Field Marshal Fritz von Piffel-Schlimmburg is flying high above the battlefield in his helicopter. For the last two turns he has been carefully watching the dark mass of French horsemen who seem to be hovering at the edge of the forest about a mile in front of his thinlystretched right flank. At a glance, he knows that they are Hussars and Chasseurs - he can even pick out the regimental numbers. He turns to his aide, Captain Naseblasen, and says:
"Read me those modifiers again?"
Out comes the cardstock chart. Naseblasen reads:
"Plus three against our line regiments, plus five against the Landwehr, even if they get into square in time."
"Distance?" Piffel-Schlimmburg asks, squinting to see. (A buzzard has just flown by the helicopter, distracting him momentarily.)
"Well, if they move full and then charge, they'll reach us in three turns," Naseblasen replies. "Plenty of time, mein Chef."
"What time is it, anyway?"
"Urn..." Naseblasen looks at his watch. "Turn Seven, sir. It's their movement phase, coming up. We'll get to see what happens in a few seconds."
"Hmm... This battle will be over in... what? Five more turns. Well." The old Marshal frowns. "Still, let's not take any chances. Move the Foot Guards up behind the right flank. Send the order now."
"Yes, sir." Naseblasen takes out his tape-measure, and... "Oh! Sorry, sir, bad news. The Foot Guards are out of your command radius. We can't send them any orders this turn at all."
Piffel-Schlimmburg glares at him. He has fired three staff officers in the last three battles, all because of snickering about his poor Command Radius. (He even appealed to the Imperial Council on Rules-Writers to get himself upgraded at least to "average," but so far no luck.) Naseblasen needs no reminder of the Marshal's sensitivity on this issue. Well, we can't all be French generals, now can we?
"Shall I take the helicopter over so they're within your radius, sir?" Naseblasen says helpfully, ignoring the old man's scowl.
Awe-Inspiring
Aesthetically, my first experience with miniatures was awe-inspiring. From a gaming point of view, it was a catastrophe. Let's just put it this way: it will be a long, long time before anyone can again talk me into being the 1806 Prussians, outnumbered, at the foot of a hill, and with my back against an unfordable river.
I was slaughtered by a group of experienced players, who knew exactly what was going on during the "PreStrategic Grand-Tactical Assault Movement Phase," located on page 246 of the rulebook, right between the "Post-Melee Undergarment Soiling and Embarrassment Test" phase, and the chart for determining how many "Cumulative Force-March Sweat Points (CFMSPs) are obtained during the "Semi-Tactical Motivational Adjustment Phase."
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm a reasonably smart guy. I can handle complicated rules. I may not like them very much, but I can handle them. Some years ago I noticed that the differences between complex rules and simple rules were mainly to be found in the command systems. True, some games stretch out combat mechanics more than others. I've rolled dice and consulted charts and tables sometimes as many as six different times just to resolve a single combat with a single unit. Most ironic, I think, is the horrendously over-cluttered melee system used by the Warhammer family of games; ironic because so many people praise the simplicity of these games. But no matter how complex, combat is usually just combat. What tends to clog the arteries of the biggest, fattest games are the sections of rules dedicated to achieving some kind of simulation of the art (or is it a science?) of command.
This is where games really bog down. Consider a game like Legacy of Glory: twenty, thirty pages devoted to attempts to represent the mechanics of generals making decisions, and the circuits by which those decisions transmit into actions. Contrast this with Warhammer again (I realize some of you are having strokes at my mentioning this game in the same paragraph with a "real simulation.") I dare say the combat system of Warhammer is more stupid and complex by far than that of any historical game. But Warhammer has "solved" the command issue in a dramatic way: it has none. Consequently, it seems more simple than Empire, and indeed takes less time to play.
