Classic Traveller: Dark Nebula

 

Continuing my read-through of the Classic Traveller wargames, Dark Nebula was published in 1980 and covers a war between the Solomani and the Aslan over about two subsectors of space, including one difficult-to-traverse nebula.  Turns are two years of in-universe time, each hex is half a parsec, naval units represent individual ships, and ground units are divisions.

Overall the core of this game looks pretty reasonable.  The space combat system is kinda neat.  The defender nominates a ship, the attacker chooses one of their ships to engage it, and then this repeats until one side is out of uncommitted ships, at which point the side with more ships left uncommitted can assign them as they please to the various 1:1 ship combats already committed to.  Once ships are matched up, the resolution of each of these combats looks pretty straightforward.

I think what I like about this fleet combat design is that there are lots of significant choices (what order to nominate and assign your ships in) but little mechanical complexity.  In general this seems like a desirable property in a game.  And at the scale this game is operating at, "where do you assign which assets" probably is the right question to be posing to players.

I'm also tickled by the inclusion of tanker-ships, really mobile refineries that you can park in systems without gas giants to skim hydrogen off of the star and refine it into fuel, allowing that system to be traversed by other ships without delays.  I love me some logistics-infrastructure-construction.

One thing here that I found a bit surprising was that moving ships can move as far as they want on the hex maps as long as they're moving along jump routes between systems with fuel available, until they enter a system that lacks fuel or where there's an enemy presence (or is in the nebula and requires exploration).  It makes some sense under the time-per-turn assumptions and the scale of the map, but "move as far as you want" still made me stop and think.  It almost has a railroad-war feeling, like the American Civil War or World War 1, rather than an open-water naval warfare feeling.  Maybe that's always been true of naval warfare under Traveller's assumptions and I just never realized it.

There are a couple of other surprising things in Dark Nebula.  It feels like a somewhat experimental game; there's tech progress from research in the titular nebula, semi-randomized initial boardstate due to the map placement procedure, and neutral forces with reaction rolls, potentially hostile or potentially hireable.  I definitely didn't expect randomization of map layout in a Traveller game set in the Third Imperium continuity.  Some weirdness arises from this - the maps have hex numbers seemingly from a much bigger hexmap, which are very unlikely to end up getting put together into a sensible order during the alternating placement procedure.  I appreciate that the scan quality is good enough to read the hex numbers though!

There are also a couple of other things about the maps which are weird, and not in a great way.  The star density on them is rather lower than is typical for Traveller.  Several of these quarter-subsector maps only have four stars in them, and the densest have eight.  In a typical Traveller subsector, I'd expect more like 40 systems, or 10 per average map on this scale.  I'm not sure how well the balance of unit production against destruction would scale up to higher-density maps and owning more planets.  Also, having a much higher-density graph of systems might lose some of that railroad-war feel and change the character of the game significantly.  Finally, the way Dark Nebula handles ground forces on planets is that there's a box in an empty hex adjacent to each inhabited system, representing the surface of the planet, and you put troop counters there.  But this would not scale well to higher-density maps.  The quality of infrastructure in these inhabited systems is also denoted by the color of the planet's box, which is a bit lousy - printing your own copy of the map requires color, you have to remember what the colors mean, colorblindness problems, etc.  Frankly I found the color-coding confusing on first read and first look at the map; the icons for the stars use random colors not related to the color coding for the system's infrastructure quality.  They're probably supposed to relate to stellar spectrum class but that's not relevant here and we're already gone non-canonical with the random map so...  I don't know why they did that, rather than making the stars the same color as their respective planet boxes.

The lack of compatibility between Dark Nebula's maps and Traveller RPG subsector maps (both in scale and density) also highlights another oddity here - Dark Nebula is the first Traveller wargame I've read that makes no mention of integration with the RPG.  It does seem like integrating a game where turns are two years of in-universe time would be tough, but I was surprised that there was nothing.  I didn't expect much of Invasion: Earth, but we still got one good patron hook there.

What I didn't realize when I initially read Dark Nebula (not until halfway through writing this post and getting kind of suspicious that the combat system seemed much more staid than the rest of the game) was that it was a clear successor to Imperium, published in 1977.  I've only skimmed Imperium, but it looks like it shared the 2-year turn, combat system, turn structure, etc but is played on a fixed map, with slightly more complex fleet compositions including fighters and carriers, and some neat rules about armistices / inter-war periods (allowing the game to be played in a campaign fashion) and interaction between the Imperial player (playing as a frontier governor, not the emperor) and the Third Imperium.  Notably, Imperium does mostly omit tech progress and lacks neutral forces.  Like Dark Nebula, it foregoes any mention of integration with the Traveller RPG (which made more sense in 1977) and still uses the system of planetary surface boxes in adjacent empty hexes.  I may return to Imperium at some point, but given that my interest is at least nominally in RPG integration, I think it may have to wait.

My blind spot for Imperium and trying to understand Dark Nebula's place in the chronology of CT wargames also caused me to take a quick look at 1981's Fifth Frontier War.   This looks like a monster of a game, bringing together the multi-subsector scale of Imperium and Dark Nebula with some details like SDBs and percentage-based damage to units from Invasion: Earth, but with a greater eye towards RPG integration.  First and foremost, hexes in Fifth Frontier War are one parsec rather than Imperium's half-parsec, and turns in Fifth Frontier War are only one week!  But this means that it can't just abstract starship movement into "move as far as you want this turn", so you have to deal with more details.  And fixed maps allowed Fifth Frontier War to put planetary surface boxes around the edges of the board, rather than right next to the systems they're associated with (which, admittedly, might create some difficulty in locating any particular box), allowing it to increase star system density up towards that typical of Traveller RPG campaigns.  Fifth Frontier War looks tremendously ambitious and hideously fiddly, and I can't imagine why it was the last Classic Traveller boxed-set hex and counter wargame.  At the same time I salute the dream of having a metagame world-engine wargame to run concurrently with one's RPG campaign and I look forward to learning its lessons on a more thorough read/post at some point.

Classic Traveller: Invasion: Earth Review

Invasion: Earth was published in 1981, the fifth of the series of Classic Traveller stand-alone games.  The premise is that the Third Imperium is invading Earth (defended by humans at the same tech level).  The game covers space warfare across the solar system in low detail, and then orbital bombardment, landings, and corps-scale ground warfare on a hex-map of the Earth's surface in somewhat more detail.  Turns are two weeks, with a special reinforcement turn roughly every 14 weeks, and the hex map is on an 1140 km scale.  The projection is quite neat; it's a very nice map. 

