Tankettes and the limits of theory

One of the problems facing military force planners and doctrine writers is that they have to do most of their planning in peacetime when they can't test their musings against reality.


This drawback is inescapable, although there's reason to think modern simulation techniques and realistic training can mitigate it. Still, military planners in the interwar period were faced with an especially challenging environment. Military technology was developing at an exceptionally rapid pace for peacetime in the 1930s (less so in the 20s because there was a surplus of Great War equipment lying around and other factors slowing things down such as naval treaties and Versailles.)


So it's not surprising that there were a lot of things that sounded good on paper in the writings of military experts in the 20s and 30s that turned out to be wrong in the light of actual combat experience in World War II.


For example, what's the best way to field tanks. After World War II the major powers have settled on the Main Battle Tank idea, which is that the only tank worth the trouble is one that is powerful enough to fight other tanks, mobile enough to exploit its own breakthroughs and cheap enough to field in adequate numbers. Modern armies have a number of specialized lighter vehicles for recon, infantry transport and mobile artillery support, but they generally have just one kind of tank (although they may still field a previous generation of MBT as well).


The British, no slouches in tank thought between the wars, thought there should be a functional divide between heavily armored, but slow "Infantry" tanks and fast, but lightly armored "cruiser" tanks. Unfortunately they compromised the experiment a bit by having inadequate firepower for either, but even improved firepower in later models didn't save the concept. The French followed a similar idea.


Most of the other powers went more with a light-medium-heavy division for their tank arms. This worked better than the infantry-cruiser division of labor, but also eventually fell out of favor too as it was found that light and heavy tanks were just as much trouble as medium tanks but nowhere near as flexible.


One further notion that was already falling out of favor even before the war got going in earnest as the "tankette." All the major armored powers has already decided the concept was unworkable, but tankettes saw combat with some of the second-line armored powers such as Italy and Japan and with minor armies such as Poland. The idea was that swarms of highly mobile, 2-man tankettes with machine guns would overwhelm the enemy. It turned out that the logistic cost of the tankettes did not justify their limited combat power. And they were vulnerable to a wide variety of weapons. Anything that could kill a tank could kill them, as well as many weapons that were not powerful enough to kill a tank.


It was a cute idea, but simply didn't work. The attractiveness of the concept is illustrated by the appearance of the AT-ST "chicken walker" in the Star Wars universe, which is again a small, fast, 2-man fighting vehicle not unlike a tankette in concept. Of course, in a fictional universe anything can happen, and whatever tactical drawbacks the AT-ST might have (and they do seem to take heavy losses) are not necessarily reflected in the scripted outcomes.

But in the real-life crucible of World War II the idea was discarded.

Tankettes do not appear in large numbers in wargames, but in those games where they do appear, such as Advanced Squad Leader and Axis & Allies Miniatures they are not especially useful.

So, are YOU in command?

One of the early sales pitches for Avalon Hill wargames is that YOU are in command, as shown by the box art for Tactics II, above.

Generally I like games where you can identify with some historical personage, but lots of times this is impractical. For example, in a two-player game of Napoleon or Waterloo, the allied player will be portraying at least two individuals -- Wellington and Blucher.

In many games it's even harder to pin the player as representing some distinct individual and the player really represents a corporate body. Players often make decisions at several command levels, for example. If you're playing Chickamauga you're obviously the army commander, but you are also determining the deployment of individual brigades, which the division commanders would do.

The odd thing is that many games that tout their realism are some of the most unrealistic in the amount of control they give players. In ASL, for example, players who must represent battalion commanders are also driving tanks hex-by-hex down a road and rotating a turret -- and selecting the ammo to fire.

This is one reason I'm tending to appreciate games like Memoir '44 or Tide of Iron more, because their limits on player control seem more realistic to me.

Very bad move, MMP

This "interesting" news from MMP, taken from a BGG Geeklist on the P500 staus for April.

In other news, and perhaps best put under the heading NOOOO!, MMP staff (SCS/OCS designer Dean Essig I believe) posted that the company would not support (or even allow others to make) electronic versions of its games. Needless to say, the CSW forums filled with even more ... "witty banter" then usual. And rightfully so, it's one thing in this reporter's humble opinion to not create online modules for games, quite another to exercise your right to restrict others from creating them.

