WEGO games, what happened to them?

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

Fine, let's do this then. Let's say that, on the right side, we have a WEGO game about the whole PTO that is consistently played since 2009, with many campaigns finished, that shows, on the average, historical results, generated a whole subculture and that is still going strong after 12 years.

Same is even more true of D&D.

D&D is... historical? [&:]

Edit: or WEGO, for what matters...

[z1812]

ORIGINAL: z1812

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69



On YouTube there is a whole list of Flashpoint AARs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M58ncvQ ... 6n&index=2

I'm not part of it (I don't do videos), but I really, really liked this game. A perfect WEGO, IMHO, which actually used an "asymmetrical" kind of WEGO (more mobile and agile forces could get orders more often than "slow" ones, with variables ranging from doctrine to "too many orders to process" to the effects of the electronic battlefield).

Hmmm... Thanks to wayback machine, BTW, I was able to find the original review on Wargamer - the one that sold me. Why the "new and improved" version of the site doesn't keep available these reviews - exp. considering that many games are still sold - is beyond me.

http://web.archive.org/web/201411241530 ... -interview

"Red Storm" is hypothetical, right? So how could it be evaluated for historical performance?

Various Ministries of Defence, and Military Colleges, use wego and igoyougo games for evaluating strategies and tactics to respond to probable situations they are likely to encounter. The games they use cover different periods of history. Especially at the college level.

If Wego is good enough for them. Then it is good enough for me.

Hi Curtis, I think you missed this post........or maybe it was inconvenient for you to answer?

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: z1812

ORIGINAL: z1812

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay



"Red Storm" is hypothetical, right? So how could it be evaluated for historical performance?

Various Ministries of Defence, and Military Colleges, use wego and igoyougo games for evaluating strategies and tactics to respond to probable situations they are likely to encounter. The games they use cover different periods of history. Especially at the college level.

If Wego is good enough for them. Then it is good enough for me.

Hi Curtis, I think you missed this post........or maybe it was inconvenient for you to answer?

He has previously dismissed military experts and has maintained that people who make war games for a profit are better informed.

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

ORIGINAL: z1812

ORIGINAL: z1812




Various Ministries of Defence, and Military Colleges, use wego and igoyougo games for evaluating strategies and tactics to respond to probable situations they are likely to encounter. The games they use cover different periods of history. Especially at the college level.

If Wego is good enough for them. Then it is good enough for me.

Hi Curtis, I think you missed this post........or maybe it was inconvenient for you to answer?

He has previously dismissed military experts and has maintained that people who make war games for a profit are better informed.

I thought that people who make war games for the military did them for profit too [&:]

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

ORIGINAL: z1812




Hi Curtis, I think you missed this post........or maybe it was inconvenient for you to answer?

He has previously dismissed military experts and has maintained that people who make war games for a profit are better informed.

I thought that people who make war games for the military did them for profit too [&:]

No necessarily if you mean by something other than their military pay if they are in the military. Civilians who do make war games for the military do make the game for profit but on the complete finished work and not by the number of sales to civilian consumers.

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe




He has previously dismissed military experts and has maintained that people who make war games for a profit are better informed.

I thought that people who make war games for the military did them for profit too [&:]

No necessarily if you mean by something other than their military pay if they are in the military. Civilians who do make war games for the military do make the game for profit but on the complete finished work and not by the number of sales to civilian consumers.

I actually meant both things. I don't think that there is an army which drafts people for their wargaming department. I guess that you must want to do it: apply for it, demonstrate your competence in a variety of fields (according to what is to be wargamed) and so on. So I guess that you can be in the armed forces and you have clawed your way up to your dream job: to design and run wargames professionally, helped by "insider-only" info for your model. And of course you are paid for it.

Or you can be an external contractor. For simplicity's sake let's say that you create the whole package, based on the specs you are given. By this point you are a wargame designer that very possibly operates with non-public domain sets of data (covered of course by nazi-like NDAs). Again, this is your job, you do it for a profit (unless you are some kind of retired dilettante) and... I can't see how you cannot be better informed that your colleagues who have to infer all the non public domain data.

