Quotulatiousness

November 14, 2011

New wargame “ripped from the headlines”

Filed under: Gaming, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Clash of Arms games is releasing a new wargame based on a possible Israeli airstrike against Iranian nuclear facilities:

Speculation regarding a possible Israeli air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities has been rife for years — a pair of MIT students wrote an analysis on the subject back in 2007, and countless articles have appeared before then and since. Now, however, it’s possible to do more than simply talk about such a battle: should you wish to, you can set aside the Monopoly or the chess set in favour of a rousing boardgame pitting one player as Iran against another as Israel, with preservation or destruction of Tehran’s nuclear capability as the prize.

The game is called — perhaps inevitably — Persian Incursion, and is the brainchild of technothriller writer Larry Bond, formerly well known as a designer of tactical combat games (Bond has collaborated with Tom Clancy, and it’s said that his games were used extensively in development of such seminal Cold War works as The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising).

The CoA webpage for Persian Incursion is here.

July 18, 2011

Soviet tank battles

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

I just picked up a copy of The Battle of Kursk by David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, based on a recommendation by Jim Dunnigan in his World War II Bookshelf. While any attempt to pick the top books about the Second World War is doomed to perpetual nit-picking by second-guessers and Monday Morning Quarterbacks, I’ve generally found the works he recommended to be worth reading.

Although I’ve read much about World War II, I haven’t read much about arguably the most critical part of the entire war: the gargantuan battles pitting the Soviet Red Army against Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Some of that is just sheer pig-headedness: I used to work for the biggest wargame store in Toronto, back when wargames meant cardboard counters, vast paper hexagonal maps, and charts and tables galore. The hardest of the hard-core gamers seemed to be either Napoleonic grognards (down to the secret stash of sabres and shakos in the gaming room) or even more dedicated junkies of the “Great Patriotic War”/”Operation Barbarossa”. Some of the latter were genuinely crazy, right down to the barely contained hints that “Hitler was just misunderstood”.

On the assumption that certain forms of craziness are contagious, I avoided most of the latter as much as I could, consistent with my duty to sell them the latest and greatest game involving their particular passion.

One day, perhaps in a fit of weakness, I allowed myself to get lectured by one of the fanatics about the details of the Battle of Kursk. The fan who felt the need to bend my ear was eager to impart information about some “famous battle” that turned out to have been a serious tactical miscalculation by a Soviet officer. The story, as he told it, had a very large formation of Soviet tanks “taking a shortcut” through a major minefield, resulting in many disabled/destroyed tanks and wounded or dead men. In the telling, this kind of thing could not be admitted as having happened without some enemy contact, so it was propagandized as being a major tank battle involving significant formations of German panzer troops and/or SS units (of whom, of course, the glorious defenders of the Motherland took a greater toll than they suffered themselves).

I’d heard a couple of variations of this story by this point, but none of them could name the general who led the formation, the location of the event, or the “battle” that was supposedly re-written for propaganda purposes.

Does this story ring a bell for anyone? I’d imagine if it had really happened in a way close to the way it was told to me, it would have been documented in great detail (especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, in that brief period that both the Soviet and the Nazi records were available to western researchers without direct censorship).

April 19, 2011

Another commercial wargame used for professional training

Filed under: Gaming, Military, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Back in 2005, I posted some information about a software package in use by the USMC called Tacops, which was a single-developer wargame that provided very high training value. The unusual thing was that the military was willing to adopt a commercial wargame for their own training, over internally developed simulations. They seem to have gotten over that inhibition, as Steel Beasts, another single developer wargame, is seeing similar use today:

It was a decade ago that tank crews the world over became aware of a computer tank simulator, Steel Beasts, that was different. Steel Beasts was created by a single programmer, but with input from several professional tank troops. The graphics weren’t the greatest, but it was very accurate, so much so that the professionals were starting to use it as a training device. The publisher and creator of Steel Beasts seized the opportunity, and by 2006 there was a version for military use (Steel Beasts Professional) only that allowed for the use of a LAN, an instructor watching over how all the players were doing, scenario and terrain building and AAR (after action report) functions so that everything that happened in a game was captured. This allowed the instructor to point out errors, and what should have been done.

So far, ten countries (Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Chile, Canada, Australia, Spain and the U.S.) have bought Steel Beast Professional (at $125 a copy) for training their armor vehicle crews. The troops find the vehicle controls, and tactical situations to be realistic, and compelling. The game really gets the pucker factor going, and even before the pro version came along, troops were buying the commercial version and playing it for the professional, and entertainment, value.

