empire was ever really established by being nice to people across the board.

Technological Teleology

2011-07-09T02:00:00.000-07:00

Now, you have to admit that, whatever the content of the post, that is a fairly good title. It alliterates; it draws you in, it makes you wonder. But what does it mean?

What I’d like to ponder is, actually, a question that arose in the context of ‘military culture’. Some rule sets, it was observed, treat a man armed with a shield and a spear pretty much the same no matter which era he fought in. The bloke with the pointy stick and dustbin lid performed pretty much the same no matter if he were a Greek, a Pict or a Saxon.

Now, at a technological level, of course, we can see that this must be so. There are only certain things that a man can do with a pointy stick (no sniggering at the back there). Mostly, he can stand in a line with a lot of other men with pointy sticks and defy all comers. This might be called a phalanx, or a shield wall or whatever, but essentially the formation, its possibilities and results are defined by the weapons. The weapons define the ends to which they can be used. Technological teleology, you see.

The next move is, of course to question whether that is a correct picture of warfare across the ages. Could you swap a Saxon shield wall formation of a hoplite phalanx and expect to get the same results? Is a whole bunch of men with pointy sticks and dustbin lids at, say, Hastings the same as a whole bunch of men with dustbin lids and pointy sticks at Delium?

I cannot really see why we should assume that they would be the same. The societies from which they were raised were different, after all, so why should they behave in the same way?

Now here I have to confess that my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon society is sorely lacking, so I’ll have to change the example to something else. Now, some rule sets equate the Roman legionary to a dismounted medieval knight. This is perhaps, something of a more extreme example than the last one, but hopefully it will allow me to explore the issue.

The Roman legionary was a long service professional deployed to the frontiers of the empire to keep order, fight battles, do patrols, build roads and fortifications and so on. The French knight was a fairly professional solider from the upper classes whose main interest was honour and his estates, and who fought for the King when called out and made to.

Both of these troop types wore heavy armour for their day, both used swords, shields, possibly spears and other polearms. Technologically, they can be categorised as the same thing.

Can this be true, however? The differences are as spectacular as the similarities. The legionaries were trained and disciplines as units. The knights were not, however much individual training they had received. The legionaries obeyed orders on pain of pain. The knights did not, notoriously, obey commands and could (and did) argue back, or even change sides if they though that way lay their best interests.

In short, the societies from which these two types of warriors came from differed so much that it is really a bit rich to describe them in any way except technologically similar. The world views of these people were significantly different. People do not usually fight because they have a weapon to hand; they fight because of a complex of social, cultural and ideological factors.

Legionaries fought because that is what they trained to do as individuals and units, and not doing so would lead them to a sticky end. Medieval knights fought because that is what they trained to do at an individual level, and not to fight when required would land them up in a sticky mess, possibly with dishonourable charges laid against them.

The point is that these differing world views have consequences on the battle field, I think. A base of knights is not going to be as coherent as one of legionaries, if only because the latter had been together for a number of years. And that, surely, is going to have an impact on their battlefield behaviour.

Now, it could be argued that these differences can be accounted for under some sort of factor system. Legionaries would get extra for cohesion, for example, while knights might get extra for élan but lose it for inability to obey orders or the general dim-wittedness of the upper classes. In some rule sets that may well be the case, but when you start to look in any great detail at either army, the only conclusion you can honestly come to is that they were sufficiently different to warrant different rules.

So, what do we gain from these considerations. Firstly, most wargame rule writers being male and western, I suspect that we do rely quite heavily on technology to determine category. ‘All men with pointy sticks are the same’, we declare, and write our rules appropriately. Secondly, as humans, we like to categorize our lives and experiences, so putting as many historical types into one category is neat, tidy and makes us feel like we have some control over the knowledge. Unfortunately, as I hope the example makes clear, it is also wrong.

So, what can we do? As I’ve mentioned before, broad sweep rules tend to make these assumptions. I suspect that, as they tend to key in to our own ideas and categories, many of us go along with them. But actually, it is in fact probably better to zoom in on smaller eras and try to model what was actually there on the ground, not to fit what we see to a bunch of pre-designated categories.

Disrespectful Wargaming

2011-07-02T02:00:00.000-07:00

The intermittent discussion here on wargaming ethics has moved on a chunk or two with some of the more recent comments (thanks, JWH, in particular). The question we are now faced with is ‘are wargames in some sense disrespectful to those who fought and died?’

I think the first thing to note about this question is that it is different from some of the others we have tried to engage with. Previous questions have been based around wargaming as encouraging violence and similar areas. My own view of these at the moment is that the three level model of a wargame and the concept of speech acts at these different levels have more or less answered those concerns.

The first thing we need to establish with the question of wargaming being disrespectful is to whom could wargaming be disrespectful? There are some obvious actors to whom wargaming cannot be disrespectful – the players, rule writers and so on in the present. Therefore those to whom it may express disrespect are those who were actors in the original battles.

Now, the original actors will be the soldiers, generals and civilians caught up in the original battle, campaign, war, or whatever. Thus, the potential for disrespect to these people is in belittling their experiences of war – the horror, carnage, death and so on which is associated with every battle from the earliest times to today.

What form can the disrespect take? Here, I suspect that we are embarking on more difficult areas. For example, many nations refuse to countenance ‘disrespect’ of their flags – things like burning it or trampling it underfoot are held to be disrespectful to the nation, as symbolised in the flag. Other symbols of national pride and identity can be similarly upheld. For example, in the UK a few people have been in court over climbing on or otherwise misusing war memorials. This sort of activity is held to be disrespectful to the memory of those who died and are commemorated on these items.

So can wargaming be held to be disrespectful to the memory of those who died in war? I suppose in some sense it could be. For example, if we have a unit on the table that was known to be courageous in real life, but in the historical refight runs away at the first shot, that could, possibly be described as disrespectful. History being what it is, however, it is unlikely that anyone would land up in court over this. The contingencies of history are recognised widely, and I guess that an incident like that is unlikely to be regarded as disrespectful except in some totalitarian state where the activity of that unit is important to the self-image of the regime or nation.

I suspect that it is in this area that the disrespectful rubber hits the road. Suppose you were playing a wargame based on the Battle of Britain, as the British, and lost. Is that disrespectful to the RAF pilots who fought in the battle, and, perhaps more particularly, those who died? Or does it fall within the contingency of history, or that the rules are, in some way, flawed? Perhaps the onus is then one the rule writer to get things right, in order to respect the historical outcomes.

I think, however, that the overall issue is a broader one than respecting national self-image or historical outcome. The underlying issue seems to be the whole idea of turning a battle into a game, a war into an entertaining pastime. Is a wargame set on the Eastern Front in World War Two in any way disrespectful to the millions who died in the Great Patriotic War?

I suppose that on the positive side, the wargamer can argue that, by playing the game, he is keeping the memory of those awful events alive. It is all too easy to forget, even in a few decades, the disasters that can happen when a total war is declared. This may well, of course be true, but the objector could respond that while they are happy to see the memory of those events recalled, the wargamer would not be recalling them unless the activity was enjoyable in some sense. Thus, the wargamer is enjoying the suffering of others, and that is disrespectful to those who suffered.

This seems to me to be a bit tricky to answer, but my first line of defence would be to argue that the events represented happened anyway as a matter of historical fact. Yes, they were horrible, not to be repeated and caused terribly suffering, but the existence of a wargame about them does not mean that the suffering of the participants is in any way increased. Nor does it mean that the fact of their suffering is diminished. By recalling the events of the suffering and what caused it, the wargamer might cause more compassion in themselves and in others and a greater determination to avoid war so far as is possible.

This defence is, therefore, one which falls into the area of virtue ethics. What is important is the motivation and intentions of the individual. I do not set out to play a game based around the awful suffering that war can inflict. I do set out to play a game which is in some senses enjoyable, and which in some senses is historically accurate, but I do not set out to either ignore or emphasise the suffering which is caused. An accurate wargame can invoke feelings of pity and compassion for those who found themselves confronted by the evils of war, and can provide insight into why things happened as they did.

I think we would all recoil from someone who was gleeful over, say, the number of Russian ‘dead’ at the end of an Eastern Front game, rather than agreeing that the outcome was in some sense accurate. The former seems to be somewhat close to the SS re-enactors discussed earlier. They are somewhere outside our limits of the acceptable. Wargames, played in the spirit described above, do not have to be disrespectful, I think.

One Way of Doing A Campaign: Fuzigore

2011-06-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

The Backstory:

The old empire had fallen, but it had not fallen far. In corners of its old domain the factions held out. In Rasaec and in Yepmop the claimants to the throne of Emor eked out an existence of sorts. The old territories had broken away however, and the tribal lands had slumped back into their usual anarchy. Sutnop had returned to its old mix of civilization and despotism, while the unconquered might of Aihtrap maintained its military and cultural threat to the southlands. In the far north, Ainattirb, mist covered and mysterious continued without the firm stamp of Emor sandal with whatever awful rites were performed there.

In the centre, Emor itself and the Old Lands were reinvigorating. The imperial overstretch which had precipitated the civil wars and collapse of empire was a thing of the past, and an enthusiastic senate and reformed military, with the new young ruler, were starting to seek the reconquest of the rebel lands.

In his study in the Imperial Palace at Emor, the new emperor, Sutsugua, pondered. His grandfather’s will had read, in full: ‘Dear Son, there are no soldiers, there is no money. Best of luck.’ By dint of abandoning the outlands his father’s concentration on survival had paid off. He had built a bit of industry in Emor so the city could keep itself in carts and weapons. The political and military structures had been renewed. At his death, Emor had been ready to strike to reclaim the lands that were rightfully hers, who had been revelling in their freedom for two generations. Now, there was an army. Now there was money. The question was how to use them?

To the south, the Kingdom of Sutnop had reconstituted itself. As the old saying went ‘Sutnop always rises again.’ Further south still, Old Emor, in the shape of Yepmop, a pretender to the imperial throne held sway, influencing the lands of Gracia still further south. Striking south was an attractive option, but Sutnop had a large and effective army and, if backed by Yepmop, could be a very testing target.

Northwards, the tribal lands of Cillag were an easier target. Divided into three tribal areas, it might just be that each could be over-run in turn. The possibilities would then be either to turn on Ynareg, or to settle with the Rasaec break-aways. Sutsugua shifted in his seat. “Divide and conquer” his father had told him. He must find out how tightly the Cillag tribes bonded together.

*

Now, I’ve not gone completely mad (or at least, no madder than last time) but I thought I should put my money where my mouth is and describe a campaign. The above is the opening backstory of the said campaign, which is set in an imagined continent. So far, all I’ve got is a blob map of the countries and their relationship to each other, and the writing above. All the tools so far have been a pen, a piece of paper, a list of the Roman era armies I have, and a bit of imagination.

It was noted on one of the other solo-wargaming blogs recently, that it is all very well trying to set up a campaign like Tony Bath’s Hyporia, but actually it is an awful lot of work and you’ve forgotten why you did it when you’ve finished. I agree, and I’d go a little further, too, arguing that this is not, in fact, how Hyboria started. After all, the write ups in Battle and Military Modelling were under the title ‘The Campaign That Grew’. The most complex bits came along later.

Some sort of narrative campaigning is actually much easier. Of course, you can include or not whatever you like in terms of detail, and you can use whatever system you like to create incidents. In the above, so far, we are now at the point where I introduced a random element to determine the relations between the Cillag tribes. To do this I stole, I think, an idea on national diplomacy from an article in an old Lone Warrior, and I’ve got a table of the tribes. A D6 was then rolled and it turned out that two of the tribes were at war: T-sae and Ht-ous.

‘Bother,’ I thought. 'I’m going to have to paint some more Gauls.’

However, the narrative can continue:

“There is war, sire.”

“Between?”

“T-sae and Ht-ous, sire.”

“This may give us an opportunity. Who is winning?”

“There are threats and raids, sire. Not much else is happening. Maybe after planting they will fight.”

“We need to find their intentions. See to it.”

*

Firstly, a note on names. I am not good at names, plus I do need to keep track of the real world prototypes of the Fuzigore nations. In the above, the names are, more or less, the real world ones spelt backwards (as if you’ve not already worked that out). Stuart Asquith once wrote that it was really no good, for example, running a War of Spanish Succession campaign with a fortified city called Lille, because everyone would imagine that they had to besiege it. Changing the names, or making them less obviously historical can tackle this problem.

So, where now?

The next move is actually to focus in on one individual and his adventures in spying from Erom on Cillag. I’d always envisaged the campaign working on multiple levels. The accuracy of the information that Sutsugua will have depends on how well my hero, a junior wine merchant called Ocram, succeeds in his mission. But perhaps more of that some other time.

Postmodern wargaming?

2011-06-18T02:00:00.000-07:00

Having waffled on a bit about the Greeks defining themselves as Greek via the Persian wars, and how that presents us with a problem because the Greek writers are the only major narrative source for the wars, I suppose it is time to get all postmodern. By this I mean: how can we actually know anything about ancient history?

Actually, the answer is not quite as bad as it could be. We do have a certain amount of information which does not derive from the Greeks, such as archaeology and other artefacts. So we are not wholly reliant on Greek sources for the Persians. To some extent, the documents and monuments of the Persians can counteract some of the inherent bias of the sources.

But can it really? I am whom I am, too, born and brought up in a certain culture, with a certain world view (which includes wargaming as a hobby) and an Anglo-American analytic educational and philosophical outlook. If you think that doesn’t matter, go and talk to a philosopher of education. Not only that, but I belong to a minority hobby which is also based in those traditions and, worse, requires some specific and concrete answers to certain unanswerable questions to function. These are questions which most classical historians and archaeologists would simply shrug off as impossible to respond to.

Another problem, I’m finding (as I’ve grumbled about before) is that wargamers are a fairly conservative lot. Much of our understanding of our periods of interest come from some fairly old and, it has to be said, dubious stock. Now, I’m not really out to do a disservice to the dead white male amateur historian, but why is it that wargamers rely so heavily on, say, Sir Charles Oman for medieval and early modern wargames. It isn’t that Oman is wrong, strictly speaking, but that his world view, understandings and interpretations were framed by his time, and probably would not survive in a modern academic forum.

Yet still Oman is relied upon. Why? My best guess is that there is not much else out there which actually fits the wargamer’s bill. We like the nice Victorian maps with the clear blocks of troops and the battle narratives, quoting original sources. But most modern, professional historians, even those who are military historians, do not write that sort of book. In fact, that sort of book, starting I suppose with ‘Decisive battles of the world’ and finishing somewhere about Hodge and Oman, simply don’t seem to be written any more. The major synthesis seems to be a thing of the past.

So, the upshot of this so far is that as a hobby, we rely on 100 year old interpretations of battles by retired military men, which we like because they tell us, clearly enough, what we want to know so we can get on with a game.

You might argue that rules writers are different. They, at least, surely must go back and try to work things out from first principles. I’d like to agree, but can’t find it in myself to do so. The other day I was flicking idly through my collection of army lists for ancient wargaming, and happened upon the Persian lists. Having now read Herodotus, I noted a pattern, with a sinking feeling. The list of troops was the same as that given by Herodotus for Xerxes’ expedition.

‘Great’, you might say, ‘original source!’

Yes. But. An original source which probably has little to do with the army, yet, because it is there, we take it a make it into a list which is then handed on down from one generation of rule writers to another. Unfortunately, the early authors were not textual critics and, like all of us, the later writers can be a bit lazy rely on what has gone before.

And, of course, this is where our post-modern trap bites. We cannot dismiss the source, because it is all we have. Nor can we accept it, because some of what Herodotus says is clearly bonkers. Furthermore, we have a conception of the Persian Empire which is formed by our culture and education, which likes to portray the other, the eastern as decadent, wealthy, tyrannous and generally not like us. So of course we want to accept the picture Herodotus paints. He, Herodotus, was a founder of our historiographical methods.

It goes beyond the Greeks, of course. Have you ever wondered, for example, why the Romans are always the good guys? Consider the Rosemary Sutcliffe novels, particularly Eagle of the Ninth (if you’ve not read it, do so now, then come back and finish the post). Who are the good guys? Of course, the picture is nuanced, but noble savages are also a good stock fiction character. Has anyone ever read a novel or seen a film where the (say) Celtic British are the heros, before King Arthur? I’m not sure I have. It is always the Romans point of view that wins, because they did the building and writing.

So, in terms of postmodern wargaming, are we really stuffed? Nearly, but not quite, I think. Once we recognise our ingrained prejudices we can work to overcome them. The Celtic British were not unthinking woad-covered thugs who provided a target for legionary pilum-practice, nor were the Persians as autocratic, rich and bad at fighting as we’d like to think. But we do have to dig a bit deeper to find out what really went on.

Books about Greeks

2011-06-11T02:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading a number of fairly interesting books recently, about the Persian Wars.

The first, ‘The Greek Wars: Why Persia Lost’ is by George Caukwell, and argues at academic length that the Persians lost the Greek wars because of their own mistakes. Although the author regards Herodotus as being mostly unreliable, he actually relies on him a fair bit. I think I’ve observed before that we don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to the Greek Wars.

About half way through, however, Caukwell comments on the end and aftermath of the Peloponnesian wars, and observes that in essence, Persia had won at that point. The Ionian Greek cities on the edge of Asia Minor were under her control, the Athenians and Spartans did pretty well what they were told and if they got uppity, a switch in funding would bring them down, as the Thebans proved to the Spartans.

However, the Persians are still regarded as losers, largely because of the innumerable satrapal rebellions there were in the empire which points, so the argument goes, to political instability. Here, I somewhat disagree. So far as I recall, no ancient empire lasted any length of time without revolts in the provinces. The Romans didn’t manage it, the Greeks certainly didn’t. I don’t know much about China, but I’d guess there were the occasional rebellions, and, to choose a different example, the Aztec empire spent a lot of its time swatting rebels.

So, I would argue that provincial revolts were not necessarily signs of weakness in the empire in which they occurred, but more to do with the necessarily decentralised nature of the polity. It is quite a long way from Susa to Sardis, and it is fairly likely that ambitious satraps reckoned that they had a chance, particularly if the King of King’s attention were elsewhere.

It seems to me that the empire was more an Aztec style tribute and acknowledgement of power state than one of secure political domination. The point is that the organisation of the Persian Empire was much looser than modern empires. Rebellion, even losing control of Egypt for 60 years, is not a sign of decline or inherent weakness, but of the natural state of affairs for most empires in the ancient world, most of the time.

