I wrote last time about
perturbation theory. This sort of things occasionally gets one smirked at, as
being a pretentious wargaming geek with no friends and no life at all. Well,
possibly. But that is not going to stop me.
Anyway, perturbation theory, as
applied to wargame rules, has an assumption underlying it. This assumption is
that things deteriorate slowly for a unit in a battle. It arrives at the battle
all smart and shiny. Stuff happens to it. The unit takes casualties, comes
under sustained fire, has a few frights and gets into combat and so on. The idea
of perturbation theory is that these are relatively minor items, any one of
which the unit will survive as a fighting force. The combination, or
accumulation, of negatives, however, slowly undermines the unit and its ability
to fight coherently.
This sort of model underlies, I
think, many wargame rules. When I started, it was all the rage to have a
defined man to figure ratio, usually of 20:1, and to calculate casualties in “real”,
so for each twenty casualties a figure was removed. I always found this a bit
fiddly, and also a little illogical, as a unit with nineteen casualties would
fight as effectively as one with none. I
also came to a bit of a halt when some rules required that you calculated the
number of casualties per figure to see if some extra factors were required to
be included. Surely, I though (and still think, if I ever do think about it)
that we can either have a figure removal, or calculate the number of casualties
per figure. Doing both seems a bit incoherent.
Further reading around military history
has led me to think that the model adopted, of casualties calculated, is, in
fact, wildly incorrect. Early rules had a tendency to permit units to fight on
until they are reduced by fifty per cent (or so) in strength. History shows
that units became ineffective at levels much below that.
For example, Charles Cartlon, in ‘Going
to the Wars’ (I think, it is not on my shelf) argues that casualties in English
Civil War battles were low. The scepticism often shown towards the casualty
counts from ECW battles is incorrect. Montrose really could win a battle with
the loss of only a handful of men, while his opponents could lose hundreds.
This is because most of the casualties were inflicted during the pursuit phase.
Similarly, in Greek hoplite
battles, the winning side had a casualty rate of around five per cent, while
the losers clocked up about fifteen per cent. Again, the difference would seem
to be that the losers ran away, which was a fairly dangerous thing to do.
Actually, it would seem to be fairly dangerous in all circumstances, most
particularly if you are an infantryman and the opposition has cavalry who can
pursue. Even so, the psychological trauma of battle, plus the exhaustion of
having fought and then run away makes anyone on the losing side leaving a
battle vulnerable even to unarmed non-combatants. Carlton relates a story of a
router killed by a milkmaid with her bucket as he fled.
So, the original ‘casualty count’
model seems to be incorrect, historically. We can argue, of course, that
counting casualties is simply doing accountancy for loss of cohesion, and to an
extent we would be entirely justified and correct in that. On the other hand,
however, we could also argue that if we are using ‘men’ simply as an
accountancy term, we should use some other word that does not make us think of
people being blown apart, maimed or otherwise traumatized. And even then, we
should stop removing figures.
The other point is that this
model, based on a perturbation approach, does not really account for the sudden
crisis that causes units to really run away, or at least, render them
ineffective, either permanently or temporarily. To some extent the clue is in
the rule I have just criticised. The number of casualties per figure in the
unit is a way of assessing the impact of a sudden trauma.
More modern rules do not make use
of counting casualties, on the whole. The argument is that the counting method
gave wargame commanders far too much information about the state of their
units. This, coupled I suspect with the idea that not that many casualties are,
in fact, inflicted during the battle part of the battle, has led to a move away
from such systems and into looking at the unit as a whole. It might be
advancing, halted without orders, falling back or running away. The unit is
viewed in terms of its current activity, rather than the precise status of its
internal functioning.
What, then, changes the status of
the unit if it is not some sort of wearing down pattern based on perturbation
theory? I think the answer is in the ‘crisis’ model. The key here is that a
wargame unit only does something when provoked by a crisis. For different
units, of course, different things cause a crisis. An elite guards unit is
unlikely to be particularly perturbed by an inaccurate long range bombardment,
while a levy unit might just take the opportunity to ‘go as see their friends’,
as the Earl of Essex so delicately put it. But now, in such rule sets as the De Bellis…
series and even, I suspect, Piquet, the underlying model is of a sudden crisis
which causes the unit to respond, sometimes positively (by winning a combat,
for example), sometimes negatively, by running away.
The fact is, I suppose, that both
models are required by a wargame. Certainly, some units get worn down by
ongoing minor combat. Some units, say, get hit in the flank and disintegrate.
Perhaps, in some of the rules, the focus is too much on one sort of underlying
model. There is, for example, no unit attrition in the DB* series of rules. A
unit can fight, flee and return to combat in the same condition. On the other
hand, the perturbation model can make us accountants, not wargamers.