April 7, 2011

Unmanned sub hunter

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Lewis Page looks at the Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV):

No doubt regular readers will recall the US military’s cunning plan to develop unmanned submarine-hunting robotic frigates — warships which would prowl the oceans like automated Mary Celestes, remorselessly tracking enemy submarines regardless of how their pale, sweaty, malodorous captains might twist and turn.

The Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) project is intended to produce “an X-ship founded on the assumption that no person steps aboard at any point in its operating cycle”. The uncrewed frigate would have enough range and endurance for “global, months long deployments with no underway human maintenance”, being able to cross oceans and fight its battles largely without any human input — communications back to base would be “intermittent”, according to DARPA.

As you might imagine, there are lots of potential issues to sending an armed, unmanned ship out into the ocean, including how to handle interactions with other users of the sea lanes. It’d be worse than embarassing to the US Navy to have one of their fancy new ACTUV vessels get tangled up in a fishing net or get caught in the middle of a regatta.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it has been decided that the best way to hammer out a set of tactics for ACTUVs is to develop a game-style simulation pitting ACTUV against submarine and get people to play it — so crowdsourcing the methods and tactical principles that will then be coded into the robo-frigates’ AIs.

The new game — from which these visuals are drawn — is called ACTUV Tactics. The game engine is used in various military sims and in the Dangerous Waters commercial release of 2005. [. . .]. In it, a player tries to find and track an enemy submarine while avoiding collisions with commercial vessels and the like. Various different proposed models of ACTUV robo-frigate are available: Gator, Remora, Seahorse, Shark and Triton.

September 27, 2010

Uh-oh. Eric’s been drinking the Eurogame Kool-Aid

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:08

If you’re not a gamer, you can safely ignore this posting.

Still here? Good. Here’s Eric S. Raymond losing his religion:

I’m what people in the strategy-gaming hobby call a grognard. The word is literally French for “grumbler”, historically used for Napoleonist diehards who never reconciled themselves to the fall of L’Empereur even after 1815, and nowadays refers to guys who cut their teeth on the classic, old-school hex-grid wargames of the 1970s.

As a grognard, I’m expected to grumble dyspeptically about the superiority of the huge, heavy, elaborately simulationist two-player wargames we used to play back in the day, and bemoan how fluffy and social the modern wave of multiplayer Eurogames are. Sure, they’ve got four-color printing and unit counters you don’t have to use tweezers to pick up, but where are my pages and pages of combat resolution tables? Where are my hairsplitting distinctions between different types of self-propelled assault gun? O tempora! O mores!

But you know what? Times change, and game designers have actually learned a few things in the last forty years. In this essay I’m going to revisit two games I’ve reviewed previously (Commands and Colors: Ancients and Memoir ‘44) and take a closer look at two others: War Galley, and Conflict of Heroes. These games exemplify how very much things have changed, and how little point there really is in pining for the old-school games any more. Yes, I may forfeit my old-fart credentials by saying it, but … I think the golden age of wargaming is now.

August 30, 2010

Charles S. Roberts, RIP

Filed under: Gaming, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:04

The Armorer passed on some sad news today:

Charles S. Roberts, one of my enduring heroes, has passed. The company he founded, Avalon Hill, and the products it produced, awoke a part of me that still earns me gainful employment to this day. I may have to go downstairs and break out Afrika Corps, or Gettysburg, and play a game in his honor. All you role players out there, heirs to Dungeons and Dragons? You owe Mr. Roberts thanks, too — like me, Gary Gygax got his start with Avalon Hill wargames.

May 13, 2010

A “secret weapon” from WW2 updated for the 21st century

Filed under: History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Strategy Page looks at Operations Research in its modern guise:

It all began back in the 1970s, when some CIA analysts discovered a new way to analyze the mountains of information they were receiving. The new tool was predictive analysis. What does this do for intelligence analysts? Predictive analysis was the result of a fortuitous combination of OR (Operations Research), large amounts of data and more powerful computers. OR is one the major (and generally unheralded) scientific developments of the early 20th century. OR is basically applying mathematical analysis to problems. OR turned out to be a major “weapon” for the Allies during World War II. OR, like radar, was developed in the 1930s, just in time for a major war, when whatever was available was put to work to win the conflict. OR is also, half jokingly, called a merger of math and common sense. It is widely used today in science, industry and, especially, in business (it’s the primary tool of MBAs, where it’s called “management science”.) With predictive analysis, the most important OR tool was the ability to “backtest” (see if the simulation of a situation could accurately predict the outcome of something that had already happened, if the same historical decisions are made). For predictive analysis of contemporary situations, the backtest is, instead, a predictive tool that reveals likely outcomes.