Overall verdict: very ambitious, some neat ideas, but a bit of a mess

The main pdf is 29 pages total, including the cover, front matter, rules, map, inventory of counters, counter-sheets, and combat resolution tables.  The text itself is only about 12 pages, of which two are background information on the Solomani Rim War and one and a smidge deal with using Earth in Traveller campaigns separate from the wargame.  So we really only get about nine pages of wargame rules, which is not much to cover so grand a conflict.

The rules start out relatively well with space combat, dividing the solar system into near-earth, far orbit, and deep space, and covering jumping in, closing through those distances, actually fighting, and going dark in deep space.  There is some weirdness around System Defense Boats fighting space targets; SDBs are primarily atmospheric / low orbit (I'm imagining them kind of like SSTO spaceplanes but agrav) and have only a ground bombardment attack score instead of having both a space attack score and a ground attack score like many naval units.  But because of this there's a whole separate space combat firing step just for SDBs attacking proper ships, and you have to divide up fleets being attacked by both SDBs and typical naval vessels, with part of the Imperial fleet fighting just SDBs and part fighting the regular navy. (How you divide your fleet is an interesting gameplay choice at least I guess?)  I'm not really clear why SDBs don't just have an anti-ship offensive score and use the regular combat resolution table when attacking ships, and then have a bombardment score for attacking ground targets.  Maybe it's so that they can add their bombardment score with the bombardment scores of planetary defense batteries when attacking ships doing landings?  But SDB weirdness aside, the space rules seem basically reasonable.

Atmospheric stuff like bombardment and landings follow.  There are some very weird things in this section.  Space ships in low orbit can go on overwatch against SDBs coming out of hiding in the oceans (neat) but the action economy on it is very strange, where you get to fire against each SDB wing with every naval unit on overwatch?  If the rules didn't say verbatim "All overwatch naval units attack each SDB wing that came out of hiding" I wouldn't think that that could possibly be the correct interpretation.  In the following bombardment phase, each ship or planetary defense battery only gets to attack once ("Each unit capable of firing during this phase may fire once."), but in the contested landings phase after that, planetary defense batteries can get to fire at every unit landing near them.  No saturating these air defenses up close I guess; that I can kind of buy.  But the SDB overwatch thing seems trickier to justify.

Ground combat seems fairly reasonable; units are quite mobile because antigravs are assumed to be standard kit on both sides, there's a supply system which is fairly simple and based on space-dropping logistics bases which is neat, there are stacking limits on how much stuff you can fit in a hex but this is a wargame with counters so you get some super-corps counters that refer to an off-map sheet of boxes to say "here's all the stuff that is in that hex".  There are some weird bits in the way that targets are selected during ground combat; the example of combat even provides a case where A and B are on the same side and C and D are on the other, and basically A shoots at C, C shoots at B, B shoots at D, and D shoots at A.  And apparently that's fine, there's no conception of fronts and mutual engagement with particular units who are fighting you while you're fighting them (except inasmuch as you're all in the same 1150km hex, which I guess is just a big melee of anti-gravs and plasma weapons).

Reinforcement and scoring has some interesting bits; it is assumed that the Imperial player will definitely take the Earth, and he has access to as much replacement of lost units as he wants, but taking more time and using more replacement units costs him at scoring and may cause him to lose the game even though he has taken the planet.  The actual details of reinforcement for the Solomani (hereafter Terran) player look somewhat fiddly and involve counting how many of his starting 60ish urban terrain hexes are not yet garrisoned by the Imperial player.  The game also ends when the Imperial player has occupied 50ish of those urban hexes so you need to count them to determine if the game is over, in addition to reinforcements.  The setup procedure for the Terrans to place all their starting units looks like something I might want a beer for (and I imagine the Imperial player might want a beer while he waits).

As I mentioned at the beginning, the map is neat.  Sadly the counter-sheets are quite blurry and everything that follows about the units is working from the Counter Inventory rather than the counters themselves.  (Also, I hope you like NATO symbology.  Still, would it be a proper hex-and-counter wargame without it?)  The unit variety looks painfully-high; the Terran player has nine different kinds of System Defense Boat wings, most of which have fairly small differences in stats between them.  The Imperials have lots of one-off units; for example, they get five Colonial Lift Infantry Corps at TL12 and then one at TL11 with the same nominal stats but which takes an extra penalty in combat resolution because the TL is lower.  I kind of question the inclusion of regiment-scale units with 5 combat power in a game where there are corps with 100 combat power rolling around.  Could we have just...  dropped regiments, divided all the combat power numbers by 5, and eliminated space transport capacity from cruiser squadrons?

Which is to say - there's significant room for simplification here.

(On the other hand, looking at it again, almost all of the regiment-sized units are elite, armored, or both, which means that their combat strengths are understated - they might use 5 points of transport capacity but then actually fight at strength 20)

I do appreciate that we get half a page on using this ruleset for conflicts other than this particular battle in this particular war in the Third Imperium Setting.  It mostly deals with ground troops without grav vehicles; wheeled, cavalry, and foot, and the implications on supply and sealift of not having grav vehicles be standard.   I'm here for this, it's exactly the kind of stuff that I want for mercenary involvement on Balkanized worlds in the course of a Traveller campaign, but...  there are other blockers for that.

The combat tables are mostly OK but there are some under-explained modifiers next to the Surface Bombardment Table.  It's interesting that bombardment damage on surface targets caps at 50% of the target's strength per turn - which means that splitting your fire and bombarding two targets with half of your firepower each for two turns can be more effective than concentrating it all on one target in the first turn, then the other target the next turn.  So that's a bit odd, but maybe it doesn't actually come up in play.

The material on using Earth in Traveller campaigns is basically three patrons and a couple of deeper conspiracies to tie them into.  Two were a bit trite and could happen anywhere but the third actually ties into something from the wargame so I liked that one.

Again, in conclusion - a very ambitious sort of conflict to try to tackle in nine pages of rules, and some rough edges are apparent as a result.  If anybody knows of a ruleset that is to this what Azhanti High Lightning was to Snapshot, an expanded and cleaned-up version, please let me know in the comments.

On further reflection, the other thing that this game needs is Tyranids.  It is excusable that it doesn't have them, because they may not have been invented yet when it was published, but nevertheless, it is the perfect use-case.  "How long can 50,000 guardsmen and assorted aerospace assets delay the advance of the hive fleet?  How much can they make it cost to devour this world?" are exactly the kind of questions that Invasion: Earth is aimed at answering.  This is the kind of scale that a Warhammer 40k game should be operating at.

