This article will present some basic principles of war game strategy--specifically, how to apply the strategic method of "the indirect approach." First enunciated by B.H. Liddell-Hart in his book Strategy, the method rests on one basic idea. Namely, it is better to knock the supports from beneath your enemy than to attack him head-to-head. Every army rests on some physical and psychological props. We'll see that to attack these, instead of to attack the enemy directly, is both cheaper and more likely to bring victory. Some time during his first match of Napoleon at Waterloo from SPI/TSR Inc., the beginner learns a simple example of the indirect approach: surround and destroy. That game's Combat Results Table (CRT) doesn't have a single Defender Eliminated (DE) result in its 3-1 column. But an encircled unit can't retreat, so against it a Defender Retreat equals a DE. In that case a 3-1 attack gives a 5/6 chance of a DE. To get that same chance in a head-on attack you'd need 6-1 odds, and even then you'd take greater losses through Exchange results. The point is that by cutting the defender's retreat first, you enable yourself to destroy him using much less force and having fewer casualties. Here, is another simple example, from the tactical level. In The Avalon Hill Game Company's Squad Leader a very economical way to destroy a powerful stack is to first surround it with lines of fire, then break its morale by fire, then move one piece adjacent. The broken stack must now retreat, but it can't retreat into your lines of fire, so it surrenders. The break result you need is much easier to obtain than a KIA result would be. Cutting off the enemy's retreat is one form of indirect approach. Another very effective one is to cut his line of supply. Even a very strong position sometimes can collapse very quickly for lack of supply. In any Russian Front game, for instance, always check: How long can units exist when cut off from supply? (At that scale there usually is some time limit.) There is more than one such game in which units simply are eliminated after one full turn out of supply. This suggests the following plan of attack. As the Axis player, concentrate your power against a couple of weaker points in the Russian line and break through. Race the tanks around to his rear to encircle a large body of Soviet units. And then let the supply rule destroy those units for you. Of course this plan presumes a couple of weak points, hut there always will be a few such. As somebody said, "A line can't he strong everywhere." Even if the supply rule won't actually eliminate enemy units, an unsupplied unit is sure to move less rapidly and fight with less strength. In fact it may be so ineffective that you can drive right past it, ignoring it while you press on to the important objectives in the east. The Frederick the Great game from The Avalon Hill Game Company shows how to exploit the enemy's supply problems when defending. This classic game pits France, Austria, and Russia against Frederick's much outnumbered Prussia. Frederick has to reckon that a huge Russian army will lumber through East Prussia toward Berlin. Usually, he can spare only a small force to oppose it, given his needs against his other two enemies. The small Prussian force has no chance to simply attack and defeat the Russians in the field. And its prospects in a defensive battle aren't much better. But it does have one advantage-it moves faster. So, it can dart behind the Russian force and destroy a depotleaving the Russians out of supplyand then hustle back to get itself in supply again. The now unsupplied Russians can only withdraw -taking attrition losses as they go - and waste time rebuilding their depot. The most the Prussians lose is one point from force marching. By repeating this maneuver the Prussians can hold a much larger Russian force at bay all summer, at small cost. A similar maneuver can be used to rescue a besieged city, both in Frederick the Great and in many other games. Besieging armies often construct earthworks which you would not want to assault. But they also burn lots of supplies, and by cutting the supply line you may raise the siege very cheaply. In these examples, especially the second, an outnumbered force used movement in place of brute strength. And that is central to the whole idea of the indirect approach. More than the printed combat strength goes into a unit's real effectiveness. A faster unit can project its power over a larger area, making it a greater threat than a slower unit which mav have even a larger combat strength. Rapid or unexpected movement can upset the enemy's balance. Attack from an unexpected direction. Threaten one way, then go another. Victory Games Inc.'s The Civil War is an excellent game in which to use such methods. By building up a threat in one theater, you tempt the enemy to spend his command points and reinforcements there, to counter you. Then the first time you have a large command point allowance, off you go to seize something important in the other theater. The Avalon Hill Game Company's Third Reich invites this to some extent too. Using "Strategic Redeployment," you can shift from one theater to another fairly quickly. This lets you strike in some theater that the enemy neglected while building up his defenses at the point he thought you were going to attack. These examples depended on the attacker "selling a dummy." The opponent, whose strength would have won out in a fair fight, was encouraged to waste that strength defending a point that wasn't going to be attacked. A very good way to do this, in general, is to place yourself in a position from which you threaten several objectives at once. This puts the other fellow on the horns of a dilemma. Should he cover just one objective and let you take the others? Or should he split up and try to guard them all, in which case you might defeat his forces piecemeal? A House Divided from Game Designers' Workshop is well suited to this kind of strategy. A single Rebel cavalry unit, suitably placed inside the Union states, can threaten several important Northern cities. A single Rebel army, in the same way, can threaten most of the important Eastern Seaboard cities at once. What makes the move so effective in this game is the rule that you expend one "march" to move all the forces in one box, no matter how large those forces are. The Confederate stack can move around using just one march per turn. The Union, to cover against those threats, must spend a bundle of marches (and units). With his extra marches, the Confederate player can develop still more threats elsewhere, get together his defenses, and so on. Once again movement, or the threat of movement, has multiplied force. Indeed, the indirect approach is most effective in games that have strong command control rules or games in which a side can't move all its pieces every turn. The idea behind the indirect approach, after all, is to avoid the enemy's strong prepared defenses. Attack him from some other direction or in some other way, instead of the one ground where he is most ready to fight you. If he has strong defenses along his land border, try a descent from the sea in his rear. Then he has to rearrange everything all in a hurry. The fewer pieces he can move at a time, the more this rearrangement upsets him. force coming to attack them just to fight for these hexes in front of their beginning positions. The Confederates were able to conduct some startingly effective counterattacks during the actual battle but the first of these didn't occur until the battle was about an hour and a half old (or by turn 5). If the Confederates wait that long during the game it will be all over before it has begun. The present victory conditions force on the Confederate player an unrealistic and a historical activity; that of capturing woods and hilltop hexes and burning out brigades just because you have to do it in order to have a chance to win. These conditions ignore the real reason that Antietam was fought: The Army of the Potomac was attempting the destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia. It certainly would aid in the endeavor if the Union army were to take certain key terrain features, but that was not the primary goal. To call these Union Morale Point hexes is also a misnomer. Union morale is taken care of quite handily in a rule called "Division Withdrawal" (29.5) in which Union divisions pull out of the fight after sustaining a certain number of casualties. These Victory Point hexes also force the Union commander to attack through the same ten hexes game after game, turn after turn. There is no room for innovative tactics or maneuvers. You must take certain hexes to win. if not, you lose. I don't play games to be forced to use the same tactic game after game just because the victory point schedule says so. That is not fun or challenging. The new Victory conditions included here should alleviate this problem. Jon Southard has designed several war games including the 1984 Charles Roberts Award winner, South Mountain. Back to Table of Contents -- Game News #11 To Game News List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1986 by Dana Lombardy. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com