FOW/Intelligence

[vandorenp]

Thought about putting this in Game Suggestions thread but that thread is too messy.

Over the course of 50 years playing wargames I have noticed the difficulty designers have coming up with systems which are realistic and yet "fun" to play. They do the best they can yet still receive criticism when players discover there are no chances at all for historical outcomes to occur. Or perhaps there are odd rules which force things to work out. Say for instance an inevitable German defeat. I have been toying with a conclusion - designers have difficulty including the the WWII state of the art in enemy OB and deployment intelligence. Even more so including the Allied intelligence advantage brought about by the MAGIC and ULTRA programs, which BTW the Soviets did benefit from.

Since WitE has such a sophisticated logistics model I think it is fair to use it for discussing what a designer should be attempting to create which would represent the state of Corps and higher enemy OB and deployment intelligence in WWII.

(i am receiving error saying i do not have sufficient privileges to upload files) Attached are 3 jpeg files of the US 12 AG Weekly intelligence Summary 18 Nov 1944 German OB Annex. You will see clearly boundaries between armies and army groups as well as HQ locations to include OB West. Known and suspected locations of units out of contact are shown. Units out of contact but location unknown are listed. A host of capabilities were in place for both sides which produced such intelligence products. Air Recce seems to be the only one in WitE. To give the look and feel of WWII state of the art WitE should have the following when FOW is turned on:

Suspected and known HQ locations
List of HQ whose locations are unknown
Visual enemy unit location history
Display location of enemy units which participated in combat during previous enemy turn but you no longer are adjacent to (opponent wiped out all the units you had in contact with these)
List of units location unknown
Better info on units in the rear (Reinhard Gehlens book The Service if you think that is unrealistic)

Then there is ULTRA and MAGIC to incorporate. General Omar Bradley wrote in his second autobiography "A Generals Life" the following regarding these sources:

"As a result of information gained from Ultra and Magic, as well as aerial reconnaissance and other sources, we were extraordinarily well informed about the enemy, his probable intentions, his power and weapons and his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Seldom in history has an opposing army known so much about it’s opponent.
...my G-2’s and Ultra reps became highly skilled at interpreting the important material in the (Ultra) data and thereafter presented it to me daily. ... Added to the massive flow of Ultra from the Germans was an additional bonus: A Magic source in the ETO. This was Japan’s ambassador in Berlin, General Baron Hiroshi Oshima. ... Oshima passed to Tokyo the results of his diplomatic interviews with Hitler and his staff. The importance of Oshima’s contribution to our ...intelligence picture may be inferred from an excerpt from a letter George Marshall wrote in the summer of 1944, ”Our main basis of information regarding Hitler’s intentions in Europe is obtained from Baron Oshima’s messages from Berlin reporting his interviews with Hitler and other officials to the Japanese government.”"

Magic provided intercepts from all the Japanese diplomatic personnel in the various European postings. The Japanese ambassadors and military attaches had free reign to go anywhere and see most everything. And they reported on all of it. So how do you design a realistic WWII game? Realistically the Allies should ALMOST ALWAYS have the chance to change deployments and schemes of maneuver before and as the Germans execute their plans. Unrealistically the German player now knows his every plan is known to his opponent. No point to playing that game.

So a game designed without ULTRA and MAGIC is a game which ought not play out as WWII did. What would that be like? See Sir Harry Hinsley's 1993 lecture on the Impact of ULTRA http://www.cix.co.uk/~klockstone/hinsley.htm. Search on "Russian Front" to go immediately to the part of concern to WitE.

[vandorenp]

The NE corner

[vandorenp]

The SW part of the map

[lowtech]

Interesting where are you going with this? I think there's way too much info for the players even under the current max settings.

[vandorenp]

Basically i am trying to make two points.

1. When you are playing FOW the picture is not close to what the combatants Army Groups and Theater HQ's had in front of the them - the look and feel is wrong.

2. No operational or strategic WWII game is realistic unless the Allied players have an intelligence picture as good as the one the Allies had due to ULTRA and MAGIC. Otherwise the game is a fantasy game.

[Mehring]

Firstly, I can't help but to disagree with using current logistics as a model of sophistication worthy of emulation. Major improvements are in the pipeline but it currently bears little relation to historical capabilities.

As far as intel goes-

Display location of enemy units which participated in combat during previous enemy turn but you no longer are adjacent to Given that unit intel decays over time at a rate of 1-5 per turn from a max of 10, this is already in place. It's likely that units you were adjacent to will also remain visible for a while, even without combat.

known HQ locations You can highlight known enemy units by type, IIRC including HQs, which allows a player to inform their guesses as to where threats are coming from. The problem here is that you lose the highlight when you click on a unit so the interface could be improved.


