Defending a river line

[ColinWright]

ORIGINAL: golden delicious

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

Real forces operate both simultaneously AND sentiently. WEGO gets the simultaneous part right but the sentient part wrong. IGOUGO gets the sentient part right and the simultaneous part wrong.

It isn't necessarily a bad thing for the player not to have minute control of every movement a unit makes. Of course a simple WEGO system would apply this very unevenly.

TOAW is just too flexible. Scenarios can have huge movement allowances.

This tends to make the problems of IGO-UGO more apparent, though. Force A completes a stunning encirclement of Force B over the course of a week. Force B just sits there.

Overall, WEGO is probably better for realism. As Rommel would say, any reaction is better than no reaction. But until it is applied at the full range of scales covered by TOAW, it won't threaten to replace TOAW, and even then the vagueries of the system may lead a lot of people to stick to IGO-UGO because it's what they're used to.

What comes to my mind is the different reaction speeds of different armies. Some armies do just sit there. This was a major problem with the Iraqi army in their war with Iran. An Iraqi division would be getting chewed to pieces -- but no one could move until Saddam had been consulted. Similarly with the Russians -- particularly before 1944. The British in World War One chronically made holes -- and then failed to do anything with them until it was too late.

Conversely, one of the great virtues of the German army was that it would react. You break through, and you better exploit the hole now. If you wait an hour, a battalion of infantry will be digging in. Leave a weir unguarded and some bright young spark of a panzer commander will have a battalion of infantry over it by breakfast and be working on building a bridge. Etc.

So 'we go' has its points. However, it's not a panacea.

[ColinWright]

ORIGINAL: Telumar

ORIGINAL: ColinWright

ORIGINAL: Telumar




Disagree. I like Bob's idea.

The advantage the defender gets is already that of the mountain terrain's defensive benefits. Of course the defender can oversee the lower terrain, but at 10km/hex? Or at 15? There are always valleys or lower ground in the hilly terrain where one is safe from enemy observation. Or forests.. Whereas in a river hex there are not always many bridges..

Yeah -- but at 5 km or 2.5 km? I was working on Seelowe. Being dug in on a range of 300 meter-high hills is not an advantage if the attacker is looking down on you from a 1000-meter high ridge a few kilometers away -- with no low ground between you and him.

The point is that there are all kinds of problems with the terrain in the game -- the above is just a random example. To fixate on rivers as 'the problem' is mildly absurd. The rivers actually work relatively well.

If you want ultimate realism in such tactical situations you're better off with the AA series..

Maybe you need to reread my posts. My point is not that 'hills' need to be fixed, but that the way 'rivers' are modeled is no worse than the way any other terrain is modeled. As I said, the hill/mountain thing is just one example. To take some others:

Why is 'plain terrain' universally the same? The fact is that even the plainest of plain terrain as in Western Europe offers far more in the way of defensive possibilties than the Don Steppe, or the desert in North Africa.

What about woodland in developed countries? Look at a map: they're laced with fine roads. The defensive possibilities are cetainly there -- but movement is halved? No it isn't: go ahead and drive through the local wood. Your car will go fully as fast as it will when there're no trees around.

I could go on -- or we could start arguing about the above examples. The point, however, would remain. There's nothing in particular wrong with the way rivers are handled. TOAW has to grossly oversimplify and generalize. We'll always be able to find flaws with the terrain we're given. Which of these flaws bother us, and even whether we see them as flaws at all depends entirely on what we're trying to model. Make rivers work 'right' for one setting, and they'll just be wrong for another.

[ColinWright]

ORIGINAL: rhinobones

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

And inject more. It is no panacea.

Real forces operate both simultaneously AND sentiently. WEGO gets the simultaneous part right but the sentient part wrong. IGOUGO gets the sentient part right and the simultaneous part wrong.

For most situations the sentient part is far more important. Most of the time one side is primarily in a positional defense, where WEGO will have little impact . . .

Telumar - Check out this response. It is a perfect example of the way people bend backwards to rationalize IGYG as more reliastic than WEGO. "Sentiently" Not real sure what sentiently is intended to mean, but I suspect it just might be a case of watching too much Star Trek.

Curt - Next time you're on an open highway try the IGYG at 65 mph. If you survive, write us a note.

Actually, the IGYG system on roadways is known as 'traffic lights.' They do indeed work pretty good.

[ColinWright]

ORIGINAL: rhinobones

ORIGINAL: golden delicious
However, it doesn't compete with TOAW because the scales are different. And then there's the question of the first word in your above quote.