I’ve also just finished ‘Attrition: Aspects of Command in the Peloponnesian Wars’ by Godfrey Hutchinson. This I got cheap at a show, and I’m slightly relieved by that. As a book is it reasonably good, but, overall, I’d say that it is largely a re-hash of Thucydides. It is none the less interesting, but the author is obviously restricted by what is written by the Greek historian, and so does not really expand much beyond retelling the stories. In other words, I found that it failed to penetrate much below the surface of the historical narrative and actually explain how command worked in the Greek armies of the war. That said, it is a light and fairly easy read and as an introduction to what Thucydides was about is a good sort of start.

The last book I’m going to wax lyrical about is ‘The Persian empire – A History’ by Lindsay Allen. This is a book to accompany the British Museum exhibition of a few years ago. It isn’t the catalogue, but an attempt to contextualise the Persian Empire in its own terms.

Now I have to say that this is a very good book. It is what I call ‘mid-range scholarly’ by which I mean that it isn’t a full blown scholarly work, but it is written for the general public (such as would go to exhibitions in the BM, of course) but has copious end-notes relating to where in the scholarly literature the basic reports and arguments can be found. The interested reader can follow up the references and delve into the literature.

I’ve not finished this one, but it has provided a much needed balance to the normal pictures given of Persian decadence, opulence and the vast resources supposed to be at the King of King’s command. I suppose that the overall view given of the Persian Empire is one of an empire which had got, fairly well, as big as it could have done. The King of Kings could not, for example, spend a large amount of time concentrating on one end of the empire, such as Greece. He had plenty of other things to do, like administrating the rest of territory. While the court was moveable, and indeed did move between four capitals, the key figure needed to be somewhere fairly central as accessible. This, it seems to me, was not Attica, so Xerxes fairly brief sojourn there should not be explained as cowardice of hubris, but as administrative necessity.

The other interesting thing to arise from these works is that the idea of ‘Greek’ came about from the experience of the Persian wars. As I’ve said before, I’m sure, the Greek cities scattered around the Mediterranean coasts were linguistically linked, and some were colonies, but before, say 500 BC there was not particular Greekness associated. This came about after the Persian wars, as Herodotus and others were writing the histories. The ability to divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, became the difference between ‘east’ and ‘west’, Greek and barbarian, which was then taken over into the Roman empire and, through the writings rediscovered or recirculated during the European renaissance, became our view of the world. Very interesting, and slightly alarming when you come to think of it…

Clashing Cultures

2011-06-04T02:00:00.000-07:00

A while ago it was mentioned that warfare is about clashing cultures – Greek against Persian; Roman against Celt; Revolutionary France against everyone else, and so on. I suppose the question to ask now is ‘is this true?’

In certain, obvious respects, it is true. For example, the Greeks and Persians did not have much in common. The Greeks were civilised, freedom loving, democratic sea farers, the Persians were decadent, power mad, tyrannous and land based with huge territories built on fear and massive armies of untrained levies sent out to die for the King of Kings.

I imagine that those of you who have read this blog for a while will not be surprised when I say I don’t believe a word of the last paragraph. Indeed, one or two people have complained to me that the effect of reading this blog has been to make them doubt all the things that they thought they knew about ancient war and wargames. Well, so be it. Rome wasn’t burnt in a day, although it might account for the paucity of comment recently. Either that or I’m boring you, repeating myself or am so obviously right that the posts need no comment.

So, are wars about clashing cultures? Well, maybe some are. You could, for example, look at the American Civil War and argue that it was. The slave owning south fought against the equal north. The industrial north was against the agricultural south. And so on. Indeed, there is some truth in these pictures. But a closer look nuances the concept. The south was in fact richer than the north, and was rapidly industrialising. In the north, plenty of people were being impoverished by industry, a point which southern plantation owners were not slow to argue. Indeed, a case can be made that slaves in the south were in a better state than many free workers in the north, and the slaves’ situation was rapidly improving because of the need for more labour. As the slave trade had been banned, the only way to increase the bonded workforce was to improve the conditions and enable them to reproduce (the slave trade before 1800 or so had been mainly to replace slaves who had died because of overwork and poor treatment; the slaves in the Caribbean did not start to replace their own population until after emancipation).

So was the ACW about a culture clash? You tell me, but I’d be willing to suggest that at least some of the cause of the war can be found in the US Constitution and the muddle that the legislature created over the boundary between Federal and State law. That makes the war over something which was distinctly about the United States as an entity; that is, that war was within a culture, not between cultures.

Looking further back, perhaps we can see some clearer cut cultural clashes. The Greeks and the Persians is a good candidate. The Persians, after all, only emerged into the Mediterranean world after Darius conquered Lydia, and Persia thus gained access to the coastline of Asia Minor. This was in the late sixth century, and was followed by expeditions across the Bosporus aimed at conquering Thrace, Macedonia and ultimately, Greece. This much seems to be the case. Even if we don’t believe much of Herodotus, we can agree that this does seem to be the Persian strategy.

But the question arises whether the wars were about different cultures and, further, were they in fact won by the culturally more muscular side? The Greek historians certainly thought so. The Persians, they argued, lost because of hubris, because they thought they couldn’t lose, and because of their own mistakes. But more than that, they lost because the Greeks were fighting for freedom and the Persians were not. The test on the battlefield was passed and failed over the idea and meaning of freedom.

I’ve suggested before that the battles were not so one sided as the numbers recorded by Herodotus suggest. This does have implications for the ‘meaning’ of the wars and their victors and losers. Perhaps the Greeks won not because they had a better culture and ideology, but because the hoplite was better adjusted to the battlefield conditions than the Persian heavy infantry bowman. The Greeks may have agreed to fight to protect their way of life, their hearths and homes, but they won because they had a technological edge. Does this make the wars a test of culture or of equipment?

Now, I suspect that I’m starting to jump up and down on thin ice. There were cultural differences between the Greek cities that fought (and many of them preferred the medeize) and the Persians, and it was the Persians who invaded. But the cultural differences were not so great that, for example, the Persians decided to wipe the Greeks out totally. The atrocities which did eventually come were as a result of the wars, not part of the initial strategy. Conquest and overlordship were at stake, not the survival of Greece per se.

So, are wars bound up with cultural clashes? Some may well be. Ideological differences do influence decisions, and are part and parcel of how conflict arises. But cultures can and do mix. The Persian empire, after all, was heterogeneous and, if the Greeks had submitted they would have become another group within the empire, like the Lydians, Ionian Greeks, Medes, Assyrians and so on. And the Persians only had to be a bit lucky to win. The Greeks had to get lucky every time and, just they did. After all, before Plataea, the Greek alliance almost collapsed, several times. A bit more patience and a refusal to attack the Greek army would have put Mardonius in charge, in all probability.

Wargame Mythology

2011-05-28T02:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I’ve learnt over the last few years of attempting to write rules is how hard it is to shift some wargamer’s myths. Some ideas and concepts are so deeply ingrained in wargamers’ minds and hearts that they appear almost impossible to shift.

For example, I was looking at some pictures of 30 Years War and ECW figures. I don’t recall which manufacturer they were from, except they were recent releases and they were 15mm and pleasant enough figures, so far as I could tell. The problem with them that I have is that the musketeers had rests. By the time that the bulk of the conflicts in question were fought, rests had gone. Indeed, there is an open question as to whether rests were ever used, at least outside the minds of drill authors and in sieges. I suppose that at least I should be grateful that the musketeers were not wearing helmets.

This sort of thing is pernicious and very difficult to shift. Of course, if you have a lovingly constructed and painted ECW army, you don’t really want to hear that it is wrong. The problem is that the myths persist in this way. Many ECW gamers will have been bought up on George Gush’s Renaissance Rules, where firelocks are downgraded at long range because they don’t have rests. Maybe I’m a simpleton, but if a firearm is light enough to hold without needing a rest, its performance at range is not going to downgrade as a result of that fact. I’m not trying to rubbish the rules – I used them for many years – but this sort of thing does perpetuate the myth.

Another source of irritation in “Renaissance” gaming (aside from the name) is the caracole. This is one of those vanishing past type myths. Rupert’s cavalry in the ECW charged with the sword, as opposed to the earlier caracole. Pappenheim’s cuirassiers in the TYW look like earlier caracolers, but actually charged with sword and pistol. They learnt it from Gustavus’ troopers, who charged with the sword. This was a change from the Dutch cavalry, who charged with the sword, having learnt to from the Huguenot Millers, who wore corselets but had learnt to charge and not use firepower. They learnt to do this from their Catholic league opponents, who were the remnants of the French ordonnance lancers, who therefore charged. Given that the ordonnance lancers were constituted before the widespread use of the pistol, at least they cannot have changed tactics from firepower to shock. But the question arises: who actually did ever use caracole tactics? The answer seems to be ‘no-one, in open battle’.

The history of the grenade is another such item. Eighteenth century grenadiers are said not to use the device because its field use had died out and it was only occasionally useful in sieges. Late seventeenth century rules say basically the same thing. So do ECW rules. These highly dangerous looking cartoon bombs are only for sieges, but they used to be used in the field. When? I’ve never seen a shred of evidence that they were ever used in the field. I have a distinct impression that they never were. The myth of the field use of grenades vanishes into history, never to find any evidence.

‘Are you not supposed to be talking about Greeks?’ I hear you cry.

Well, yes. In the past I’ve noted that some things in ancient rules are distinctly dubious – the issue about Sarmatian and Parthian bows being a case in point. The further back in time you go, the more potent and dangerous the myths become to any attempt at ‘reality’ in rules.

Take an example that I’ve mentioned before. The Persians, according to the Greek historians, were vast hordes of reluctant levies, driven to attack the freedom loving Greeks and reduce them to subjugation. Herodotus records 1.7 million fighting men crossing the Bosporus under the eye of King Xerxes, while the Greek forces at Plataea are more modestly and carefully counted. Many people have accepted this number, despite the fact that such a vast horde would have simply starved to death on the road, let alone found sufficient water to drink. But the myth of Persian subject levies and their huge numbers lives on, perpetrated by popular histories, wargame rules and our own prejudices.

More realistically, it is unlikely that the Greeks were heavily outnumbered. If you look at the numbers in armies all the way to the end of the seventeenth century, it is highly unusual to find more than say, 70,000. The logistical difficulties in any more were simply too great. Most armies were much smaller, 20,000 or less. These sorts of sizes solved many of the logistical and command difficulties, and so make perfect sense. Our ancestors may not have had our technology, but they were not stupid. More than one general discovered that large armies starved.

The Greeks, therefore, won the battles of the Persian wars because the hoplite was better at the sort of battle that happened than the Persian foot. Indeed, after 450 BC or so, the Persians recruited numbers of Greek mercenaries and also tried to develop their own heavy foot. But there is a limit to the Greek dominance. If they were so much better, we would expect Greek armies to dominate in Asia Minor, and they didn’t. While Athens ‘freed’ the Ionian cities after Plataea, the Greeks did not penetrate inland.

Why not? Well, given the dominance on the battlefield, you might expect that they did. But in reality, logistics and the fact that the real Greek dominance was on sea after Salamis means that only the coastal cities of Ionia could be ‘freed’. The Persian Empire still had control of its heartlands, at least until Alexander came along. But that was an entirely different style of warfare.

Simple Campaign Games

2011-05-21T02:00:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of being a solo wargamer, aside from the lack of arguments, is the ability to fight out campaign games. Campaigns vary is scale and ambition, as do ordinary tabletop battles, but there is a degree of satisfaction in having a series of linked battles coming to some overall conclusion.

Over the years I’ve had a number of good campaign games which I can now look back on with a nostalgic glow, and I’ll comment on a few here.

First, and most ambitiously, I ran an internet based campaign called 1618-Something. I don’t think the site exists any more (I can’t find it anyway) but it was based on the board game Machiavelli. If you’ve not played Machiavelli you have missed out, but I translated the basic idea to a map of Europe at the beginning of the 30 Years War and recruited players from across the world to run the countries. The battles were fought out by the players themselves, or by me as umpire.

The results were wildly unpredictable and occasionally hilarious. Sweden got knocked out by Russia. A French fleet landed up in the Baltic. An alliance of Steppe Peoples lost to the advancing Russians. In India (yes, my megalomania ran that far) various invasions and battles took place. My favourite one was one I fought where the highly unpredictable rockets took out one general. Just before his army collapsed, rocket fire was returned at the opposing general, who was also removed. The result was the collapse of both armies, and me spending the rest of the weekend chuckling over the player’s reactions.
Another aspect of the game was the newspaper, the ‘Ankara Advertiser’ which existed to provide a platform for me to provoke and make fun of the players. A suprising number of submissions and battle reports were sent in, showing that a lot of the players wanted to get their stories out there too.

After about 2 years of game play, however, I became both overworked and over ambitious, and the project collapsed, largely under its own weight. As this was run through the old DBM-list from Stanford, I guess that more modern communications technology would make running the thing easier. But I’m not going to be the one who finds out; it was a lot of work.

Having accumulated all sorts of odd DBR armies (100 points – the only way to play DBR sensibly, I found) I looked around for something else to do. Having just got Stephen Turnbull’s Samurai Sourcebook, and having the Manchu, Chinese and Koreans to match them, I set up a very simple invasion campaign game. Two Samurai armies invaded a river valley from the sea, opposed at first by a Korean army, which was later reinforced by the Chinese and Manchu. This worked, as I recall, rather well, with the Samurai forcing the Koreans back in a series of battles, but then being heavily outnumbered and unable to recover their losses quickly enough, the combined Samurai remnants were unable to hold their positions and were forced to retreat.

Again, this campaign seems to reflect the importance of including, even vaguely, some sort of logistical consideration in a game. It doesn’t have to be a major one, but if the Samurai had remained at full strength I don’t think the combined might of the others would have overcome them.

Another effort I made was with the Italian Wars, based vaguely on Machiavelli again. In this, however, I realised that I had to slow the sides down. After all, the French invaded in 1494 and the Spanish did not really arrive until 1500 or so. So for this I had a method of activation. Each month, each side (there were several – French, Milanese, Papal states, Spain etc) drew a card, and they needed a heart to do something. The something could be anything – sending ambassadors, raising an army, dispatching the army, and so on. This slowed the game considerably, which would have been frustrating face to face but was fascinating (and a lot more realistic) solo.

By the end of 1496, the French were in Milan and besieging Genoa, while the Spanish were just starting to arrive at the southern tip of Italy. One of the interesting aspects of this campaign is that there were no battles at all. I think I gave up because it was by no means clear that there ever would be. I’d set the game up sufficiently to make the Italian states swap sides to avoid such an outcome. A good solo campaign then, but a bit of a disaster if it had been face to face.

So, where does this ramble lead to?

Firstly, as you may have guessed, I’m as fan of campaign games. They do lead to an extra dimension, some ‘depth’ to the on table battles. I suppose that, in fact, they add to the back story of the tabletop activity, and even, in some cases, seem to take over and develop a life of their own.

Secondly, campaign games seem to work better solo. Maybe this is because I prefer solo, or, more likely, I suspect that if you have a live player, the temptation is always to get the models out and play. Sitting around with maps and diaries does not count at terribly exciting.

Thirdly, there needs to be a brief word of warning. Once upon a time, I drew a beautiful map of an island, with four countries, an interesting back story for each, some leaders with carefully drawn out characters, trade and agriculture rules and economic activity and so on. When all this was done I thought ‘wonderful! Let the battles commence!’ Unfortunately, they didn’t; all the countries were too peaceable for that. All that work never generated a single battle. I believe those four nations are now a federal state with the GNP of Switzerland….

Non-Ethical Questions

2011-05-14T02:00:00.000-07:00

You might object that last time’s questions about the conceptual pongs which might emanate from the conceptual plumbing of wargaming were all ethical, or at least about taste and offence. You would, of course, be correct in that assessment. So the question for now is ‘are there any other conceptual problems with wargaming?’

I suppose that most people would answer ‘no’. Wargaming is wargaming, and we just do it without worrying about the abstract concepts and issues that may, or may not, be predicated upon it. Mostly, I agree with that standpoint, but occasionally I do get a bit worried that we are a little complacent.

My first official set of rules were, I think, Tony Bath’s ancient rules – ‘Peltast and Pilum’, I think they were called. From memory (and the rules themselves are long gone), the result was an almost skirmish like game, where the pila used by the Roman legionary had an effect similar to a machine gun, if it hit. Was it fun? I suppose it was, yes, certainly as I recall it was. Did it bear any relationship to real life? I’m not sure it did, to be honest.

I had a bit of a break from wargaming, and when I returned, DBM ruled the roost. An interesting set of rules, I always felt, but one which didn’t quite fulfil the criteria for a big battle set for DBA. I’ve moaned before about trying to cover too large a range of history in a single rule set, so I won’t inflict that on you again, but there is, for me, too much detail, and the rules are too dependent on the army lists for my taste.
However, the most important shift that had taken place between the two rule sets was a shift away from the individual solider and his javelin towards the tactical unit and its effects. It seems to me that this shift does reflect something of an underlying conceptual change in wargaming.

The problem is something like this: in early wargaming two sorts of things were known, more or less. One was the equipment of the troops, in terms of spears or swords, javelins or shields, that kind of thing. The other was some knowledge that these troops operated in some sort of formation. The early rules seem to have taken the possible effects of the weaponry and then imposed some sort of rules to attempt to persuade wargamers to keep their troops in formation.

Of course, this worked to some extent, and, when added to the fact that wargamers knew that troops fought in formation, it did lead to some interesting, fun and even reasonably historical wargames. But the paperwork of keeping track of individual casualties when the troop to figure ratio was 1:20 was a bit of a drag.

Furthermore, as I recall, the casualty rate were not historical. For example, in some English Civil War battles the casualty list for the victors could be really low, in the single figures. This never happened in all the ECW wargames I fought. I suspect that it couldn’t happen.

So, in the brave new world of bases that I returned to, this issue was largely overcome. Individual casualties were no longer kept track of, and it was the unit that advanced or retreated, charged or fled. And that, I think, is an improvement.

But what now? What are the next paradigms to fall in wargaming?

