In Astronomy (my other hobby) there exists a term quite useful in application to wargaming as well-resolution. In the former field, it refers to the smallest level of detail visible in a given instrument. Excluding concerns which vary from observer to observer and night to night, there is a theoretical minimal distance between objects which can differentiated-resolved--from each other. Objects smaller than that, in apparent size, just cannot be seen.

The application to wargaming is both quick and obviousto each scale of game there exists a maximum level of detail which the player should be allowed to deal with, beyond which the game bogs down radically, and/or the player is swamped with things to do which he would have little or no control over. While the astronomical version refers almost exclusively to "size" or "distance" in determination of resolution, I contend that in wargaming the correct measures are of importance and size of effect. There are two different aspects of this rather fuzzy line--the playability vs. detail trade off, and the limitations on what commanders at different levels can reasonably be expected to deal with. The line itself is very fuzzy (conforming nicely to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, strangely enough) as both the differing tastes of players and differing skills of designers may redraw the line at any given moment for a given scale. That aside, let's look at some basic issues.

Playability, Detail, and (That Devil) Realism

All detail is a trade off against playability. Certain important details must be included to bring a game from a model of nothing to being a model of warfare. All too often, great quantities of detail are added on top of a game in the sacred name of "realism." Quite a few gamers have informed me that I should add more detail because they like "realism" in their games. As I've said before in this magazine, greater detail does no tequal greater realism, nor can one conclude that detail and realism are differing ends of a single yardstick. Beyond a certain level (dependent as it is on both the players and the designer) additional detail merely detracts from and weighs down a game's simulation value. It also has the incredibly easy trap of blowing things out of proportion attached to it. Taken to an extreme to prove a point one can imagine Europa players rolling for individual machine gun malfunctions as if they were playing a monster-sized ASL (Ok, it's not that easy to imagine). Would this make the former game "more realistic?" Hardly. AH it would accomplish is to bog the game down to an incredibly slow and boring pace as well as exaggerating the effect of machine gun malfunctions as seen through the eyes of Army Group and Front commanders!

A couple of examples from an OCS playtester will help illustrate the point. (My apologies, Brian.) The playtester was sure that to add an upper limit to the command abilities of HQs in Guderian's Blitzkrieg would make the game "more realistic." Do HQs have upper control limits? Yes. Would such a rule change the game? Occasionally. The more important point is at what cost does this "realism" cost players in the game? Not only would I have to assign each HQ an arbitrary upper command limit (there is no ..correct" way to calculate such a thing), but players would have to repeatedly check their HQs every turn to ensure that no one has gone over their limit. Slapped on top of all of this would have to be some method of determining the "size" of all the elements involved, a method of disposing of infractions, and some sort of regulation of how elements get transferred from one HQ to another.

Along the same lines, he suggested that supply dumps have some form of ownership applied to them, rightfully thinking that commanders would be jealous of their supplies and would be less than generous with other commands. While this is all well, true, and good. The playability compromise trade-off to get this bit of reality would be enormous. Here again we must keep track of all the dumps in the game and who owns them. How does one go about transferring from dump to dump? How are newly arriving SPs to be divided up? If an HQ (with a dump) gets destroyed, how are the SPs to be handled? A virtual can of worms opens from such a simple request. These issues cannot be brushed aside, and I cannot ignore them and "let the players figure it out." So the price tag that comes along with this seemingly unobtrusive little added detail far outweighs any addition to the game's model bought for that price.

In short, all detail has its cost in playability. It is the designer's job (which cannot be shirked) to decide if a particular detail's value exceeds its cost (and it should be included) or if the opposite is true. Furthermore, additional detail does not equate to additional realism (or, as I would prefer to think of it, additional accuracy).

Looking Down from On High

Here sits the player, god-like in all ways, commanding his armies marches them hither and yon, decides who lives and who dies--all in the course of a pleasant Saturday afternoon. That's why we are here-to have fun and to learn. As we scoot about those corps level counters, the level of resolution the designer has striven for dramatically impacts our enjoyment. If he chose correctly, we will be lulled into the "illusion" that the wargame world is relatively accurate (it might be, it might be not, here I am more concerned with feel). If not, we will struggle in vain with. his constructions and eventually throw in the towel for something that feels better. The approach of the designer's level of aim to the one most enjoyed by a particular player and the skill with which he pulls it off directly impact the player's enjoyment.

I am neither sage enough, nor clairvoyant enough, to outline any concrete methods of determining the theoretical resolution of differing game scales. Among other problems such a decision would encounter are the following: Every time, hex, and unit scale (and all their combinations) would have a different resolution affixed to it. The max resolution one designer might be able to get away with would have nothing to do with that practiced by another. The desires and predilections of each player is different. Any new design mechanic or tool would dramatically influence where the line would be drawn. Even the skill of the graphic artist would influence what the designer could accomplish (it is easy for a poor graphic design to completely soil what would otherwise be a fine game design).

In fact, deciding what to keep and what to throw away is a great deal of the "art"in the art of wargame design. No set standards or rules can be created to follow. Each designer must take to his own council and decide what works best. The most important point to be made is that the designer must decide on where to draw the line and stick to his guns (adjusting as his skill dictates, but trusting his own judgment). hi no case should he just decide to 'throw it all in" on some obscure notion that the end result will be more "realistic." Game players have been sold that bill of goods before--it didn't work then, it won't work now.

The Commander's Will

The second reason for drawing the line somewhere (other than the playability trade off) is that commanders at each level can only affect their world only so much. The rest is done because they must be able to trust their subordinates and their judgment when out of sight. I do not mean that the player should only be able to influence the war from one level alone and that all other levels are "off limits." No, I can easily say I prefer that players operate at multiple levels. In the case of game resolution, however, there still must be some lower limit on the size (importance?) of the items the player should be allowed to deal with.

