General Problems

Inevitably, I suppose, I’ve run in to a major problem in writing rules for the classical period, by which I mean roughly speaking Greece from Marathon to the Successors. The problem is with generalship, and so I’m putting it here in the hope that someone can have a good idea to solve it. I’ve been reading a paper by Meissner (Journal of Military and Strategic Studies (2010) 13, 1, 4-27) and it has rather thrown the issue into stark relief.

Basically speaking, early Greek generals did not do very much. At Marathon in 490 BC there were ten generals and a Polemarch. So there was no central command, and the Athenian forces were commanded on a ‘tribal’ basis. This system itself only dated from 510 BC, and the generals, or ‘army commanders’ came along a bit later to supplement the polemarch (‘war leader’), which was an aristocratic post. Anyway, as you probably know, the strategoi were divided and Militades waited until it was his day in command to attack the Persians.

The invasion of Greece in 480 BC forced further changes. Cities entered into alliance, set up a council to debate decisions and had an overall commander, a Spartan on land and an Athenian by sea. The Greeks actually did not agree on strategy very closely – the Spartans preferring to defend the Isthmus of Corinth and the Athenians wanting to be further forward, largely because Athens would be undefended. After Salamis, in the winter of 480 – 479, this nearly broke the alliance.

Incidentally, Herodotus’ description of Thermopylae indicates that the Greeks varied their hoplite tactics, by introducing feigned retreats to draw the Persians on. Try finding that in any set of wargame rules on the period…

Anyway, control of the army was exerted directly by the Spartan general Leonidas. He, despite his own doubts and preferences, carried out the orders he had been given. There was no local council to decide on the battle – the strategic plan, of defending the pass, had been drawn up and Leonidas was to execute it. There was a supreme command and a council of war making the decisions, and no actual argument on the battlefield, a significant change from Marathon.

As the century evolved, so did command structures. In Athens the democratic government kept control over military operations by popular assembly and the personal accountability of post holding commanders. Accountability for the vast cost of military adventures was, in particular, kept by the assembly. The commanders of expeditions were given their orders and resources, although obviously, the local commanders in theatre were able to make some sorts of decisions. They could not, however, simply go somewhere else.

Obviously, this sort of control could occasionally go awry, particularly after the Peloponnesian war when mercenaries were attracted into Persian service. Xenophon gives an account of his adventures after the battle of Cunaxa, which sees to Ten Thousand reorganise itself (on a democratic basis) after the main commanders had been killed, and march to the Black Sea.

With Xenophon we arrive at a period when there started to be theorizing about warfare, strategy and tactics. Xenophon himself was at the fore of these developments, although his writings about them are mainly part of his attacks on the Sophists. Xenophon argues that the Sophists teach tactics, but not logistics or judgement, and certainly not strategy. Nevertheless, there was clearly a debate to be had, and we have now come a long way from Marathon in just one hundred years.

Alexander, of course, bought his own particular (and possibly peculiar) personality to the whole question of strategy and tactics. Due to his victories the world, and the requirements of the military situation, changed. While the campaigning was fairly straightforward and the aim of the battle was the destruction of the enemy army, the control of the general, Alexander himself, could be clear, direct and personal. It was part of the mystique of Alexander that he intervened at the critical point, when the battle was in the balance. In short, he did the hero thing.

When, however, Alexander was having problems in, for example, the Hundu Kush against, essentially, an insurgency, his charisma and control started to slip. The Macedonians had to operate in smaller groups under lesser commanders. Overall direction had to be decentralised; there were, simply insufficient Alexanders to go around. This lead to dissention in the high command and, ultimately, violence as Alexander felt he had to act against some of his commanders. Perhaps they really were plotting against him. Or maybe he was just getting paranoid.

Nevertheless, we now have a more or less complete change in the mode of command of an army. From a diverse group of ‘democratically’ elected representative, through a supreme command with a council, to a charismatic leader with a group of companions to a diffused anti-insurgency campaign, we see a major alteration in the method of command.