My initial reaction to this is negative and I'll explain why. I'm a big fan of several systems published by MMP, namely TCS, GCACW and ASL. What they all have in common is that they are A) very 'grognardy' B) expensive and C) time-consuming to play . What all these features add up to are an extensive collection of games that have a real hard time hitting the game table anyway. So creating a barrier to online play doesn't seem very customer-friendly to me. While I may very well keep buying these lines (TCS and GCACW anyway, I've already bailed on ASL) I definitely will think twice before buying into any other systems.

Now, if this proprietary system turns out to be very easy to use (like Hexwar.com) AND not too expensive (don't make me buy the damn game twice!) then I might be mollified. On the other hand, I may very well just say to heck with it and spend my money elsewhere on games I'll get to play more.

There's no doubt MMP is within their legal rights here. But if they don't impart sufficient added value then they may just kill off the customer base. Some of their games are pretty popular (ASL, OCS, SCS, GCACW) by wargame standards but none of them are wildly popular by any other measure and they can ill-afford to turn off dedicated players.

On the other hand, if they offer a very good product, then they may have something there. VASSEL and Cyberboard are very good for what they do, but their strength is also their weakness. They are generic enough to have the flexibility to handle most any game, but that also means they can't focus on providing a hassle-free game experience. I find that VASSEL and Cyberboard games take a significant time commitment, although not an unreasonable one. But I find it worthwhile to subscribe to the Hexwar game service because it's easy to play a lot. And I do that even though I'm not otherwise a big fan of the games they offer (mostly old SPI quads)

Bottom line is that I'm skeptical, but could be convinced. If, on the other hand, it starts to smell like just a way to wring a few more bucks out of players without offering them anything they can't get elsewhere for less then I'm outta there.

Curt Schilling retires

Well, now that he is retired from baseball I wonder if that will have any implications for MMP? Perhaps he will take a more active role in the company's management.

I seem to recall that he said once that he promised his wife that MMP would be a self-sustaining business, in other words his baseball earnings were not going to subsidize his hobby. So I wouldn't expect his retirement to mean more funds for the business.

On the other hand, he may have more time available, even if he spends a lot of it on other business opportunities. That time may very well have a lot of value in itself, but it also could mean a better focus. Given that Schilling is obviously a highly competitive person, directing some of his competitive energy into making MMP a bigger company wouldn't be surprising.

ASL SK #1 -- Evidence wargamers don't care about mounted boards

On BoardGame Geek it's not uncommon to have some euro-background gamer express disappointment over the component quality of their first wargame compared to what they are used to.

When parsed, it usually comes down to the board, which is generally not mounted on stiff cardboard, but is paper or thick cardstock. The otter area of complaint is with rules, and often those complaints have some validity. Writing good rules is undoubtedly the biggest challenge for wargame publishers.

But long before they get to find the inadequacies of the rules, many of these new wargamers have a bad impression because the map is, to their eyes, flimsy and cheap.

Yet there's little evidence that veteran wargamers care much about whether the map is mounted or not and there's nothing to suggest a lot of agitation among consumers for mounted boards. Indeed. mounted boards have never been all that common for wargames.

Sure, Avalon Hill almost always used mounted mapboards, but that company was a special case. They published many family and adult games where having a mounted board was required, from a marketing standpoint and the company was owned by a printer, reducing the costs considerations that affected other publishers.

Throughout the history of wargames, mounted boards have been associated with attempts to branch out to the wider gaming public, which has been conditioned to expect boardgames to have mounted playing surfaces ever since they got Candyland or Monopoly. SPI's "designer" series wargames, TSR's Onslaught and Red Storm Rising, Steve Jackson Games' Deluxe Ogre, etc. are all examples from years gone by.

But hardcore, mainstream hex-and-counter wargames have generally had paper maps or, for more deluxe versions, thick cardstock. Partly this is because paper maps are the only practical option for wargames published in a magazine format such as Strategy & Tactics magazine. But even for their boxed games, publishers such as SPI, GDW, Columbia, and otters have used paper or cardstock maps.