Reading OD&D: Chainmail

Delta's latest post got me interested in OD&D, particularly his mention of a movement point system.  The whole "miles per day with multipliers that don't work out to even numbers of hexes" has been a thorn in my side before, so I'm really curious to see what came before it.

 

Reading Chainmail first.  As usual this is a collection of notes on things that surprised me while reading.

 

Part 1: Mass Combat

 

One figure represents 20 guys, and one inch of table is 10 yards.  Looking at the pictures before the introduction, it looks like groups of 20-30ish figures were the norm, or about 400-600 guys per large block of troops.  So the whole battle was probably around battalion scale, in Domains at War terms.

 

I love that secret orders with simultaneous movement is an option - Domains at War with secret orders and simultaneous movement would be interesting. 

 

Movement rates are already of the form 6/9/12 for armored, heavy, and light foot.

 

Tracking fatigue for individual units, oh dear.

It is interesting that fatigue kicks in after 4-5 turns of action, after which you need a rest turn, and fatigue makes units attack, defend and roll morale one step worse.  Which sounds suspiciously like dungeon fatigue, where you get 5 turns of action followed by a rest or you take -1 to hit and damage.

Using a painted dowel to resolve cannon fire.

 

Morale is big, obviously.

 

No firing into melee.

 

Crossbowmen can't volley overhead.

Landsknechte seem to get a bunch of bonuses?

Knights have to roll obedience or charge any enemy within charging range (preferably enemy knights).

Mercenaries can demand more pay or defect mid-battle.

Peasants have to roll before attempting basically anything.

Religious order knights never surrender.

English longbowmen can plant stakes to ward off cavalry.

Mongols recover from retreats (but not routs) automatically.

Polish troops have elite morale.

 

If enemy units get near your table-edge they can loot your camp.

 

I like the weather state-machine, and the influence of heat on fatigue.

 

Part 2: Man-to-Man Combat (shifting the scale from 20 guys per figure down to 1 guy per figure):

 

I don't see a ground scale for man-to-man combat (where each figure represents just one guy) mentioned.  If you have 20 guys per 30' square, with one guy you'd expect 30' * sqrt(1/20) or about 6.5 feet per inch.  So looks closer to a 5 foot square than a 10 foot square, and engaged in melee is within 3 inches or about 15-20 feet.

 

Crazy rules about how the relation between the reach (rank) of the attacker and defender's weapons determines who strikes first and how many attacks they get.  Between this and the weapon-vs-armor table, picking weapons seems like it would matter a lot.

 

Parrying!  Forfeit your attack to give someone attacking you a penalty to theirs.  Naturally weapon reach/speed plays into whether and how effectively you can parry. 

Berserkers appear here; I guess you just can't get them in bulk.

 

Jousting.

Part 3: The Fantasy Supplement

 

Dwarves and Gnomes are equivalent, as are Goblins and Kobolds.  Even here dwarves have darkvision (and this is the origin of the "giants have a hard time hitting dwarves" too), but elves don't.  Elves can all turn invisible and have magic swords that wreck orcs and goblins, but use different mechanics from human magic swords.  Hobbits "have small place in the wargame", can blend into terrain, and can throw stones as well as an archer shoots / to the same range which is wild.

 

Orcs are "nothing more than over-grown Goblins" and have to pass an obedience roll or start fighting other orc warbands within charge range, even if they're on the same side, unless already engaged in melee.

 

Heroes fight as four normal men (hence 4th level fighter's level title and the breakpoints for to-hit in Basic, presumably) and super-heroes fight as 8 normal men.  They can also just...  shoot down flying dragons (with a low chance, but it's all-or-nothing for each individual shot).  Rangers are slightly better heroes - this might be the origin of ranger as a weird special class that you had to become rather than something you could start as.

 

Various levels of wizard; they have different penalties to casting depending on how strong they are, but all fight as two normal men and are impervious to normal missiles.  Fireball and lightning bolt are both save-or-die (but you have to pre-declare a range, like artillery fire in Warhammer 40k, so they're easy to miss with) and dragons don't give a fuck about either.  Counterspelling is a totally normal wizard thing to do.  Phantasmal Forces creates an illusory unit.  Haste doesn't give extra attacks, just more movement speed to a unit (likewise Slow just lowers movement speed).  Confusion interacts with secret orders.  Cloudkill drifts at random if not concentrated on.  "In order to cast and maintain any spell, a Wizard must be both stationary and undisturbed by attack upon his person."  The Number of Spells table says "The power of the magic user determines the number of spells he is able to manage:"  This is ambiguous - number of spells known, or number of simultaneous spells he can concentrate on?  Presumably the former but the latter would be an interesting alternate direction to have taken magic in D&D.

 

Optional rule for rolling to cast may have the spell fail, or it might just be delayed a round, which the wizard has to spend continuing to concentrate.  The six degrees of spell complexity look like the beginnings of the spell level system.

 

Wraiths are very ringwraith and paralyze any normal man they touch; paralysis persists until touched by a friendly Elf, Hero, or Wizard, which rather reminds me of freeze tag / capture the flag.  Lycanthropes are only werebears and werewolves, and when near forest terrain they get bonus attacks from allied beasts.

 

Troll / ogre distinction is muddy and they don't regenerate, but they do fight as six normal men.  Their hit points are ablative though - six cumulative hits, whereas heroes need four simultaneous hits in a single round to be killed.  That's a really interesting distinction.  Hit points are great as a resource that can be ground down in dungeoneering but having damage be all-or-nothing / non-cumulative ("it takes 18 damage in a single minute to kill a 4th level fighter") is another strange direction D&D could've gone, like magic users concentrating on simultaneous spells.  True Trolls can only be killed by fantastic creatures but aren't very good at attacking normal men.  Giants fight as 12 men with cumulative damage, can throw rocks like a light catapult, and never check morale (except when hit with fireball or lightning bolt).

 

Dragonbreath is also save or die, and it's not three times per day - it's three times before they have to land and "remain stationary for one turn in order to rekindle his internal fires."  Dragons also attack other fantastic beasts regardless of side, and are immune to normal weapons and missile fire.