The problem is that all of these, if we are going to have a single set of rules to cover the period, have to be assimilated in one command system. It will not be good enough, I think, just to assume that Militades is simply an earlier version of Alexander. On the other hand, the other generals at Marathon may have had more influence than we think; who else ordered the Greek wings to turn in, after all, but the tribal generals?

I’m not sure I can really think of another period of history where the structure of command changed so radically in one ‘era’. Granted things did change during, for example, the English Civil War, but not quite so significantly, and Roman command structures remained pretty well as they were during the early Empire.

So, short of having something really complex, how can this be accommodated in a rule set? Or am I worrying to no sense?

Qualia in Wargaming

I seem to be slowly hitting a wall in understanding how wargames work. The problem goes something like this:

Firstly, wargames need to have something to do with history.

Secondly, historical accounts of battles are inadequate

Thirdly, even if historical accounts were adequate, Hume's problem about induction will still mean that we cannot predict what is going to happen in a given situation.

Finally, we seem to be forced back into a situation where a set of wargame rules rely on our a priori understanding of what might happen.

Now, here we hit another snag, I think, to do with our minds.

The thought experiment goes something like this:

Imagine someone who lives in a monochromatic world. All they see are black, white and various scales of grey. Suppose that they were a research scientist, and came across this fascinating concept of the colour red. They become very, very interested in red, and read about it extensively. They do experiments with red light, and measure the effects of it. In short, they become the world’s leading expert on the colour red.

But something is missing, something which you and I take for granted.

Suppose our research scientist opens a forbidden door and steps into our world. A welcoming committee is there, all wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with the words ‘This is RED’.

Our scientist will have now had an experience that she has never had before – seeing red. Even though she knew everything there was to know about the colour red, she had never, ever experienced it before. Something had been missing from her knowledge.

In technical terms, the thing that was missing is called a ‘qualia’. It denotes a certain quality that experience of something gives to a person. In the above example, the qualia are that of experiencing seeing the colour red. That, of course, is something we have all (or most of us, anyway) already experienced, and it is kind of hard to imagine not have done so. But, nevertheless, there is a distinct difference between knowing about something and having experienced it.

A similar sort of example might be some craft activities. Watching some of these historical farming programs, you come across people doing barrel making or basket weaving. Mostly, they work by eye, by touch, by feel, by hearing and even tasting. This cannot be measured, they argue, you need to be apprenticed to it, to learn the craft over many years. There are qualia here.

You see this lack of understanding of qualia a fair bit in historiography. Academic historians do a good line in pontificating as to how, for example, English Civil War armies formed up. There is a certain amount of historical evidence for this, in terms of manuals, sketches of deployment, and descriptions of the armies just before battles and so on. A good description can be written, and often is.

However, what is lacking is a degree of experience. How, precisely, do 600 pikemen form up into a block? How do the commanders prevent them from falling into disorder? These are not, particularly, questions that can be easily answered from the sources. There is some sort of answer, of course, in terms of sections of block, and files and so on. But there is no understanding as to why this is so.

The answer is, of course, to try it out. The re-enactment societies do this, and it turns out that the structure within the pike block allows it to function without falling into disorder. File leaders and file closers become important men. NCOs are given their proper place in the overall scheme of commanding and ordering the troops. And so on.

Again, there are qualia between reading about the formation and trying it out. In this case, the re-enactors have a point. Only by doing, trying to recreate what happened, can you understand why it happened. The qualia come to the fore.

Now, as wargamers we are, of course, not just interested in how armies deployed, but how they fought. And here, not even re-enactors can help. Despite the sometimes significant rivalry between the different re-enactor sides, when they come into ‘combat’, no one is really trying to kill them. It is, as has been described to me, ‘cream puffs at five paces’.

And yet, surely, here is a qualia set. How does it feel to be encased in armour with an eighteen foot pike in your hand, surrounded by comrades and with someone, somewhere, trying to kill you?