Paper and cardstock maps are much less costly, for one thing, and given that wargames are already fairly expensive, players have been willing to save that expense. Paper and cardstock maps have some practical advantages as well. They're usually one large piece which avoids problems with the folds and gaps often seen in mounted boards and, when covered by Plexiglas, form a very flat, solid, spill-resistant and convenient playing surface.

Paper maps do have some drawbacks, of course. The most serious is durability. As they age they tend to rip and develop holes, especially along the folds, and for this reason more deluxe wargames tend to use a thick cardstock instead of paper. This medium ha all the advantages of paper maps while being more durable.

The pattern has been well-established and shows little propensity to change. The wargames that have mounted maps today tend to be the ones that appeal to a wider, non-wargame audience as well, such as Memoir' 44, War of the Ring and Napoleon's Triumph. Wargamers seem perfectly satisfied with heavy cardstock games, as the success of GMT, L2 Design and Columbia show.

The latest evidence for this is the ASL community and MMP, which is in the process of converting the ASL world from mounted maps to heavy cardstock maps, something few euro-oriented gamers would consider an improvement.

That ASL had mounted boards at all is largely because it was an Avalon Hill game and all AH games had mounted maps back then. In truth, however, the mounted boards always created some problems for ASL players because they didn't abut with the precision the game really needed. ASL traces line of sight using a "naturalistic" rule that depends on the actual contours of terrain features such as building and woods. (As opposed to the other common wargame convention of considering blocking terrain to fill en entire hex and therefore only worrying about hexsides.

The small gaps and irregular lineup caused by the board mounting process meant, in ASL, that any LOS that crossed the boundary between two boards was necessarily a little "off" from what it would have been if the boards were really adjacent.

ASL started using paper maps with the historical modules, which were based on actual terrain and usually came on one or two standard-sized game maps. This was well-received by players, so there was no obvious resistance to non-mounted maps by players. The biggest obstacle to changing over was the the fact that there was the legacy of some 40+ previously published AH mapboards. All new players necessarily started with those.

The ASL Start kits, however, have provided an alternative entry point for new players and MMP has apparently take that opportunity to switch the ASL community over to heavy cardstock maps to replace the existing stock. Reprints will have the cardstock maps instead of mounted maps. It's less of a bother than it might seem to mix them because a player can simply place a cardstock map on top of an unused mounted mapboard and use the Plexiglas to hold it all down.

There are few wargame communities more "hard core" than ASLers, and I think the evidence is clear, real wargamers don't need mounted maps.

ASL and the urge for epics

One urge common to wargamers but rare among other board gaming flavors (although shared with RPGs) is to seek out and play the "epic," "campaign" or "monster" game. All three are just different manifestations of the same desire, I think, to capture the sweep and drama of a bigger-than-life gaming experience.
Warfare, by its very nature, lends itself to the grand sweep of things and its interrelated parts are well-suited to being linked. Even the otherwise-rather basic Commands and Colors system includes "Epic" and "Overlord" versions. Monster games requiring a half-dozen players achieve the links laterally.
But perhaps the most common way to create a campaign narrative is by linking a series of individual scenarios together into a longer metagame. The whole idea of "scenarios" is itself peculiar to wargames. I don't think there's anything like it in other boardgames.
The original Squad Leader included a way to build a campaign narrative including the opportunity for promoting a "personal leader" but there were many ways to link games even in ASL. The historical modules like Red Barricades and Kampfgruppe Peiper have obvious linkages, for example, but others are possible.
Myself and my regular ASL partners engaged in a giant metacampaign for the 50th anniversary of World War II playing the "official" Avalon Hill ASL scenarios in chronological order more or less on the 50th anniversaries of the actual fights. Like perhaps most such overly ambitious wargame projects it didn't reach completion (at least not yet) but it did reach fruition. We made it well in the summer of 1944 before life changes knocked the effort off schedule. Finishing the last year of the war is an ongoing, if very occasional, project to this day, even as the 60th anniversaries have now passed.
Still, we got some 200+ games played in some kind of order and had a good time doing so. There's a unique satisfaction to playing on the epic scale.