Yes, agree that the big "when" is a critical milestone for CA. Hopefully the "when" comes while I'm still capable of punching computer keys. There is hope though; a few of Iron Duke's statements make me think that a release is in the foreseeable future.

Also agree that CA has a serious limitation on scale. Would like to see spatial and distance scales more in line with TOAW, but at this point in time it is much too soon to make a “wish” list. However, with all that said, there are still quite a few TOAW scenarios at 2.5 km and battalion/company units that would do very well as CA scenarios. As examples, I think that Two Weeks In Normandy, A Bridge Too Far, Leros 1943 and CFNA would do very well as 1 km, CA scenarios.

Regards, RhinoBones

CFNA at one km/hex? Just how big a map did you have in mind? Anyway, I've no objection to a system that covers this scale -- which OPART doesn't. In fact, I've no objection to any alternate system at all. I'm just not prepared to believe it's actually going to be a better mousetrap until I see the dead mice.

[rhinobones]

ORIGINAL: ColinWright

Actually, the IGYG system on roadways is known as 'traffic lights.' They do indeed work pretty good.

Think you need to re-read my post. I specifically said 'open highway'. No traffic lights on the open highways that I travel. This is just another distortion created by IGYG.

Regards, RhinoBones

[ColinWright]

ORIGINAL: rhinobones

ORIGINAL: ColinWright

Actually, the IGYG system on roadways is known as 'traffic lights.' They do indeed work pretty good.

Think you need to re-read my post. I specifically said 'open highway'. No traffic lights on the open highways that I travel. This is just another distortion created by IGYG.

Regards, RhinoBones

No -- but traffic is regulated so that it's all flowing one way on one side of the road. At least it is assuming you're not posting from certain countries I've visited.

Anyway, your metaphor is flawed. It would be valid if IGYG let each player move units whenever he pleased. Actually it is indeed like a signalized intersection: first the traffic going one way moves, then the traffic going the other way moves. You would assert that it would work better if everyone just went at once.

It's a red herring, though. I can see the advantages of WeGo. It's just that (a) there are problems implementing it, and (b) it's not a panacea.

[Telumar]

Be it as it is, TOAW IV will most probably see no WEGO. Kind of useless to discuss about it. Though i can't understand what should be better with IGYG than with WEGO. The question is not wether it's a panacea or not. Fact is: it simply models things in a more realistic fashion. It's obviously.

But everyone al Gusto.

ORIGINAL: Colin Wright
Maybe you need to reread my posts. My point is not that 'hills' need to be fixed, but that the way 'rivers' are modeled is no worse than the way any other terrain is modeled. As I said, the hill/mountain thing is just one example.

[...]

 The point, however, would remain. There's nothing in particular wrong with the way rivers are handled. TOAW has to grossly oversimplify and generalize. We'll always be able to find flaws with the terrain we're given. Which of these flaws bother us, and even whether we see them as flaws at all depends entirely on what we're trying to model. Make rivers work 'right' for one setting, and they'll just be wrong for another.

Okay. Agree. But no reason to leave things as they are. If we find a better way to model a certain thing we should do it.

[rhinobones]

ORIGINAL: ColinWright
. . . and (b) it's not a panacea.

Don’t think that I have heard anyone from the WEGO side state that WEGO is a panacea. You are the only one who has used that word and you continue to falsely imply that the WEGO side is claiming WEGO to be a panacea. This just isn’t true. I just think that when one objectively adds up all of the pros and cons, WEGO comes out ahead.

In real life though, it would sometimes be advantageous to be in an IGYG system. I could fly to the bad guy’s place, make the hit and fly home before the bad guys get a chance to move. For that I guess, IGYG gets one point on the pro side.

In the mean time, the DOW is off 300+ points and I’m making money on my short positions. That’s the power of WEGO.

Regards, RhinoBones

[JAMiAM]

Unfortunately, having been on the Beta Team for CA, almost 4 full years ago, and presumably still under the terms of its NDA, all I can say is:

1. I believe that if/when CA is released, it will end up appealing to gamers who are looking for a significantly different gaming experience than TOAW III, or TOAW IV. There really is very little overlap between the two systems.

2. Only those gamers whose ideals of realism are extremely heavily weighted in favor of WEGO over IGOUGO, will fell that CA is any more "realistic" than TOAW III. Again, it is a very different system than TOAW III, and some of the things that TOAW deals well with, and in detail, are highly abstracted in CA, and vice versa.

3. I believe that due to these differences, the games will be less competitors in terms of market share of the operational wargame construction kit style niche than people are predicting. They will be much more complimentary products than competitive products.