 

Wyverns, griffons, and rocs are all under one entry and can transport a single man-sized figure, so presumably these rocs are more like Tolkein's giant eagles than the roc of Arabian Nights.  Djinn and efreet are just normal elementals.  Wights and ghouls are in the same entry; they are immune to normal missiles, their paralysis lasts one turn, and you get a chance to attack them first.  Zombies are a subset of wights and ghouls but slower; they fight as orcs, but I can't seem to figure out what orcs fight as against normal men?  Ah, it's on the table, as heavy foot.  That's sort of interesting, that orcs don't fight significantly better than humans.

Weapon vs armor table.  Weirdly, the single-man scale missile fire rules basically have ascending AC - "Class of armor worn by defender", from 1 to 8, with 1 corresponding to No Armor and 8 corresponding to Plate and Shield.  So it's really surprising to me that we somehow got to descending AC from here, and then back to ascending AC later.

In conclusion: I'm amazed that we ended up with the D&D that we did given this starting point.  I love how all these units are unreliable in their own special ways; knights having to charge, mercenaries defecting, peasants cowering, orcs fighting each other, dragons fighting other beasts regardless of side.  It seems like it would lead to unpredictable but hilarious games.

Classic Traveller: Striker

Rod Thompson suggested that I look into Striker for Classic Traveller's vehicular combat system.  I picked up the first edition and it turned out to be quite interesting!  My points for comparison are Stargrunt, Dirtside, Battletech, OGRE, and Epic.

If you want to do Hammer's Slammers with Classic Traveller, this is The Correct Thing.

This is the sort of system that I would have adored in high school and college.  Now...  maybe it would work better with a computer for a referee.  Looking at the structure of orders that you can give a normal-initiative unit, it looks a lot like writing a program.

The approach to dealing with orders and initiative is interesting and makes a lot of sense for a hybrid wargame-RPG.  I could definitely see it being frustrating and a fair bit of overhead if not automated, though.

I like that, compared to Stargrunt, infantry operates in stands.  I dislike that you still have to track the state of every infantryman.  The scale is generally more zoomed-out than Stargrunt but more zoomed-in than Dirtside, which I think is "about right".

Vehicle damage is more complicated than Dirtside and less complicated than Battletech.  I think Mongoose Traveller's vehicle damage system is a bit simpler.

The layout and organization do not lend themselves well to reading through and understanding the system.  All of the tables are at the very end, and the rules are depth-first rather than establishing general principles and then enumerating exceptions and special cases (so, for example, indirect fire missions come between infantry firing and resolution of damage).  A lot of things that I would ordinarily consider "rules" are sort of punted out into tables which are far from the relevant text.  I feel like after a cursory read I still didn't have a good idea of how firing on vehicles works.

I was ever so slightly disappointed that there was no fission powerplant option - it would've been funny to build a fission ramjet missile-drone where you don't even need a payload, just a powerplant that explodes on impact.  And support for AI, of course, is negligible (drones are remote-controlled).  Support for enormous OGRE-style tanks seems fine but they will need a lot of crew.  No mechs / walker suspension type but it wouldn't be too hard to add.  On the upside, I'm pretty sure you can build gatling mortars with nuclear shells.  Not that you should, but the point of design systems is designing ridiculous things (...  right?).

I'm...  not sure if there's a way to arm infantry with nuclear weapons.  I think it might be possible to put one in a man-portable missile, but there's the additional requirement for vehicle-carried nukes that they be shielded storage containers with a bunch of extra mass.  So it would be dodgy.

On the other hand, you could absolutely give an infantryman a 9kg 8.5cm mortar round and a detonator, and he could carry it around at full movement speed under the encumbrance rules.  I'm not clear on the morale implications of suicide units, but if you want to model ISIS, infested terrans, or banelings, it wouldn't be hard (though the bang on a single 8.5cm mortar round is not spectacular; at TL5 they're comparable to a TL11 rifle grenade, while at TL11 parity they have about double the blast area and slightly better armor penetration.  And that's before the errata that nerfed TL scaling on HE artillery like that).

No flamethrowers?  How am I to werf flammen and/or barbeque aliens?  Plasma guns with 250m effective range just aren't quite the same.

It would be funny to add a "biological metabolism" powerplant type to the design system for eg carnifexes and other vehicle-sized bugs, with range/endurance calculated based on carried fat stores (or...  alcohol bladders, since it's almost as energy-dense as fats, and alcohol-based metabolisms would be funny).  I guess it's also worth considering that if an animal can operate in vacuum, it must also be carrying its own oxidizers?  And in order to not overheat in the insulation of vacuum, maybe you pump your heat into your metabolism's exhaust gases, which you then vent?

I hadn't looked at the rules for combat on planets with odd characteristics until the oxygen question got me curious and Striker does indeed ban air-breathing engines in certain atmosphere types (and lasers are more effective in such atmospheres, for lack of scatter).  Also: rules for tiny worlds where the horizon might only be 2km away and there's very little gravity.

It tickles my fancy that on very small worlds, artillery pieces could attain muzzle velocities higher than escape velocity (eg, the Paris Gun had a muzzle velocity of almost 1700 m/s, while Pluto's escape velocity is only around 1200 m/s), and what goes up might not come back down if your smallest available unit of propellant is too big.  Not that Striker has rules for this, but it's the sort of thing the system gets you thinking about.

I like that you can equip a weapon with multiple types of fire control.  I suspect the intention here is to let you equip lasers with both direct fire and point defense fire control, but I like that it would let you do Starcraft-style siege tanks that can fire both as artillery and direct fire.

The whole initiative system might actually make adding eg AI and weird command structures like tyranids easy.  Your low-initiative AI troops need constant supervision and wedge (or revert to instinctive behavior) if not actively controlled.  Your normal-initiative AI troops, your armored vehicles with an expert system in them, need orders.  Maybe giving them orders takes double the normal time because you have to be very careful with your language, but they're immune to panic.  The existing Drone Vehicle rules actually work just fine for this sort of AI.  And then high-initiative AIs are just like high-initiative meatbrains, with full sentience and autonomy, but self-awareness comes at the cost of morale.

The inclusion of pikes and broadswords on the melee weapons table makes me want to abuse this system by running medieval combats with it.  We need shields, bows, and javelins too though.  Aaand maybe to change the ground-scale so that your stand of 4 guys with pikes isn't covering a linear area of 30m.