Irony Number Two: the more a game designer tries to recreate the speed and flow of real-time decisionmaking in a battle, the more slow and cumbersome a system usually results. I've watched a game turn representing fifteen minutes take two hours to complete. That game in which I played the miserable 1806 Prussians was a home-spun design by a guy who thought that Empire (third edition, back in those days) wasn't nearly detailed enough (!) in terms of representing how general staffs worked. It took me about half an hour just to figure out how to give the order to change formation. When my poor pitiful Prussian infantry finally got through the process and changed into Line, there was a regiment of French hussars coming at them, no doubt very amused.
Wargame designers have a handful of basic formulae for command systems. The vast majority of games fall into one of these categories:
1. Orders? We Don't Need No Stinkin Orders...
Quite a few games -and "historical" games, too, not just fantasy games -have no discernable command system whatsoever. When your turn comes, you just move, shoot, and do your thing. These games can be quite a lot of fun, assuming you don't mind the idea of units roaming far and wide, each acting completely autonomously, yet with perfect, omniscient cooperation with each other. It certainly speeds up the game.
There's something to be said for this, since the whole notion of a wargame "table" is completely artificial, anyway. What we're doing, essentially, is limiting an army to the playing surface represented by the table, which is a kind of command limitation. In most games, for instance, no unit may go off-table, then move, then re-appear on the enemy's flank, so the table does in fact represent a command restriction.
Some games (most famously Tactica) developed a more scientific version of the NoCommand-System concept. These games divide up the table into deployment zones, or place other arbitrary restrictions upon the way units can move (like Tactica's "main battleline rule"). But essentially, these games have no command system. Within the constraints of those invisible lines, all units are free to act as they please, at all times.
2. The Magic Circle
The vast majority of wargames designed by Americans have some variation of the Magic Circle concept, illustrated at the beginning of this article by our intrepid Prussian Marshal Fritz von Piffel-Schlimmburg. A command radius emanates from the army chiefs base stand, and all units within that radius are "in command," and may function normally. Those outside the radius are penalized in some way. (Amazingly, over the years, very few gamers have figured out that they need only to make enormous base-stands for their generals, so as to increase their command radii. Imagine Marshal Fritz in 15mm, mounted on a stand the size of a dinner plate.)
The most famous application of the Magic Circle is probably the three-level version used by Napoleon's Battles, in which Army, Corps, and Divisional commanders each have their radii, with varying levels of command coverage. In that game, a unit which is outside its divisional commander's radius is penalized more harshly than if it is within his radius, yet the divisional commander is outside his Corps commander's radius, etc.
The great advantage of this system is clarity. It is quite quick and decisive, and always provides a lovely binary: Unit A is always either in command or out of command. There is no possibility for any confusion on that score. The Magic Circle has the effect that bad generals must cluster their units closely around them, while good generals can spread out more. But aside from that, all units act exactly the same if they're in the Circle, whether led by Napoleon or Bl0cher or Kermit the Frog. The only real difference between generals in a system like this is the degree to which the armies can spread out. That's always seemed to me a rather odd way of showing one general to be better than another.
The disadvantage of this system is, well... that it is really stupid. As I tried to show in my story about Marshal Fritz, it is absurd to think that a general will move his headquarters in order to be closer to a unit, so as to give it orders. Why on earth would the Foot Guards (I V away) behave differently from the Dragoons (10" away.) That extra inch of distance from the army HQ represents what... fifty yards?
When I was a kid, the neighbors had this psychotic collie dog who would bite anyone and anything it could get its jaws on. So they tied it to a big tree in their backyard with an elastic tether. Naturally, my friends and I would torment the poor, demented creature by yelling and waving our arms, and watching the dog charge out toward us, only to reach the end of its tether and be jerked violently backward like a slingshot. That's the image that keeps surfacing in my mind as I imagine the general's courier, galloping out to the edge of the general's command radius, frustrated that the Foot Guards are another fifty feet away, and thus can't receive the general's orders.
3. Carry this Slip of Paper, Smedley, and Godspeed!
For years, the pioneers of wargame design were all Brits, and I've noticed that games written by Brits all have certain quirks. For one thing, the Brits tended to favor simultaneous movement. British games also frequently used a very literal kind of command system: you (the player representing the army commander) actually write out your order on a little slip of paper, stick it under a figure representing a courier, and then off it goes across the table, hopefully avoiding the Cossacks, and reaching the recipient a few turns later.