It seems to me that there are at least two diverse trends. One is the ‘Old School’ wargaming, which takes as its paradigm, perhaps, Charles Grant’s ‘The War Game’ and uses large figures on big boards with single figure casualties. We might argue that this is a retrogressive step, a shift back to the ‘good old days’ that most of us never encountered. To some extent, that might be true; we could consider carefully what we did before we had nostalgia, and decide that harking back to the 1970’s is no bad thing (except for the flares, of course). On the other hand, we could see this move as seeking some sort of simplification of the way many wargames are these days. In the era of charts and endless factors, a ‘roll a six to hit’ game has attractive features.

The other trend is in almost the opposite direction. While rules in the 1970’s went for massive tables of factors and inherent complexity, which were then simplified to the DBA style games of the 1990’s, now we seem to in some cases heading back to good old complexity. I look at the new rule sets and they seem massive. OK, the production values are high and the pictures pretty and in colour, but the quantity of rules seem excessive, the complexity high and the number of extra bits you have to buy in order to play seems to me both expensive and, to be honest, a bit of a con job.

So, to answer my question ‘what next’? It seems to me that, with increasing busyness in life and pressures on timetables, that complexity of our rules is either going to have to be removed, so we all hard back to the good old days, or hidden as the individuals are in the base based rules. Tackling the complexity of even an ancient battlefield is no joke, but somehow I think we need to rise above even the tactical base as an army unit, and look at the larger scale structures on the battlefield. Currently we let the individuals alone and worry about the tactical units. Can we let them look after themselves and worry about the legions, brigades and division?

What Am I Doing Here?

2011-05-07T02:00:00.000-07:00

I often wonder, when I’m writing these pieces, why I’m doing it. It may be a familiar feeling to you too, but on the other hand, you don’t have to read them. But it is an interesting question: why try to understand wargaming or worry about its ethics, rather than just paint soldiers and play games?

I suppose that, for someone attempting to engage with classical Greek warfare and culture, a bit of philosophy can be excused. After all, Socrates was a soldier too, and he came to think about things rather hard. So perhaps a bit of philosophising, without the excuse of so much as a pint of beer to do it over, can be excused.

However, that does not answer the question of what I/we are trying to do here. I’m not sure that there is a particularly good answer, or that it is a particularly well formed question. After all, I’ve written about rules, dice, ethics, logistics and wargame periods so far, to name but a few and there need not be a common theme running through them all.

There are, I think, two broad views of philosophy and its relation to life. The first, which we might term the ‘engineering’ point of view, arises when we have a rather high flautin’ view of our thinking. This view emanates, for me, from Simon Blackburn, who argues (in Think: A compelling introduction to philosophy) that philosophy is conceptual engineering, that is, constructing edifices of thought for the good of our fellow man. Well, maybe, but it certainly is not what I’m doing here.

The other view comes from, for example, Mary Midgley. Her concept of philosophy is the plumbing one. That is, it is largely unseen and not worried about until something starts to smell, and then we have to get under the floorboards and see what has gone wrong. Philosophically, this means that we run on understood concepts until something goes wrong, and then we have to pull the concepts out and see what smells.

As you may have gathered, I’m more in favour of the latter, rather than the former model of doing philosophy. But, at this point you may object that, in fact, in wargaming nothing smells. There do not seem to be too many philosophical, ethical or conceptual issues around wargaming. Everything in the battle-game garden is smelling of roses.
So, are there any issues that might have us wrinkling our noses, just a little?

Consider this:
In 2007, the clergy of Manchester Cathedral protested that a computer generated visualisation of the inside of the cathedral was being used as the backdrop to a violent computer game released by Sony Corporation, entitled ‘Resistance: Fall of Man’. Aside from issues over copyright and defamation, the Dean also objected to the ‘virtual desecration’ of the sacred space of the cathedral’s nave. The game is set in an alternate time line in the 1950’s, and part of it depicts a gory gun battle in the cathedral, particularly ironic in the light of the cathedral’s outreach to victims of gun crime.

Does this make our noses wrinkle at the smell? Is there, indeed a smell here to be discerned? When I’ve written about speech acts and performative utterances, offence and the harm principle, do those considerations apply? Is this something, as hobbyists, we should be concerned about?

Consider this:
In 2003, a miniature war game journal published a short article relating to British SS ‘Freikorps’ troops in action against Soviet forces during World War Two. This provoked a significant reaction from the readership, including a detailed refutation of the premises of the original article. The original was, in its historical interpretations, alarmingly close to neo-Nazi views.

Again, is this something we should worry about? Why was there such a reaction? On a similar notethere was a distinct problem at a UK show a few years ago when a group of World war II re-enactors turned out to be re-enacting the SS. There were protests, the group were removed and the show organisers issued a highly apologetic statement. Why? I’d be willing to lay a small amount of money that somewhere in the show you could have seen SS soldiers in a demonstration game, or bought some, or bought a book about them at least.

So, there are some smelly corners of wargaming, ethically at least. If you can think of any more, please do let me know, because this is the way that the thinking about the hobby can be developed.

Are there similar things in the concepts of the game. Quite possibly, but I think I need a bit of a lie down now.

Performative Utterances and Wargames

2011-04-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, or have read some of the archives, may recall that I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions things called ‘speech acts’. I’ve vaguely explained what they are, but perhaps it is now time to give a bit more information.

Performative utterances and speech acts were identified by the English philosopher J. L. Austin, in the post-war era. At the time, logical positivism was arguing that there were two sorts of statement. One was analytic, and could be proved scientifically; something along the lines that ‘all single men are batchelors’ or ‘2+3 = 5’. All meaningful statements could be reduced to analytic ones.

Other statements existed, such as ‘you shall not steal’. These, however, are not analytic and thus refer to a state of mind. ‘You shall not steal’ really means ‘I do not like stealing’. Morality thus becomes expressions of our emotions, and this form of approach to ethics is described often as ‘emotivism’ or, perhaps more aptly ‘boo-hooray’ ethics. So if I say ‘murder’ you reaction is, in effect, ‘Boo!’ and if I say ‘give to charity’ your reaction is ‘hooray’. However, this whole morality thing is meaningless because it cannot be verified scientifically or logically.

Austin pointed out that, in fact, the logical positivists had missed out a large class of statements which were true but could not easily be verified. These he termed ‘performative utterances’. Examples for performative utterances could be saying ‘I do’ during a wedding service, or ‘I resign’ while being the president of the United States. The person is not only saying something, but doing something.
The most important factors in performative utterances are the context and the reciprocity. For example, a clergy person during a wedding service can say ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’. In that context, with the authority they have to do that, this is a speech act. Everyone knows that they can do this, and it is expected. Thus the context and the expectation (reciprocity) are satisfied.

Now, suppose (as seems to be popular these days) that the same clergyperson goes into a junior school which is “doing” marriage. There is a 10 year old groom and an 8 year old bride and so on. The clergy then declares ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’. The words are the same, the person is the same, but no-one actually believes that the children are married. Context and reciprocity are not there for this to be a speech act.

I’ve written before about the three level model of wargaming. There is the game level, the rules level, and the real world level. The first is the fictional world of our toy soldiers, the last is the world in which we move, drink, roll dice and paint models. The rules level is the interface between these two other worlds.

So, now, a speech act at the game world could be ‘I hit you with my bastard sword.’ In the context of the game world, this is a speech act, assuming that the character had a bastard sword and could use it. The context is adequate to the speech-act, as is the expectation for all involved that, in fact, the person could be hit with a bastard sword.

Now, the speech-act that the game level triggers some other actions in the higher levels. Most obviously, in the rules level, it asks the question ‘can this be’. The rules level will answer with something like ‘55% chance to hit’. And that will then trigger some action in the real world level – in fact, another speech-act along the lines of ‘I roll the dice’. The result of the dice roll then asks in the rules level ‘hit or miss?’, and that is translated into an action in the game level.

Suppose the result is a ‘hit’. Then the next speech act is from the recipient saying something like ‘I parry’ and the whole varying level set of speech-acts goes off again.
This is fine within the game. We are all conscious of the difference between the game level, the rules level and the real world or rolling dice. So conscious, in fact, that we do not bother, usually, to make the transitions. What I mean is that a player will say ‘I hit you with my sword’ and immediately roll the dice. The system is familiar, so familiar that my description of it feels really slow and clunky. We all know what is going on.

Now, consider an outsider. They are not ‘within’ the game world, and so cannot see that the actions within the game world, the speech-acts such as ‘I hit you with my bastard sword’ are valid within that context. They have no access to it. Therefore, they hear the speech-act as one pertaining to the real world, threatening violence, even if they recognise that that violence (along with the sword) are ‘make believe’. At this point they turn away and shudder and declare that wargaming is making people violent.

This, I think, is one of the issues that I’ve been nibbling at these past few months with respect to the ethics of wargaming. There are other issues, perhaps, but it seems to me that the main reaction of those who object to wargaming as encouraging violence is this mixing of the three levels and misunderstanding the context of the game level speech acts. Perhaps, when non-wargamers are around, we should play more slowly and make the levels clearer.

On the other hand, making statements like ‘My character in the game will try to hit yours with his sword at 55 per cent chance’ is going to make the game a lot less fun to play, even if it wouldn’t frighten the non-wargaming horses as much. It would be a bit like living life without performative utterances; possible, but dull.

Playing with Toy Soldiers

2011-04-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

Should we grow out of playing with toy soldiers? Someone, in a comment a while ago (I think it was Ruraigh) commented that the expressions is often used to denigrate our activity as wargamers. The implication is that it is juvenile, and that we should have grown out of such things.

Is this the case? Are we, as wargamers, simply emotionally immature and should we put our efforts into doing grown up activities, such as fiddling our expenses, keeping up with the Jones’ or watching endless repeats of game shows on TV?

Firstly, we need to look at the idea of play. Now, obviously, humanity is not the only species that plays. Most mammal young do, and quite a few older animals will too given half a chance. Our 3 year old cat will certainly play with us, with leaves or feathers she picks up, and, of course, with unfortunate rodents she picks up along the way. Now, of course, it could be argued that she is simply honing her hunting skills by doing so, but really her hunting skills don’t need honing at all.

Human adults, of course, play all the time. Often, it simply recognised as such. ‘Playing a round of golf’ is clearly using the language of game, even though this meaning is sometimes carefully hidden from the people making the statement. Golf is a game, along with lots of other games. The fact that some people, professional golfers, suppliers of golfing equipment and owners of golf courses can make a living out of it is neither here nor there. Golf is a game, even if it is one claimed by adults rather than children.

So why is wargaming often picked out as being evidence for immaturity?

It is a little hard to say, precisely. However, consider an analogy I’ve picked up from the philosopher Mary Midgley (in Animals and Why They Matter, chapter 10).

Most people are happy to let their children play with young animals of different species – a kitten or puppy, say. They may also assume that it is just a phase, an attachment that the child will grow out of when he or she matures. The assumption is that animals are suitable practice material for the immature, enabling them to ultimately take their place in the real world, that is, the society of grown up, mature, humans.

Midgley points out that taking an interest in animals is no different from taking an interest in music or machines. Stroking my cat is not an abrogation of my role in human society, any more than sitting and typing at my computer is. All of these things contribute to human flourishing, or at least to my flourishing: you may not find this blog contributes to your flourishing, but that is not strictly my problem.

So if interest in animals, or art, or machines contributes to our flourishing as humans, then surely wargaming can too. Humans have the quality of neoteny (thanks Mary: a good word). That is, they take some qualities or activities from childhood into adulthood. One of these characteristics is that of play. I’ve already given the evidence for that above.

Play, then, is carried through to adulthood, even though many who claim to be mature would not own the fact. The cornerstones of play are, probably, sympathy and curiosity. The trouble is that these things are often denigrated. I don’t often disagree with St. Paul, but he argues ‘when I was a child I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put childish things aside’ (I Cor 13:11). Well, in defence of Paul he isn’t really taking about playing, but learning, but the implication of what he actually wrote is that we can and do put ‘childish’ things aside.

In my career as a research scientist I was, often, playing with ideas, data, concepts, trying to make sense of them. This is acceptable adult behaviour, much lauded in Western society and culture today (think Richard Dawkins). But it was guided by the same curiosity I had as a child. Indeed, it was noted by my detractors that I hadn’t grown up and was an ‘eternal student’, even though my research was at the cutting edge of the field.

In the evenings I would go home and grapple with other problems. How had Cromwell trained his men? Why did Rupert re-deploy so aggressively just before Naseby? What coat colour had the Earl of Northampton’s men worn? At home, I was often playing with these ideas, concepts, questions, trying to make sense of them. But it was regarded as being childish, immature. Not by everyone, I grant, but by a significant minority.

There is a huge amount to say on this topic, and I need to do a lot more thinking about it. But, as a final thought for this piece, consider this. Play is creative. Children will create all sorts of worlds, activities and so on with or without toys. Creativity is one of the hallmarks of play, and creative people often play with things. For example, artists often play with the tools of their trade, the materials, textures, perspective and points of view, for example. In wargaming, too, we play with the tools of the hobby – model soldiers, rules, terrain pieces, history, story and so on.

So we can claim, at least thus far, that while wargaming is play, it is creative play, and stimulates those activities of creativity and imagination which are needed in our culture to do stuff to advance, such as making great art works, doing physics research or programming computers. Just because it is play, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t important.

Aesthetics and Wargames

2011-04-16T02:00:00.000-07:00

One of the (probably many) things I’ve not commented on about wargames so far is the aesthetic of them. What I mean by this is the experience of viewing a nice wargame, with good terrain, well painted figures well based and so on.

My experience is that using nice figures on nice terrain gives a positive impression and leaves us feeling better about life in general, than using unpainted figures in a piece of chipboard with roads marked on in chalk.

This seems to link back to what we were saying the other week about imagination. It is a lot easier, perhaps, to imagine what is going on, to get into the story, as it were, if the terrain and model soldiers are good, as in well modelled, painted and looking fresh.
Consider going to a wargame show, at least in the UK. Usually, there are a number of games on display, and, mostly, they have beautifully painted figures and a terrain that would grace most model railway layouts. Generally, the displays represent some sort of historical or quasi-historical conflict, and the board is surrounded by explanatory information.

This sort of display is eye catching and is the sort of thing that many gamers aspire to, even though the actual effort of putting such a display on is considerable.

Now consider looking in the ‘competitions’ room. Now, I’m not a competitive gamer, but I have wandered through a few tournament game rooms, usually when I’ve been lost. Of course, you could not expect the same level of terrain as for the demonstration games. Mostly, after all, the terrain is only decided just before the game is started. But usually what I’ve seen has been a few bits of felt which, so far as the non-involved can tell, could be fields, woods or hills. In extreme cases, I’ve just seen a few chalk scribblings.

In terms of aesthetic value, I dare say we would all agree that the demonstration games win hands down.

My own experience is so. I started off as a youngster with Airfix HO/OO figures, straight off the sprue. The terrain was provided by the floor, furniture, maybe trenches dug in the flower beds outside in the summer. Moving on from there I started with 15mm Romans and ECW armies, which I painted, very badly, and based on bits of cardboard. Not very aesthetic, I’ll grant, but better than not painted at all. I will say, by way of defence of my younger self, however, that unless you washed the plastic figures, the paint simply flaked off anyway.

Then, for me, role playing games took over, and with that some more nicely painted 25 mm figures, although, it has to be said, no terrain to speak of. In role playing games, I think, the dominant force is the narrative driving the imagination.

The case of tournament games is slightly different. The constraints are, if you like, fairly similar. The terrain is unknown until the game starts, although in role playing games the scene shifts a lot more quickly. But as a self-consciously competitive game the aesthetic quality come last to the narrative within the battle and the competitive nature of the interaction.

The display game is a self-conscious ‘advert’ for some quality of the hobby and the people putting the game on. The modelling skills and painting are to the fore, and the eye catching displays of both wargame and background information are the important factors.

How about club or solo wargames? Of course, club games can suffer from the same constraints, or nearly so, as tournament games. There is a need for speed, to get the soldiers out and have a battle before the bar closes or the time in the venue expires. Nevertheless I think most club games (at least, in my very limited experience) have a higher quality of terrain than tournament games. At least clubs can and do have terrain items for use by members, and they do get used.

For individual or solo gamers there are two factors. Firstly are resources. I cannot afford to buy nice terrain pieces, and, if I’m honest, most nice terrain pieces would fill up my table. I can, however, practice improving my painting and basing of my models. While this blog does not do eye candy (there are many others, much more popular than this which do), I do get pleasure out of using nicely painted (so far as I am able) and based (ditto) soldiers.

The second factor, of course, goes back to imagination and narrative. The terrain needs to be sufficient to draw the imagination in to this particular situation, this battle, this story. I used to think it didn’t much matter, and had cardboard cut-out trees and roads marked by bits of wool blue-tac’ed to the table. And that was fine for the time.

Now I’m (quite a lot) older, and maybe my imagination just needs more help, because I find that I much prefer terrain which looks the part. Thus I’ve got some nice thick felt blankets of reasonable colours, and some professional buildings, and even proper trees. While I don’t often get a wargame played (some may argue that I spend too much time pontificating here for that), when I do I do get pleasure from handling the soldiers in that model terrain, which is a lot nicer than I recall my teenage games being.

So somewhere in this ramble is a factor or the aesthetic appeal of wargaming. Somewhere it connects to some value of art deep within me, anyway. But clearly this is not the case for everyone, or all situations. But now I’m starting to get confused, so I’ll stop.

Logistics in Wargames

2011-04-09T02:00:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I played a very simple wargame campaign.
It was set in a valley. The Royalists had a fort at one end, the Parliamentarians at the other, and there were a few villages and so on in between. One aspect of the campaign was that the losses for each side would be replenished, after a suitable time, to the home fort of each side, and could then move, at normal rates, to the main army.

There was no clever stuff in the campaign – no side roads or long outflanking movements or anything of that nature. The bookkeeping was quite straightforward. I seem to recall, and here memory becomes a little fuzzy, that the losses were divided into five categories and returned at one category per week, or something like that.

As you would expect, the first encounter occurred somewhere in the middle of the map, and resulted in a victory for one side or the other, I forget which. The losing force recoiled and another battle was fought, which they also lost and they then fell back on their base fort.

But now, something interesting happened. Having fallen back to their base, the losing side regained its casualties at a faster rate than the winners. Thus, the force back at base and on the defensive was stronger than the attackers, and easily shrugged off the attempt by the other side to take their fort.