In the CWB, players function as the army, corps, and to a degree, division commanders. The game more actively models the higher command levels. When the player is wearing his division commander's hat, he is pushing brigades about making the best tactical combination he can--but his ability to influence his force at that level is fairly limited. He cannot, for instance, dictate to his brigades the precise arrangement of regiments or any of the multiple evolutions the brigade is going through during the course of a movement in the game's "line" formation.

The player's control is more heavily imbedded in the higher command echelons and the orders flying between army and corps HQs. As suck it would be incorrect for the player at this level to be worried by the game system over the exact load his cannons are firing, etc. The army commander would generally have to trust in his subordinate's judgment regarding that detail of his battle (and that is why he has both specially trained officers in that arm under his command as well as specialized unit types to control various weapons). As a designer, if I were to force the player to deal with those decisions (valid as they might be) I would be making the player operate at too great a depth at once. While I feel that it is wrong to rigidly confine the player in just one level, it is just as incorrect to make him function at too many levels, or too wide a range, at once.

There are certain aspects of battle which completely escape the control of the officers of the army in question, no matter how much they would like to dictate how they might be done.

Items which are too BIG

A further point must be made regarding the level of comand and the player. Some things are out of the player's grasp because the deciding agents for them are at levels above the player's role. Just as the player should not be responsible for all levels below his position, he should not be tasked with all levels above it. Unlike the inclusion of tiny detail, few games suffer from resolution problems on the large scale side--in fact I can't think of any off hand. Almost all games place things like reinforcements out of the reach of the player-you'll get them when your superiors decide you need them, and not before. Home front production and the Re is well out of reach. These things are taken into account (and properly so, I might add) in games at a strategic level, but they rarely intrude on operational and tactical games.

While the levels "above your own" usually follow a fairly rigid historical pattern--6th Corps historically showed up at such and such a time at Gettysburg, yours will too--an interesting effect was applied to Omaha. In that game, German reinforcements are almost exclusively determined in a random manner. This represents the decision making at levels above your own (and can be used as a commentary on the same, at times) in which the commanders above your level are either sending you the reinforcements or sending them to someone else. Since you aren't privy to what is going on elsewhere and how it compares to your part of the front (we all think our part is the most important) a string of bad rolls might mean that the British beaches are having a hard time or are perceived as being much more important than your fight on Omaha. Usually, however, a fairly equal distribution of resources can be assumed-you, your superiors, and the dice cannot determine much about what is going on, so everyone gets a little.

A like system is employed in Afrika for Allied withdrawals. Instead of making the player toe the line of what really happened outside his game world, those things (and the demands made on him from elsewhere) are taken care of by a random dice method. Your real life counterpart couldn't predict when the home islands, Greece, Crete, or Syria might need reinforcement ahead of time, and neither can you.

Everything Need Not Be Explicitly Modeled

A common pitfall to new game designers and *in game player thoughts on design is that "if it isn't explicitly in the game, it has been ignored---and that the designer says it didn't have an effect." This is just not so.

Many things can be integrated within existing game mechanics and so have their historical effect, but don't get in the way of game play as something the player must worry about. In many games the ability of armor to attack, but its limited ability to hold ground is readily shown by the difference in offensive and defensive combat values of armor units. In the TCS, there are no rules about hull-down positions. Why? Because all vehicles are assumed to enter such positions whenever they get into fire mode. The benefits of being hulldown with respect to different terrain types is shown by the terrain effects on combat chart. The proper integration of meaningful effects directly into a game's systems such that the player needn't do anything about them-they are just there-is the best way to get such detail into a game. It gives effect without playability cost.

"Abstraction" (as it's called) can be abused. It's very easy for a sloppy designer to just say "oh, that's abstracted in..." to cover for mistakes, errors, or omissions. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for the game player to determine if the designer did thoughtfully integrate the "abstraction" or if he is just covering his behind. A designer should have the guts to stand up behind his design and say that whatever it is was either left out by mistake or was intentionally ditched because of complexity concerns. If it is the latter, the player is free to make his own decision about the validity of the designer's resolution determination (as it applies to himself) but should respect where the designer drew the line and that he honestly thought about the matter. In that case, it is a reflection of the designer's appreciation of the game design art. When the designer sticks to his "it's abstracted in" guns, the player can either decide that the designer is telling the truth-and therefore adding further detail about it will throw the whole process out of whack as the item will be accounted for twiceor that he isn't, and adding it on will correct an omission if handled correctly.

The key point in all resolution discussions is that the designer must decide what he wants to accomplish and stick to it. The most common and natural pitfall is to throw in everything one can think of, thinking that it will I make the game 'better'. Designers must place reasonable limits on the resolution of their games or the design will get buried under the weight of unneeded detail.

Games as Models of Reality

A lot of verbiage has been bandied about in the last few years to the effect that 'no game gives correct historical results' and therefore why should designers bother with all this historical nonsense for a model that can't work. Bull. No wargame model win ever give 100% results (true enough), but is that a reason for the gamer to be forced to be satisfied with one which gives 25% because getting to 70% is too hard on the Poor designer? I think this chorus of complaints is the direct result of frustration with a generally stagnated design art (read: no depth) and the slow realization gamers are coming to that they have been down more golden paths than they care for and want designs which give an honest appreciation of history. We are doing the very best we can toward that goal and it is up to you to be the judge of the results and give credit where credit is due. No one else will do that for you.