(Bonus: biological powerplant, legged suspension, megawatt plasma cannon "breath weapon" dragons.  Not that powering a megawatt with biological scaling laws is really workable, you'd need to mass a couple of hundred thousand metric tons to have that sort of output continuously, but it's fun to play with)

Come to think of it, since there are revolvers, early gatling guns, and rules for riding animals, Wild West combats might be viable too.  Tweak bolt-action rifles down to lever-action and add bows and you're good to go (pardner).

Zhodani teleport-commandos in battledress with plasma guns are a daunting prospect.

I think I mostly like the handling of infantry armor penetration here, where you roll 2d6, add the weapon's armor penetration score, subtract the target's armor score, and index into a table of hit severity.  You make tradeoffs in ammunition selection, since high-explosive ammunition does more severe hits but has lower penetration than sabot.  This is how they dodge the problem that Mongoose Traveller has with armor as DR, where anything that can hurt a guy in battle dress kills anyone else instantly - sabot ammunition does less damage to lightly-armored guys in Striker than HE ammunition, but has a better chance of hurting the guys in heavy armor.

I'm a little surprised that I'm not seeing any rules for readying actions, like Stargrunt's overwatch?  But I guess in a system that is all about orders, "go to that hill and fire on any enemies that come within xx range" is just a thing you can do without a special rule maybe?  Is that the intent of the segment of the fire phase where the other player's units fire, to do fire in reaction to your movement?  I wish the rules were clearer about this; the Indirect Fire section has a paragraph on "When Units Fire", but there isn't one like that for Direct Fire.  There are also basically no sidebar-style examples of how rules are supposed to work, and looking for after-action reports or youtube videos was, of course, fruitless.  I guess I the old Citizens of the Imperium forums are probably the right venue for this question?

I think the combat rules are rather heavy for use as a mass combat add-on to Traveller RPG play, and the command-and-control is a little heavy/annoying for use as a miniatures combat game.  But it's a thought-provoking set of rules and would probably be a fun toolkit to fiddle with.

Bonus: buried in the back of the Advanced Rules is a section on computing the planetary domestic product of different world types in Traveller, for the purpose of figuring their military spending, of course.  This would be a hilarious launching point for "domain" gameplay.

No Clerics, D&D as Wargame

Delta wrote a post recently about the early history of removing clerics from D&D, which has some interesting discussion in the comments.  Since I can't get commenting to work (probably related to PrivacyBadger), I guess I'm responding here.

I do also think that they can be interesting as sort of combat medics, acting as a tougher support class to the front line fighters. Essentially second line "shaft of the spear" battle logistics. But maybe that's more apropos to a wargame than rpg/dungeon exploration.

That right there is the crux of the issue for me.  As far as I'm concerned, D&D is a wargame (I refer to [TO]SR D&D here and following).  Storygamers sometimes say that derisively, but over the last couple of years I've come to terms with owning it.

And clerics are a damn handy unit.

Among wargames, D&D has some interesting properties.  D&D is refereed; this is true of some (Stargrunt and Dirtside, for example, recommend a ref), but not most wargames.  D&D is highly asymmetric, in terms of information asymmetry between referee forces and PC forces, force composition / capabilities (classed and leveled characters versus monster HD and special abilities, often numerical asymmetries), and structure of play (PCs typically proactive, on offense, and logistically-bound).  D&D is typically played cooperatively, with a group of players and a referee, extending that asymmetry into the processing-power domain (one DM cannot out-think four typical players) but adding a group dynamic which must be carefully managed for optimal play (at the party-scale).  Finally and obviously, D&D is campaign-focused to an extraordinary degree; the campaign rules, for adding units to your party and for units gaining new abilities, probably outweigh the combat rules (not that this stops anyone from running one-off battles / "one-shots").

The only wargame-qua-wargame that I know of with similar properties is Charlie Company, which I have not acquired.  Space Hulk hits some of those properties (highly asymmetric, similar indoor environments, often played many-versus-one and in campaigns) but is pretty much never refereed, and their campaigns lack the continuity and advancement of D&D campaigns (due in part to tremendous casualty rates / poor human win ratio).

A couple of questions naturally follow.  What are the consequences of viewing D&D as a wargame?  Is D&D a good wargame?  How do I run a sensible science-fiction campaign wargame along similar lines?  I have partial answers to consequences, probably in a future post.  I'm not sure what makes a good wargame, particularly for such a weird combination of attributes.  And I really haven't thought about the third question yet.

Dirtside

I've had the 2011 Summer of Starmada on my mind lately.  There were a couple of things that made Starmada successful, I think.  One was that it was simple enough to introduce new players without too much difficulty, with many options disabled-by-default.  This allowed us to achieve a critical mass of regular players and establish a metagame.  Finally, the availability of design rules led to strong participation in the game away from the table and allowed players to play fleets representing whatever science-fiction background they came from.  Unfortunately, it was that same design system that tore the metagame apart.

Dirtside 2 shares some, but not all, of these characteristics.  It does have a design system capable of modeling a wide variety of forces, and if the rulebook were better organized it would be easy to separate into a simple core and a number of optional components.  Compared to its brother Stargrunt, its morale system is simpler, it is larger scale, and it has a greater focus on combined arms. Unfortunately, as a ground-combat wargame, it depends heavily on terrain, and it uses a weird miniatures scale (6mm "microarmor").  Also, like Stargrunt, it does not handle alien psychology very well.  Finally, it uses a really weird damage resolution system involving drawing chits from a bowl; simple enough in practice, but an annoying number of moving parts.  If you lose a damage chit, your probability distribution is going to be skewed forever.

I've had my eye on Dirtside for a long time, but it just never seemed viable, due largely to hardware.  I looked at using roll20, but roll20's support for facing is very awkward, the asymmetric DM-player model isn't a great fit for wargames, and it sort of chugs on large maps in my experience.  I considered writing a VASSAL module, but java.  Now I think I might've found the correct tool, though - Tabletop Simulator.  TTS is already widely-available to the group that I game with, and is cheaper than miniatures.  It is easy to import hexmaps into it (I've looked at just taking Google Maps screenshots, imposing a hex grid at 100 meters per hex, and dropping them in), which solves the terrain problem.  It supports the "drawing damage chits" idiom very nicely with either decks or bags.  There are already steam workshop mods for it with models from the Dawn of War games, intended for playing Epic 40k, which would be perfect for representing units (I've been looking at using NATO-standard counters instead, but for some reason NATO has no symbols for "antigrav tank" or "giant mecha".  Gotta get on that, guys).  It seems like a very good solution to the "need miniatures", "losing damage chits", and "terrain is complicated" problems (though it may introduce some new problems, like "playing against opponents face-to-face is fun, and so is standing over a big physical map".  Maybe I need a ceiling-mounted projector aimed down on to a real table for that "war room" effect...)

