What else can one hide?

Lets assume we are going to put on the table some category of units - tanks (stands representing 10 each) and infantry (in stands representing 80-120).  What can we use that to hide?

• The stands may have variable strength depending on casualties - say two or three steps available.
• They may also the straight-up strength-zero dummies.
• It is easy to hide which is the command stand, if it matters.
• An indicator can show which stand has the FOO with it.
• Small support weapons (MGs, light AT guns, etc) can be a marker under an infantry stand until it should be deployed.  

Concealment is critical to understanding WWII, and a set of grand-tactical rules has to acknowledge that.

Secrecy in combat

Lets presume we can get away from the idea that we have to identify a particular firing stand and target stand, but can deal in groups firing and targeted.  That means that dummy stand might stay unidentified for a bit longer, since one need not exclude particular stand from those identified to the enemy as firing.

Megablitz has a nice idea where you total up your combat dice and hand them to your opponent, who roles them and secretly applies the results.  I'd like to extend this a bit to differentiate weapons fire.  So, I might determine that my 88 at 1500m gets a "red" dice.  Having rolled the dice, the target player organizes the results - so a red dice rolling a 4 might score a major results on a T/34 stand  but no result on a JS2 stand.  Results would be secret, and might or might not involve a visible result for the attacker; likewise, the exact firing stands might or might not be revealed.

Mixed formation

After lunch with Ross, one point from the discussion I want to capture are the cases where differing pieces of equipment were deliberately deployed in mixed formations - the classic being the 1-firefly per 4-sherman-75 troops used by Commonwealth forces in NWE.  Platoon level rules kind of ignore this, basically letting the player deploy one troop of fireflys per 4 troops of sherman-75s.

Visually, that's fine but I want a way that blends capabilities to represent to effectiveness of the merged formation.

Need hidden state information

I just realized an implication of having magetized bases.

  Here is a stand (50mm x 30mm Jagdpanzer IV)

It has state information and you can't see it.

Here it is:

The labels on the bottom are inkjet-printable business-card fridge magnets - an Avery product I think.  While 60th Regiment, 15. Division VIII corps is more applicable to the Prussian army (another project) the fact is that this is an easy way to put stance, casualty, morale or "I am a decoy" information on a stand so that it cannot be seen.  It is easy to add or remove but a brief experiment suggests that it is reasonably durable during normal stand use.

Something to think about.  Perhaps let every German AFV use a Tiger stand until the real type attached to the bottom is revealed? 

It is also fine for ID information that is not particularly needed by the opponent but is needed by the player.  Or key chart values to save looking them up?  The mind boggles. :-)

Combat System

I don't know the answer yet, still thinking of the questions.

For a fast, clean system with a lot of kit on the table, this is where the rubber meets the road.
  A winning system should be:

• Fast:  Few rolls, few exceptions
• No "game tactics":  real world tactics should pay off, but there should be no temptation to tweaking the action of the individual stand.  Infantry, especially, should be operating by the battalion.
• Minimal record keeping.

The cycle of decide-act-resolve should be fast and lead to a clear conclusion quickly so the players can get on to the next decisions.

"One mechanism" sounds good, and BKC actually manages that, but it does not necessarily simplify the visualization of what is happening.  Players  (IMHO, YMMV) accept that tanks, guns and infantry act and interact differently.   Having multiple mechanisms does not seem to harm Command Decision for example.

The simplest system would have two results at least on a stand basis, pushed back and destroyed; a battalion who's attack was broken up by push backs would have to concentrate on keeping together or accept the loss of capability.  Strict distance rules might count the pushed back units as effectively lost until the attack had been re-organized.

Also, add factors and one roll,or handful of dice?  Single-die stats are certainly simpler to work with, but it is not hard to do Monte-Carlo analysis of  "handful" results.  The curve shape I have in mind would be to increase central tendency as the volume of fire increases, but to reduce the incidence of "low effect" events while allowing an increasing tail of "high effect" events.