This is a pretty way to do things, one must admit. Not logical or time-efficient, but pretty. Think of all those little slips of paper running to and fro across the table. Think of the time wasted in writing the obvious, such as: "Send help! My flank is collapsing!" Under this system, gamers have to make-believe that they can't see what they can plainly see. The helicopter effect ruins the pretense. It's almost like having no command system at all, since players will take advantage of the absence of restrictions, and use their omniscient view of the battlefield to do as they see fit.
Now I'm not suggesting that wargamers are inveterate cheaters, but it didn't take me long to figure out that this system, while stylistically elegant, was also rather dumb. If I wanted one of my corps commanders to change what he was doing, I simply waited until the referee wasn't looking, and whispered it quietly into his ear. Oh sure, we all went through the motions of writing the orders and sending them across the table, and it was fun in games that had rules where you could capture the enemy messenger and read the message. But come on, really, what use was it to read the captured message which read:
"Charge the Pratzen Heights! Attack Now!"
...when you could look across the table and see that they'd been doing exactly that, anyway, for the past three turns?
Maybe elderly British wargamers are just more ethical than young American gamers. Maybe back in Donald Featherstone's day, you could actually trust the players to make-believe and abide within the illusions of the system. Or perhaps they'd all had several pints of stout by that point in the afternoon, and were way beyond caring.
4. Where Do You Want to Go Today?
Back in 1990, Rich Hasenhauer introduced an elegantly truncated command system in his Fire and Fury rules. Every single unit, every single turn, had to roll a die to check its command status, before it tried to do anything at all - even if it was only planning on sitting still. This wasn't as cumbersome as it sounds, especially with a couple of players on each side. Experienced players could knock out the rolls in a couple of minutes. One exasperating - and clever - outcome of the system was that sometimes units did exactly the opposite of what you wanted. Perhaps you wanted them to sit still, and yet they moved.
Hasenhauer had tuned the system so that under certain circumstances a player could be reasonably sure that his better units would behave exactly as planned. (There was a tame version of the Magic Circle, which played a role in these roles.) Still, there was always that anxiety coming from the knowledge that your best-laid plans might come apart. And the worse things got for a unit, the less reliable was its performance.
This is a relatively good system, although it was never applied at the Corps level. One could find the 7th Brigade falling back without orders, for instance, but one would never see Dan Sickles advancing the whole III Corps into the Peach Orchard on his own initiative. There was never a real link between the army commander and the different corps, which to my mind is one of the most fascinating parts of command. Corps commanders throughout history have been notoriously uncooperative and unpredictable men, whose actions frequently turn the battle one way or another.
5. Staff Work Extravaganza (a.k.a. "Don't Give me that Chit")
Third-edition Empire represented a major break from its predecessors, in that it abandoned simultaneous movement in favor of the "Telescoping Time" technique. (Scott Bowden, in a fit of modesty, actually trademarked that phrase.) Part of this concept was a new command system, by which army commanders (i.e., the players) would issue orders to the corps commanders (who might or might not be players), and the entire corps would face restrictions based upon those orders. Individual regiments couldn't go charging off, for instance, if their parent corps was acting under a "Defend" order. The order was represented by a chit that was placed next to the corps commander figure. So here we had something opposite of the Fire and Fury method: individual units are totally reliable, but restricted by the rules affecting the whole corps. (Or, really the "Maneuver Element," since there's another routine whereby the divisions then try to activate the Corps order.)
Ah, but there was a catch. When you wanted to change the orders of your corps, you found yourself in a strange world of tables and charts and modifiers. These tables were supposed to represent the relative efficiency of different generals and their staffs. Some generals could change orders faster than others. While the game designers could make a case for inefficient staff work, it certainly looked weird on the battlefield. There I was, three inches (150 yards) from my corps commander, and I wanted to give him a new order; I wanted him to Attack now, instead of Defend. I consulted my charts, I rolled my dice, I cross-indexed with the right column on the "Putting on the Bicorne" table, factoring in the baldness of my commander, Marshal Davout (in the 75-100% Baldness column of that chart), and I came up with my answer: Two hours.
