Panther's games in Lawrence, KS, 20 & 21 Feb 2009

[James Sterrett]

Lawrence Wargaming is running the show; This is the list of games being run.

As noted here --

"A featured group at the convention will be the Simulation Support Team from Fort Leavenworth's Command and General Staff College. This team of contractors from Northrop Grumman's Technical Services division will run a Kriegsspiel game, a forerunner of modern wargaming, adopted by the Prussian General Staff in the 19th century. To further demonstrate the evolution and practical use of wargaming in military planning, they will also offer a miniatures wargame used in the 1980s and 1990s to simulate a possible Cold War conflict. Finally, they will demonstrate a computerized staff exercise using the WWII simulation Conquest of the Aegean."

If you're a participant, you'll be put in one of the key staff positions (Commander, XO, Fires, Intel, Future Ops, Current Ops) for your side. We'll walk you through the planning process and then fight the battle. No experience is necessary!

And, by the way, we'll have a beta version of Battles from the Bulge and just-might run one of the staff exercises using that, too.

I'll also be running exercises in this mode at the Origins Game Faire in June -- I'm expecting to run exercises in COTA or BFTB, Flashpoint: Germany, and TacOps.

[TinyPirate]

Oh that sounds interesting!

Has anyone tried running COTA as a staff exercise through forums? It would be really interesting to see folks write up and issue orders and then to have a GM plot them on the map as instructed, and to watch the players respond.

Or it could be a lot of tedious paperwork...

[James Sterrett]

It could work.  Let me chew on it a it.

[TinyPirate]

So... what happened?

[James Sterrett]

Note: Rename the extension of the attached file from .gif to .zip to unpack it.

We wound up running two scenarios, both from COTA:

1) First Clean Break: We had 4 people playing. As usual, it took them some time to become fully comfortable with their staff roles. However, after about a day of the battle, the roles clicked -- especially for Future Ops -- and from them on it was pretty smooth sailing.

Why does future ops ("5") matter so much? Because the 5 is working out "what happens when the current orders are complete"! In a fast-moving, fluid situation like FCB, the 5 cannot afford to get sucked into the vortex of current operations, or the force will run out of plans. (I've watched a staff fail to win FCB, as the Germans, despite annihilating the British, because they outran their plans and didn't get sorted out in time to exit the map.)

2) Elasson Rearguard: We had 11 playing, 6 on the German side and 5 for the British. The German staff had a lot of trouble coming together (and Chaim Krause, their coach/instructor, knows more of what happened there than I do). On the New Zealand side, the commander rapidly took charge of the staff and their planning largely proceeded smoothly. Execution was calm and measured until German armor punched over the Elasson bridge. The NZs committed very hard to Elasson in response, leaving two units to cover the ferries in the west. Then one unit to cover the ferries in the west -- and it blew one of them when a German force appeared, but in the press of events, nobody twigged to the importance of "German forces in the West", and was ordered to the defence of Elasson instead of being ordered to hold the second ferry. The Germans slipped across the second ferry. Suddenly -- and even I was completely shocked by the speed of the advance -- two battalions of German motorized infantry were rampaging across the southern edge of the map, chewing up the NZ artillery park, plus grabbing Tirnavos and the exit point. NZ overcommitment to the Elasson fight meant all their troops were 1) exhausted and 2) engaged, preventing them from pulling out and reforming again. It's a very hard fight for NZ at the best of times.

The commander of the NZ force asked me, afterwards, how they'd managed in real life. I don't know, though I understand they bought enough time for the bulk of the Commonwealth forces to move to Thermopylae. Both this scenario and FCB drive home just how hard it is to run a mobile defense.

[James Sterrett]

If you meant about running this through the forums, though....  I'm still chewing.  [:)]
 
The planning process would run about the same as usual, on an email list or a dedicated planning forum.
 
In principle, we could run the game by my advancing time an hour every evening and sending out the savegame file, using passwords to protect the two sides.  I put in any new orders that I get in time, and run another turn.  At one hour per day, that's going to require several months to work through.
 
Another issue would be letting people spectate without letting the two staffs into each other's forums -- I've no idea how much of a pain that would be to set up.

[BAL]

Are there any plans to do another one of these in the future?  I'm within driving distance but due to other committments I couldn't make it last weekend.

[James Sterrett]

There's a decent chance we'll be running games at Recruits, in about a month's time; but it is not settled yet!

[BAL]

Thanks for the reply.  Please keep us posted!

[James Sterrett]

An incident that slipped my mind:
 
As we were running the second COTA staff game, somebody came up and watched while carrying a boardgame:  Trial of Strength http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8208 . 
 
So, between his boardgame and our computers, we had the first, and the most recently released, Panther Games games. 
 
The same person also recalled putting in long hours with Panther's first computer game, Fire Brigade, which shares HTTR/COTA's mechanic of "give a group of units an order and they'll see to it".
 
 

[barbarossa2]

Trial of Strength... looks cool. Makes me want to order a copy of it and see what this CLIMACS system is about.

I can't believe I used to play (or try to play) games with playing times over 100 hours.

But it looks cool.

[TinyPirate]

Thanks for the news. And I've no idea how you'd do a big campaign game - it would be extremely hard work!

[James Sterrett]

I've no idea how I'd do a campaign game (multiple linked scenarios) either -- it would require using the scenario editor on each successive engagement, and potentially creating new battles from scratch...  which is a lot of work.

[TinyPirate]

Oh, I didn't mean a campaign game like that - I meant a big group of players doing one scenario using forums as the staff meeting place.