After that, of course, the initially losing side took the offensive and drove the others back to their base in a series of battles. Then, the same circumstances pertained, except the other way around, and the roles were reversed, until the other side were back at their home base again.

The campaign thus ebbed and flowed until I gave up in frustration, neither side being able to land the killer blow. I’ve always regarded that campaign as a good generator of battles, but flawed in the execution of the campaign aspect. Surely someone should have actually been able to win it.

A recent comment column in the (London) Times made me thing otherwise. It was talking about the fighting in Libya, and how it had ebbed and flowed from Tripoli to Benghazi and back again. It compared this with the desert campaigns of World War Two, where the fighting between the Commonwealth and German-Italian forces ebbed and flowed in a similar way.

This ebb and flow was for logistical reasons. The victors outran their supplies and were forced to stop, while the losers fell back to positions closer to their own logistical support. The columnist, whose name I forget, suggested that the same might happen in the Libyan civil war, even with a no fly zone.

This article reminded me of my own failed campaign. Perhaps it wasn’t so flawed after all. A mind numbingly simple rule, albeit one only about casualties and replacements, had reproduced a similar sort of ebb and flow in a wargame campaign.

Now, of course, World War Two logistics was about much more than the supply of replacements. For that matter, so were logistics in the English Civil War, but the strategic situation in both my campaign game and the desert were similar. There basically was only one route for the forces and their logistics. In my game, it was up and down the valley, in the desert it was along the coast.

Logistics is usually ignored by the average wargamer, as I think I’ve mentioned before. Usually this is because they are regarded as being too difficult and too boring. But in the context of a campaign game, particularly a solo one, they do seem to add an extra dimension. And, as my example shows, they do not have to be that complex.

The mechanics of my replacement was, I think, 5 margarine tubs per side. At the end of each battle, the losses were split equally between the five categories (I think they were unwounded, lightly wounded, badly wounded, severely wounded and dead). I seem to recall that the basic dynamic came from Charles Grant’s The Wargame, but I couldn’t swear to it. The movements of the replacements could be kept track of on the map until they joined the main force when they could simply re-join their units and be counted; that is, the margarine tub would be opened and the models therein added to their comrades in the unit boxes.

This simple mechanism had the complex result to which I have already alluded. This was, of course, before the days of personal computers and sophisticated spreadsheets, but it strikes me that if such a simple mechanism could reproduce such a real world effect, something even slightly more complex could generate a much more complex scenario in our wargaming, without much cost in terms of book-keeping and other dull as ditchwater activities.

Narrative Wargaming

2011-04-02T02:00:00.000-07:00

One of the issues raised recently has been about the story of wargaming, the narrative that makes playing the game worth while. But here we need to be a little careful, because fiction is not as obvious as we might like to think.

A wargame could be defined as a social interaction within a given set of rules with representations of real life objects (i.e. the model soldiers). With the exception of the representations, this is a reasonably good definition of fiction according to one view of it – that fiction is a social practice constituted by rules and conventions.

Another difference in wargaming is the involvement of the writers of the fiction (the authors, in this case the wargamers) and the consumers of the fiction, the readers, in this case also the wargamers, in the construction of the fiction. The generators and consumers of the fiction are the same people. Given that few philosophers can agree over the nature of normal fiction, the spontaneous generation of the fiction by a set of people who are both author and reader is going to get complex.

So lets hold on to our hats and see where, if anywhere, we can get with this. I think that, some time ago, I may have mentioned speech acts and their relation to wargaming. Looked at from the point of view of narrative fiction, a speech act is a locution with no real life referent. The propositions spoken in a wargame have no referent in real life, but they do on the wargame table. They are ‘false’ in real life, but ‘true’ in the fictional world on the table. Similarly, the statement ‘reader, I married him’ is ‘true’ in the fictional world, but ‘false’ in the real one.

How does this work, then? I think that we need to add another factor to our model to make it so, and that is imagination. In fiction, a model world is constructed, inhabited by the characters, into which we enter to find something out – what the fates of the characters might be, for example. Our imagination, prompted by the speech-acts of the author, probes the story as it is unravelled. By imagination and reflection we draw out the meanings of the fiction and, perhaps, learn something about our world thereby.

For example, The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald is, on the face of it a slightly unfinished love story between a Cambridge don and a student nurse. The deeper meaning of the story is also about the failure of science to account for non-rational events, such as falling in love. There is also something about the nature of time and coincidence in there too. We draw these things out by reading, imagining and reflecting on the story as it is told. I won’t describe it any more; you’ll have to go and read it for yourself.

The point, however, is that it is the rules and conventions of fiction, and the speech-acts of the author in the writing itself that stimulate our imaginations and reflections to learn what we may from a story. It is this, I think, that leads people to re-read stories. They are multi-faceted (good ones, anyway), and there is always something more we can draw from them.

In wargame terms, the rules and conventions of playing the game give us a similar sort of safe sand-box to play in as a story. The actions on the table, described by the speech-acts of the players and the relative motions of the representations engage our imaginations. We are engaged, as writer and reader in story-telling, whether solo or in groups. The narrative is strong, because battles are always powerful elements in any story. Just consider how many films and books end with a cataclysmic battle.
So we have a powerful narrative element in our games, that is, a battle. This is fine for the imaginative part of narrative, but does reflection have any bearing on this?

In some practical ways reflection plays its part. For example, we might find that light armed infantry do poorly against cavalry under the rules. By pondering this before our next game, we may come to the conclusion that they are only to be deployed in rough ground where the cavalry are at a disadvantage. We have learnt something about the game world through reflection on our experience ‘in’ it.

Can we go further than this, though? If our fictive world of a battle is trying to represent to us some real world, historical event, then we might. If our rule sets are reasonably accurate, then we might learn something about how the historical even unfolded. For better or worse, I think I learnt that Wellington didn’t win at Waterloo himself, but he needed the arrival of the Prussians, from wargames of the battle. But that wasn’t how the history I learnt described it (1970's parochialism will out, I suppose).

Then, of course, our reflective and critical faculties can engage with the difference between our game world and the real historical event. Wargames are played against a backdrop of understanding of battles, and, in some cases, the understanding of this battle. The narrative is compared either with the outcome of the historical event or our judgement of what would have happened had such a historical event occurred.
So the narrative element of wargaming does seem to be very important as it engages our imagination and reflection and enables us to make sense, in some way, of the events in the fictive world on the table. It may also, but does not necessarily, engage us to reflect on the historical event, or parallels to those events. This process can be enjoyable, as can reading a novel or watching a film.

There seems to me to be at least one outstanding question about this, though. Why do we start to display anxiety at the outcomes of wargames? Is it just like getting scared when watching a horror film?

Just Wargaming?

2011-03-26T02:00:00.000-07:00

As I write, military powers around the world are considering intervening in yet another country. One of the things that is slowing this down is the need for the proper authorisation of a military intervention. That is: who has the power to legitimately authorise the use of military force? Further questions follow: is the war to be fought with good intentions? Is the cause just? The airwaves and internet are full of such questions.

These ideas, and similar, are the cause of much controversy. I note, in passing, the much of the controversy over the invasion of Iraq was caused by them. Did the invaders have a legitimate cause? Who has the power to authorise the use of force? Were all other paths to resolution blocked? What were the intentions of the invaders? The answers to these questions from different individuals cause all sorts of political problems and demonstrations across the western world, at least.

Now, I’m not in the business here of discussing the rights and wrongs of military intervention in the modern world. But these issues draw attention to a tradition of ethics relating to war, which is known as the just war theory. The questions about intent and legitimacy referred to above are part of the tradition, and it is heavily ingrained in our debates about the use of military force; so much so that the debate is often entered into without the participants realising that they are so doing.

The just war tradition has a venerable history. In part, it derives from Judaeo-Christian principles, such as the laws of war in the Old Testament and Jesus’ sayings about taking up the sword in the new. Entwined with these are ideas from the classical Graeco-Roman world of Seneca and other stoics. The first real statements of the just war tradition were made by St Augustine in the early 5th century. A more systematic working of them (although still brief) was developed by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century (Summa Theological II-II Q40). This was further worked out in the 16th and 17th centuries by Grotius and Suarez, and became the basis of the system we now know as international law. Hence the debate and questions about modern conflicts and interventions is still framed within just war traditions.

Is the just war tradition of any use to me in my quest for an ethic of wargaming?
The tradition divides neatly into two: just cause and just execution of war. The requirements of a just war are, roughly speaking, those set out above. The snag is, from the traditions point of view, that if one side is clearly just, the other side clearly isn’t. Thus, in a wargame, one player would be representing the just, the other the unjust. Surely, then, the ethical thing to do would be for the player playing the unjust side to, to use a chess term, resign. As I’m sure you can see, this would not make a terribly interesting wargame.

I think, therefore, the justness of the cause which our little lead men represent is not a good basis for selecting our battles. In historical, or historically related wargaming, the causes of the fighting are matters of brute historical fact. We may not approve of the ethics of the SS or the Assyrians, and I hope we do not, but the historical fact is that they fought in such-and-such battles and thereby need representing, if we are going to make any claim to historicity.

In terms of just execution of the fighting we might be on firmer ground. The just laws of war forbid, for example, deliberate targeting of civilians, the causing of unnecessary suffering to combatants and the use of proportional force. It is rather hard to imagine that a satisfying wargame could be fought where any of these rules were deliberately broken.

We may know, for example, that part of the success of the German offensive of May 1940 was due to terror bombing flooding the roads with refugees and thus inhibiting military movement, but we are unlikely to wish to devote our energies to modelling and representing this fact. We may wish to include it in our scenarios, with some comment that allied troops will appear at random due to the problems of transport, but we are unlikely to represent it directly.

So what conclusion can I draw from this? Overall, I do not think that the just war tradition is particularly useful in the pursuit of wargame ethics. It might give us some outer limits about what we wish to represent on the wargame table, but it is such a significant part of our tradition anyway, as noted above, that we are fairly unlikely to wish to do so anyway. The nastiness of warfare is best abstracted away in our games.

Update on the Greeks

2011-03-19T02:00:00.000-07:00

Well, a warm welcome to all our new readers!

Some of you might recall that this blog was originally about my attempts to write some wargame rules in the Polemos series covering classical Greece. It has been a while since I said anything at all about that, so perhaps I should give an update, rather than continuing to worry about what wargaming means.

So, here goes.

Firstly, the good news is that I finished Herodotus, who finishes up as quite a good read. Certainly his account of Plataea is a lot clearer and more detailed than that of Marathon. Perhaps this is why Marathon is so popular with classical historians now. You can speculate an awful lot more with much less information.

So what did I learn from Herodotus?

The overall impressions is that the troops were not, really, terribly good. The Greeks were badly co-ordinated, not terribly well lead and landed up in a difficult situation which they had to fight their way out of. The Persians were probably rather worse. We’ve already done the ‘fighting quality’ thing with respect to Marathon, and the foot combat seems to be similar at Plataea – a long slog but with the Greeks winning.

The Persian cavalry had a mixed performance in my view. They were very useful on the grand tactical or semi-strategic level, seizing springs and intercepting the Greek supplies which forced the Greeks to redeploy which brought on the battle. In the battle, however, they were less useful. Herodotus describes them galloping up by squadrons to the Greek lines, loosing off their missiles and then turning away. This is the sort of ‘heavy skirmish’ style of battle, where they will exploit any chinks in the infantry formation by charging, but otherwise turn away. As the Greeks stood firm, the cavalry turned out to be fairly useless.

How about leadership and generalship?

Well, the Greeks did all right, obviously, considering that they won. We could argue that they were a bit lucky. Trying to stage a withdrawal in the face of an enemy with cavalry superiority was always going to be risky. Insubordination certainly didn’t help, and the Greeks essentially fought two separate battles, fighting their way through to ultimately sack the Persian camp.

On the other side, the Persians started with the advantages and lost. All they had to do really was maintain a force in being and the Greek alliance would probably have collapsed anyway. It had nearly done so in the winter, and the longer the campaign went on, the more likely it was that the Greeks were going to fall out again. However, a fleeting opportunity to win decisively presented itself and finished in disaster. The Persians only collapsed when Mardonius was killed however; the battle was not just a Greek hot knife cutting through Persian butter.

So, how do we rate this lot? Firstly, I don’t really see any grounds for altering my assessment of the Greek and Persian foot. The Greeks did have a hard, but winning fight on their hands. Persian cavalry is weak in face to face combat, but useful for working flanks and being highly annoying on supply lines. So we can rate them as not able to take hoplites on by charging, unless the hoplites are shaken, and also indulging in skirmishing most of the time. The main usefulness of the Persian cavalry was, as I’ve mentioned, on a strategic or grand tactical scale. Well handled, the Persian cavalry could have forced the Greeks into strategic retreat, although the ability to handle them well enough, given the communication limitations in an ancient battle, was probably very limited indeed.

The next interesting thing to consider is why, given the superiority of the Greeks on home territory, did they fail so badly in the offensive part of the Persian wars?
I suspect that the answer to this is twofold. Firstly, we’ve already noted the problems of command in the Greeks. The Spartans thought they should be in charge, while the Athenian navy was the largest component. Eventually, the Athenians took over (and started to build an empire) while Sparta lost interest. Secondly, there is the logistical issue of transporting and supporting land troops in Asia Minor. The Athenian navy could transport, land and support a thousand or so hoplites, and these might get some assistance from allied Ionian cities. But the bottom line is that this size of force was insufficient to have an impact in the relatively large scale of Persia itself. The Persian empire lasted longer than Athens did as an independent state. Given the constraints of the time, the Athenians probably did a much as they could in picking up islands and cities.

This, of course, leads fairly simply on to the next bit of Greek wargaming history, when Sparta woke from her slumbers and war broke out. I’ve just started reading Thucydides, and so far it has been interesting, but got me wondering how it could work on the wargame battlefield. The fact is that the opening moves of the war were based around a land power fighting a naval power. The Athenians spent the first part of the war doing pretty well what the Royal Navy did in the 18th and 19th centuries – building up and defending strategically important bases. However, as the Royal Navy also found out, there is a limit to what you can do via raids and command of the sea. The ultimate power is a land army holding the ports that you need.

At the moment, instead of a conventional wargame, I’m feeling that some sort of campaign game might be better. But that would put me even further out into left field than I already am.

Historical Wargaming

2011-03-12T02:00:00.001-08:00

One of the main discourses in historical wargaming is, of course, the idea that a wargame can have any relationship to history. If this claim bears no scrutiny, then we really are playing with toy soldiers in fantasy worlds.

I suppose that there are several ways in which historical wargaming does bear a relation to the real, historical world. Firstly, they model soldiers are historically accurate. By this I mean that the uniforms, weapons and other equipment are accurate representations of the soldiers of the time claimed to be represented. Thus, we would expect that if we travelled back in a time machine and waved a well painted figure of the Imperial Guard under Napoleon’s nose, he would recognise it as such.

Secondly, the terrains of our battles resemble those of the battles of the historical era. Obviously, I’m considering historical match ups here, not Zulu vs. Aztec ahistorical tournament games. Thus, to keep up the Napoleonic link, our battle of Waterloo would need representations of Hougomont, the ridge and so on. There has to be both a resemblance of the troops and the terrain to give a historical wargame.

I do not mean that we always have to slavishly follow only real battles, but that there must be some ill-defined “historical feel” to the game. For example, a fictional battle set in Normandy in 1944 between the British and Germans would ‘feel’ wrong if fought on wide open spaces with Chieftain tanks. Thick hedgerows and Churchills should be the order of the day.

The third element is related to this, and is about the units our model soldiers are grouped in. It would feel strange to find Macedonian pike deployed as skirmishers, as it would to encounter Tommies in Normandy lined up shoulder to shoulder. We expect our models to represent not only themselves – that is the real soldiers – but also the configurations they found themselves in, the squad, platoon, company, battalion, regiment and so on.

The next element concerns the rules. Again, there is an expectation that, for example, Napoleonic musketry is not like taking a machine gun to a football crowd. There is an assumption that the results, however obtained, will bear some resemblance to the fact that while a musket volley could be damaging, it was not usually decisive by itself. Similarly, we expect that infantry charge in flank by cavalry will generally come off second best, and so on. So the rules have to conform to some conception of the warfare of the period they are trying to represent.

This discourse of historical wargaming thus covers the models, terrain, units and rules.
The next question is along the lines of how much can we expect from each element in this set? Clearly, accuracy per se declines as the centuries roll back. Therefore, we have to ask how historical is historical?

This is where things get a little flaky. We can, of course, still argue that our models and terrain are as historically accurate as possible. There may be some discussion over what colour tunics Roman legionaries wore, or the designs on hoplite shields, but in general, as far as knowledge goes, we can be accurate. But the problem comes with the units and rules. What do we mean here by historical?

Now, we get into all sorts of problems. For example, DBR is rightly criticised for allowing or encouraging ahistorical deployment. But I can’t think of a rule mechanism which would force a wargamer into a historical deployment. Encouraging ahistorical deployment is clearly a bad thing and may indicate some missing element to the rules, but most wargames I’ve seen don’t do, for example, reserves. I suspect that from a professional soldier’s viewpoint, most wargames resemble 7 year old boys’ football games where all 22 players chase the ball. Without using some clunky mechanisms I think it would be hard to make players keep reserves. What we need is a more subtle mechanism to persuade players to keep reserves, but that is very hard to achieve, in my judgement.
So the rule element is probably the hardest to make historical. The combination of poor or non-existent knowledge, complex activities both in real life and around the wargames table and the necessary compromises of the tabletop activity make the whole activity of rule writing a precarious one.

I suppose that is why, as opposed to some recent rule sets, I’m trying to encourage people to discuss and experiment with Polemos: Imperial Rome, when it sees the light of day. I’m not claiming that my interpretation is right, or the best, or that the game is subtly balanced in ways the players wouldn’t understand. But it is the rules that seem to make the wargame (as opposed to the models) historical.

On the other hand, we do make claims about the historicity of our wargames. We expect a certain conformity to historical outcomes of battles, and a certain logicality in the process of achieving those outcomes. Going back to Lonergan’s Insight, it is these judgements of our common sense, in the situation of the wargame, which makes us agree or disagree that the wargame is historical or not. If the cry often goes up “that wouldn’t’ve happened”, then perhaps historicity is compromised.