I honestly can't see in which universe the sentence "people who make war games for a profit are better informed" said like if it cuts off wargame designers for professional use can make sense.

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: 76mm

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay
I think my "France 1944" test is hard to beat. Lodgement established about as historically. Beach connection at the right time. Breakout maybe a turn late. Paris captured a couple of turns late. Offensive runs out of steam right about the historical point after Market-Garden.

Plenty of evidence for IGOUGO doing a bang-up job. Where's the evidence for WEGO? How do they get off claiming to be a superior system if they can't produce superior results?

So you're claiming that IGOUGO has "superior results" on the basis of one playthrough of one scenario of one game? Really? That's what you call "evidence"? That's completely, utterly ridiculous. IGOUGO might be better for many wargaming scenarios, but you've done nothing to demonstrate that.

Imagine if I had taken 10 trials to get one right! Imagine what criticism I would have gotten from you then! The thing worked right the first time out of the box. Spectacularly!

And, if you had checked the original post, you would know that I posted similarly historical results from Germany 1945 and Soviet Union 1941. And those are just the examples I had movies made of.

Imagine if I could post a movie from the game Warspite1 played with my CFNA scenario. It too turned out spot-on.

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

Fine, let's do this then. Let's say that, on the right side, we have a WEGO game about the whole PTO that is consistently played since 2009, with many campaigns finished, that shows, on the average, historical results, generated a whole subculture and that is still going strong after 12 years.

Same is even more true of D&D.

D&D is... historical? [&:]

Edit: or WEGO, for what matters...

I should have highlighted the "subculture" part.

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: z1812

ORIGINAL: z1812

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay



"Red Storm" is hypothetical, right? So how could it be evaluated for historical performance?

Various Ministries of Defence, and Military Colleges, use wego and igoyougo games for evaluating strategies and tactics to respond to probable situations they are likely to encounter. The games they use cover different periods of history. Especially at the college level.

If Wego is good enough for them. Then it is good enough for me.

Hi Curtis, I think you missed this post........or maybe it was inconvenient for you to answer?

I don't care what anyone's opinion is, no matter who they are. I care what their evidence is. WEGO is a religion. It's sure to have disciples in those establishments.

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

ORIGINAL: z1812

ORIGINAL: z1812




Various Ministries of Defence, and Military Colleges, use wego and igoyougo games for evaluating strategies and tactics to respond to probable situations they are likely to encounter. The games they use cover different periods of history. Especially at the college level.

If Wego is good enough for them. Then it is good enough for me.

Hi Curtis, I think you missed this post........or maybe it was inconvenient for you to answer?

He has previously dismissed military experts and has maintained that people who make war games for a profit are better informed.

Getting information about me from this clown is like getting your information about Israel from ISIS.

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

What is "historicity" if not a "scenario" played once - and thus not comparable with anything similar?

We will never know how the Allies' performance in '44-'45 fell on an hypothetical "probability curve". Maybe they rolled two six-sided dice, were unlucky, and got a "3". Maybe had Market-Garden been a bit more lucky they could have been in Berlin for Christmas. Maybe, had the campaign be played ten times, we would have discovered that the Allies won the war earlier eight times out of them. We will never know.

What we do know is that "the historical result was 3". So we build a top-down model that has 3 as the average: two six-sided dice with only 1s and 2s on their faces. This way we concede that the Allies can got a "2" or a "4", with the historical "3" as the most probable result. But we can't refuse the idea that the model is skewed: you can't shop it around as "correct", because we can't compare what it models (i.e. the real campaign) with anything. It was artificially built to get a specific result.

They were rolling a billion dice. That limits the standard deviation a bunch. There's no way anyone can deny that my France 1944 playtest results were spectacular!

NATO ends up in Vladivostok or Warsaw Pact ends up in San Francisco. Neither case (nor anything in between) could be refuted.

Maybe not, but I do have a pretty good idea about why we never saw many plans tackling those "cases" [:)]

Whether you considered them or not, no result could have been refuted with historical evidence.

[Orm]

Please, be nice. [:)]

I like following threads, and arguments, like this even though I have nothing interesting to contribute with. [&o] So much easier to do so if everyone is nice, and polite.