The "poorly-organized rulebook" problem remains, however.  The rulebook is also not OCR'd, which is pretty annoying.  These two facts combined lead me to the conclusion that maybe I should transcribe / rewrite the rulebook, cutting it up into independent modules like Starmada had:

• Core / Armor
• general sequence of play, units, objectives
• armored vehicle (tracked, wheeled, GEV, grav, mechs) movement
• big index of combat actions, direct fire, guided missiles, damage resolution
• Infantry
• Artillery
• Aerospace (I'm conflicted about VTOLs; most of the time they play like armor, but then they're also vulnerable to air defense)
• Engineering (mines, fires and smoke, bridgelaying, ...)
• Optional Stuff (oversized vehicles, experimental rules for drones and aliens, ???)
• Vehicle Design and Points

It's already mostly organized like this.  The problem is that (for example) infantry movement is in the movement section with armored vehicles, rather than in the infantry section, and chit validity for artillery fire is in the direct fire chit validity table rather than the artillery chapter.  That's fine for a reference, but bad when you're first learning the game.  It's (only) a 60-page rulebook, so cutting it up and figuring it out is less work than learning all the quirks of an RPG, probably.  Combined with making tokens in TTS and a unit design spreadsheet (though there is already an online vehicle design tool, but it doesn't really support houseruling), it should be a reasonable, but not overwhelming, prep effort.

Mad Ramblings - Wargames, Dreamworlds, Nihilism, Sandboxes

This is not a well-structured, carefully-pruned, cohesive post.

Sometimes I think the game I really want to be running is not D&D, a fantasy RPG with dungeoneering, but a fantasy campaign skirmish wargame.  Ditch hitpoints, switch to single-digit numbers of Warhammer-style wounds, use an armor save instead of AC, and make characters largely replaceable.  Remove character detail, improve speed-in-play, perhaps increase tactical detail (as discussed back in Starmada, there's a big difference between character-creation complexity and tactical complexity).  A lot of this would just be nice on the DM side - I don't want to think about how many HP this goblin has.  It's 1HD, it has 1 wound, done.  A shift to wargaming mentality also does some interesting things for party composition; each player builds a warband from some fixed pool of resources.  "Just one sixth-level wizard with no henchmen" and "a big pile of second-level fighters" both become valid, interoperable ways to play.

The primeval purpose of play, as seen in young animals, is training, for food acquisition, mating-fights, or flight.  What are we training for?  With a wargame it's pretty clear.  With D&D it's much less so.  Maybe we're training for everything, but when you defend everything, you defend nothing.

On the other hand, rather than "I want to run D&D as a wargame", it may be more true that I seem to always end up running D&D as a wargame, and making systemic changes would make my life easier, but not more satisfying.  I'm not really sure why my games seem to keep ending up as wargames.  I think I enjoy the tactical challenge of actually giving players a good fight (and a good fright).  I also feel that I have lost confidence in the quality of my creative output, leaving tactics as the only place I'm willing to go nuts.  The well feels dry more than it used to.  Part of this, I suspect, is that I've basically stopped consuming fantasy media.  The last fantasy book I read was Wizard of Earthsea about a year ago (I did read Beowulf and finally finished the Saga of Burnt Njal this winter, but those doesn't quite count).  In terms of videogames, I think the only fantasy stuff I've played in the last year was Skyrim (lousy) and Hammerwatch (arcade, empty).  Skyrim was a strong contributing factor to launching the last campaign, actually - "If as many people loved Skyrim as seemed to, the bar must be lower than I thought; maybe I should give it another shot."  In any case, not much fantasy input, not much to remix and quietly steal.  I tried tapping dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations - that's how we ended up with a mad city-dungeon open to the endless void of space, showered by metal shavings from the decrepit cosmic engine that burns the souls of the damned to spin the earth.  No seriously, that's where the copper pieces came from - they fell out of the sky and into the dungeon as the engine ground itself towards inevitable failure and the End of Days.  Really the embarrassing part is that I put something as mundane as ratmen in such a place.

Reflecting on that, I was remiss to omit that I began reading Kill Six Billion Demons some time last summer, and I greatly enjoyed its Planescape-ness, its strangeness.  Still do.  So I suppose perhaps that influenced me more than I thought, but I put my own spin (ie, Warhammer-esque) on it, and thereby took most of the strangeness right out of it.

What I have been reading has been mostly history and sociology, which are relevant to D&D but not in useful ways.  D&D (and RPGs generally) are fundamentally based around emulating stories; myth, legend, books, movies.  I have gotten very skeptical, suspicious, of stories.  Stories simplify the very complex into nice simple causal chains.  A good story is always simpler than the reality of the situation; it's an authorial duty to cut out parts, to simplify for human consumption (Venkatesh Rao argues in a very roundabout way that all human organizations are based on such simplifications, claiming that leaders create simplifying myths for their underlings to live within).  Making wilderness illegible, or making running a domain hard because of historically-reasonable administrative information shortages, is not conducive to producing any sort of resonant narrative.  They're interesting thought experiments, but probably terrible in practice.  Which is a better story, the one that people all know, that riffs off of will resonate with them: Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, or King William and the Census?

At any rate, I suspect my nonfiction reading has made me a worse ACKS DM.  Played in a more typical D&D fashion ("band of roving murderers saves kingdom"), things like administrative information shortages could be turned into reasonable narratives, but when it comes to players looking at rulership, it gets mighty tedious to have to maintain both a true set of information for my own use, and a plausible false set of information to feed players.  In the case of an NPC governor deceiving an NPC king, I don't have to do the latter.  Frankly I have little desire to do the former anymore either.  I need all of my paperwork tolerance for taxes this season.