Also, given one hour turns, I think it would make sense to provide rewards for effective combined arms "from above" rather than try to have it fall out of a "bottom up" model.

Are tables evil?  It might be interesting to look at using a nomogram of some sort as a play aid to integrate comparative firepower, protection and morale effects into a single roll without using tables or formulas in the familiar sense.

Still WWII Rules

Three notes this evening:

(1)

I have just received my copy of John Curry's "British Army Tactical Wargame 1956" which is filled with fascinating data on planning cycles, movement rates, and the like.  Written by professionals with experience on the WWII and Korean War battlefields, should be a gold mine.

This was  my first order from Lulu and I am impressed.  Solidly made, stapled spine and fulfillment from a company in Canada-- received promptly and while I am not a fanatic about these things its nice to not be a 100% importer of my hobby books.

(2)

I have swung around to a change of heart in unit representation.  If we take a stand to equal a company,. we end up expecting it to act like a company -- cover the frontage of a company, take initiative like a company, lead its own existence like a company.  That pushes awareness down a level too far for my purposes.  If I take a stand to 100 men (or ten vehicles) and the basic unit to be the battalion, then the player (who should be thinking divisions or at least brigades anyway) may manipulate the stands of the battalion as part of the battalion performing its mission, but they are just a representation.  It also makes it a bit easier to pace the degradation of battalion capability as numbers are lost.

(3)

Written orders.  Not the thing for a "club night" game these days -- writing seems seriously out of fashion.  On the other hand, looking at the basic doctrine of WWII it is hard to see how we can get away without at least recorded objectives, artillery fire plans and the like.  These don't have to be written for each turn but some mechanism seems essential to constrain telepathic opportunism, especially if we are to eschew random aids to represent a formation's failure to do whatever the commander desires.

(4)

Four, four notes.  OK - concealment.  Critical to the success of those nasty lads with their tiny we anti-tank guns.  Blinds might work.  So might allowing some "key concealment" units to be attached to more visible units and not revealed otherwise.  So an AT gun could be deployed with an infantry unit and only revealed when it fires.

Maybe.  A general referee-free solution to the concealment problem would be far better.  Blinds?  Strictly limiting orders before deployment?  I really don't know just yet.

A couple of interesting documentaries

Unknown War -- A fascinating Brezhnev-era piece from 1978 showed up at my favorite video shop.  This is pretty broad brush stuff, as probably befits a Soviet official history aimed at an American audience.  There is a current western historian there to provide some perspective; which if you do not actually know the history yourself is more than needed.

What does it offer the wargamer?  A lot of documentary footage that I for one had never seen before.  If you want to see some great combat film footage, and are old enough that "detente" is a nostalgic period in your life (I visited some of the cities shown rebuilt in the film in 1974) I'd recommend renting it (or finding it elsewhere -- I am sure much of it is kicking around youtube).

If you consider yourself at risk from too much Communist propaganda, you might counter-dose with Russia's War -- which basically portrays Stalin's entire time as General Secretary as his war against his own people.  Likewise kicking around you-tube and available on DVD.

This, by the way, is my preferred film version of 1984.

I also recommend the recent Polish film Katyn - very powerful stuff.  It paints a county coming to terms with the enormity of Nazi occupation, while dealing with the Stalinist occupation that took its place, and how individual Poles tried to come to terms with that reality.

My final offering in what seems to have been a festival of grimness in the last couple of weeks is the book Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.  It covered the area of Poland and the former Soviet Union controlled by the Nazi and Stalinist states from final collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture to the death of Stalin.  The detailed portrayal of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 that opens the book is certainly as compete as any I have seen.  The book also makes a real effort to affirm the dignity and uniqueness of each of those murdered; it is well worth reading.  In looking for a link for the book I found (I should not have been surprised) that there is a lot of controversy around it; both because the Holocaust is a loaded subject for a lot of people and because (as also should not be surprising) no group comes away with completely clean hands.

I really must find a light comedy or a superhero movie to watch come Saturday.