Predictive analysis, like OR in general, creates a framework that points you towards the right questions, and often provides the best answers as well. Like many OR problems, especially in the business world, the simulation framework is often quite rough. But in war, as in commerce, anything that will give you an edge can lead to success over your opponents. A predictive analysis is similar to what engineers call “a 60 percent solution” that can be calculated on the back of an envelope.

The one form of predictive analysis that the general public is aware of is wargames, and these have been increasingly useful in predicting the outbreak, and outcomes, of wars. There have even been commercial manual (like chess) wargames that have successfully applied predictive analysis. The commercial manual wargames produced some impressive results when it came to actual wars.

In late 1972 a game (“Year of the Rat”) was published covering the recent (earlier in the year) North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. This game didn’t predict the outcome of the war, but it got the attention of people in the intelligence community, especially those who knew something about wargames, for it was a convincing demonstration of what a manual wargame, using unclassified data, could do in representing a very recently fought campaign. There was even talk that these games could actually predict the outcome, and details, of a future war. The next year, wargames did just that, accurately portraying the outcome of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The game (“Sinai”) was about to be published when the war broke out, but some people in the intelligence community knew about it. A member of the Israeli UN delegation had watched the game in development (he was a wargamer), and was assigned to camp out at the publishers offices, while the war raged, and report what the game was predicting.

April 16, 2010

Wargame company accused of “simulat[ing] violent combat”

Filed under: Gaming, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:19

<sarcasm>I know, I know, it’s shocking to discover that a wargaming company produces games that “simulate violent combat“. You’d think they’d realize that nobody is actually interested in violence or combat, and especially not “violent combat”, as this game is alleged to glorify:</sarcasm>

One player racks up points by defeating Native American tribal leaders, the other by snuffing out settlements of English colonists. Capture Boston or Plymouth Colony? Victory is yours.

That’s the gist of “King Philip’s War,” a board game based on a bloody and violent clash of the same name between colonists and Indian tribes in 17th-century New England, and developed by a company partly owned by former major league pitcher Curt Schilling.

The game’s designer says he hopes to educate children and others about a war that cost thousands of lives but receives scant attention in history books. But some Native Americans want the game blocked from release, saying it trivializes the conflict and insensitively perpetuates a stereotype of Indian tribes as bellicose savages.

The people getting all hot and bothered by this are clearly people who’ve never even seen a board wargame.

Given that the game wasn’t going to see publication until MMP got enough orders to justify printing and distributing it, I suspect this will end up being another Streisand Effect in operation.

February 24, 2010

Roleplaying games, back-in-the-day

Filed under: Gaming, History, Personal — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

Jon, my former virtual landlord (and still host for my original blog archives), sent along a link to this article. Knowing Jon’s distaste for such things, he must have been grimacing when he clicked Send:

I was initiated into the mysteries of gaming via a grade school classmate’s copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. A mysterious artifact, this red box contained a set of waxy, dull-edged dice and a couple of thin rulebooks. Designed to be played on its own or as an introduction to the complexities of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the Basic Set-or “Red Box” as it came to be known by gamers-became the key to an entire universe of adventure and magic. Little did I know at the time this would be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with gaming and fantasy in general.

With the news that D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast intends to release a new edition of the introductory rule set-in a red box no less-I thought it might be fun to ask a few writers about their own early experiences with the world’s best known fantasy role-playing game.

My first experience with the game was in high school, where a classmate found out that I was into wargames and wanted to “help me” by diverting me away from such evil warmongering stuff. His gaming methadone involved mass slaughter of beings and beasts in a “dungeon” he’d created. About a dozen of us were introduced to the game in the same session . . . let’s just say that it didn’t go terribly well. With no experienced players in the pack, we specialized in aggravating the Dungeon Master (the person running the game for us). After about an hour, the DM was deliberately killing us off as fast as he could.

I played several other role playing game systems after that, but never found one I was comfortable with. I ended up “rolling my own” by basing it on Metagaming’s Melee and Wizard games (both designs originally by the great Steve Jackson) for the combat and magic systems. I found this worked best for my occasional RPG sessions, as I hate-with-a-passion being in games with rules lawyers (the archetypical one has memorized all the rulebooks, tables, supplements, and so on). If I don’t explain why something is happening, they have to concentrate on what to do about it instead of getting into heated arguments about die roll modifiers and such.

In the early 1980’s, I ended up working at Mr. Gameway’s Ark in Toronto (which appears to be Google-proof . . . or doesn’t have more than occasional mentions in mailing list conversations), which was the largest independent game store in town. I got to read the rules of dozens of RPG systems, but perhaps I was spoiled for choice . . . I never did end up playing any.

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