You know what else I'm starting to hate?  Character levels.  Having mechanical advancement be a thing that the system does means that players (well OK, people like me and my players) will aggressively optimize for it.  ACKS has this problem where the level of risk you have to take in order to make enough money to level at any sort of reasonable* pace results in levels being attritted away by casualties faster than they are earned.  I like the exponential XP curve; I really do.  It means that you can bring in 1st-level guys and they catch up, provided that any XP at all is being earned.  Domain XP breaks this, by providing XP only to the high-level characters in the party, and leads to the gap opening rather than closing.  The real problem with the OSR's XP curves (for us) is that they're build to support loooong-haul campaigns that run for multiple years of real-time.  That's something that we never do; in the six month duration of my typical ACKS campaign, players tend to get from 3rd or 4th level to 7th or 8th level.  Calibrated on 3.x, my players are frustrated by this slow progression and unwilling to take the sort of risks required to accelerate it.  ACKS dangles the domain carrot, of safe monthly gold and XP, and they really want to skip getting beaten with the wilderness stick (having labeled it as a poor risk-reward balance previously).  This is frustrating for me, because I feel that we haven't even scratched the surface of wilderness play (for example, tactics in the wilderness), while I find domain play tedious / boring so far.  It's kind of funny if you interpret it in a certain light: as adolescents the fantasy was to kill the dragon and win the princess, but as adults the fantasy is to be the guy at the top of the hierarchy who collects taxes from the safety of his castle while other people do the dying and the dirty work.  I miss Tim's meandering / anti-domain style of play.  Probably I should switch to some other retroclone, but I suspect my current playerbase (such as it is) has been accumulated in part by the allure of domains.

It would be an interesting experiment to bring a bunch of PCs in at low domain level (8th or 9th or so) and say "OK that's it, no leveling, all advancement will be Traveller-style through gear and hirelings and domains and achieving ends-in-the-world" (or just lower the level cap to 9th across the board...).  I've also been thinking about how poorly the leveling system as it currently exists does at supporting common narrative tropes.  The characters who start the weakest, the farmboy and the squire, have the greatest potential, while the characters to start strong, the knight and the wizard, rarely gain.  Lancelot and Merlin and Han Solo never get any stronger; Arthur and Luke do (though I guess this could also be interpreted as a game with a lower level cap).  What if you had the option to start at a higher level, but your maximum level was lowered accordingly?  This is a much more interesting use of level limits than demihumans; make it correlate with age at the beginning of the campaign.  Starting older gives you XP, but limits the new tricks your old dog can learn.  What if henchmen simply couldn't outlevel their masters - they could continue accumulating XP, but without adequate mentorship, they can never reach their full potential.  There are lots of interesting things to try in this space.

In any case, stopping or capping leveling suddenly introduces a gaping existential hole - why play?  I had hoped that ACKS, by making the domain game mechanical and providing XP for interacting with it, would encourage players to interact with the world on non-mechanical terms.  This was foolish; if you have mechanics for interacting with something, it will be interacted with mechanically at the exclusion of non-mechanical interactions (for another example, see 3.x Diplomacy hacks).  This is the underlying logical crux of the OSR's "rulings, not rules" stance, and its opposition to skill systems.  It also relates back to old thoughts on reliability and aim-of-playing, which loops back to "why play?".  Last spring, when I quit, I had been reading Interaction Ritual Chains, which discusses the process by which sacredness is manufactured through ritual (by which is meant routine, roughly-weekly interactions where a set of participants gather, isolated from the rest of the world, and waste resources).  I observed that this description fit the weekly D&D game perfectly, and was left very conflicted and disturbed about it all.  It left me asking "why do we really play?  Sure we have our surface reasons, that we like to kill monsters and gain levels, but is there another level of motivations underneath it where we value the game in itself?"  I observed that this potential treatment of the game as lightly-sacred was consistent with my behavior on one occasion, where I wrecked my bike on the way home from work and wasn't sure whether I'd sprained or broken my wrist, but went to run the weekly ACKS instead of to the hospital (I ended up there the next morning when the pain woke me up at 0430).  That is not the sort of thing that rational self-interested actors do.  Past-me is an idiot and the ACKS ritual made me so.  There is something weird going on here.  There is also a conflict between Interaction Ritual Chains and Rao's schema here, in that Rao doesn't believe that the organizing myth-makers get caught up in their own myths.  When I was reading Interaction Ritual Chains, I was elated, that now I understood how to create values, and the keys to power, to binding man, were in my grasp.  It was not until later that I realized that I could not help but become caught in those values myself, at which point I destroyed all of my social rituals (except the inescapable lunchtime at the office) and strove for hermit-hood, moral freedom, and the rejection of fantasy.  Success has been mixed; habits, personal rituals, are hard to break, and it is draining work.

I did not viscerally understand nihilism / moral relativism until Interaction Ritual Chains showed me how the sacred sausage is made.  It is one thing to be told "all morality is constructed", and another to be told exactly how it is constructed and at what cost.  I'm still not sure what to do with that information.  I suppose I can link this back to the bit above about leveling by noting that removing explicit / absolute mechanical objectives (like XP / leveling) is killing god (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase and meaning) and exposing the players to that same paralyzing freedom, of "all is permitted but nothing matters; freedom, and futility, are the only absolutes."  This ties back to the article by Rao, where political leadership requires simplifying political realities for human consumption.  It is also true that moral leadership generally requires simplifying moral realities for human consumption.  XP and reward system is essentially a moral choice (albeit a laughably small one), and delegating that choice down onto players is probably not what they're looking for.  They are here to play a game, to escape the spirit of gravity and the burdens of life, maybe for some occasional catharsis, but not to stare into the abyss.  Sandboxing in general has this problem.

One reasonable response, though, is that while the sacredness of moral norms may be an emergent property of social organizations rather than a reflection of any cosmic significance, that doesn't invalidate their usefulness.  Sacredness and morality formation are a mechanism for something (probably social cohesion and ingroup predictability) - if they weren't worth their cost in "wasted" resources, they wouldn't have emerged over and over again, in every society across human history.  Now granted, they may provide a fitness advantage to societies in competition with each other rather than to the individuals within those societies, who are materially poorer as a result of ritual expenditures (but the success of those individuals' genes and memes over the long term is tied to that of the society in which they live).  In any case, my response, cutting out all sacredness without really reflecting on its function, was like that of the D&D3.0 group that removes attacks of opportunity or the XP cost from creating magic items, or bans grappling because it's complicated, without understanding the effects that these will have on the system (spellcasters even more overpowered than normal).  Chesterton's Fence applies here:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

But enough of that.

I also miss the competitive-cooperative nature of the first ACKS campaign.  I've been reading some game theory stuff lately and there is a category of "non-fixed sum" games that describes observed player behavior during that campaign well.  It also helped that there were a variety of vigorously-argued value-systems / player utility functions present in that campaign, rather than a tacit convergence on the "whatever maximizes GP/XP" utility function that I see more now.  There's no playfulness anymore, and this is probably my fault for setting lethality high and leveling so slow.  I keep hoping that we'll hit the point of fatalist playfulness - "we're all going to die, so better to die for something, heroically or entertainingly, rather than waiting for the eventually-inevitable lame, random, or cowardly death" - but I think character advancement, and specifically the risk of falling behind the rest of the party, discourages this.  So I suppose there is still some competition, but it's boring, tacit competition that drives inaction, rather than entertaining competition that drives action.