Excuse me? It would take two hours for my staff to change the order? What is this? Soviet Russia? The man was standing 150 yards away. I'll just jump up and down and scream "Attack! Attack!" No, that's not the way you do it. Copies have to be filed, signatures have to be added....
This system has its own internal logic, of course, but the application was always absurd. Two hours go by and BAM! All of a sudden every division commander in the Corps receives his orders. Now we go through it again. If the division commanders activate then BAM again every battalion in that division goes over to the attack and begins doing exactly what the army commander wants. In essence, what this system had accomplished was a precise, very reliable and predictable model of unreliability. Utterly frustrating.
Many years later, Arty Conliffe offered a somewhat streamlined and randomized version of this command system in his Spearhead rules. In that game, a unit has a general order like "Attack" or "Defend," and can only change the order if the controlling player rolls successfully. This represents an improvement only in the sense that one never knows exactly how long it will take, or if your subordinate commander will ever change the order at all. It adds a bit of randomness to what is otherwise quite a drag.
6. We're Attacking - Pass it On!
Ever since 1989, with the near-simultaneous release of Tactica and DBA, ancients games have had a distinctive "feel." Back in the bad old days of WRG, most ancients games were typically British: written orders and simultaneous movement. But by 1990, everybody was switching to the "battleline" concept.
The idea was to recreate a very stiff and brittle kind of army organization, in which units had to be physically joined at the flanks, all linked together as a body. (Armati made some subtle modifications to this, but essentially kept the idea.) So long as a unit was part of the big group hug, it could move and fight normally. Once it was broken off, however, the end was near.
This system was ameliorated by making allowances for different levels of army flexibility. Some armies, it was argued, could handle more "independent" units, or various "wings" operating more or less autonomously, while others had to remain interlinked.
This is fine as far as it goes, but few people have proposed that this system would be useful beyond the ancient/medieval period. (Volley and Bayonet uses a hybrid of this plus the Magic Circle - if a unit is "in command," then so are any other units in base-contact with that unit.) Indeed, the embrace of this system has virtually defined the way ancients games are played. Almost nobody ever tries to suggest an historical re-fight; everybody plays with these formula armies on a restricted square battlefield, and everybody agrees that this grossly artificial arrangement somehow makes everything more "historical." I'm no expert on ancient warfare, so I can't comment on that, but the system does have two overwhelming advantages. For one thing, it is very simple. And for another, it does away with a whole lot of command issues that haunt other game systems. If we assume that the army is in fact only one big unit, then we no longer need a command system at all. So on that level, these games have been very successful.
7. Pick a Card, Any Card....
One solution to the problem of predictability was to randomize absolutely everything. In the mid-1990s, cardbased games began to become popular. There were a number of variations. In some games, everybody drew from one deck, fishing out something like "French attack," or "Rally Attempts." In another variation (such as that used by Haub and Hubig's Great War) cards contained numbers, which represented the number of things a player could do in that phase, although what things, exactly, were up to the player. In other systems, each army had a different deck, perhaps with the same cards, perhaps with different cards, based on the comparative skill levels of the different command systems.
This is a clever but limited system. People at conventions rapidly discovered that cardbased games are best for two-player confrontations, and become very slow when several players are standing around waiting for "their" card(s) to come up. Furthermore, the cards may be randomized, but they're as predictable as any deck of cards. If you know there's only one "Rally Attempts" card, and you draw it, then you know it won't be coming up again this turn. Anybody with half a brain can remember the cards that have been played, and the ones that haven't.
Finally, though, card-based systems never really proved that they were in any way superior to the tum-based games. Why, exactly, is it better to mix up the order of moving and firing? What do you really accomplish by doing so? You're still a helicopter general with perfect knowledge of the enemy army and the components of each turn, even if they're a little jumbled.
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© Copyright 2001 Hal Thinglum
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