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From the manual, should be enlightening:

"Each ground element has attributes of speed, size and armour, which is zero for all ground elements except for AFV and other combat vehicles. Ground elements are equipped with devices that represent the actual weapons they would fire (or throw/emplace for devices such as grenades and satchel charges) during combat.

For AFV and combat vehicles, the equipped devices are considered part of the vehicle and may have their rate of fire modified to reflect the restrictions of operating the device inside the vehicle. The men that are part of the AFV or combat vehicle ground element are inside the vehicle operating it and employing the equipped devices. For other types of ground elements, the men employ the equipped devices directly, whether the device is a 150mm Howitzer or a hand grenade.

Large (20mm or greater) direct fire devices may have a positive modifier that increases the accuracy of the device to reflect both a more stable firing platform and superior optics. Each device in turn is rated for range, accuracy, rate of fire, ability to affect different types of targets (air, personnel, vehicles), and ability to penetrate armour."

You can watch battles more or less blow by blow, but that will take forever if it's a big one so personally I switch the detail to the lowest level, as I'm only interested in losses and which side wins, as those are basically the only things that matter from an operational/strategic perspective, the tactical perspective of squad X hurting squad Y is nice to have around for those preferring detail, but largely irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.

Ascended, have you taken a look at Command Ops: Battles for the Bulge ? It is one of my favorite operational wargames (the command and control model is so ingenious and realistic), but the tactical details are very detailed too. It has one of the finest wargame engines of all. Might be close to what you're looking for.

tl;dr: the tactical (not merely "technical") level dominates operational outcomes; Operational level games need to abstract the tactical level in fairly high resolution for accurate operational results to occur.

Command Ops: Battles for the Bulge

I played Highway to the Reich and Airborne Assault, they were both good, but definitely tactical level games.

I think there is some confusion about what I'm getting at in my posts, sorry for that. Essentially I want an operational level game -- division and regimental unit scales -- with a combat resolution system smart enough to compare the terrain and the units to create an outcome that is close to what would happen if you simmed it all out in a game like CO:BftB or PzC:O.

I'm not offering suggestions on how to do this. [:'(] I could help a programmer understand all the inputs so that he/she could know what things need to be considered.

One of the biggest issues would be spotting and detection and order of resolution.

Something like:

Combat Team A,
Infantry Heavy, light equipment, low experience, high morale
T-26 Coy, dug in & keyholed <-- note that keyholing would have to be a variable and something set in player doctrine, because it has an enormous effect on how the company itself performs.
120mm mortar battery, good experience and morale, direct support

Combat Team B
Mounted Infantry Battalion, Halftracks. High Experience, High Morale. Attacking
PzJgI Coy overwatching
105mm arty battery in support

The engine would need to first determine what the contact will be. It can either be done by player input on formation of march or else knowledge of doctrine.

Likely, Halftracks with infantry are ambushed from a flank by T-26 and then obliterated by mortar fire.

Remaining Halftrack/Infantry squads don't have information on exact location of the enemy, so they need to dismount and press infantry forward.

PzJg I are not useful because they haven't got spots.

Infantry move forward to get spots, and are subject to combat by all of the Soviet elements. (They can all hurt the German infantry in this case.)

PzJg I again ignored because they don't get spots, T-26's are keyholed.

Enemy infantry locations disclosed by combat.

105mm gets to fire on enemy infantry, plus any direct fire from escorting halftracks.

Player doctrine choice determines aggression of PzJg I's -- do they move up to fire on keyholed enemy armor or hang back to stay safe from enemy infantry? (Otherwise, a set doctrine decided by the programmer.)

Notice that already we have two exchanges of combat based on tactical circumstances that have excluded part of the German total CV.

Command Ops would be able to do represent all this because it uses the building blocks of each team as the basic elements.

For an operational level or strategic level game, somehow we need to put the process being gamed out in a game like Command Ops under the hood of the battle resolution.

I think it could be done, or at least improved upon from what we have now.

It might seem like a lot of work for nothing, but as pointed out above, in operations historically these are by far the largest kind of influences on the success or failure of operational plans. Not supply (more strategic), not experience levels (often overwhelmed by numbers, quickly), not numerical superiority (tactical hangups 'clog' numerical odds OR neutralize them -- see 6 TC, first two days of Op Mars.), not technology... (terrain mitigates -- again, tactically.)

Etc.

Nuff said I guess. I'm glad it was an interesting idea.

Something as specific as that might run one a Cray Supercomputer, but definitely not on modern PC processors. You're talking about gaming hundreds or perhaps even thousands of individual engagements, down to the company level (on a front that at its peak had over 10 million men in the front lines) with expectations of determining doctrine, terrain, fire and response, etc.

It isn't going to happen anytime soon - you may (may is a loose term here) build some framework of programming, but there is no way you'd ever have the processing power to do it on this type of level - anytime soon.

Etc.

I think what you will get in this game is a "light" version of this, with single squads and weapons platforms being modeled engaging each other in every engagement, modified by factors like morale, supply, terrain.

Still, you won´t get the very detailed combat simulation that you lay out in your post, that´s just too computationally expensive at the moment. But hey, one day...

Ascended...what you want is a dream game that all of us would pounce on straight away...trouble is the we are limited by our tech so unti then you have to use your imagination and if results aren't exactly how they should be blame it on a useless subordinate.

I have read this string twice and have come to the conclusion that very reasonable answers have been given to a highly intelligent but totally unrealistic expectation. I just went out to pick up my cray computer so I can Mod every soldier, standing behind every tree ready to sneek up behind every tank on the East front. Sorry, I understand the answers. I just don't get the question!