We cannot know. There is a qualia gap too great for us to cross.

Now, perhaps we can gain some understanding from recent combat experiences that too many people have. And, indeed, reading their memoirs or talking to them may help in terms of what it is like to have someone trying to kill you because of the uniform you wear.

But that is not what it was like in the seventeenth century. Again, we have closed the qualia gap a bit, but not by enough to know very much more than where we started from.

Overall, then, there seems to be little we are able to do to close what I have termed the qualia gap. We are forced back on that most difficult thing of the entire human mind to use, our reason.

As I’ve noted before, we can have some reasonable expectation of outcomes from particular combat contexts. We can expect a given range of results from, say, two musket armed units coming to combat. We have a range of possible outcomes, which, if we want to posh it up a bit, we can call a manifold of possibilities.

Unfortunately, as I’ve also noted before, it is very difficult to assign probabilities to these outcomes, even relatively. We do not really have a statistically significant sample size, to start off with, nor do we have repeated experiments. All we can do is assign some sort of reasonable looking probability, based on what we can achieve, usually with a couple of six sided dice.

One of the truisms of wargaming seems to be, therefore, that a lot of it depends on the properties of six sided dice.

Writing Rules

Writing wargame rules is, when you come to think of it, a very odd pastime indeed. On the one hand you steep yourself in the historical evidence, whatever that may be, or at least read a popular book or two on the subject, and on the other you try to reduce what you have read to a single set of cogent guidelines for reproducing it on a table top with toy soldiers.

It is little wonder that it is a more difficult task than may immediately strike the consciousness. On the other hand, the fact that it looks easier than it is is probably a good thing, or no-one would embark on such an undertaking, and we would not have the variety of rule sets that now exist.

Rule writing does, however, possess a deep problem which is, I think, insurmountable. As a human race, we like to detect patterns. If something happened this way in one instance, and then another, we predict, often accurately, that it will happen thus in a third.

This, for those of a philosophical turn of mind, is nothing but the problem of induction, as outlined by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.

The problem, Hume argues, is this: The sun has come up on every day of my life so far, and, therefore, I expect the sun to come up tomorrow.

How can I justify this belief? Well, Hume says, I cannot. Just because the event has happened every day of my experience so far, it does not mean it will happen again. There is no proof that it will happen the same tomorrow, absolutely none.

Now Hume was no fool, and he recognised that induction is something which we use every day, many times a day. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if induction did not work? If, every time you turned the wheel of your car left you were uncertain whether the car would turn left or right?

Whatever its faults, induction does work, which is probably just as well. However, Hume’s point remains, that we cannot justify the use of it. This has been, and still is, a problem for the philosophy of science, because science relies on induction to work.

In science, we make an observation of A, and we observe that associated with A is always a B. We make a sizeable set of observations, and every time we see an A, we see a B too. And so we declare a law of nature – if you see an A, a B is there as well. And so science progresses.

However, if you look closely at the structure of that argument, you should see Hume’s problem. Actually, we have proved nothing, except that there is a certain, probably (or hopefully) rather high, probability of seeing a B if you see an A. Without getting into complexities, we are relying on something called Bayesian probabilities, which allows us to use induction to get the best explanation, and accounts for increasing amounts of evidence improving the odds that our explanation is right.

So, what has this got to do with writing wargame rules?

Well, we are in a far worse situation with wargame rules and historical accounts than scientists are with induction. A scientist can always go and repeat the experiment, while we, as wargamers, cannot.

What we are left with is a series of contingent events and no way of working out how likely they are to be repeated in a similar situation. Given that each historical event has its own context, even if we had sufficient data to directly compare events, we would still be struggling because the contingent contexts are different.

Now, history is all right on the battlefield. What I mean is that no-one bothers to calculate the probability of this volley of musket fire turning out all right. They just shout ‘fire’ and hope it goes well. If, by some low probability event, all the musket balls strike home and disable an opponent, the commanders are not going to stop and explain how remarkable it was. They are simply going to shout ‘charge’.