4. Of the two, TOAW III will be the game that I will still prefer to play, while TOAW IV will end up being the game I have always dreamed of playing, and...

5. No comment...[;)]

[JAMiAM]

ORIGINAL: rhinobones

ORIGINAL: ColinWright
. . . and (b) it's not a panacea.

Don’t think that I have heard anyone from the WEGO side state that WEGO is a panacea. You are the only one who has used that word and you continue to falsely imply that the WEGO side is claiming WEGO to be a panacea.

Actually, that's not true. I think Bob first used it in this thread, and for what it's worth, for the last 24 hours, I was mentally composing a reply that was going to use the word, but was delayed by being afk...

Time to buy a lotto ticket when the three of us agree on anything...[:D]

[JAMiAM]

ORIGINAL: rhinobones
This thread has evidently strayed far from the original intent.  Or, at least, what I thought was the original intent.  That was to discuss/debate the merits of hex side rivers as opposed to Koger rivers.  This debate was to be in the context of a “Wish List” item...

No. It was only after the CA crowd and those chomping at the bit in waiting for it decided to hijack the thread, that it veered away from its original intent into a knockdown, drag-out brawl over the merits of one system over another, wishlists, development time versus perceived engine improvement, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The original intent was to ask a simple gameplay question on how they worked and an observation that Elmer did not seem to lend them too much credence. Maybe he's smarter than we give him credit for, after all...[;)]

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: golden delicious
It isn't necessarily a bad thing for the player not to have minute control of every movement a unit makes. Of course a simple WEGO system would apply this very unevenly.

It's far worse to have no control at all over them once you push the "start" button. Think of the incredible range of decisions you make over the course of a game turn. They can't be pre-plotted in advance because you don't know how combats will turn out or what hidden units will be encountered.

Just think of the simple case where you mount a suite of attacks. You don't know which will be successful in advance. But you will send your reserves into the breach of whichever ones are. No way to pre-plot that.

Of course, you can always hand it over to the PO. But that's about as brainless - and is it really wargaming?

WEGO would actually be a good system for modeling the Somme, or any other WWI-like topic, where the units performed like mindless robots.

This tends to make the problems of IGO-UGO more apparent, though. Force A completes a stunning encirclement of Force B over the course of a week. Force B just sits there.

Actually sounds like a lot of historical events I can think of.

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: rhinobones
"Sentiently" Not real sure what sentiently is intended to mean, but I suspect it just might be a case of watching too much Star Trek.

Sentient: "Aware", "alert", "cognizant", "observant", "conscious and alive". In other words, not a mindless robot.

Curt - Next time you're on an open highway try the IGYG at 65 mph. If you survive, write us a note.

Far, far better than using WEGO. Here's the WEGO trip to the grocery store:

I program my car to back out of the driveway, drive down the street to the intersection, turn on to the main road, drive through the traffic light, turn left, drive to the entrance, enter the parking lot, and park in the space in front. I stay home and wait for its return.

It backs over children on the way out of the driveway, hits a parked car on the way to the intersection, gets sideswiped turning onto the main road, hits head-on at the light, runs over a grandmother with her shopping cart in the parking lot, and pulls into an occupied space to park.

At least in the IGOUGO drive to the grocery store, I'm actually in the car controlling it.

[ColinWright]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

ORIGINAL: rhinobones
"Sentiently" Not real sure what sentiently is intended to mean, but I suspect it just might be a case of watching too much Star Trek.

Sentient: "Aware", "alert", "cognizant", "observant", "conscious and alive". In other words, not a mindless robot.

Curt - Next time you're on an open highway try the IGYG at 65 mph. If you survive, write us a note.

Far, far better than using WEGO. Here's the WEGO trip to the grocery store:

I program my car to back out of the driveway, drive down the street to the intersection, turn on to the main road, drive through the traffic light, turn left, drive to the entrance, enter the parking lot, and park in the space in front. I stay home and wait for its return.

It backs over children on the way out of the driveway, hits a parked car on the way to the intersection, gets sideswiped turning onto the main road, hits head-on at the light, runs over a grandmother with her shopping cart in the parking lot, and pulls into an occupied space to park.

And that sounds like a lot of battles I can think of.

I'd like to see a WEGO system. How well it would work is another matter, of course.

[IronDuke_slith]

ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

ORIGINAL: golden delicious
WEGO may remove a lot of the unrealistic occurences in TOAW, ...

And inject more. It is no panacea.

Real forces operate both simultaneously AND sentiently. WEGO gets the simultaneous part right but the sentient part wrong. IGOUGO gets the sentient part right and the simultaneous part wrong.