Where does this leave us? We have to rely on our readings and interpretations of history, plus our judgement and logic in deciding how the discourse of historical wargaming is determined. In writing rules we need all of that, plus the ability to abstract the historical evidence into a set of mechanics that can apply to any possible situation. That, I submit, is difficult, and is why so many rule sets don’t seem to work that well for what they are designed to do.

Fairness

2011-03-05T02:00:00.000-08:00

My very minor claim to wargaming ‘fame’ if such fame there be, is to have started the Solowargames Yahoo! Group. It has been going a while now, and has a fair number of members, and even a few participants. It is a friendly place and new posters usually find a good welcome, advice and encouragement there.

Nevertheless, there is still a bit of a stigma hanging over the solo wargamer. I mean, wargamers as a whole are generally regarded as being a bit odd by society. A solo gamer doesn’t even have the excuse of social interaction at a club to hang his hobby on. Even other wargamers might view solo wargamers as being odd, or sad, or antisocial.

I’ve always been a solo wargamer, ever since I finished throwing marbles at Airfix figures. The number of competitive wargames I’ve had can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand, if you exclude role playing games. There too, somewhere in my cupboard I have a Musketeer who is busy escaping from a Spanish castle (which looks suspiciously like the Tower of London, but I digress). So even role playing games can and have been played solo.

So what is it about solo games as opposed to face to face wargames? That is, why bother as a solo gamer?

I suppose that most of the aspects of wargaming are still the same. You research the period, choose the figures, paint them, base them and then are ready to commence. Aside from the fact that you have to do this for both sides, this is all fairly similar to everyone else. You can even pontificate on your hobby in public, either through Lone Warrior, august journal of the Solo Wargamer’s Association, or on a blog such as this one. I’ve done both in my time.

The thing I suppose that solo wargaming lacks is the competition, the facing another across the table and beating them (or being beaten, but I’m still trying to be upbeat, here). At least as a solo gamer you both win and lose. I imagine that this turns on whether, as individuals we are either competitive, in which case taking on a live opponent is important, or gregarious, in which case meeting with others is important, or not. I guess I fail on both counts.

On the plus side, as a solo wargamer, you never have to have arguments over rule interpretations or how many gaiters the Imperial Guard were issued with in 1814. Solo gamers also seem to be more likely to run campaigns. This is possibly because there is not the same imperative to get the armies out and fight as when a live opponent appears, and also possibly because, as a solo gamer, unfair fights can be envisaged.

We’ve mentioned before that one of the discourses of wargaming is about fairness. I remember reading about one participation game where the participant was charged with scouting a farm in Normandy, 1944. They were given a small foot patrol. The German forces at the farm were generated randomly by the umpire, and could range from nothing to a Panzer division. Quite often, in the latter case, the participant would calmly start to dig in, assuming that the game in some way had to be fair, and they had to have a chance. Fairness, equality, a chance to win is somehow expected in our games.

As a solo gamer, I’ve found that often it is best to stack the odds against you. A few years ago I developed a system for fighting campaigns in preconquest Aztec Mexico. It was based on the DBA campaign system and I used DBA to resolve the battles. I think it used cards to determine my opponent’s strength, and any ambushes they had set. Events such as wandering tribes and revolts against my rule were determined randomly. This worked really well, until the system conspired against me and my 12 base DBA army, depleted by battle losses but strengthened by an ally went down to something like 28 bases of enemy. But it was fun, even though my last battle looked more like the Alamo than anything else. I was so impressed that I wrote it up for Miniature Wargames and they even published it.

It seems to me, then, that solo wargaming can work around the discourse of fairness that pervades our hobby. I’m not arguing that every game should have one side fighting against impossible odds, but that imbalance exists in our games, even in rule systems that claim to create fairness through a points system. In such systems players can spend long hours obtaining the best army under the rules for a fixed number of points. Real life generals, I suspect, have to go with what they get.

Is this discourse of fairness a bad thing in the hobby? Not necessarily, I think. But being aware of it is a good thing. Fairness is something we are brought up with, but it is not something that can be readily applied to the conduct of real wars. A general who waited until his enemy had received reinforcements before he attacked would, in real life, be rapidly sacked. In wargaming this might be acceptable, because it is fair.

The only circumstance when unfairness might be acceptable in a wargame is when the game is part of a campaign, or when there is a carefully designed scenario where the disparity in numbers is balanced by advantage in position. Even that is fair, to some degree, so really we need to run with campaign games. But even there, both sides have to have a chance, even if it is only overall and not in a particular encounter.

So this discourse of fairness seems to pervade our hobby. Fair, I might say, enough. I suppose it is something like that which determines whether the activity is a hobby. A game of chess, a round of golf or a rubber of bridge would not get played if there was no chance of one of the participants winning, even though in skill, practice or experience there may be big discrepancies. Perhaps then, the discourse of fairness in wargaming is something that makes it a hobby. Unfair wargames could be a bit too close to the real thing.

Territory and Battles

2011-02-26T02:00:00.000-08:00

I made a rash statement a few weeks ago, that sieges and holding territory were more important than battles in military history. This was quite rightly challenged, and it was agreed, more or less, that occasional colonial reprisal raids were not aimed at capturing territory.

This of course could lead to arguments about what we might mean by ‘capturing territory’. Punitive raids in the North-West province of India could be regarded as a means of keeping territory by making sure the locals were overawed by the Imperial might that could be deployed against them. If the raids were not carried out, the regions would become independent, the Imperial bases would then be threatened and that is before Russian agents drifted over the Himalayas to stir up trouble. So even the colonial argument touches territory at some point, perhaps not quite as directly as some.

Turning from the 19th century to the 14th, we have another candidate for not trying to capture territory. In this case, it is one I know a little more about: the early years of the Hundred Year’s war. Now, as wargamers we know that this revolved about the battles of Poitiers and Crecy. If we are dead sophisticated we might also admit that the siege of Calais was also part of the Crecy campaign. But the battles were decisive, were they not?

To answer this question we have to look a bit harder at Edward III’s strategy. I’m stealing most of this from Clifford Rogers’ book ‘War Cruel and Sharp’. He argues that after the Weardale campaign of 1327, Edward adopted Robert the Bruce’s strategy of chevauchee, siege and battle. The idea of this strategy was to use the chevauchee to devastate the enemy’s economic base. Dead or starving peasants pay no taxes, after all. The use of siege was aimed at drawing the enemy into battle, and the use of battle was to defeat the enemy field army, make prisoners and ensure a advantageous peace.

So, Edward III set off on a number of such adventures. Firstly, he besieged Berwick which led to the disastrous (for the Scots) battle of Halidon Hill. But the Scots were forced to fight, because Berwick, which was an important place economically and strategically, had to be saved. The devastation caused by the English archers up the hill was not the Scots fault. The fact that they had to try was Edward’s strategic success, brought about by the siege.

So, one up to the siege argument, I'd claim.

How about Crecy? Well, the battle came about largely because of the chevauchee, which devastated the lands where it passed. One of the issues in medieval policy was ‘good lordship’ which meant that the feudal lords, and ultimately the king, had to protect their vassals. So, if your vassal’s fields and houses were being burnt, you had to try to do something about it. Thus, the French army shadowed the English until they clashed at Crecy. Shadowing the enemy was a good way of ensuring that less damage was done, as small groups of enemy soldiers could not be sent out to devastate the countryside for fear of being picked off. The French did not need to engage the English directly. The fact that they did would seem to speak more of French overconfidence than strategic requirement. Edward, it seems did want to fight and went out of his way to persuade the French to accept battle. Removing the enemy field army would permit him strategic freedom to carry on his campaign and secure a port. After the battle, the English restarted their devastating raids and, of course captured Calais.

How do we classify this? Possibly one up to the ‘battle’ brigade, although the upshot was, in fact, a strategic, territorial, accession to the English crown, via a siege. Maybe we ought to halve the points.

How about Poitiers? Again, a large scale chevauchee by the English and lots of problems for the French. Again, it seems that the Black Prince sought battle and the French accepted it. Again the English won and captured various important people from whom an advantageous treaty was extracted, including lots of territory for the English crown.

How do we assess Poitiers? Well, probably one to the ‘battle’ brigade. The decisive battle gave the English a distinct diplomatic advantage.

Overall, therefore, we have to say that my comment, which was designed to provoke, is only partially confirmed by the first part of the Hundred Years War. However, it is worth noting that Edward’s strategy was composed of three linked parts – raid, siege and battle. Just going out and defeating the enemy on the battlefield was insufficient to ensure success in the war as a whole. This had to be linked with the chevauchees, which undermined the enemy in terms of both lordship and income and forced them to fight or lose by default. Sieges performed the same role, as the Berwick, but also were the upshot of defeating the enemy field army. Capturing strategically important locations, like Calais, was important, and that brings us around again to territory.

As wargamers, of course, we focus on battles. How many times have you seen a wargame of Crecy or Poitiers? How many times have you seen a campaign based around a chevauchee? Do we have the balance right? Should we be doing something different? Indeed, is it possible to have a good game based around the premise of devastating enemy territory?

Rumours of Wargames

2011-02-19T02:00:00.000-08:00

I think I’m finally making a little progress with my thinking, thanks to some of your comments. A few weeks ago I wrote ‘Perhaps we need to separate the ideas of war and wargames’. JWH responded that we probably did, but that we cannot separate them entirely or wargames become entirely abstract, like chess.

So here we seem to have a slight paradox. We don’t like war, because it is dangerous, nasty, violent, murderous, pointless and so on. But, as wargamers, we cannot ignore it totally, because otherwise we land up with something which is just an abstract game. We seek historical accuracy on the table top, but not to the extent of people dying, having limbs blown off, attempting to kill each other, setting fire to things and generally creating carnage.

We do need real war, or some account of it, to provide some normalisation for our rules, though. In our quest for historical accuracy we cannot ignore the original battle, however much carnage, death and destruction it caused. So as wargamers we are pulled in two different directions by this.

There would seem to be two responses to this situation. The first suggests that wargames reproduce actual battles, and actual battles are to be deprecated. Therefore wargames should be deprecated, and civilised, mature humans should not engage in them as a form of recreation.

The second is that wargames reproduce actual battles, and actual battles are to be deprecated. But wargames only reproduce certain abstract activities and outcomes of actual battles, therefore wargames should not be deprecated as a form of recreation.

Now, most wargames are pretty abstract. We push bases of toy soldiers around and call it a battle, and we use rules which are supposed to reproduce, at this abstract level, the historical outcome. The second response is a viable defence of this activity, I think. The wargame is sufficiently distinct from the awful reality as to not really worry anyone who has the slightest clues about the hobby.

There is, still, however, a line of attack open to the proponent of the first response. They might concede that the abstract wargame is at such an abstract level as not to really represent a real battle, but might argue that the necessary engagement with military history exposes the wargamer to all sorts of negative, violent images that the threshold for violence in the wargamer’s life, and in society generally, is lowered.

I think that, as wargamers, we have a defence to the first accusation, in that we may engage with military history, but that, at least, exposes us to the horror and general pointlessness of war, rather than inspires us to recreate it in our, or anyone else’s life. In terms of society generally, wargaming is a pretty minority activity and probably doesn’t change society’s outlook with regards to violence and warfare. It is perhaps to violent video games and films that the anti-war brigade should look, rather than people pushing toy soldiers around and rolling dice.

Yet another response by the proponents of the first response might be, again, to concede that fairly abstract wargames might be all right, but that skirmish games and role-playing games bring the violence close up and personal. Someone crying ‘I slash you with my bastard sword’ is, in fact, perpetrating violence, even at an abstract level, on someone else. Skirmish wargames, while less personal, record individual wounds and show that violence is, at some level, acceptable. In both cases the link to military history is more tenuous than the abstract wargame.

I’m not sure that I have a particularly good response to this accusation at present. One line of defence could be that the violence is still at the abstract level, even though it is more personal because the figure attacked and the person who “is” that figure are readily identifiable. Another might be that the violence of role-playing games is incidental, or at least an unintended consequence of the game. But the counter to that is that if that were the case, role-playing game rules would have far less space devoted to combat. The only set I can think of, off hand, where this was the case, was Call of Cthulhu, where it was probably true that if you got into a fight with anything more than fists, you were probably doing it wrong.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, the proper defence of wargaming is that of George Santayana: He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it. Even though professional historians seem to try to do a good job of ignoring and forgetting wars and battles, we need to keep some memory of them alive, or we will amble into another conflict without due consideration.

Insight

2011-02-12T02:00:00.000-08:00

I’m currently, extremely slowly, reading a very interesting book, Insight, by Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan argues that we can understand how we understand, and, once we have done that, we have a general method for understanding anything.

According to Lonergan, understanding is a process which includes a moment, or several moments, of insight. An insight is what happens when Archimedes jumps out of the bath shouting ‘eureka!’, or you or I say, ‘ah yes, I’ve got it’. That moment of insight is a critical point in our development of understanding. The movement to the moment of insight may be lengthy or short. Teachers, colleagues and others may, along the way, provide pointers, information, experiences and similar sorts of things that build up the context in which we can have an insight. But the insight can only be had by and within us, individually.

Lonergan further distinguishes between empirical sciences, like physics, and common sense. Empirical science, he argues, abstracts from the events of experience and creates a system of relating objects to each other. An example of this would be the model we have of the planets, revolving in elliptical orbits around the sun. This started with a set of observations, some mathematical tools and a good deal of insight from the likes of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. The point is that the observations were abstracted to provide the basis for the model. The model has predictive power in the concrete world, but, in itself, it is abstract and could be applied to any planetary system we care to think of.

Common sense, on the other hand, is a system of experiences, reflections on those experiences, traditions, ways of doing things, and so on, which are completed by the concrete. For example, I know how to ride a bike, but I cannot demonstrate this without a bike to ride. My knowledge is completed by the concrete item, the bike to ride. Lonergan argues that common sense knowledge is as valid as scientific, but that they inhabit different worlds. They are not in conflict because they start from different viewpoints.

To return to the planets, a common sense view of the solar system would be that the Earth is stationary and everything else revolves around it. The scientific point of view is that the Earth and everything else revolves around the Sun. Both of these claims are correct, it just depends on your point of view, and what you are trying to do. No-one would use the common sense view to calculate the trajectory of a comet, but nor would you use celestial mechanics to catch a ball.

So how do these considerations apply to wargaming?

I think I’ve mentioned before the problem with the evidence for wargaming. What happened in a battle was a one-off, never to be repeated set of circumstances and outcomes. Even assuming that our sources are accurate, there were only a few battles and the whole manifold of possible combinations could not have been tested. Therefore, we have an incomplete data set to start with. Wargames can, and probably do, cover a much larger range of combinations of troop types, morale, location and so on than were covered in real life.

So, what does Lonergan add to this? I think that we need to put the data side of wargaming, the accounts of battles that we have, the archaeology and so on, down on the common sense account. The insights that they contain are concrete, completed by the circumstances of the particular incidents.

Wargame rules, on the other hand, attempt to abstract the data of wargaming to a system. We wargame rule writers, poor benighted beings that we are, attempt to take the information that we have, extrapolate it to fill the gaps, abstract it to a few common principles, and present it as a system to provide the required concrete results once it is applied to the particular circumstances on the table.

In the process, of course, the original data will have been interpreted, misinterpreted, ignored, bent out of shape to fit our preconceptions and over-used. Thus, it is unlikely that the abstract system of rules that we develop will reproduce the outcome in real life. There will be some residue, what Lonergan calls the ‘empirical residue’ of those things which don’t fit within the abstraction process required to obtain the general rules. Thus, even if we believe we have sufficient evidence on which to base our rules, the process of abstraction is highly likely to mean that the particular incident cannot be reproduced in all its detail.

Is there then no hope for wargame rule historical accuracy?

I think there is. Another of Lonergan’s points is about the self-correction of these processes. Scientists make loads of mistakes and misinterpretations along the way to scientific truth. As testing takes place, the errors are discovered and discarded. Common sense is self-correcting in that both we as individuals and as collectives of people do learn and change our common sense understandings. Thus, over time, we do correct our misunderstandings, notice our prejudices and overcome them, and improve the way we look at and do things.

Thus, as our knowledge and insight into a period deepens, as new ideas for rules are bandied about, we can develop rule sets which are more accurate, more fun to play and so on. Each set can be regarded as an abstraction from the knowledge and insight of the time, and as a building block for the future.

Positive Philosophy

2011-02-05T02:00:00.000-08:00

You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher, but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in. James Boswell.

It might be thought, by looking back at the six months or so of posts on this blog, that I don’t have much regard for wargaming. It might be considered that I think most wargaming to be inaccurate, incoherent, ethically dubious and, quite possibly, imperialist. I dare say that evidence for all of these, and some others, would be available from the posts here.

In other words, I seem to have a real downer on my hobby.

Actually, I have no such thing, although all the above accusations could still be true. I think wargaming is in something of a golden age. When I remember the difficulty of acquiring toy soldiers, the dearth of rules and other paraphernalia of wargaming when I started, the range of services available today is truly remarkable. It is unclear if this will continue, although perhaps the internet will facilitate the exchange of ideas and goods. The real problem, I suspect, will be weaning people off computer games to “the real thing”. But that isn’t my problem, at least at present.

What I am trying to do is to think as clearly as possible about the phenomenon of wargaming, how it works, and what it means, in so far as any hobby means anything. As a case study, there is the development of some rules for ancient Greeks, but what I am trying to do is to get below the ‘just do it for a laugh’ layer and try to see what is really going on.

To suggest that wargaming presents a philosophical or ethical problem is already starting to reflect at a deeper level than simply deciding what soldiers to buy next. But can we define what the philosophical question (or questions) raised by wargaming are?

Pondering this over the last few months, it seems to me that there are both philosophical and ethical issues within and about wargaming, and both revolve around exactly what it is we are doing, or rather, what it is we are representing on the wargame table.

Now, most people who react badly to the information that I’m a wargamer do so, I think, because they imagine that there is actual representation of the violence of a battle on the table. In this sense, I think, that the same people should react in the same way to, say, a violent movie. Not too many people reacted badly to the violence of, say, Saving Private Ryan, but would a wargame of Omaha Beach engender the same muted reaction?
If not, then the difference must revolve about the engagement of the individual with the representation. The representation of the violent act in the movie is “out there”, on the screen, perhaps even a matter of historical record. But the representation of the violent acts in wargaming is also out there, on the table, but the player has some degree of control over what happens.