Jimbo

ORIGINAL: wodin

Ascended...what you want is a dream game that all of us would pounce on straight away...

Not quite everyone. I, for one, have zero interest in the tactical end of things and almost always hit the autoresolve button in games that include both a strategic and tactical element.

In a game this size, resolving all the tactical actions manually would be incredibly tedious. Plainly, mileage does vary.

I don't believe he's asking for a manual resolution on the tactical level, he just wants the computer to take into account the tactics, doctrine, experience level, and terrain down to the company/battalion level (I'm assuming it would auto-resolve, in this hypothetical scenario).

The main problem is just the processing power necessary to do that. You might get away with it in theory on current high-end machines, but you also might be talking a couple of days or a week to actually crunch all of the available numbers (or longer). You would probably need something like a research system (like they use to resolve out large-scale climate modeling or planetary system development), to be able to get this done in anything like what we would experience using the existing system on the average machine today.

Not to say that it isn't the logical next (or next, next) step in wargamming development, because the more details the resolution gets, the better results you will have as well, it just flies in the face of what is currently available.

I think the idea has merit and perhaps our kids will be playing that type of game when they get close to our respective ages. We'll just have to see. Good question though.

A greater problem is getting people to agree to the very large number a formula that would be required.

For the specific example he gives (German Mech Bn vs. Sov. Inf co. with T-26 co.) Does anyone have actual data? If we had a whole lot of data under various conditions for this specific match-up, we might be able to settle this one conclusively. Otherwise we are speculating and people would surely debate any results which we assigned.

There are probably millions of possible tactical combinations. Some of these would include elements which never faced off against each other IRL and for which no combat data exists.

The designers do the best they can and we can agree or disagree. But we should probably cut them some slack as the problem is ultimatly unsolvable.

I don't have access to the in game combat formulas, and they are rather complicated, but the game doesn't just take aggregate strengths on each side, compare them to one another, and generate a result. There's a fire procedure involved, and leadership, morale, experience and terrain effects get calculated at the unit element level for each stage of the combat procedure, which doesn't involve all the elements at once. Unit elements can indeed be disrupted and damaged before their point in the firing procedure arrives. Failed leadership checks can result in significant variances in combat results, too.

Pavel can explain this better than I can (or Gary for that matter) but I'm not sure how much of it can be discussed publicly, it is proprietary coding information I suspect.

There's been some pretty fierce discussions about the particulars of this in the dev boards. (Hi Bob!) And the engine has been tweaked repeatedly (and will probably continue to be tweaked post release) to get more accurate results.

ORIGINAL: Ascended

It might seem like a lot of work for nothing, but as pointed out above, in operations historically these are by far the largest kind of influences on the success or failure of operational plans. Not supply (more strategic), not experience levels (often overwhelmed by numbers, quickly), not numerical superiority (tactical hangups 'clog' numerical odds OR neutralize them -- see 6 TC, first two days of Op Mars.), not technology... (terrain mitigates -- again, tactically.)

Not sure I buy this rather sweeping generalization.

But even if the point is granted, there's are larger problem that puts simulating at Ascended's level for a game scoped at the level of WitE (or any game where the scope of the simulated units is orders of magnitude greater than the desired scope of the simulation variables). This problem cannot be solved by more computing horsepower. The problem is DATA; for starters: detailed, quantative, historically accurate data about every piece of terrain that affects cover and concealment at the tactical level for each particular encounter.

If you have to randomly generate this data, then you have only added vast appearance of detail, without adding accuracy in the least.

The scope of the data needs to be appropriate to the scope of the simulation. Then combat resolution algorithms can incorporate Murphy's Law to represent unusual events at lower levels of combat within overall statistically valid results. It is impossible (due to the passage of time alone) the gather vast quanties of accurate low level data for a high level simulation.

I hear what Ascended is asking for and agree it would be adding more realism to the game. However, it's asking for almost the impossible. Here's some reasons why:

- I agree with the importance of tactical decisions after reading enough books about the many battles fought on the eastern front. Some of the outcomes are directly or indirectly related to some bizarre leadership decisions or just bad luck. So if the data existed it would still be impossible (at this point in time) to code up a database with all the leaders from Army down to squad level with their personalities, leadership strengths and weaknesses. All of this would have to be thrown into a very complex algorithm to determine battles outcomes.

- We haven't even begun to discuss all the communication issues that plagued the battlefields in WWII. How many times did units receive the wrong orders or just misinterpret orders. So wouldn't it make sense to factor in some factor based on leadership, weather, and maybe terrain as to units possibly not doing exactly what we have clicked on them to do? We take it for granted as armchair generals w/computer games that our wonderfully laid out plans to move units here and there, attack here and there, all happen as we wanted. Well that wasn't reality on the eastern front and with the communication technology at that period in history.

I actually remember an old SSI classic, Kursk, in which there were 2-4 phases (inf 2, armor 4) that you could plan your turns. After each side planned their turns they would be executed simultaneously. That actually gave a little flavor as to how your operational plans could go completely in a different directions. Not says that WitE should be modeled that way, but rather just something to think about.

Ok can I buy this game now? My credit card just jumped out of my wallet again and is humping my leg for WitE like some dog in heat. [:'(]

It's not just a question of technical means, I think there is a "philosophic" edge to it about whether operational factors dominate tactical ones or vice versa.

I have no interest in the tactical level being highly detailed in an operational game per se, but I do want operational decisions to have realistic results. I want the player to be punished for making bad operational decisions the same way the commanders were historically. And I propose that current operational level games don't do that so well. They tend to fulfill expectations (even perhaps stereotypes, but that is debatable) rather than challenge them.

And yeah, Cray computers would be nice. But who wants to program on that level. ><