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: Orm

Please, be nice. [:)]

I like following threads, and arguments, like this even though I have nothing interesting to contribute with. [&o] So much easier to do so if everyone is nice, and polite.

Observe and report . . . [:D]

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69



I thought that people who make war games for the military did them for profit too [&:]

No necessarily if you mean by something other than their military pay if they are in the military. Civilians who do make war games for the military do make the game for profit but on the complete finished work and not by the number of sales to civilian consumers.

I actually meant both things. I don't think that there is an army which drafts people for their wargaming department. I guess that you must want to do it: apply for it, demonstrate your competence in a variety of fields (according to what is to be wargamed) and so on. So I guess that you can be in the armed forces and you have clawed your way up to your dream job: to design and run wargames professionally, helped by "insider-only" info for your model. And of course you are paid for it.

Or you can be an external contractor. For simplicity's sake let's say that you create the whole package, based on the specs you are given. By this point you are a wargame designer that very possibly operates with non-public domain sets of data (covered of course by nazi-like NDAs). Again, this is your job, you do it for a profit (unless you are some kind of retired dilettante) and... I can't see how you cannot be better informed that your colleagues who have to infer all the non public domain data.

I honestly can't see in which universe the sentence "people who make war games for a profit are better informed" said like if it cuts off wargame designers for professional use can make sense.

The military people may have information not available to the wargame designers up to and including actual experience with said weapons and systems in action.

But what are nazi-like NDAs? Are you referring to items that they need to sign not to disclose highly classified information which may go beyond public knowledge or even the knowledge known by users of said weapons and weapons systems? Such information would be highly useful to potential enemies.

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

ORIGINAL: z1812




Hi Curtis, I think you missed this post........or maybe it was inconvenient for you to answer?

He has previously dismissed military experts and has maintained that people who make war games for a profit are better informed.

Getting information about me from this clown is like getting your information about Israel from ISIS.

[:-]

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay
And, if you had checked the original post, you would know that I posted similarly historical results from Germany 1945 and Soviet Union 1941. And those are just the examples I had movies made of.

So you've cherry-picked the handful of scenario play-throughs that you found closely resembled historical results...so what? Other play throughs have undoubtedly resulted in wildly ahistorical results. You understand that just posting the results that support your argument is completely irrelevant, right? Do you think that's how data analysis works? Before drawing any conclusions you need to look at all the results, which you do not, and cannot possibly, have.

[wodin]

I see only one fanatic and preacher in this thread.

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

What is "historicity" if not a "scenario" played once - and thus not comparable with anything similar?

We will never know how the Allies' performance in '44-'45 fell on an hypothetical "probability curve". Maybe they rolled two six-sided dice, were unlucky, and got a "3". Maybe had Market-Garden been a bit more lucky they could have been in Berlin for Christmas. Maybe, had the campaign be played ten times, we would have discovered that the Allies won the war earlier eight times out of them. We will never know.

What we do know is that "the historical result was 3". So we build a top-down model that has 3 as the average: two six-sided dice with only 1s and 2s on their faces. This way we concede that the Allies can got a "2" or a "4", with the historical "3" as the most probable result. But we can't refuse the idea that the model is skewed: you can't shop it around as "correct", because we can't compare what it models (i.e. the real campaign) with anything. It was artificially built to get a specific result.

They were rolling a billion dice. That limits the standard deviation a bunch. There's no way anyone can deny that my France 1944 playtest results were spectacular!

Again, no.

Let's say that you build your model to simulate the '44-'45 Campaign in the West. You input in it your best understanding of a variety of factors: from weapon performances, to supply and supply net problems, to various units proficiencies, to anything else you think that can have an impact on the end result. You then run the simulation ten times. The results are:

- Eight times out of ten the Allies reach Berlin by November 1944
- One time out of ten the Allies reach Berlin by the late December 1944
- One time out of ten the Allies stop at the Elbe in late April 1945.

What your conclusion would be?

A) Boy, the Allies were really unlucky! They could have freed Poland before the Russians!
B) The model is wrong! The historical result only happens one time out of ten! It must be flawed!