The problem for us as wargame rule writers is that these probabilities are important to us. A set of wargame rules is exactly a means of writing some laws to govern these contingent outcomes. We are relying on induction to say something along the lines of ‘a unit of fresh musketeers shooting at a unit of militia will, on average, have X result’, and we then adjust the average by a random factor to make life a little uncertain.

The problem is, of course, Hume’s. We have no justification for doing this and, indeed, cannot. The empirical evidence is simply not there. On how many occasions did a unit of musketeers fire on one of militia under equal, controlled circumstances and recorded the outcome? I’ve not done an archive search, but at a rough guess I’d say, with, I think a reasonably high chance of being right, precisely none.

Thus, we have a major problem in rule writing. We cannot know the probabilities, and so we cannot base rules on empirical evidence. We can only work with what we have and hope that our mechanics give some sort of acceptable result.

In short, in writing wargame rules, we have to have some a priori concept of what we are about and what the probabilities of the outcomes should be, even if these are not explicit in our thinking. We expect, rationally, even logically, that a trained unit of professionals should, all other things being equal (and there is the catch), defeat a unit of hastily raised militia.

But the point is that this is something which we apply to the world, an expectation drawn from how the world works, in general. Providing specific evidence for it is hard, even impossible, so ultimately we cannot base our rules on empirical evidence.

And even if we do manage some evidence, Hume’s argument about induction still bites us.

On Logistics

There is an old aphorism that states, in terms of military activity, that amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. Given the great deal of difficulty which modern armies experience in getting into and out of theatres of war, this does seem to be true. The logistical tail of even a relatively small combat force is, in modern armies, huge.

This, of course, has a major knock on effect, in terms of speed of deployment, supply lines and security. One of the aspects of the modern campaigns in Afghanistan are the vulnerability of the supply lines from outside the country to the borders, and also, naturally, within the country itself. One of the factors, I think, in persuading the Russians to quit was the difficulty of resupply and the frequency of convoy ambush.

This is not a modern phenomenon, as I’m sure you know. The French had significant difficulty in Spain. Wellington could shut himself up behind practically impregnable defences, supported by command of the sea, and simply wait for the French armies to run out of supplies and, therefore, be forced to retreat. And that doesn’t say anything about the painful fiasco Napoleon engineered in Russia.

Now, on a tiny scale, I do some vegetable growing. The idea is to get some fresh air during the summer (rather to sit here looking at the garden). One of the things I’ve noticed has been how much effort is required to produce even a small crop. What I produce is by no means sufficient to supply a person even for a week, and that is with modern amenities such as slug repellent and finely honed composts.

I concede that there are probably economies of scale, so if I planted a whole field of, say, cabbages, and looked after them properly (i.e. stopped the slugs before they started), then, at the end of the season, I would probably have a large-ish number of cabbages, possibly enough to feed a company for a week, if they like cabbage soup.

Even modern, peace time, logistic chains can break down, though. There was a recent story on the BBC News site about a tarragon crisis. Apparently, you cannot buy tarragon in UK supermarkets at the moment, because the foreign (I think Spanish) growers have had a bad season, and British supplies have not kicked in yet. Indeed, I’m sitting next to a pot of tarragon seedlings as I type.

All this has set me thinking a bit more about generalship and logistics. An army of, say, ten to fifteen thousand men must consume a fantastic amount of food, let alone anything else. The Persian army invading Greece before Plataea is, after all, reported by Herodotus to have drunk several rivers dry. That may be hyperbole, but the pressure on resources that such a force, even if it were ‘only’ twenty thousand strong, would place on those parts where it passed would be massive.

I seem to recall reading an argument that, towards the end of the Thirty Years Was in Germany, the armies became much lighter, and more cavalry and musketeer focussed. It was claimed that this was because the lands being fought over were so devastated that only lighter, faster moving and smaller armies could survive. Mind you, some also argued that this was because of a shift in tactics, so the claim is not so clear cut.