Visual enemy unit location history That sounds like a recipe for an intolerable mess, but in-hex arrows showing the direction of movement of units revealed by interdiction/recon would be nice.

Better info on units in the rear Not sure that we need quantitatively better information than that already obtainable with air recon but see below.

List of (HQ) units location unknown Sure.


Suspected HQ locations BTR allows the LW to gauge the intensity of incoming attacks by monitoring radio traffic. Wasn't this also a feature of the ground war and radio traffic an indication of HQ presence/location? Perhaps radio traffic could rise and fall according to movement and attacks of subordinate units, its intensity be depicted visually like a "soft factor."

Much of the problem is expressing Western Allies intel advantages. This is sort of simulated by air superiority in 44+, but less so where air superiority is not absolute. What if a random die is made each turn to crack enigma and subsequently, all Axis units are subjected to a random die each turn, the outcome of which would possibly reveal that unit and position it within a certain number of hexes of its actual position?

The same might be applied to CW units in Egypt/Libya due to "Little Fellows" who for a protracted period told Rommel all he needed to know about their condition and intentions. DAK might also gain an "insubordination intel advantage" while commanded by Rommel as his not following intercepted orders frequently enabled DAK to surprise the Allies.

[chaos45]

Actually as to Rommel in the desert he had good intel up until his HQ was overrun by the British. My understanding is his intel network was mainly the good/hard work of a the personnel in this intel unit and most were killed/wounded in this attack and from then on the Germans werent reading the british mail so to speak.

[Mehring]

ORIGINAL: chaos45

Actually as to Rommel in the desert he had good intel up until his HQ was overrun by the British. My understanding is his intel network was mainly the good/hard work of a the personnel in this intel unit and most were killed/wounded in this attack and from then on the Germans werent reading the british mail so to speak.

Not sure about that. Maybe wrong, I thought his intel staff were killed when they were pressed into an attack, long time ago I read about this though.

The Allies weren't the only side into code theft and breaking. Rommel's main loss of intel was the US military attaché in Cairo, Bonner Fellers, who for more than six months provided detailed information on any and everything he saw on the CW side in the dessert.

http://www.historynet.com/intercepted-c ... rommel.htm

[musashi64]

ORIGINAL: chaos45

Actually as to Rommel in the desert he had good intel up until his HQ was overrun by the British. My understanding is his intel network was mainly the good/hard work of a the personnel in this intel unit and most were killed/wounded in this attack and from then on the Germans werent reading the british mail so to speak.

From the book "L'Ultimo Fronte d'Africa" written by Paolo Colacicchi ,Vice chief of the Information Office of the Italian Army in Africa:
It is true that Rommel had detailed informations about the 8th Army's movements from an Arab network of spies destroyed on July 1942 (just before of the first battle of El Alamein)
From the same book, the author says that they were able to identify which units they were facing identifying who was tarnsmitting, because every soldier have a way to do it.
You have, anyway , to remember the different number of units involved in the African theater with that of the Eastern Front.

Kind Regards

Roberto

[musashi64]

ORIGINAL: Mehring

ORIGINAL: chaos45

Actually as to Rommel in the desert he had good intel up until his HQ was overrun by the British. My understanding is his intel network was mainly the good/hard work of a the personnel in this intel unit and most were killed/wounded in this attack and from then on the Germans werent reading the british mail so to speak.

Not sure about that. Maybe wrong, I thought his intel staff were killed when they were pressed into an attack, long time ago I read about this though.

The Allies weren't the only side into code theft and breaking. Rommel's main loss of intel was the US military attaché in Cairo, Bonner Fellers, who for more than six months provided detailed information on any and everything he saw on the CW side in the dessert.

http://www.historynet.com/intercepted-c ... rommel.htm

Exactly what I have said in my previous post.
The Arab network was having as source of information the US military attachè.

Kind regards

Roberto

[chaos45]

Might have been Von Lucks book, cant remember as it was book I read awhile back.

Anyway the German in the book talks about how a british breakthrough got to the HQ and all the intel personnel had to be used in the fight and many were lost because the HQ was basically destroyed in the fighting but the breakthrough stopped. An he goes on to state that after that the value/accuraccy of the intel the HQ received was of much lower quality from then forward.

Basically they lost most of their quality staff and the replacements werent as good.