If your answer is A), you are boasting that your model is perfect without having proof - because we only have a single example for that campaign: the historical one. And we don't know where the historical one fell in the possible spectrum of results.

If your answer is B), then you are admitting that you will tweak your model until the historical result will happen "on the average" - i.e. you will build a top-down, artificial model until you get "average" results. It doesn't matter that, again, we don't know if the historical result was "the average" one. Who knows? Maybe the original model was the right one and led us to discover an interesting fact about WWII: the Allies were very unlucky. With case B) we will never known.

And there is more. Let's consider...

They were rolling a billion dice. That limits the standard deviation a bunch.

Except that not all dice rolls are created equal and have the same impact on the standard deviation. Let's consider, for example, France 1940. True: the French Army had invisible weaknesses and the German one not yet readily understood strengths. The Germans, however, had any kind of lucky breaks - starting with the chain of events that led Hitler to learn about the "Manstein Plan" when Halder had already torpedoed both Manstein and his plan.

On the field, we can reasonably say that the Le Mans-like race from the Meuse to the Channel by Guderian and his merry panzers was instrumental in knocking out the wind from the Allies in May, 1940. We also know that a horrified German high command, fearing a trap, tried many times to stop this race, and that Guderian went on either by misrepresenting these orders or by flatly ignoring them. Only his competence, brazen face and prestige allowed him to pull this feat. I don't think that the 1940 Germans had another general available with his qualities, not even Rommel (who, in all fairness, was conducting his private war "Rommel vs. The Whole of France" at the head of the 7th Panzer Division, thus contributing to the chaos...)

But we also know, from Guderian's own memories, that on May, 12th 1940 (i.e. crucially before the Meuse crossing), he was almost killed by Allied bombers twice in a day. He came this close. Alistair Horne, in To Lose a Battle: France 1940 writes about "this narrow escape, which might so easily have altered the course of the coming battle."

So, I guess that a lot of Germans "rolled their dice" that day - but what Guderian rolled was exponentially more important than what a humble motorcyclist in the 10th Panzer Division got (or what a bullet fired by him did). The face of the whole campaign would have changed just like that, on that crucial die roll.

France 1940 is actually considered such a "black swan" event for the Allies that every single operational/strategic WWII game uses some kind of astounding contortion to ensure that France dies - maybe gloriously, but dies. Because God forbids that the French player can play smart resulting in Germany delaying or - gasp! [X(] - having to abandon Barbarossa (interesting explorations about what WWII could have been, beside the usual tale, being a cause for panic attacks or such, I guess, but I'm digressing).

NATO ends up in Vladivostok or Warsaw Pact ends up in San Francisco. Neither case (nor anything in between) could be refuted.

Maybe not, but I do have a pretty good idea about why we never saw many plans tackling those "cases" [:)]

Whether you considered them or not, no result could have been refuted with historical evidence.
[/quote]
And still they talked more about the Fulda-Frankfurt corridor than about NATO plans for the siege of Vladivostok. Who knows? Maybe they had faith in their models [;)]

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

But what are nazi-like NDAs? Are you referring to items that they need to sign not to disclose highly classified information which may go beyond public knowledge or even the knowledge known by users of said weapons and weapons systems? Such information would be highly useful to potential enemies.

Sorry, it was a language-thing. Over here we use expressions like "nazi-NDA" or "nazi-DRM" as a form of hyperbole - it has nothing to do with real nazis [:)]

[RangerJoe]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

But what are nazi-like NDAs? Are you referring to items that they need to sign not to disclose highly classified information which may go beyond public knowledge or even the knowledge known by users of said weapons and weapons systems? Such information would be highly useful to potential enemies.

Sorry, it was a language-thing. Over here we use expressions like "nazi-NDA" or "nazi-DRM" as a form of hyperbole - it has nothing to do with real nazis [:)]

Well, the language might be strict and very specific but it has to be for such things. Otherwise then a "no" will be equal to a "maybe" and a "maybe" then equal to a "yes!" Even a missing comma "," can completely change the meaning such as the difference between:

"Let us eat Grandma!"
and
"Let us eat, Grandma!"

I somehow think that Grandma would prefer the second one over the first one. [;)]