In the English Civil war there was also a trend towards cavalry dominated armies, at least on the Royalist side. This does not seem to have been strictly tactical, but more to do with the fact that infantry are expensive and became difficult to recruit, while cavalry are much easier to retain. While the Parliamentary side had slightly less trouble with this, examination suggests that their logistics were very much centred on some major civilian contractors in London. Without the financial clout of the city, and the control of the sea, the Parliamentary cause would have struggled much more. Mind you, given those facts, you have to be quite impressed that the King lasted as long as he did.

What effects does this have on our wargaming?

It has to be admitted that the usual reply is ‘not much’. The battle is the thing; we are, after all, amateurs, and the thing is that logistics is dull as ditchwater. But it need not be; I’ve referred before to a very simple system of controlling reinforcements which led to some surprisingly realistic results. I’m sure I recall that there are some rules out there for logistics, although mostly they are not used. Even the incorporation of supply lines, with suitable penalties for having them cut would increase our sensitivity to the problem, if not solve it.

Obviously, some people will complain at that and argue ‘the game is the thing’, and to some extent that is the case. But to focus on the battle and tactics alone is to miss out on a large chunk of the constraints and concomitant opportunities which did present themselves to the original generals. Attention to the state of supply of the armies could determine the course of the battle and explain some of the tactical and strategic factors.

For example, the battle of Plataea happened because the Persian cavalry got between the Greeks and their water supply. On a grander scale, the Ottomans were besieging Vienna because they had a series of logistical bases all the way back to Constantinople. They were there because they could be, while the Austrians did not have such a logistical base. Similarly, the Holy Roman Emperor hung on against Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War because Wallenstein had a massive logistic support and distribution base behind him. Wallenstein was not a particularly brilliant general, but a large army, well fed, has a quality all of its own.

Finally, consider this. We tend to rate generals as good or bad by their battlefield performance. I’ve noted before that generals do not make many decisions actually on the battlefield. The true measure of success of a general is, therefore, their ability to get an army to the field of battle in a reasonable condition to fight at all. Maybe all generals who fought battles should therefore be rated as good.

Who Knows?

It was noted after a post a few weeks ago about reserves that a major problem with wargames is that the wargamer knows more than the general on the ground would have done, and hence takes fewer unnecessary precautions, such as keeping a reserve to cover the unexpected.

I know that some wargame rules do allow for flank marches, to place that uncertainty in the player’s mind. DBM was one such rule set (I think DBA does it too), but the fact that part of the enemy army was on a flank march was fairly obvious (or blindingly obvious to an experienced player) and, given the interaction of the flank march rules with the terrain rules, most players could work out where the flank march was likely to arrive and take appropriate precautions.

One of the contributory factors to this problem is that we, as wargamers, have come to expect “balanced” games. Most wargames, so far as I can tell, are between equal points ‘matched’ army, which is supposed to give either side a fighting chance of winning. This is in keeping with good traditions of playing fairly and so on. I think I’ve banged on about that in a previous post, too.

The problem is, of course, that real war does not proceed on the basis of fairness, nor could most commanders look at the enemy’s deployment and say ‘one third of that army is on a flank march’. The brighter might suspect that something was afoot when the enemy accepted battle while being obviously weakened, but some might view it as a wonderful opportunity and get stuck in.

So the question arises: what can we do about this?

From a philosophical point of view, this is a problem of epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Somehow, in order to model the real decisions of the generals, we have to evolve a system to place real uncertainty in the wargamer’s mind. The wargamer must not be able to ‘know’, in the sense of working out from rules and army lists what is going on.