For most situations the sentient part is far more important. Most of the time one side is primarily in a positional defense, where WEGO will have little impact.

On the other hand, think of the now universal infantry tactic of infiltration developed in 1917. It's principle was "take the path of least resistance". That can't be programmed in advance, unless movement allowances are so short that no unrevealed forces can be encountered.

TOAW is just too flexible. Scenarios can have huge movement allowances. Try and imagine CFNA using WEGO. I suppose one could design specific scenarios tailored to function in a WEGO environment, but IGOUGO would have to be retained for most.

Combined Arms copes with the sentience angle by having pre-set choices about what to do if something unexpected happens. If you think you are going to run into something, you can pre-set your forces to defend or attack etc if they come up against this. So, they merrily proceed forward and then revert to this programming if they hit something in their path.

Of course, it doesn't allow you to specify for each unit what to do at point of unexpected contact as you can in IGOUGO, but then no one ever got this kind of control in real life either so you're not losing a valuable part of a simulation, but losing an unhistorical part of any simulation.

I personally think the two games will exist side by side for a time because CA is at the lower operational level. However, with WEGO, the ability to switch units between parent formations, Command and control rules, dynamic supply for both ammo/food and petrol/gas as separate commodities on a formation by formation basis (and a scenario editor which is a dream when it comes to composing OOBs) I think TOAW will be supplanted if they decide to up the scale for a CA 2. That would be my choice but the Project Leads may decide to do Modern CA instead, who knows.

TOAW may actually suffer because of a combination of WIR and CA. I wouldn't have thought 2by3 would stop, having done the eastern front, if the game engine has some mileage left in it. A new map and some new terrain types wouldn't be that hard if the moement, supply and combat mechanics were already worked out and you wanted to do the Western front.

IronDuke

[IronDuke_slith]

ORIGINAL: golden delicious

ORIGINAL: rhinobones

When Combined Arms is published (WEGO, hex side rivers, editable scenarios, battalion level combat, Matrix support), the TOAW forums will go silent as war game enthusiasts quickly migrate to a new, and better, game system. 

I'm sure Combined Arms is a fine system. However, it doesn't compete with TOAW because the scales are different. And then there's the question of the first word in your above quote.

It will be released.

Besides when is TOAW IV due? [;)]

Whatever the answer to the above, will it have formation, supply and national characteristics sorted out?

Regards,
IronDuke

[ColinWright]

ORIGINAL: IronDuke


Whatever the answer to the above, will it have formation, supply and national characteristics sorted out?

Regards,
IronDuke

And air/naval warfare?

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: ColinWright
And that sounds like a lot of battles I can think of.

Provided all the unit commanders have had lobotomies.

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: IronDuke
Combined Arms copes with the sentience angle by having pre-set choices about what to do if something unexpected happens. If you think you are going to run into something, you can pre-set your forces to defend or attack etc if they come up against this. So, they merrily proceed forward and then revert to this programming if they hit something in their path.

Which covers about 0.1% of the possible situations that can be encountered. You simply can't pre-program an evaluation of the situation that remotely compares with what a human can evalute. So, that unit you programmed to stop if it encounters something does so when it hits that truck park. The other unit you programmed to drive on does so when it bumps into Panzer Lehr. And, of course, there is no way to coordinate forces or manuever in such unplanned encounters.

And, as I said before, there is no way to implement infiltration tactics - Warfare 101 since 1918. You can't pre-program "take the path of least resistance" or "reinforce success, abandon failure". Again, the more WWI-like the topic, the better WEGO will do.

Of course, it doesn't allow you to specify for each unit what to do at point of unexpected contact as you can in IGOUGO, but then no one ever got this kind of control in real life either so you're not losing a valuable part of a simulation, but losing an unhistorical part of any simulation.

Not true, even at the individual soldier scale, much less TOAW's scales. Even individual soldiers had the latitude to adjust their paths to flank and coordinate against anything they encountered. No Post-WWI force functions as brainlessly as WEGO requires.

In fact, I have to ask: Just where is the wargaming in all of this? There doesn't seem to be much more to it than pointing your forces where you want them to go and watching them go.

[Curtis Lemay]

ORIGINAL: ColinWright

ORIGINAL: rhinobones
... and CFNA would do very well as 1 km, CA scenarios.

CFNA at one km/hex? Just how big a map did you have in mind?

1360 x 745 hexes.

And each motorized unit would have a movement allowance of 330 MPs. Each MP would have to be pre-programmed blind. So MP #234 would have to be programmed without knowing what had happened during the expenditure of MPs 1-233, etc.