Perhaps, then, the genesis of the ‘yuck’ response that some people have to wargaming is due to this control. I can choose whether this company, platoon or whatever is placed in harm’s way or not. A wargamer has control over who “lives” and who “dies” in a way that a movie-goer does not. It is perhaps that control which raises, in a few people’s minds, anyway, that question of whether it is ethical to wargame this or that event.
Anyway, I do think, in accord with the quote at the top of this post, that the positives of wargaming outweigh the negatives. Wargaming, mostly, promotes social interaction, historical perspective, literacy and numeracy skills and an inclination to research. It may also provoke philosophic reflection, as well as resource management experience and, finally, it is actually fun.

So I’m not really negative about wargaming, honest. But I am going to try to continue thinking about what it might mean, both to itself and within a broader social context.

Granularity

2011-01-29T02:00:00.000-08:00

D6 or D10, that is the question? Whether it is nobler of the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…

With due apologies to Mr Shakespeare, I would like to consider dice this time.
We use dice in wargaming because battles are unpredictable. Battles are complex affairs with plenty of contingent activity, and nothing can be predictable in such circumstances. So we use dice to model these contingencies, chances and probabilities.

Now, this gives rise to two effects. The first is a granularity in our wargames. Real life is a continuum. Groups of soldiers do not go from a ‘let’s get on with it’ to a ‘let’s run away’ frame of mind directly. There is a period of time, great or small, when they lose confidence, coherence and so on, and then the rout starts slowly, before the panic spreads. We cannot model this continuum, partly because it is so poorly understood, and secondly because qua wargame the troops need to be is a definite state, standing firm or running, not somewhere ill-defined in between.

So dice impose a degree of order on the wargame table, a controlling of the chances, but at the cost of losing the continuum of real life. Of course, the more dice you use, the less granular you can make the game. Role playing games, for example, often use D20 or D100. The effects of being able to roll from 01 – 99 are to wash out many of the effects of the granularity of the dice roll, although there is still a real distinction between a hit and a miss. For some, a near miss could be as demoralising as a light hit, but somewhere the complexity has to be cut off.

To spill the beans a little more on the early days of Polemous, the original was based on using a D10. We wanted a more finely grained set of results. However, the first battle with the rules showed us the error of our ways. The results were fairly wild. Using a difference system and a D10 a side gave a huge range of results, and as the body count mounted we decided that switching back to a D6 system made more sense. Variety is the spice of life, but too much just gets silly.

The choice of dice thus makes a significant contribution to the nature of the game. I’m sure we could have found some means of tackling the wildness of the D10 game. At least, by increasing the factors for the troops we could have reduced the effects of the difference between rolling a 0 and a 9, and by adjusting the tactical factors we could have made them balance the dice fluctuations. I think the reason we didn’t do this was that D6 systems are more familiar and thus intuitive, and we would have had to have worked much harder to balance the system with D10’s.

The second effect is a bit more subtle. Initially, I’d like to make a distinction between chance and probability. Chance is the randomising effect of unknown factors. For example, three arrows shot by the same person consecutively under the same conditions will land in slightly different places. This is due to factors like wind fluctuations, material differences and so on. Probability is the ability to predict the likelihood of some event happening. By this I mean that there is, say, a 10% chance of 15 hits from a volley of 100 muskets hitting a battalion sized target at 100 paces.

Now, the probability may be a cumulation of all the chances affecting each individual discharge of each musket, and the factors affecting each might be different, depending on the individual’s consumption of alcohol before the battle, whether they’ve just shot their ramrod at the enemy and that sort of thing. But the overall effect is one of probability.

How does this affect a wargame? I think the issue is the confluence of chance and probability. Suppose our volley at 100 paces is at the enemy general at the head of his guards battalion. We have a global probability of hits, but does the general get wounded, incapacitated or does he laugh in the face of danger as his invincible guards mow down the enemy? This is surely the province of chance.

But here is the rub: we use the same system to resolve both of these events. Roll globally to determine the overall number of hurts. Then roll again to determine the damage to the general.

Does this matter? Probably not much, but sometimes I do wonder. As a species we are not good at doing probability. The gambler’s fallacy is alive and well and living on a wargames table near you. Million to one chances do not come up fifty-fifty. As for wargaming, of course, probabilities do get complex, and a wargame is a diversion, a hobby, not an extension of applied mathematics. But there are issues.

How many squares were charged in the Napoleonic era? How many of those were broken? Now, suppose we could document all of them. So far as I know only a few squares were broken, and I’d imagine well over 2000 squares were charged. So, to make the numbers easy, let’s say 2 broken squares and 2000 charges, giving a 1:1000 chance of breaking a square. Now, 1/6 to the fourth power is 0.00077, which is just under 0.001. So on this basis the chances of breaking a square are the same as rolling a 6 four times.

Now here comes the problem: we charge squares in wargames many more times than was done in real life, so we see squares broken in wargames many more times than we do in real life. In fact, from real life, we have no idea how often squares were broken, so we land up with meaningless probabilities which we translate to the wargames table. The numbers above look reasonable but were in fact plucked from thin air.

How do we deal with this?

It seems to me that the only way forward is to ignore real life and make the best guesses we can. But if we do that, how can we stay in even slight contact with historical reality? Are we all just playing fantasy games, regardless of whether we have the right coloured piping on the Imperial Guard’s uniform or not?

Discoursing Again

2011-01-22T02:00:00.000-08:00

I rather feel that last week’s effort didn’t quite go where I expected, so I’ll try again.

What are the discourses of wargaming?

By this I mean, roughly, how do we construct the social phenomenon that is wargaming today? Wargaming is decidedly a social construct, I think, but I want to try to consider how it is formed.

There are various structures that, I suppose, frame wargaming. Materially, these would include the figures themselves, books of rules, history books (or “source” books if we are talking fantasy or science fiction), terrain and so on.

Then there are the more social structures. Wargame clubs and shows, online email lists and fora, and even blogs such as this one. Spanning the material and the social are the associations of wargamers, such as the Society of Ancients and the Solo Wargamers Association, which produce their own material as well as form a social space for discussion. Similarly, I suppose, the glossy wargame magazines provide the same sort of space.

The thing about all of this stuff is that it constrains our means of creating wargames. We fight wargames in a way that is constrained by the physical space and objects, as well as the rules. Furthermore, the constraints on our time, by work, family commitments or the sheer activity of everyday life also limit what we can achieve.

Nevertheless, wargaming exists, and exists in a socio-cultural environment that permits it to exist. How then can it said to be constructed?

At a fairly low level, it could be observed that wargaming is a method of telling ourselves stories. A narrative of sorts unfolds as a wargame proceeds. The unpredictable nature of these stories, moderated by dice and decisions, makes them engaging. A wargame might be written up as such a story (I’ve posted one here myself, complete with pictures) but that is a post-wargame reflection on the event, or series of events, that made up the game. The game itself is more engaging than simple story-telling.

From another view point, the game is constrained by the rhetoric of the rules. Some rules are more guidelines to the players which outline the sorts of things that should happen. Some are more dogmatic, instructing the players in how to lay out the terrain, deploy the armies and in many cases, exactly which troops are allowed in which army. Indeed, I recall furious debates in some parts of the wargame community in the 1970’s about the use of army lists and how they were dumbing down the hobby, and writing your own rules was deemed to be the ‘best’ or ‘most accurate’, whatever that was held to mean.

Of course, the rules we play do make a difference, not least to the language me use in describing a wargame. In Polemos, the term ‘shaken’ has a specific meaning, and that enters then discourse of the players. Shaken in Polemos does not necessarily correlate to descriptions of battles which state ‘The 39th foot was shaken but unmoved’. It might, but not necessarily. It is probably worth recalling that in the earliest version of Polemos there ever was, shaken was described as ‘not ‘appy’, as in “This base is not ‘appy”. The discourse of Polemos could have been very different is we had retained this name for it.

So we layer various frames, constraints and discourses onto our wargames. Does any of it matter? Well, perhaps, because the constructs that we make inform the choices and directions we take. For example, 6 mm figures were long regarded as either being for WWII wargames, where they were respectable, or for the poor or cheapskates (like me). I well remember being told by someone that my 6 mm armies were ‘versatile’. As this was said with a slightly malicious grin, I presume that the implication was that they could be used for practically anything. The discourse here was to do down someone with a non-fashionable view or set of actions, in this case, in buying, painting and playing with 6 mm toys. Only with the hard work of Mr Berry and other 6 mm advocates has this bit of discourse started to change. Mind you, I do recall similar views being expressed about 15 mm toys in the 1970’s (and guess who was buying them then).

Similarly, I could argue that my favourite bugbear of recent times, the ancient rules covering everything from Sumeria to GarIgliano and all stations between around the world is a part of the wargaming discourse. It says that, for example, chariots are pretty well medieval knights, and Huns are more or less border horse. The claim lying behind here is that all ancients were pretty well the same, and can be treated the same. I would submit that this part of wargame discourse is as ill-founded as the argument that what really matters in WWII wargaming is the number of rivets on a Tiger tank’s turret.
It may be that I’m beating dead horses here, but I do think that, while talking, thinking and taking part in wargames, we probably do need to watch our language a bit. Not only do we run the risk of boxing ourselves in and cashing in our creativity for a few D6, but we also may well startle non-wargamers but exalting the virtues of, say, Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, which, at least, is not part of everyone’s everyday conversation.

Some Discourses of Wargaming

2011-01-15T02:00:00.000-08:00

Wargaming occurs in a cultural context. Certain conditions have to be met before people can wargame. For example, I do not have to grow my own food, and that gives me a certain amount of leisure time in which to pursue other activates, which might include the reading of history and, ultimately, wargaming.

This, however, has certain implications for how we wargame. For example, I have long suspected that the most important part of any real war is the capture and holding of territory. Think of the battles in history which came about as a result of sieges. The Persians besieged the Greek cities in Ionia. Those who had no walls either surrendered or came out to fight. In the English Civil war the Royalists besieged and captured Leicester to draw the Parliamentarians away from Chester. This ultimately led to Naseby and the demise of the main royal army. More recently, Tobruk was a lengthy siege that distracted the Afrika Korps from the main aim of capturing Egypt, while I suppose that we could view the whole of the western front in World War One as a lengthy and very bloody siege, even ignoring such episodes as Verdun.

Waterloo is perhaps the paradigm counter-example. On the other hand, you could argue that Waterloo stands out as a counter example precisely because it was unusual. In 100 days there wasn’t much time to man fortresses and bring up the heavy artillery. The whole point, from both sides, was to prevent that from happening by obtaining a quick victory.

So why do we focus on the battle in wargaming? Professional soldiers, I’m told, focus on logistics while amateurs look at tactics. I’m an amateur; fair enough, and logistics is boring. But battles tend to have all the ‘glamour’ items: heroism, pageant, colour, movement, action, adventure and so on. Sieges tend to be nearly as dull as logistics.
I remember mentioning my idea that battles were largely unimportant while sieges and capturing territory were vital on an email list (now defunct). I was shouted down (as far as one can be in cyberspace), although I did challenge the list to provide in period examples of battles that were not fought as a consequence of besieging or a desire to lay siege to somewhere. I don’t recall the details, but there were few in the period which could be put forward.

So we seem to have this discourse in wargaming, that battles are important. That is true enough, as in many cases they are. Furthermore, we believe in the decisive battle. But actually, this is hiding something. Within wargaming, battle is important because that is all we can reproduce, interestingly and frequently. So the hidden need to fight wargame battles may be part of the motivation for the wargamer-ly focus on battles in the first place.

Now, this has slightly interesting consequences, I think. The battles wargamers are interested in tend to be the ones that are regarded as being decisive in terms of western history, culture or understanding of war. But not everyone in the world has this idea of war, necessarily. The Mexica culture before the conquest had a highly developed concept of the “Flower War”. This was an agreed combat between warriors on each side, but not the whole armies. Its meaning and effects are not entirely clear (not to me, anyway, and it is a while since I read Hassig’s account of it), but it is an entirely different understanding of decisive combat. But I’ve never seen a wargame based around it.

There are other implications. I’ve mentioned before the issue of the Persians being seen through Greek eyes. I discovered the other day on Amazon a book called ‘Military Orientalism’. Orientalism, in case you didn’t know, is a concept originally developed by an Egyptian-American scholar called Edward Said, which basically argues that Occidental attitudes to the East (I think Said started with the Middle East but the concept has been broadened) is a mixture of fear and arrogance. According to what I’ve seen of the Military Orientalism book blurb, the argument is that ever since Herodotus, the occident has misunderstood and misinterpreted the ways of fighting of the orient. The point is that the strategy and tactics make sense to those using them, even if to western eyes (and often, the only accounts we have are from western accounts) they look odd, cowardly, counter-productive, ineffective, or whatever.

The classic case of this might well be Afghanistan, where, in all of western involvement there, the strategy of the Afghans has not been to fight pitched battles, but to sit in the hills and cause such casualties and difficulties for the invaders that they’ve simply got bored and gone home (I generalise, but only a bit). The politics of the forces being there may well vary, but the argument is that western politicians in their capitals misunderstand the situation on the ground, and the strategy of the enemy.

So, where I’m trying to get to here is a complex place where we, as wargamers, wargame the things that interest us, which are battles in the western tradition of war, and, then, in many cases, impose these ways of doing battle (on the wargame table, at least) on other cultures which do not (or would not have been able to) recognise warfare in these terms. ‘Wargame Orientalism’, anybody?

Periodicity

2011-01-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

What makes a wargame period?

Conventionally, we see a certain set of wargame periods:
Ancient and medieval: 3000 BC – 1500 AD
Renaissance: 1500 – 1700 AD
Horse and Musket: 1700 – 1900 AD
Modern: 1900-2000 AD

As a broad sweep of history, I suppose that this is all right, but it is painting in broad brush strokes and on closer investigation starts to look a bit dubious.

Take, for example, the end of the medieval period. This is set as 1500 AD. Why? Did things change suddenly at the end of 1499? I think not. I suspect that the real reason is that original wargame rules went to 1485, which was regarded as the ‘end of the medieval era’, closing the War of the Roses with the Battle of Bosworth and ushering in the ‘modern’ Tudors.

Now, of course, we know so much better, and are no longer so hidebound by arbitrary western historiography. So the date has shifted from 1485 to 1500, which is, after all, a nice, round, number. Political correctness is satisfied because we have removed ourselves from a specifically Anglophone viewpoint, and everything is spiffy again.

Well, not quite. Those poor Italian War wargamers are going to be a bit confused, what with their actions falling on both sides of the boundary, but you can’t please everyone. The fact that muskets become alarmingly more effective in most rules after 1500 is just an artefact of perceptions and the unfortunate consequence of writing rule sets. We all know that there is continuity across the boundary, but we busily ignore it because, well, there isn’t much else we can do.

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed (should you have read it) that the Christmas day post put the Polemos: Polemous date range as 490 BC – 330 BC. Why, you might have asked, is this? Similarly, when (or if) the Imperial Rome rules see the light of day, it will be noticed that they cover first century BC to second century AD. In the light of what I’ve just said about the boundaries being arbitrary, hadn’t I better start justifying myself, and quickly?

To some extent, of course, I cannot do any justification. Any boundary in dates is going to have a degree of arbitrariness to it. Take 330 BC. Why choose this date? More or less, it is the end of the Persian Empire, and the triumph of Alexander the Chancer (I beg your pardon, I mean ‘great’). With that, perhaps the world did change, if only a little, and so it seemed a reasonable, if entirely arbitrary date. It might be argued that it is better than, say, 323 BC, which only marks the death of Alexander himself. While on the ‘great man’ theory of history this is the terminal date for the period, the collapse of Persia could be regarded as being a little more important.

The beginning off this time span is marked, of course, by Marathon. While, it is true, Herodotus does describe a few battles earlier than this, they are not presented in enough detail for even the most imaginative wargamer to be able to reproduce the action. Marathon is about as early as we can go with a decent description. You could argue that we can’t really reproduce Marathon, but we can at least have a go.

The upshot of this is, of course, to merely redefine the arbitrary boundaries to dates other than those of conventional wargames usage. While covering a much narrower time range, the terminal dates are no less sudden. You could argue, quite correctly, that Chaeronea in 338 BC marks a reasonable turning point when the Macedonians defeated the Greeks. The pike, it could be claimed, thenceforth dominated over the spear armed hoplite.

Alternatively, you could argue that the period should be extended to the end of the second century BC or 168 BC when the battle of Pynda marked the end of anything approximating to the Alexandrian Macedonian Empire. But even that is dubious, because the Ptolemys ruled in Egypt until Cleopatra. History is made of continuities, not of disjunctions.

Perhaps it is best to define rules actually as having a core period and a peripheral one. For example, many of the rules describing themselves as ‘renaissance’ in fact have quite well developed English Civil War rules, and maybe one other period, depending on what the author has been reading. For example, some rules do quite good French Wars of Religion, or Italian Wars, or even Williamite rules, without quite getting, say, Poles against Muscovites or Ottomans right. In this case, ECW or FWoR are ‘core’ periods to the rule set, while the Turkish Wars or Time of Troubles are peripheral. The rules might work OK, but they might not. Caveat imperator, eh?

So for the Polemos: Imperial Rome rules we can say that they should work OK for what most people think of as the wars of the Roman legions, while those who try to push them back to Pynda or forward to the Sassanid Empire do so at their own peril. And I suppose that the Polemos: Polemous rules will work the same way, with the core being the Greek – Persian rules and the Greek – Greek ones, with everyone else having to take pot luck.

So perhaps, instead of a paradigm troop type for a rule set, we should have a paradigm set of interactions, or possibly just a single interaction. For example, hoplite vs. Persian infantryman would be the paradigm. Everything else is assessed relative to this interaction. So, was a lightly armed man better or worse than a Persian infantryman? How did Persian cavalry rate against hoplites? And so on. As the net spreads wider, so the accuracy of our comparisons get poorer. Eventually, they must land up distorted, or we would be answering the question of how a Hittite spearman rates against an SA80 wielding SAS man, or at least a Roman legionary against a dismounted French knight from the Agincourt era. And we wouldn’t want to do that, now, would we?