Of course, the standard way of handling this is to say ‘run a campaign’. There, wargamers can accept battle if weakened and hope that the reinforcements making forced marches can make it before the holding force is defeated. Additionally, it does encourage the keeping of reserves and discourage attempts to win at all costs or hold out beyond defeat. If there is another battle to fight another day, then keeping troops intact, even if you have been defeated, is a good idea in a way which is not necessarily the case in a one off battle.

Another effect of a well-run campaign is that the emphasis is placed much more heavily on scouting and reconnaissance. Light horse, dragoons, armoured cars or whatever become much more important. Without them the wargamer is blind. It is amazing to see how cautious movement becomes when you do not know where the enemy actually is.

As Don Featherstone remarks in Solo Wargaming, what you also get are battles between scouting parties. These can be resolved in an abstract manner (one proposal included 3 cavalry figures a side and a chess board) or a full wargame can be set up, switching figure scales and using every cavalry figure you can muster (purists may wince at this point).

I have tried this, and it really does work (and all cavalry battles have a flavour of their own), but it does slow down the progress of the campaign and, often there is no major objective to the action as it is very unlikely that one side will so totally defeat the other that no information is taken back to the army of the defeated side.

An alternative approach is to use a somewhat abstract method, and I’ve tried to do that in the Polemos rules that I’ve been involved with. I confess that this is not original, being based on a boardgame of the English Civil War that I had years ago. I’m not sure it was a very good simulation of the ECW; the winning general tended to build a huge stack of units that could simply pulverise anything in its path. As England was divided into areas, there was no stacking limit, but I suspect that armies of that size would simply have starved. But I digress.

When armies encountered each other in one of the zones, they could both accept battle, or one, or the other, or both could attempt to refuse it. If both refused then there was a one in six chance of them bumping into each other anyway. If one attempted to refuse battle, then the cavalry forces of each side were matched, with a random dice roll, and the winner could choose to fight or not.

Now, obviously, in a table top wargame situation, both sides are going to accept battle, or there would be no wargame, but if we can manage to move away from equal points armies with known components, then we can start creating uncertainty in the minds of the players by giving definite but incorrect information which is known to be incorrect. Of course, this might rely on the services of an umpire, but they would only be needed at the start of the game.

So instead of saying ‘this is a 350 point army’, we can say:

“Scouts report 5 or 6 regiments of foot, two of cavalry and three guns” and also “Spies report that 4 regiments of foot and one cavalry regiment were bivouacked in the town overnight”

Both of course could be right, but how many cavalry units are there. If only one appears on the other side, is there another one? What about the foot? If 4 appear, where are the other two, if they exist?

This is, perhaps, a modest attempt to sow some seeds of uncertainty, but it is surely better than thinking ‘there is one 150 point command missing from that army, and it must be flank marching to the left because the right is an impassable waterway.’

Ancient Literacy

For reasons unconnected with wargaming, I have just been reading a book on the archaeology of first century Palestine (OK, I was sent it to review). One of the issues raised there was about literacy in the ancient world, and how widespread it was. It struck me that this was actually quite an interesting question for wargame reasons, and so I thought I’d explore it.

The initial question is, of course, why it should be interesting?

If we consider giving orders to units, then there are two transmission routes, of course. Firstly, there is the oral route, the general giving an aide some orders and that person galloping off to transmit them to the unit commander.

Clearly, there are some problems here. Firstly, the aide might not make it to the unit or the commander; battlefields are dangerous places, after all. Secondly, it is possible that the aide could get their transmission of the orders wrong, and finally the unit commander may misinterpret them, or, possibly worse, try to implement them against a changed context. Add to this, of course, the possibility that the aide could interpret the rules to suit their own views. From a later age one is put in mind of Captain Nolan at the Battle of Balaclava, waving his sword and shouting ‘There, My Lord, enemy, there are your guns’, contributing in no small way to the debacle of the charge of the Light Brigade.

Written orders do not remove all of these problems, of course. Nolan, after all, had delivered written orders, but they were ambiguous. In general, though written orders would reduce the ability to be creative with the general’s instructions. On the down side, they would also be useful to the enemy if intercepted and read, and they can still get lost.