Something most games tie to a generals ability is also alot of the ability in the staff. Such as Manstein lamenting the break-up of the 11st Army after crimea campaign. Having an army/staff that is used to working together builds on itself from relationships and understanding when you constantly switch units and staff around it will degrade performance in the short term usually.

As it takes awhile for relationships/understanding/intel to build up within the new command structure. Games really dont reflect these issues at all usually. In all honesty in WiTE level of game play when you switch units between commands they should take a hit of some sort in the short term. Until the new structure gets in place. Either no bonus or reduced bonus from the new command for at least that turn if not several turns.

1 week isnt that long in real life to set up command relationships especially with everything else the staff is trying to manage. Even in modern war with much better communications change of responsibilities take awhile to execute and things always fall through the cracks.

[lowtech]

Firstly, I can't help but to disagree with using current logistics as a model of sophistication worthy of emulation. Major improvements are in the pipeline but it currently bears little relation to historical capabilities.

Mehring. I am a logistics "nut" and I couldn't agree with you more. But... WitE is the system that at least focuses on logistics and has a group of players/modders/designers willing to work on it.

Intelligence aka Intel

Where to begin. So there are, of course, lots of different kinds of Intel but at a basic level the Intelligence cycle is:

Collection This is what many people think of as Intel, includes all the Ways & Means spying, recon, SigInt (Radio and Signals Intercepts etc.)

Analysis Both interpretation as well as determining the trustworthiness of the source

Distribution Getting the processed Intel to the correct "users". This part of the Cycle is almost always heavily influenced by secrecy; "need to know". In order to protect the "Ways & Means" ie. how the Intel was collected in the first place. There have been plenty of Movies made based on this premise.

Note that different kinds of Intelligence have different "shelf lives"; that some kinds remain valid for longer, industrial production, major transfers of units to a distant theater and such. Others are useful only for very limited times, Radio Intercepts indicating an inbound air raid and so on.

This process functions at all levels even at the lowest level of the hierarchy. For example a "good" (high experience) Soviet or German Line Company spent a great deal of effort engaging in Patrolling, basically wandering near or even probing enemy positions to gather information: location of defensive positions, types of troops and weapons, any unusual activity. The crowning glory of a patrol was to capture enemy personnel and then interrogate them. Humint, human intelligence, as this is now known in the US remains one of the best sources of local intelligence. This information would be analyzed and both distributed to all the units in the Company and also sent "back up" the hierarchy becoming one more source of Intel.

At higher levels in a military organization the kinds and amounts of Intel grow exponentially and the importance of Distribution grows. Which is my whole point in all this:

Looking at the War in the East

Strategic Level Intel: Soviets, good to very good, but very poor distribution. Axis abysmal- beyond terrible or rather through the political lens of Nazism, facts were made to conform with reality so that the OKW/OKH consistently radically underestimated the size and capacity of the Soviet Union.

Operational Intel Basically WitE (more or less) Soviets had reasonable collection, good analysis, terrible distribution, thus crippling their analysis. Like so many other Soviet military functions the distribution got radically better post 43; but was still not up to German Standards. German Operational Intel, and especially the distribution was phenomenal (relatively speaking). The lowly, slow prop-recon aircraft attached directly to the Corps or even Division (in rare cases) gave the German commanders in 1941 and 1942 unprecedented ability to see the first 10kms battlefield . As the war progressed and the Axis lost air superiority this advantage went away which was one of the main reasons the Soviets were able to mass forces over a period of weeks near the Germans in many places, even early in the war. Moscow in Dec 41 and the abortive Kharkov offensive in the Spring of 42.

By summer of 1943 the Axis has an extremely limited ability to "see" beyond the front lines. The Soviet Air prevents the "promiscuous" use of all the slow, corps level recon aircraft. Now basically only high-performance fighter recon aircraft have a chance consistently penetrating Soviet Airspace. And the Soviets have gotten extremely good at Counter-Intel, hiding their forces in general and even deceiving the German analysts. Combined with the ever more sophisticated Soviet collection and partisan Intel collection and much better distribution, the Soviets became ever better informed where the Axis formations were. They still suffered on the tactical levels though, for a variety of reasons; mostly their never really solved issues with coordinating complex operations.

