Connections 2003

Game Night:
Peloponesian War

by Russ Lockwood


You had a choice of several simulations. Being an ancient buff, I chose the Peloponesian War, but a modern exercise was also available.

The Peloponesian War is played on a network -- another set of problems getting commercial software to run across military security networks. Like a bad Star Trek episode, computer stations went down one by one, so that the programmers had to keep rebooting individual systems, and the network game programming was too incapable of adding a new player while a game was running. You had to power every one down and start again.

I think we got in three turns in 15 minutes across a three hour session fraught with the aforementioned reboots and such. I can't say I was impressed with the technical knowhow of the programmers, but I wonder what the security processes in the military lab computers did to the game.

In any case, set against the Athens vs. Sparta war, two people play each power. One is the minister of war who selects what type of military units to build, and the other is the assembly leader who can veto building of units. Prestige points attach to the minister of war--if he is successful, he builds poionts to stay in power. If unsuccesful, he loses points and when he goes negative the assembly leader becomes minister, and the minister becomes assembly leader.

John Tiller and I formed a team in Athens. As minister of war, I wracked up some wins to stay in power, despite John's efforts to derail my buildup against those Spartans and others. However, then the bottom fell out as my offensive could not be sustained due to John's manipulations. He eventually became miniater of war of an Athens that looked to be swallowed by Sparta...unless the Persians decided to hit Sparta while we occupied the full attention. Then thegame crashed again.

I can't say I understood the battle process. I distinctly remember hoarding hoplites and then unleashing them against a Spartan recon-in-force force. I outnumbered the Spartans 3:1 in hoplites and cavalry, and balanced off just about everything else (leadership in particular). The result was an Athenian disaster and got my can kicked out of the War Ministry.

So, it had promise, but I also can't say I gave it a good testing. It crashed too often -- although that allowed us to go grab a bite to eat while the techs struggled to figure out why the software conflicted. I did like the interaction of multiplayer games, that is, after all the way real wars are fought, so simulations that encourage that are good.

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