Considering Cavalry

2011-01-01T02:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve always thought that Persian cavalry were the elite of the Persian forces. Thus the puzzle of why they seemed to do little at Marathon, and various attempts over the years to explain this fact away. For example, some have argued that that had already re-embarked for the descent on Athens; others have suggested that maybe Herodotus was wrong and there were no cavalry with the Persian force, or only a token number for scouting. Again, Krentz has argued that they were still deploying when the Greeks hit the Persian infantry, so they played no part in the battle.

I’ve not finished reading Herodotus’ account of Plataea, but there the Persian cavalry don’t seem to have played a major role in the battle itself. In the build up to the action they were significant – disrupting the Greek supplies and seizing the well that lead to the Greek withdrawal, which then bought on the battle. But when the battle is described, the Persian cavalry are mostly absent.

This passage in an earlier bit of Herodotus is interesting in this respect:
So they [the Scythians] used to watch for whenever they [the Persians] were gathering supplies of food and carry out their scheme. The Scythian horsemen would always rout the enemy cavalry and the Persian horsemen would retreat until they met up with their infantry, who would come to their assistance. At this point the Scythians used to turn back, because they were afraid of the Persian infantry, despite the fact that they had hurled themselves at the Persian cavalry. (Herodotus 4.128, tr. Waterfield, Oxford World Classics).

Now, given the warnings I’ve already made about the dangers of the lone passage out of context, what can we learn from this paragraph?

Darius’ Scythian campaign was in around 515 BC, and proceeded as most armchair strategists would expect, with the nomads refusing to engage in battle and the conventional forces wandering around achieving little. In this context, Herodotus’ passage makes a lot of sense: it describes classic hit and run tactics. The Scythians hit a foraging party which is forced to retreat until it finds some supports.
So far, so good, but the next part of the paragraph is that the Scythians always routed the Persian cavalry. But the Persian cavalry were armed with bow, spear, shield, nice curvy sword so beloved of ‘The Arabian Knights’ and so on. In short, they seem to have been regular cavalry of the ancient period. So why could they not withstand the Scythians?

There are two alternatives that I can see. Firstly, the Herodotus is wrong here, and they could. The second is that the Persian cavalry was fairly useless tactically.
The Persian infantry was armed with bows, and we know that, in general, foot archery was better than horse archery. So it makes a good deal of sense for the Scythian horse archers to avoid the Persian foot. So Herodotus does not seem to be wrong here, in this aspect at least.

So, the evidence from this passage is that the Persian cavalry could not stand against Scythian light horse. Now I’ll grant that Darius is unlikely to have sent out his elite cavalry to gather food, and that the Scythians were probably the best light cavalry around at the time. But this passage does seem to suggest that the Persian cavalry was below average.

If this is the case, then the absence of Persian cavalry in the accounts of Marathon is fairly easily explained. They may well have been there, but had not noticeable effect on the outcome. Similarly, at Plataea, their mobility in a grand tactical sense caused the Greeks problems, but not in the toe-to-toe stick poking that decided the outcome.
I’ve noticed this before in the ancient world. The much vaunted Sarmatians were defeated by a legion in the first century, for example. It is somewhere in Tacitus, but I forget where, although he does claim that they were weighed down with loot and fighting dismounted on a frozen lake at the time. Nevertheless, for much of the ancient period, cavalry was not up to much. There may well be exceptions, like Alexander’s companions, but mostly, before, say, 300 AD, cavalry wasn’t that much use.

Cavalry, then, seems to have been to the ancient world what artillery was in the seventeenth century. Useful to have around, but you could get by without it. The Greeks certainly managed to do as at Marathon, after all.

So where does this leave us, rules wise? Well, Mr Berry has already noted that the Imperial Rome rules are not going to please cavalry addicts. So be it. Ancient cavalry were not in the business of charging steady infantry from the front. Then again, I’m not sure cavalry of any age were quite that suicidally stupid. Cavalry have their uses, but mainly this is to protect the flanks of their own infantry and threaten those of the enemy. Strategically and grand tactically their increased mobility has significant advantages, but in battle, the Persian and most other ancient cavalry seems to have been fairly weak.

Christmas Presents...

2010-12-25T02:00:00.001-08:00

Well, a merry Christmas to one and all, and may Santa fill your stockings with all you desire (ooh, er).

Now, for your Christmas gift from me, the ‘official’ first draft of Polemos: Polemous:

Polemos:Polemous: 490 – 330 BC

	Offensive		Defensive
	Ranged	Close	Ranged	Close
Hoplite	0	4	4	4
Peltast
Greek Cavalry
Light armed
Persian infantry	2	3	3	3
Persian cavalry
Light cavalry
Elephants
Pike
Scythed cariots
Archers

Tactical factors:
-1 hoplites less than 8 ranks deep.
+1 hoplites more than 8 ranks deep (per 4 ranks)
+1 Persian infantry with shield wall in first round of combat.
+1 advancing into combat or following up.
+1 ‘the best’ (Immortals, Spartans)
-1 ‘the worst.

And finally, click here for something a bit uplifting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZTl5jZOsjQ&feature=related

Another Go At Rules

2010-12-18T02:00:00.000-08:00

This week, a return to pondering rules. I’m going to try to fix the issue there was with ‘a second stab at rules’.

Let us again take as our paradigm soldier the Persian infantryman, and give him a 3 in our system.

The Greek hoplite up against him, when 8 ranks deep, should win, so lets give him a 4.

In the centre at Marathon, the Greeks were thin; say 4 ranks deep so pick up a –1.

The Persians get a +1 for being ‘the best’ and another +1 for their initial shield wall.

Thus, in the centre, the Greeks are at 4-1, the Persians at 3 +1 +1 making 3 vs 5. However, the Greeks did charge into contact, so should get at least +1 for doing so, making 4 vs. 5 and, all other things being equal, a slow loss for the Greek centre.

On the wings, the Greeks would be 4 +1 against 3, making 5 vs. 3 and a quicker win for the Greeks.

Two issues arise here. The first is why do the Greeks only get +1 for charging?

Well, the more I’ve read the more doubtful I’ve become that a full-blooded charge could be carried out by a phalanx. This starts to get complex. Some authors would argue that a phalanx was much looser in 490 BC than we assume, but I’m not going there as I don’t see how a bunch of shield and spear armed heavy infantry are going to make progress in a loose formation. The point of a phalanx was that it was rather coherent. This is why police lines tend to hold against demonstrators, after all. So phalanxes cannot just rush at the enemy willy-nilly.

On the other hand, there has to be some bonus for getting to grips. In the case of Marathon, the Greeks would eventually have got disrupted by the Persian archery, so it was worth their while, once in range, closing. So I’ve made a perhaps rash assumption that the +1 for the Persian shields cancels out the impetus from charging / advancing into contact.

Comparing with the first stab at rules, the centre in that came out as 4 vs 4 in the first round, followed by 2 vs 3 for a slow Persian win in the second and subsequent rounds.

This week, we have 4 vs 5 in the first round and 3 vs 4 in the second and subsequent, again making a slow Persian win.

In the wings it should be a slightly faster Greek win.

So does this make any difference?

Well, the Persians still come out a little ahead when they are counted as the paradigm, but not as much as I initially thought. They get a slight advantage on the first round of combat, getting a 5 rather than a 4. This would get cancelled out if I gave the Greeks a +2 for charging, of course, so the two systems would then be equal.

However, there is a ‘but’.

Here, I’ve assumed that the outcomes would be based on the difference of the factors, and that alone. This is the normal route with Polemos rules, at least the ones I’ve written.

If a DBA style combat outcome were used, then the outcomes could be significantly different. As I’m sure most of you know, the DBA style outcome is defined by the ratio of the scored – less than half and less but more than half.

The Polemos system uses a difference of scores – 0, 1, 2, and so on.

In the ratio (DBA style) system, the higher the initial factor, the less likely an opponent is going to double the score. If both sides have a +1, and one rolls a 1, then to double, the opponent only needs to roll 3 or more. If both sides have +4, and one rolls a 1, then the opponent has to roll a 6 to double the score. I’ve not done the numbers and statistics on this, but it appears to me to be slightly non-linear.

The difference (Polemos) system is linear. No matter what the factor, the difference is the same. So a Greek vs. Persian match up at 2 vs. 3 is the same as 3 vs. 4.

So perhaps, while there may be a little bias depending on the paradigm troop type, it is much more limited in the difference system than in the ratio system.

Or, maybe, I’ve got my numbers wrong (again).

Lost in Translation

2010-12-11T03:46:00.000-08:00

Ruarigh raised an important point in a comment, and it deserves a longer consideration than it has had so far.

The issue is translation.

Now, decent translations of many ancient texts are available at reasonable prices in English, and these are what I’ve been using. So, Caesar, Tacitus, Seutonius and, more recently Herodotus grace my bookshelves.

However, there are problems in using them. The Penguin translations, for example, have an irritating habit of translating ‘cohort’ to ‘battalion’ and ‘legion’ to brigade, let alone ‘pilum’ to ‘spear’. Piecing this back to what is actually meant by the author is a frustrating business, but I don’t read Latin or Greek, or anything else except English (and some might argue I don’t do that very well!).

There is a problem here, outlined by the US philosopher Willard Quine.

Consider a sentence, S, in a language system, call it L. S only has meaning in L by virtue of other sentences also in L. Therefore, the meaning of S is not fixed by S, but by the whole language system L. The effect of this is to show that translation is always indeterminate. A translation from L into L’ is always underdetermined by the data and thus open to question.

For Quine, then, everything is up for grabs because everything is under-determined by the data and we can only choose, for example, which translation we prefer.

In my view, it gets slightly worse than this. Consider an ancient language system G. G exists, and thus gives its sentences S meaning in a specific culture, C. If C is not understood, then some aspects of G will remain unclear, as the translation is not just from one language to another, but from C to another culture.

Thus, for example, we see the Greeks rushing off to Delphi at the slightest opportunity, to consult the oracle. Why? The oracle was a powerful religious and cultural force in the culture, but unless we know this part of the culture (and we never can fully know what it meant for the Greeks), the full meaning of the language, will elude us.

Therefore, we seem to be facing a double whammy in terms of translation. There is Quine’s indeterminacy, but there is the further problem of translating from an ancient culture, and if C determines L and L determines the meaning of S, then C, to some extent, determines S.

To put this back into English, the culture of the time determines, to some extent, the meaning of the sentences we read, especially when translated. We can understand the words, and even the sentences, but the cultural block can remain.

The upshot of this for wargaming is tricky. According to our sources, I should be making sure that the players send off to Delphi before any major decision, sacrifice sheep before going into battle and undertaking all the cultural paraphernalia that can be derived from our sources that the Greeks did.

But there is a further problem.

Our sources can only give a partial account of what happened, even if those sources are concluded to be accurate. So even if we’ve got good sources (which is rare in the ancient world), we still only have a partial picture of what happened, and an even worse view of what might have happened.

Furthermore, in many cases we cannot check our sources. For early Greek history, there is only one source, Herodotus. We could dismiss Herodotus as being inaccurate. Certainly, he is not all that accurate in places where he can be checked. But if we do dismiss him, we cut off the branch upon which we are sitting. We can then say nothing else about the period except a few scraps of archaeology.

Given all this, it is a wonder that we can get anywhere at all. But we can, slowly and carefully, if we engage with our sources (albeit, in my case, in translation) and with secondary sources in books and journals which try to interpret those sources alongside others and with the archaeology of the period and places of interest.

As I’ve observed before, the danger is lifting a piece of our source material as good evidence for something, but then finding it is downgraded by different interpretations or translations of the same thing. The trick is to try to work holistically, trying to grasp the culture as well as the battles, but that is hard work, and very, very slow.

But it does explain, at least to my satisfaction, why I’m reading the whole of Herodotus, not just the paragraph or two about Marathon.

Nasty Dilemmas

2010-12-04T03:00:00.000-08:00

I’d like to try to consider two slightly different but parallel issues in wargame rule writing this week.

The first is this: my reading so far suggests that the early Greeks were not terribly good generals. Greek generalship seems to have consisted of marching up to near where the enemy are and making camp. Having done that, at a suitable point, you march your soldiers out of camp, line them up, and make an inspiring speech. You then place yourself in the front rank, shout something like “That way lads, at them” and, hopefully, everyone charges off in the right direction, destroying the enemy and winning victory, fame, glory and so on.

So what is the problem with this?

Consider this: you arrive for your wargame, set up your phalanx, set them going according to the rules and then, apparently, you have absolutely nothing else to do for the rest of the evening while your little lead heroes battle it out.

Beautifully historically accurate, but it could be a bit dull for the player.

I remember reading a long time ago in, I think, Arquebusier, about a wargame where a French 16th century army had faced an imperial one, Lansknechts and all. Of course, the Landsknechts had a skirmisher unit out of those blokes in slashed sleeves with huge great swords. These clashed with the French crossbow / handgun skirmisher unit, and routed it.

So far, so good.

A bad dice roll then ensured that the French support unit routed too. Oops, chuckle. But then the rot set in and unit after unit of the French army joined the rout. Eventually, the French player, seeing a third of his army running away, conceded the game.

How accurate! How interesting! But what a dull wargame. A minor unit had succeeded in putting a whole army to flight. ‘What a waste of an evening’, is another way of putting it.

Historical accuracy does not necessarily a decent wargame make.

The second issue is with troop types. In Aristotle’s Politics, (Book VI, para 7 1321a5 – 1321a27 for those of you into these sorts of things) four troop types are identified: cavalry, heavy infantry, light armed troops and the navy.

Discounting the navy, we have three troop types, attested by Aristotle. Yet a quick check of some popular rule sets suggests that the Greeks had far more variety than this. Where are the light horse, the Thracian peltasts, the bowmen?

According to what I’ve read so far, an early Greek army in Polemos terms would be 20 bases of hoplites, and that is it. As noted above, the general would simply point them in the right direction and let them go.

So now we arrive in the realm of trade-off and compromise that bedevils wargame rule writing. How do we keep something reasonably historically accurate while keeping the game interesting?

In this instance, do I allow Greek generals to do something other than simply fight in the front rank? If I do, and they start redeploying the phalanx to flank, then it would seem that we’ve lost historical accuracy to playability. Where do we draw the line?

On the other hand, we could quite easily argue that although Greek generals did not engage in fancy manoeuvres, they might have been able to but just did not need to, so I’m justified in allowing them to do so. This is an argument from silence, of course, and these are always dangerous (just because there is no record of alien space bats intervening, there is no reason to suppose they didn’t).

Similarly, we have a problem with the mixture of troop types. 20 bases of hoplites are a bit dull, after all. We could just about add some skirmishers (light armed troops), although they are specifically excluded by Herodotus at Marathon – the Athenians were unsupported by either cavalry or archers. If we regard Marathon as a special case, then we are again arguing from silence and the alien space bats are lurking.

So is the choice really between dull but historically worthy games and inaccurate but fun ones? Sometimes, looking at the wargaming world, it does seem to be the case. On the one hand we have tournament and fantasy games where anyone fights anyone according to a rule set which has to be fairly arbitrary to cope, while on the other hand we have painstaking models and simulations which seem to drain all the fun away.

Is that it? Are we, as wargamers simply impaled on the horns of this nasty dilemma?

Marathon in History

2010-11-27T04:15:00.000-08:00

Well, after the deafening silence engendered by the last two weeks worth of blogging (is there anyone out there?) I’ll resort to something a bit more abstract this week.

I’ve now read Peter Krentz’ new book on Marathon, which is pretty good. There are no startlingly new insights; after all, pretty well everything that can be said about Marathon has been said, but it does make an interesting read.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of the book is the first chapter, where Krentz discusses how the battle has been viewed over the centuries. People, from the Athenians, who viewed the battle as a miraculous gift of the gods (especially Pan) to the Persians, for whom it was just a minor set-back in a distant province, have always constructed or reconstructed the meaning of the battle.

Among the most determined and resolute reconstructors were the Victorians, in this, as in so many other things. From Byron to Browning, Marathon was the victory for democracy and freedom. The newly liberated Athenians defeated the invader and the prospective tyrant of Athens.

Freedom and slavery, democracy and tyranny, liberty and civilisation are all still potent political slogans of our age. Yet no-one invokes Marathon today as a symbol of freedom. Why not?

Krentz suggests that the backlash against such ideas started after the Great War. The civilization that started with Athens showed it destructive power, its capacity to commit collective suicide. The courage and virtue that won at Marathon was no match for the technological slaughter which the civilisation that Athens engendered had created.

A few other items assisted in this re-visioning of Marathon. Firstly, Marathon changed nothing. It was a sideshow for the Persians, a punitive expedition that achieved most of its goals. Ten years later, the serious invasion got going and was defeated by both land and sea. Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea sealed the fate of the Greek world, not Marathon.

Even so, the output of writing about Marathon goes on. Aside from Krentz’ book, I know of at least one more published this year on the battle. The output seems unstoppable, the speculation endless. Amazon lists at least 4 recent books on the subject. Our fascination with this battle, the earliest that we are able to even try to reconstruct, seems endless. Marathon studies are alive and well, in military history if not anywhere else.

Plataea gets a worse press, for some reason, even though it was the decisive battle. Marathon gets strap lines such as ‘civilisations in conflict’, while Plataea gets a few books published a hundred years ago and still in print (or brought back into print). How odd.

Perhaps part of the answer to our interest in Marathon lies in modern geopolitics. As I’ve mentioned before, western civilisations have an uneasy relationship with ‘the east’ and I don’t suppose that the events of the last decade have made that any better. At least at Marathon the “good guys” won, the battle was decisive and everyone neatly went home. Even Datis, the Persian commander, seems to have returned safely to Asia and not been punished. Apart from those unfortunate enough to have been killed in the battle, everyone else got away without damage. Is Marathon then the perfect ‘civilised’ battle?

I suppose the other aspect of Marathon is that it gave the Greeks, Athenians and the late arriving Spartans, confidence that the superpower could be defeated. Perhaps without Marathon Plataea and Salamis couldn’t have happened. Marathon would then be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the Greeks winning the Persian wars.

If the Athenians had lost Marathon, what would have happened? Krentz devotes part of his conclusions to such an outcome. If the Athenians had not resisted, history, he claims, would not be too different. The chances are that Athens would simply have continued to develop as it did, with a tyrant imposed by Persia to start with, then as Persian rule lightened, its own mix of tyranny and democracy. Perhaps then, the only real outcome of Marathon was to prolong the Persian wars, and to ensure the destruction of more lives.

