Simulating historical stupidity

[wodin]

Not sure what the point of playing a historical wargame would be if it became totally unhistorical...?

May aswell just play Sci Fi games.

Lots of wargames do have editors where you can pick your own force from WW2 equipment and create your own map so this would work for you. Also alot have alternative scenario versions aswell. However I do think the main default scenario should follow historical lines as much as possible.

I imagine Advanced Tactics is the wargame for you.

[bairdlander2]

My point was,WW2 was not about saving people from Nazi oppression as the propaganda films of the time promote,it was about business and making money

[MrsWargamer]

Well in my original post, one of my thoughts was, it would be nice to have a game with the design, the polish, and the mechanics of something like War in the Pacific/East/West, but not be attached to a specific historical time frame.

I have Advanced Tactics, it has some interesting elements, but it isn't a Gary Design.

Some games do randoms, some don't. They recently added Skirmish mode to Battle Academy 2. I think that aspect of the design will make it popular. Because some players, if they over play a design, might get tired of some of the fixed scenarios. And not all of us really have the desire to fiddle with an editor.

I think the Panther Games design is cool, I also wonder what that would be like as a Red vs Blue design as well.

[gradenko2k]

The most straightforward way to "simulate stupidity" is to set your game's scale, essentially declaring that the player controls nothing below this line, and then leaving everything under that line to random effects, such as die rolls.

If you attack the Stalingrad hex with your 6th Armee chit and you roll a 1 on your 6-sided die, part of it is assumed to be von Paulus not being a stellar commander.

Now, perhaps the game will also have a feature to allow you to replace von Paulus with Rommel or Model or Manstein, reducing your chances of "rolling a 1", but then games with such a feature tend to make sure that you never have enough Rommels to go around. Some of counters are always going to have to deal with having "stupid" commanders assigned to them, it's just a question of which counters in which places on which turns.

If you're talking about stupid decisions at the grand-strategy / national level, then it's the realism in those games that pushes the player towards certain outcomes, if not outright railroading them altogether: a sufficiently realistic portrayal of German industry vs American industry is never going to produce a result where the Germans beat back the Allies simply because they have Me-262s by 1943, if the game even allows the German player to fast-track Me-262 R&D and production in the first place.

In other games, control is still taken away from the player in order to try and produce "idiotic results". You might be able to issue direct orders to every Soviet unit larger than a brigade, but perhaps the game still doesn't put you in the literal shoes of Joe Stalin because there are "political rules" wherein you need to hold on to Minsk and Kiev for x turns just to prevent the entire Red Army from fleeing after the first turn of Barbarossa.

I think though that the most elusive and subtle ones are where the player is enticed to make idiotic decisions themselves. It's simply not true that "the clever wargamer, doesn't stupidly get massive swaths of his forces stupidly wiped out" even after a cursory glance of War in the East AARs in these very forums. We've seen multiple instances of players overextending themselves and getting dozens of divisions encircled. I've been in a game of No Retreat! where the Germans kept attacking Leningrad turn after turn in 1942 at 3:1 or 4:1 odds and the dice just kept rolling badly enough for them that they never took it and it crippled their warplans for the rest of the match. At the small end of the scale, I've also played in Combat Mission matches where Soviet players just didn't coordinate their attacks well enough to overwhelm lone Panthers and Tigers with numbers, allowing the big cats to engage at long-range and pick off T-34s at their leisure.

It's just that for that last sort of "bad decision simulation", it takes a while to engineer a state where the player ends up making a wrong move purely because they read the in-game situation, and not because they haven't learned the rule and interface idiosyncrasies of the game yet.

[Yogi the Great]

ORIGINAL: MrsWargamer


The old board game Blitzkrieg was essentially a red vs blue design. The sides were not identical, but there was no biased based on crazy human history.

I remember it well. Likeing "historical situation" doesn't mean you will get the same results the challenge is to do as well or better than the historical result. So for example Hitler or Burnside or whoever may have done something stupid in history but what can you do with the same forces. Lee or Patton or whoever may have done something brilliant, but can you? I understand the point of this thread but reasonable historical "accuracy" is what many gamers want, it doesn't mean the same results will occur.

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: bairdlander

My point was,WW2 was not about saving people from Nazi oppression as the propaganda films of the time promote,it was about business and making money

warspite1

I blame the Illuminati [8|]

[bairdlander2]

Im not going to debate someone who believes in Illuminati nonsense,have a good day

[parusski]

ORIGINAL: warspite1

ORIGINAL: bairdlander

My point was,WW2 was not about saving people from Nazi oppression as the propaganda films of the time promote,it was about business and making money

warspite1

I blame the Illuminati [8|]

What, you been talking to slaakman again??

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: bairdlander

Im not going to debate someone who believes in Illuminati nonsense,have a good day

warspite1

Eh? I don't [:-] it was sarcasm, hence the smiley. You said it was all about making money. That normally leads down one road - filthy bankers of a certain persuasion, Hitler apologists blah bah blah,

[zakblood]

im testing a game here atm, well quite a few tbh, but one doesn't only have history battles in it from the start and also have alt history ones in it, where there is the what if type battles that could have happened if a certain thing would happen, a different leader, a different overall commander, different units that were in the area but didn't take part, different arrival times and start dates etc, all add to the mix of more for hardly less... (don't ask either as i wont say which one)

to replay history is fine, to alter it is better,

to not have the chance to, is a missed opportunity for me...

to only play out what the developer wanted and stick to history to the letter, with facts and numbers isn't a game at all, it's a simulation, and as such can be sometimes a bit boring for some, to have the chance to alter history without going into the realms of fantasy with super weapons and fiction can be great to learn what could have been the outcome regarding different options taken at the time...

no point having 1000 bombers flying over a target if it never got bombed and there's nothing there just to say you can either, it has to impact the overall war and battle your in, not just for the sake of it...

well thats how and why i make mods and alter games to suit my style anyway, so if a game can't be modded or altered to suit me, then i don't buy it, no matter how good everyone else says it is, as i'm not a history buff for the love of it, i want to alter history and not replay bad choices made by crackpots....

[Toby42]

I don't like Fantasy Games. I like an historical situation and try to do better than how the situation turned out historically?