What this would mean in concrete game terms is adding yet even more fog-of-war, probably getting rid of the "airbase" strike or allowing it only against airbases very close to the front. And by much greater fog of war, getting rid of the ability to see the various enemy strengths, unless reconnoitered or equivalent (the "Scouted" result perhaps. Adding a good bit of uncertainty to the combat reports concerning the enemy. Captured would be a hard number but only ranges for numbers of enemy involved and killed. 10,100 Captured, 3000-4000 enemy KIA and WIA 20-50 Armored vehicles destroyed . The rear area would be a more or less blank slate with very rough indicators of concentrations. With the Soviets developing an ever greater capacity to see Axis rear areas post Winter 43-44.

Anyway I gotta get back to work. But this is a rough idea.

[governato]

The game allows the players to know the enemy's exact number of men, guns tanks etc...which is very very far from what the operational commanders could ever dream to know ...Hell even about their own troops...(in Summer 41 entire Soviet Armies were unable to communicate to STAVKA for several days in a row). I have been wishing for a better model of FOW, but I am not sure that is part of the original vision for the game and I am not sure how hard it 'd be to add to it.

[musashi64]

The problem is that the FOW should follow the trend of the war.... I mean that at the beginning of the campaign the Germans had everything: Recon, informations and so on.
On 1943 the Soviets had Lucy and the Red Orchestra that gave to them the full plan for the battle of Kursk.
What if the Germans had occupied Moscow on 1941? Had someone the wisdom to betray a winning Reich?
I say this because it is very difficult to build a true FOw and so better to keep an artificial one as we have.

Kind regards

Roberto

[uw06670]

ORIGINAL: governato

The game allows the players to know the enemy's exact number of men, guns tanks etc...

While this is true, I would hate to lose the knowledge of numbers of items in the battle as to me its a big part of the fun.

But if there was another FOW checkbox, to more obfuscate that stuff, you could just show the winning side (the one that didn't retreat) things like:
- Approx # men killed
- # men captured
- # of AFVs destroyed and captured

[Numdydar]

Also what kind of game would this be if the Allied player actually did 'know' everything the real Allies did? The Allies pretty much have an 'I win' button anyway so this would make it even worse for the Axis. Certain not a game I would want to play as the Axis.

In your eyes, WitP AE has the same issues since the US pretty much knew where the Japanese CVs were at all times. Yet in the game the FOW prevents this.

The real issue in ANY WWII game is the hindsight we have from 70 years later. Plus very few games have any or very limited political ramifications of doing things these games allow. Like attacking the Low countries at the same time Poland is attacked. This would NEVER have happened in RL simply because German was petrified of a two front war again. Why? Because Germany did not EXPECT France to fall so quickly. So they wanted to make sure the East was secure before attacking France seriously.

The only way to do what you are looking for is to create a WWII 'like' game with a random map, technologies, and politics. Then the player really is in the dark about a lot of things and is more in line with the realities that the RL leaders faced in that period. And start the game in '33 or '36 [:)]

[lowtech]

While this is true, I would hate to lose the knowledge of numbers of items in the battle as to me its a big part of the fun.

Which, of course totally kewl and as valid as me nattering on about the "historicity" of everything. [:)] And you suggest the solution:

But if there was another FOW checkbox, to more obfuscate that stuff, you could just show the winning side (the one that didn't retreat) things like:
- Approx # men killed
- # men captured
- # of AFVs destroyed and captured

Which is something computer games do very well, layered info display- though programming an AI to deal with all this....

[vandorenp]

ORIGINAL: Numdydar

Also what kind of game would this be if the Allied player actually did 'know' everything the real Allies did? The Allies pretty much have an 'I win' button anyway so this would make it even worse for the Axis. Certain not a game I would want to play as the Axis.

I agree and said the same at the beginning. I started this thread to first talk about the WWII operational and strategic level wargame design intelligence problem in general through the example of WitE. Reading Sir Harry Hinsley's 1993 lecture reinforces General Bradley's remarks on ULTRA and MAGIC and suggests the increased length of the war by two years without these sources. Nevertheless designers set the stage for a historical end. To do so something artificial has to be in the design. A fantasy is the result.

Second reason is to point out the WitEgame map does not have the look and feel of WWII operational or strategic level OOB maps of either side.

[swkuh]

Two things about WitE map:

Terrain, infrastructure, fortifications, etc. needs be well represented, although editing for usefulness & playability is always required. This forum occasionally identifies such and, I believe, some have been incorporated (at least in individual map mods,)

Lose the effects of "hex" basis for all map representations.

Anyone know any game that doesn't use hexes?

[Mehring]

ORIGINAL: rrbill

Anyone know any game that doesn't use hexes?

HOI
CotA and other Panther games.