Athough last issue I indicated that I might talk more about role-playing and the level of detail in games in this issue, I've decided to cover a subject a little more basic - movement systems. Mostly, I decided upon this because I've been doing a lot of work tinkering with some new movement systems recently, giving quite a bit of thought to the whole issue. When it came time to write this column, I reasoned that the best time to kick some of these thoughts out is now, while they're still fresh in my mind.

The basis of most movement systems in games today can be found in the great grandfather of them all, Tactics II. This system, the conventional phased movement system in which players alternate moves and combat, has remained unchanged in its basics until fairly recently, with minor additions periodically to pep it up. Advance after combat was the first (and most obvious) addition, followed closely thereafter by overruns. Both of these additions did not disturb the basic sequence of all movement followed by all combats, but instead provided a special form of com- bat during movement and a special form of movement during/after combat. This was the first attempt at integrating movement and combat in the same phase.

A more radical change was Dave Williams' addition of a second movement phase and second combat phase to each player turn in The Battle for Moscow. Along the same lines, Jim Dunnigan later introduced a mechanized movement phase in the Kursk/France 1940 family of operational games, thus allowing certain types of units to continue movement after combat to exploit breaches made in the lines. In Russian Campaign, John Edwards reintroduced Williams' second combat phase after the second movement phase.

Within the limitations of the phased movement systems, the last several years have seen numerous different attempts to further this process of integrating movement with combat. Torgau allowed both sides to fire during either movement phase by expending movement points, although only one side could actually move. John Hill's Jerusalem '48 allowed players to continue movement after combat until they had either exhausted their movement points or failed to push enemy units out of their way. SPI's Next War uses a similar system.

Recently, from England, comes Desert Rats with a refinement of this whereby all units of a side move to contact and then conduct their combats. All units are then considered to have expended as many movement points as the unit that moved the farthest, and all may then continue movement. Citadel, although giving units unlimited movement points, accomplishes much the same thing conceptually by having units move through a series of vulnerability points at which they are subject to fire from enemy units.

Approaching the subject from a slightly different angle, Fall of Tobruk utilized an impulse system whereby some of the units of a side would move and then fight, then more would move and fight, and so on. Richard Berg's Campaign for North Africa synthesizes much of the above through the use of operations points which a unit expends to move, fight, change clothes, etc. All of these examples illustrate one of the two main goals of recent innovation in movement systems: the attempt to integrate combat and movement in an alternating movement system.

Simultaneity

The second main goal of recent innovation has been the attempt to insert simultaneity in operations. An early and limited attempt at this was the tactical turns in Crimea, during which both sides alternated movement and combat in either player turn. A more direct approach was simply to insert plotting pads and make the game truly simultaneous, as SPI did in several tactical games and as Battleline did in Wooden Ships and Iron Men.

While pure simultaneous movement seemed to work well in the latter case, it became apparent that, for tactical games, it gained the goal of simultaneity at the expense of turning the game into a rather elaborate guessing match. Pure simultaneous movement was soon abandoned for land games. (Operation Crusader uses simultaneous movement only due to the unique situation covered by the game, not as any attempt to turn the state of the art in that direction again.)

A somewhat more workable system was used in Avalon Hill's Tobruk, where players alternate moving and firing individual units until all have finished. This system of ripple movement has been subsequently used in a number of SPI tactical games and has the advantage of capturing the the feel of simultaneous unfolding of operations. The disadvantages (the fellow with the fewer units is sort of screwed come the end of the turn) can be coped with and are, in general, worth the price until something better comes along.

Tackling the problem from a different direction, John Prados' work has contained a number of attempts to incorporate a reaction or reserve movement capability for the non- phasing player. In Pearl Harbor, this involves the use of pre-established reaction forces which sally forth to beat on enemy task forces intruding in their area. Similarly, Panzerkrieg includes provisions for reserves stacked with headquarters to move to shore up a threatened sector of the line. My own Road to the Rhine gives pre-determined reserves their own movement and combat phases, thus coming a little closer to simultaneity.

I mentioned at the start that I've been thinking about this whole issue for some time, specifically in regards to the movement system to be used in GDW's upcoming entry to the Benghazi handicap, Desert Victory.

The problem is not so much where to go next, but rather how to bring these two so-far divergent courses of development back together again. As things stand now, you can have combat and movement fairly well integrated in the same phase, or you can have a fair modeling of near-simultaneous reactions to developments, but you can't have both.

Fortunately, a couple of months ago, something very unusual happened that's helped to shake some of the cobwebs in my brain loose a little (and no remarks, please, as to what else may have shaken loose). Right before Origins, a friend of ours by the name of Shelby Stanton submitted an outside design for a game on the battle of Velikiye Luki. Shelby's name may be familiar to a number of you as an author on a variety of military subjects. Shelby is undoubtedly not familiar to you as a game designer, as he has never designed a game before. Shelby's forte is research, and in that he's very thorough. Consequently, his design submission for Velikiye Luki consisted solely of the research for the game along with an operational analysis.

(This was by prior arrangement between us; please don't try this on your own.)

With the bulk of the research completed, I could begin reading some operational accounts and presumably come up with a game system in short order. For a change, things worked out as planned., and White Death - the battle of Velikiye Luki - is one of our October releases this year.

Without having to do much more than filling in a few blank spots as to some Soviet unit identifications, I had the opportunity to play around a lot with the game system, trying to achieve an integrated movement/combat system in a game with a high degree of simultaneity. There really isn't anything new about the components of the system at all - they're just stuck together a little differently.

To start with, I used the basic notion of integrated combat and movement from Desert Rats. That is, all units move and then fight, with all units having expended as many MP's as the units which moved the most. Thus, movement becomes an expression of time as much as distance. The difficulty with the system as it stood originally was that units with a higher movement allowance didn't move faster, rather, they just kept moving longer than other units. In that sense, it wasn't much more than an elaborate mechanized movement phase.

To correct this, I grafted on the movement system from Avalanche. All units have a constant number of movement points (10 in this case) but expend them at different rates, depending upon their movement class. One of the beautiful things about the situation Shelby chose was the variety of troops involved, and a total of seven different movement categories are included in the game (leg, wheel, track, ski, horse-drawn, motorcycle, and cavalry). Units pay a movement point to attack, and thus units in combat tend to move slower than unengaged units. I had originally thought to include combat results that read out in numbers of MPs expended in addition to more conventional results, but the resulting systems dirt wasn't worth the effect it produced.

At this point, simultaneity was no longer a big problem. One side moves as far as it wishes and conducts combat. The other side then moves and conducts combat. This alternates until both sides have expended a total of ten MP's. If one side runs out first, the other side continues to move (and fight) until it has exhausted its MP's, which is certainly advantageous to that side.

The need for reserves is handled by imposing a MP cost to leave zones of control, and, since getting to a threatened sector by using the fewest number of MPs is the name of the game, reserves held out of the line are much more valuable than extra troops in the rifle pits. The nemesis of the Avalon Hill Shuffle has disappeared as well, as it's just too expensive in MP's.

Change is undoubtedly the nature of this business/art form, and so I harbor no illusions that the White Death system constitutes a "solution" to the problem of both integration and simultaneity. It is, I suspect, a step in the right direction and contains a number of interesting possibilities for future tinkering. The bee in my bonnet at the moment is the possibility of rating command-initiative in Desert Victory in terms of the number of MP's each side has. Units of ,.different movement categories would still retain their relative mobility, but Graziani with 8 MPs would be at a severe disadvantage against O'Connor with, say, 12 MP's.