More broadly, an operation like the Roman army relied on written orders and accounts. The Vindolanda texts are, in general, muster, accounts and instructions, with a few extra bits thrown in like invitations to birthday parties. It is also suggested that the Roman army was responsible for the spread of Latin literacy, at least in the early empire. A soldier might enter the army as a raw barbarian, twenty years later he would leave a Roman citizen. During that time he would have needed to speak and to read Latin. He would also have been numerate, and have a wide variety of trade skills.

Estimates of overall literacy in the ancient world vary. A common number bandied around is 5 – 10 %, the majority of which would have been men. It is true, however, that it is very unclear what the number would have been, and it varied between different areas, social groups and ethnicities.

For example, the Celts, before conquest by the Romans, had little in terms of written culture. The priestly Druids did use Greek script, but most knowledge was passed on orally, which is partly why there is such a rich cultural inheritance of Celtic poetry. Poetry, with repetition and vivid imagery, in relatively easy to recall, and, also, the knowledge transmitted can be anticipated, to some extent, by the hearer.

Alternatively, within the Jewish community, literacy was probably relatively high. The Hebrew scriptures were already written sources and so, probably, a considerable fraction of the male population of Palestine was in some form literate. Given that the Hebrew texts were translated into Greek, presumably for the benefit of Jews living outside Palestine, we can assume a reasonably high level of literacy amongst this section of the community.

More generally, there was probably some degree of literacy amongst the middle class sorts of people. For example, it must have been very hard to run a shop or other sort of business without at least a modicum of literacy and numeracy. Even at the simple level of a market trader, literacy, at least at a low level, must have been the norm, as amphora contents were described by labels on the neck. There is no point in selling an amphora of olive oil thinking it is wine, after all.

With the spread of the Roman bureaucracy, of course, literacy and numeracy must have spread also. The Oxyrhynchus documents are a vast dump of mainly papyrus papers, estimated at half a million documents at the very least. This is just one part of the archive of just one city in Roman Egypt. Other cities, particularly at Alexandria had, of course, whole libraries which, presumably, were not just there for show. Literacy, at least among the non-labouring classes, may have been more widespread than we might think.

Earlier than the Roman Empire, of course, we have the world of the Greeks. Here, again, there is some evidence of literacy. It is hard to imagine the democracies of some of the Greek cities thriving without some sort of literacy amongst the citizens, and one or two made provision for elementary education. We shouldn’t get carried away by the idea of mass literacy in the modern, industrial, sense, however. Most people who could read were probably what we might call ‘craft literate’, that is they could manage to read what they needed, but were not engaged in reading beyond that.

So what effect does this have on us as wargamers?

In a campaign game, you might want to add ‘literacy’ to the characteristics of officers. I’ve mentioned before the friction that is needed to be modelled to represent the time delay between receiving and executing orders, and this could be one of them. The office sending the orders, and the one receiving them, could both be forced to roll against their literacy skill and failure would mean either the orders are ambiguous or contradictory or are not properly understood. Chaos and confusion could then ensue.

It might be a little more difficult to implement literacy rolls during an actual battle when, presumably, more orders will be given orally, but even so, some sort of roll for clear transmission could be made, and, of course, this applies to later eras as well, as Captain Nolan found to his cost.

Complexity

Well, once again I have been lurking on the MiniaturesRulesDesign Yahoo! Group as an interesting discussion has developed, this time about wargames, rules, and complex adaptive systems.

Now, I’m no expert on the latter, but they do sound interesting. The idea seems to be that, for example, an army is not just a system of automata, responding in given ways to given stimuli, but a complex system of units and individuals that can adapt to a changing environment. A similar sort of view can exist of other systems, be they governments, organisations, industrial firms or whatever.

A further idea within the complex adaptive system view seems to be something along the lines of non-linear feedback. A given stimulus can have a range of results, and how that range of results and the specific outcome is determined is somewhat obscure to us (in fact, it could be entirely closed to everyone).