A Second Stab at Rules

2010-11-20T02:19:00.000-08:00

What happens if we change the basis on which we generate the rules? Following on from last week, where we took the hoplite to be the typical soldier against whom all others are measured, what happens if we change that?

Suppose we take the really typical soldier of the era, the Persian infantryman. A bloke with a bow, spear, maybe a wicker shield, and some sort of sword or long dagger. Again, we shall use Marathon as our yardstick.

Now, in our D6 based rule set, this chap would rate a 3. Opposing him, in the centre at Marathon, are 4 deep hoplites. Our Persian is elite, so gets a +1, and has an initial shield from the front rank, so gets another +1 on the first round of combat (assuming he doesn’t move into contact). So the Persian gets 3 + 1 + 1 = 5 on the first round.

The Greeks lost, so we’ll give them a 2, and then +2 for charging onto contact, giving them a 4 on the first round, and 2 on the second while the Persians get 4. The Greek centre should, on average, lose.

On the wings, the Persians rate 3, while the Greeks are 8 ranks deep, and so get a (say) +1 for that, and +2 for charging into contact. So in total they get 2+1+2 = 5. The Greeks should win on the flanks.

So, comparing this with last week’s numbers, in the centre we get from last week:

Greeks 3 –1 (for being thin) + 2 (for charging) = 4
Persians 2 + 1 (for being the best) + 1 for shields = 4

in the first round, and then

Greeks 3-1 = 2
Persians 2+1 = 3

in the second.

This week, we have

Greeks 2 +2 = 4
Persians 3 + 1 + 1 = 5

in the first round, and

Greeks 2
Persians 3 + 1 = 4

on the second.

What difference does this make?

Well, on the face of it, not much, but I’d be willing to lay a little money (if I were a betting person) that a statistical analysis of these numbers would suggest that the Persians have a bit of an easier time of it if they are the ‘average’ infantryman. That is, if the Persians are normative, they have a slight advantage, while if the Greeks are, they do.

On the wings the story is similar: The Greeks are 3 + 2 = 5 from last week, while the Persians are at 2. This week the Greeks are at 2 + 1 + 2 = 5, while the Persians are at 3. In other words, again, the Persians do slightly better (on average) if we take them to be normative.

In both schemes, the battle should be reproduced, more or less, on average. But the ease of victory, all other things being equal, the side which has been taken to be the norm does slightly better.

There doesn’t seem much to be done about this. As far as I can see, this is an inherent bias in the way the rules are set up. And I suspect that it isn’t just these rules, but pretty well any rule set. The designer, it seems to me, has to take some troop type as the basis type – English billman, Saxon huscarl, Union rifleman, whatever. But doing that, by matching others against this type seems to generate an implicit bias.

It is entirely possible that I’m wrong, here. Please do point it out to me if I am, but at the moment I can’t see it. Of course, there are many other factors apart from the raw numbers which come into play – the tactical situation, numbers of bases in contact, supports and so on, but it does seem to me that if the basis in inherently biased, the overall rules are going to be, however slightly and however much other factors might cover it up.

A First Stab at Some Rules

2010-11-13T03:37:00.000-08:00

Lets try to do some serious thinking about rules and mechanics for the Greeks and Persians.

We’ve not got much to go on, but lets try with Marathon. I’ve just got Peter Krentz’ new book on the battle; I’ve not read it, but having it is nearly as good, isn’t it?

We know a few things about the action.

Firstly, the Athenians and Plateans were hoplites – spear, shield, body armour and greaves. Secondly, the Persians were infantry – bow, short spear, sword, quilted armour. We’ll leave aside the mystery of the Persian horse for the moment (at least until I’ve read the book).

We also know that the Greeks had a thin centre and normal depth wings (Herodotus Histories 6:111). The best Persian troops were in the centre. The Greeks broke the Persian wings and the Persians the Greek centre. The Greek wings then turned in and broke the Persian centre. The fighting was lengthy – this was no walk over.

So, how do we develop some rule mechanics for this?

Let’s start with the Greeks. Let a normal (8 rank) hoplite base have a baseline fighting value of 3, assuming we are using a D6 based rule set. This is actually quite an important decision, because it means that everything else is going to be based on the perceived fighting value of hoplites.

Now, it is clear that, in hand-to-hand combat, the hoplites had the upper hand against the Persian infantry (bow, spear, kitchen sink etc – what Phil Sabin calls in Lost Battles “the elusive heavy infantry archer”). So let us give the Persian infantry a basic 2. After all, Marathon is said to be lengthy.

Now what?

Well, the Greeks in the centre were thin, so lets give that a –1, and the Persians in the centre were said to be the best, so lets give the best a +1. So that makes the centre clash a 2 (Greeks) against a 3 (Persians). The wings will be 3 (Greeks) against 2 (Persians). It is also possible that the wing Persians were worse than average, so they could be an additional –1. But this sort of balance looks about right. On average, the Greeks should win on the wings and lose in the centre.

There is also the issue of the Persian shields. Now, the rumour has it that the Persians fought in depth with arrows, with the front bloke with spear and big shield thing, possibly stuck in the ground in front of him. What do we do about this option?

Rather than invent a new troop type, I think a +1 to the Persians with this, in the first round of close combat only, would cover it. Again, I’d guess that the best Persians would have this, so the centre battle becomes 2 against 3 + 1 on the first round.

Now, the other thing is about the shooting. The Persians were archers, and we know that the Greeks advanced rapidly to cross the ‘beaten zone’. There are significant arguments in the literature as to whether this was possible or not. Additionally, I presume that this means that the hoplites hit the Persian lines at a run, as the result of a ‘charge’ in all but name. Persian archery seems, in this instance, to have been fairly ineffective, possibly because the Greeks were armoured with metal.

So, the archery should have maybe a baseline 1. I suspect that as an English person, I have in mind the Hundred Year War archer with his machine gun. Persian bows were a long way from that (unless anyone has any evidence to the contrary?), so lets make them fairly feeble. The Greeks defensive armour would give them say a 3 or 4 against archery, and we can fix the combat results table so that they do not get ‘halt’ outcomes unless it gets really bad. Furthermore, the defensive factor against shooting would not depend significantly on the depth of the formation.

Hitting the Persians at a run should give a positive factor; say +2 in the first round of combat. So now, in the centre, we have the Greeks at 2 + 2, possibly –1 for being shaken, giving 3, while the Persians are at 2 +1 for being ‘the best’ + 1 for the initial shield wall, giving 4. In the second round, the Greeks will be at 2 while the Persians are 2+1. The Persian centre should be able to stand against the Greeks and ultimately, beat them.

On the wings, the Greeks are 3 + 2 for charging, maybe –1 for being shaken, while the Persians are at 2, assuming they have no front shields and are ‘average’ as opposed to ‘poor’. At 2 vs 4 or 5, the Persian wings should crumble quite nicely to the Greeks.

The only other questions are about command and control. The Greek wings were controlled and turned in by their commanders. I wonder how they managed that, and how we are going to make a stab at reproducing it. But that is, I think, for another week.

When is a state not a state?

2010-11-08T00:25:00.000-08:00

I suspect that we all have some idea of what we mean by a state. In these days, post-1918 anyway, a state is usually a 'nation state', by which we mean a state is something of one nationality with a recognised central government and a well defined boundary.

Simple really.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Take the term ‘Greek’, for example. Well, today, the term 'Greek’ is well understood as someone who comes from Greece, or an artefact that is from there, or food, or similar sorts of things.

Wind the clock back 200 years. What is ‘Greek’ now? A geographical area under the nominal domination of the Ottoman Empire? Somewhere to borrow marbles from, Lord Elgin?

I’m sure I don’t need to labour the point any more. Notions of statehood, too, are elastic. To the classical Greeks, the city was the state – a polis.

Now, I’ve been reading Herodotus, and one of the intriguing things about this work is the practically everywhere in his world, there are Greeks. When he talks about the north coast of the Black Sea, there are Greeks to consult. In Libya, there he finds Greeks. In the south of Egypt, we find, wait for it, Greeks. All along the coast of Ionia, and far inland too, we find the Greeks.

Now, either the Greeks got around a bit, which is quite possible as Herodotus himself seems to have done, or we have a slightly different meaning to the word ‘Greek’ to the great man himself.

To Herodotus, it would seem, the term ‘Greek’ is a cultural one, not a strictly political, national or even racial one. This would seem to be why he can say, with a straight face, that Greeks were in the Persian army when, so far as we know, there were no significant troops from what we know as Greece today there. Greek to Herodotus means a certain cultural, linguistic group of peoples who regarded themselves as Greek.

It goes a lot further than that, of course. We speak of a Persian army. What do we mean? Contingents of soldiers were there from all over the place – Egypt, Persia, Asia Minor, Babylon, and who knows where else. But Persia was a lot closer to our modern idea of a state than Greece was. It had a centralised administration and taxation, and was, in ancient terms a powerful, united state with a single head. Yes, there were rebellions, but that was true of practically every state in the ancient world, and rebellions were not unknown even in early modern states.

I think, though, that we tend to read back our concepts of ‘state’ onto the ancient world. The Romans would not really recognise the term. They ruled various places, one way or another. If the natives didn’t like it, they could submit or be invaded. Our experience of say, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the former Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia suggests strongly that a modern composite state, one of various nations, doesn't work. And yet there is no a priori reason why not. On a certain view, all pre-modern states were composite, because the smack of firm central government was not readily present. Only when nationalism gets going, more or less in the nineteenth century, does the composite state start to fracture and collapse. Before that, most peoples were fairly happy to be ruled by a foreigner.

No ancient state could actually run its affairs across the whole breadth of its territory. Various empires found various sorts of solutions. The Romans ruled by province, with officials sent out from Rome. The Persians ruled by satrap, which seems suspiciously similar to me. Yet the Persians are deemed ‘alien’ and the Romans are ‘us’, even though they were not.

The exception to this seems to be the Greeks. The Greek cities (in Greece, at least) were independent. This particular culture has handed down to us a lot of our political language, and that has made the way other politics work alien to us. Greek culture has conquered us more thoroughly than Alexander ever managed to conquer the world.

At the risk of slightly repeating myself from a previous post, we thus tend to project onto the Persians some prejudice. For example, we view the Persian army as a heterogeneous mass of unwilling conscripts, scarcely better than slaves, and are hardly surprised when they get thrashed by the freedom loving Greeks.

On the other hand, the Persians managed to project force very successfully over a wide area of the ancient world. They did get beaten by the Greeks, yes, but they ran a large a successful empire with a powerful army, and Greece was a bit of a sideshow most of the time. Concepts of state and nationality are different now than they were then. The troops may have been levies, but that does not necessarily mean that they were ipso facto of low morale or poor training. They would have been supplied by treaty or agreement with the rulers of the towns and provinces, probably equipped by them, and sent off to the great king’s army. Along the way they may well have got the hang of marching together, a bit of weapons training and, most importantly, generated some esprit de corps.

Just because the troops were not fighting for their king and country (at least directly) in our terms, that does not mean that they would automatically be of poor quality. After all, modern studies of fighting men suggest quite strongly that the principal cause they fight for is their mates in the squad. Modern armies spend quite a lot of time engendering loyalty to country and regiment. It is hard to imagine that a contingent from Sardis would not be out to prove themselves better men than those wets from Ephesus, or wherever.

So again, we need to be very careful when grading troops. ‘Levy’ does not mean ‘poor’ necessarily. Nor does ‘not Persian’ mean ‘not enthusiastic’. It might, if the territory from which the unit hailed had been recently captured, or had rebelled and been re-subjugated, but it is not necessarily the case.

Oh dear. This is getting rather complicated. Now, I seem to have argued myself into the position that, to rate troops, we need to know the history of the area they come from. And, of course, we probably won’t.

What do we Want from Rules?

2010-11-01T01:57:00.001-07:00

What do we want from a set of wargame rules?

This is a slightly more complicated question than appears at first sight. Initially, it is obvious that we require rules that enable us to push toy soldiers around a table and obtain certain outcomes which are satisfying in a variety of ways. These ways could be intellectually, narratively or historically predicated.

By this I mean that the outcome of a wargame has to be intellectually coherent, that is, victory does not arrive via illogical outcomes or Alien Space Bats intervening. The game has to be coherent as a ‘story’ (I use the term loosely); there has to be some thread connecting the events. And the outcome has to be believable historically; if the French routinely stomp the English at Agincourt then most of us would probably conclude that there was something wrong with the rules.

Wargame rules can be regarded as the interface between a fictive world – that of the game – and the real world, that in which the players move, roll dice and eat crisps. A player states that he will make a move in the real world – ‘I will move the Imperial Guard to Hougoumont’. This speech-act triggers activity in the rules layer – how are orders transmitted, how far can the Guard move in a turn, and so on. Then, in the fictive game world, the Imperial Guard moves forward. The rules turn real world speech-acts into fictive world activity.

In this model, the rules are the transparent interface between the players and the game ‘world’. They provide the means by which the real world decisions of the players are interpreted in the game world. Of course, the interface acts the other way, as well, in that the rules transmit the outcomes of interactions in the game world to the players. If two bases collide in the game world, then the activity of the players is moderated by the situation on the table. The game proceeds by a complex of real world speech-acts, rules level interpretation and game world ‘activity’.

So, on this view, we want rules to provide the real – game world interface as simply and cleanly as possible.

Unfortunately, this desire for simplicity contradicts the desire for historical accuracy. Somebody once said that command and control structures in real life armies were to enable commanders to do things, while in wargame rules they were to prevent players from doing too much. There is a degree of truth in this as the rules strive to force or persuade the players to act (in the fictive world, of course) in a manner that can reasonably be interpreted as ‘historical’.

This of course, is where complexity kicks in. If I’ve learnt nothing else from re-enactors, I’ve learnt that controlling large bodies of men on battlefields is not a simple thing. A few people can interact and copy each other fairly straightforwardly. Even a corps de ballet can by lots of training and a bit of practice, do things in unison. But 500 men on a noisy, frightening, dangerous battlefield is a different thing. The problem then is, of course, that our intuition says one thing about the actions and reactions of the unit, while the reality of a large body of men is different. And then, if you put that into a wargame rule set, it is easy to get accused of historical inaccuracy.

So, I submit that writing wargame rules is not a simple or obvious activity, but one which attempts to convert one set of complex human experience – a battle – into another – a wargame. Having tried to write a few sets myself, I think that we can be forgiven for getting it wrong more often than we get it right.

And then, of course, there is that fact that a few hundred or so equally intelligent and well read individuals around the world will go through the rules with a fine tooth comb and either complain about inaccuracy or find a way of weighting armies to squeeze maximum advantage out of the rules, in ways not envisaged by the writers.

This is, I think, what ultimately kills normal ancients rule sets. Someone finds that Inca, or Vietnamese or something similar, exploit the rules sufficiently to be almost unbeatable on the wargmes table. I seem to recall that Inca in one of the DBM incarnations was unbeatable simply because no one could kill the bases quickly enough to win, while their own side was worn down by sheer numbers and the odd lucky dice roll.

That is not, I think, wargaming, but rules exploitation, and it cannot be laid at the feet of the rule writer. But, usually, the writer does get the blame.

Sulla He Isn’t

2010-10-24T03:15:00.000-07:00

Just to prove that I do occasionally play wargames, not just pontificate about them, I present for your delectation a battle report; in fact, a playtest of the soon to be forthcoming Polemos: Imperial Rome set, Pontic vs. Republican Rome. I've even got some pictures, of dubious quality, but hopefully they will show the flow of the battle, even though they are hardly eye candy.

One afternoon some time in late summer in the 1st century BC, a Republican Roman army drew up in battle formation. To the extreme left were Moorish light cavalry, with cavalry to their right. Elements of an under strength legion formed the front rank of the centre, supported by their colleagues from the other legion behind. To the right came the main strength of the cavalry, Gaul’s finest.

Figure 1: The Roman Army from its right wing

The Pontic army, having arrived slightly later, formed up with light cavalry on its extreme right, followed by a mixed formation of stratiotas and bowmen. The pikes came next in a single line, supported on their left by skirmishers. Further left was the main force of Pontic cavalry, equal numbers of Greek horse and cataphracts. On the extreme left was more light horse.

Figure 2: Pontic Army from its left wing

The opening moves confirmed the two side’s battle plans. The Pontic aim was to strike with the left and then encircle the Roman foot while keeping the pike and soldateri out of trouble. The Roman aim was to hit the centre of the Pontic army with the legionaries while keeping the Pontic cavalry occupied.

The critical clash occurred on the Roman right, predictably, while the legions were still some way off contacting the Pontic foot. The cavalry action went totally the Pontic way; all the Gallic cavalry could do was flee.

Figure 3: The Clash on the Roman Right

Figure 3 shows the aftermath of the initial cavalry clash. Only one base of Gallic horse is still in action, while the Greeks and the cataphracts pursue the rest. In the foreground the Pontic light horse lurks. In the next bound it charged across the field and hit the surviving Roman cavalry in the flank, causing it too to disperse.

In the background, the legions are advancing and, further behind, the Roman left is moving forward to prevent the stratiotas from threatening the legion’s flank. The collapse of the Roman right meant, however, that the Roman left wing cavalry had to be transferred to prop up the right.

A slight lull in proceedings occurred as both sides reorganised. The Pontics rallied their victorious cavalry, while the rear line of legions about faced to counter the threat and the Roman left wing cavalry redeployed. The fatal clash occurred behind the Roman centre, as the rallied Pontic horse clashed with the Roman left wing cavalry.

Figure 4: The Clash Behind the Roman Centre

In this, too, the Pontic cavalry was successful, leading to the dispersal of the remaining Roman horse and, crucially, the incapacitation of the Roman general. The lack of command and control structure severely hampered the remaining Roman efforts, in spite of the fact that, remarkably, their morale held firm.

Figure 4 shows the cavalry clash in the foreground while, in the background, the Roman legion has nearly made contact with the phalanx. To the top left of the picture the stratiotas and bowmen can just be seen moving forward to threaten the legions, although their advance was slowed by the Moors.

The battle finished with the legion's attack on the phalanx which was uncoordinated and unsuccessful, a couple of legionary bases being lost and even the skirmishers holding against Rome’s finest. It had, the Roman commander considered, been that sort of a day.