I suppose that an example of this is in the classic Horse and Musket era exchange of musketry, which could have outcomes ranging from no casualties but both sides running away, to massive casualties on one side but the other side running away, to both sides standing shooting each other to bits.

Put like that, the problems with this approach start to become clearer. Firstly, how do you determine the range of outcomes? In a clear sense they are context driven: the possible range of outcomes from an exchange of musketry is determinable, both by ‘common sense’ and also by looking at historical precedents, but this range is, obviously, not the same as the range of outcomes for, say, a cavalry clash, or artillery bombardment or even an infantry charge.

The second problem is, of course, how do we decide on the probabilities of each outcome? Assuming that the outcomes are clearly distinguishable from each other, we need to know the probability of outcome A (say, both sides running for it with minimal casualties) against outcome B (say, few casualties and both sides standing for another go). Given the environmental factors that go into this sort of calculation it is very hard to see that we could, in a reasonable time, determine them in any other way than a simple guess.

There is yet another problem, which is contained within the expression ‘non-linear’. We, as human beings, like linear systems. They are comfortable, they are predictable and we can weigh the outcomes. Non-linear systems are not; a slight change in the input can produce wildly differing outcomes. So far as our preconceptions go, they are unpredictable. This sort of process is often called ‘chaos’, although a better term in deterministic chaos’.

It is a well-known, but somewhat surprising fact, that even linear systems can exhibit chaotic behaviour. The driving equations do not need to be themselves badly behaved to lead to unpredictable outcomes. A quick Google on the terms ‘deterministic chaos’ will give you any number of sites which will explain the mathematics and physics of the systems, and also display pretty pictures of fractal systems (which many chaotic systems give rise to). These were all the rage as T-shirt designs a few years ago as mathematicians and physicists thought it made them look cool.

Anyway, to get back to the wargaming discussion, it was posited that we need non-linear systems in order to show the complex adaptive systems behaviour of armies in combat. Wargame rules, it was pointed out, are usually linear. Our units take a few casualties and are degraded in performance; they take a few more and get less effective, and so on, until they collapse. Even adding a bit of a random factor does not detract from the essential linear nature of the rules. Whoever argued this (and I do not recall who it was, but they did seem to know what they were talking about in terms of complex systems), also argued that we need complex adaptive rules to simulate the complex adaptive behaviour.

It is about here that I, and some other parted company from the idea. I think others did because, short of running lengthy computer simulations of our wargames, we are never going to manage to write, still less play, such a game. I think this is true, but that is not my principle problem; possibly it is because of my physics background, but I do not think we need non-linearity to get chaos.

For example, the logistic map is a nice, linear equation, which looks something like this:

X[n+1] = KX[n](1-X[n])

The X here is the variable we are interested in (classically, it is a population of moths), the n is the iteration, and K is a numerical factor between 0 and 4. For K between 0 and 1, the solution falls to zero and stays there. For k between 1 and 3, the solution converges to a stable number.

So far, so linear.

But for K>3, some interesting things start to happen. Firstly, the solution bifurcates, that is, you get two solutions and the system settles for one of them, but you cannot tell by looking at the initial conditions which one it will go for. As you increase K, the bifurcated solutions bifurcate, and then do it again and again until the whole phase space of the solution is filled with possible solutions, but you cannot tell which one you will land up in. you can see the effect on the Wikipaedia article for the logistic map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map

You might think that that is complex enough, but it is just a start with deterministic chaos.

The point is that even a nicely behaved linear (OK, quadratic, but we can actually cope with that) and deterministic system can show unpredictable behaviour. I suppose that it is possible that a full complex adaptive system to battle simulation (I think you would no longer be playing a wargame) might give you some interesting insights into what might have happened, but I suspect that it might be easier, and more fun, to include something which, in effect, gives bifurcations of outcomes to given stimuli.