I've come to the conclusion that the Death and Dismemberment table just isn't worth it.  It's funny about 10% of the time.  The other 90% of the time it just sucks - either you get an injury that doesn't matter for your class, or you get one that does and then you repeat the same "hope for effects that don't matter" procedure on the RL&L table.  If I were to build a new one, I'd probably just make it a roll between "mission killed" (out of action for the rest of this adventure), "multi-mission killed" (out of action for a couple adventures), and "campaign killed" (maybe there's enough left of you to retire, but your adventuring days are done), and leave details up to players.  I really want to make the bedrest mechanic work.  It seems like a good way to encourage players to maintain stables of characters and to swap out for mission requirements.  It sort of works for henchmen, but if a PC is out for bedrest, adventuring is often delayed, because playing a henchman risks being outleveled and because PCs are the highest level (hence most useful) and missing out on XP for a PC means falling behind on already-glacial leveling.

In conclusion: great dissatisfaction!

Return to Starmada

Matt and I played a game of Admiralty Edition this evening, using fleets from the Imperial Starmada book (I had Imperials, Matt had Negali) and the Newtonian movement rules.  I had played one of the Hammer and Claw fleets against Negali before, and had had my cruisers cored by their high-impact, high-damage weapons, so I played pretty defensively, stacking up Evasive Action with my Countermeasures and forcing Matt's to-hit numbers up towards 6+ for most of the game.  By the time we got into a close enough range that he could start shooting at 5+ (or 4+ with double range mods), I had destroyed most of his escorts and mostly won by points.

Points of frustration:

• Book fleets have lousy accuracy and prioritize impact and damage instead (compared to home-rolled fleets in our previous meta, where 3+ and 4+ were the norm for to-hit).
• Countermeasures+Evasive Maneuvers+Fire Control is very effective.  The extra -1 to Matt's to-hit from evasive action halved his expected hits per shot (5+ -> 6+), and Fire Control let me ignore evasive action's penalty on my firing.  Fire Control, in effect, became a second Countermeasures.  This variable-rate stacking of to-hit modifiers was fixed in Nova, which we're talking about playing next week.
• Shields 5 on Matt's cruiser - there was not much I could do about this, even with the impact 2 weapons available to my fleet.
• Escorts are bad.  The optimal force composition for a straight-up, no-scenario fight in Admiralty Edition is, IMO, three ships of roughly equal point value.  This forces your opponent to destroy two-thirds of your fleet instead of half.  Escorts are best used as filler, for those last 50 points, in such a way that the destruction or survival of the escorts cannot impact the outcome of the race to 50% of the VP limit.  Matt constructed a fleet of three escorts, a destroyer, and a cruiser, while mine was two battlecruisers and a light cruiser.  Destroying all of his escorts and his destroyer in detail was easier than destroying his cruiser, and because a ship will often have guns left when it is destroyed (due to the random nature of damage allocation), destroying escorts piecemeal reduced incoming fire very effectively.  It is also sometimes possible to opportunistically destroy or badly damage escorts that stray into the wrong arcs, as their great speed sometimes lets them; flanking just lets the opponent bring more of his firepower to bear.
• Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions addresses the weakness of escorts by changing the scaling factor on the point value of hulls from linear to quadratic with the growth of hull size, so that all other things being equal, a ship twice as big costs four times as much.
• Battlefleet Gothic addresses the weakness of escorts with forcebuilding rules requiring everyone to have them.  I forget how they handle scoring / victory conditions.
• BFG also has a rule that ships must fire on the closest target in each arc, unless they pass a leadership test.  Which is maybe silly, but a reasonable way to make escorts useful (and hardly the silliest thing in BFG...).
• BFG escorts are also flotilla-esque; deployed in squadrons, take a single hit to destroy.  But they carry much stronger defenses and heavier armament than Starmada flotillas.
• I am not sure if Colonial Battlefleet does anything in particular to make escorts useful, though I imagine there might be something in its Ship Role rules that would help.
• Starmada Nova...  adds an Escort trait, which blocks line of fire through the escort ship's hex and costs about as much as adding three flights of fighters to the same ship.  This sounds like it would exacerbate the problem that "escorts lack survivability and are too expensive for their utility", especially given the somewhat-dubious utility of symmetric LOS-blocking with a ship that can be killed and is worth points.  Starmada could really, really use a better force composition system and non-VP victory conditions (for example, this battle I won by VP, but could probably not have effectively killed Matt's cruiser).
• Newtonian movement was...  more work than it was worth, I think?  I don't think we ever did anything that we couldn't've done with basic movement; the only times it mattered were when some of Matt's ships took engine damage and had their potential destinations fixed, which allowed me to guarantee that they'd be in my arcs.  But that's typically also true of badly-engine-damaged ships in the naval or basic movement systems; if you're low on thrust, your options are limited.  There may have been one turn where I moved at speed equal to my thrust while using Evasive Action, which is not viable under basic movement.  I think Newtonian movement favors short-ranged fleets; it enables them to close more quickly under cover of Evasive Action (but then also forces them to slow and turn after making their pass at the enemy, during which time they are taking fire - so they must crush the enemy during their first pass).  In this case Matt was unable to turn his substantial thrust advantage into a tactical advantage, in large part because our ranges were matched and we favored similar arcs.
• Matt commented that Starmada would make a much better video game than a tabletop game...  and he's not wrong.

 So...  meh.  We solved some of the old problems with fleetbuilding by using prebuilt fleets, and found new problems.  Nova solved some of these, but hardly all.

Maneuver Warfare Handbook

I read most of Lind's Maneuver Warfare Handbook this evening, and as usual when reading this prompted a few thoughts relevant to gaming (although, unusually, more ideas related to my job - maneuver warfare applied to software development looks like a particularly weird, German flavor of Agile I expect).  The quick summary is that maneuver warfare is a mode of fighting which emphasizes distributed action rather then central control, and which has a few standard tools (mission orders / commander's intent, schwerpunkt, and the search for gaps in the enemy's surface) to make that organizational structure work.  When used properly, the more rapid reaction times of unit leaders closest to the action (who no longer have to wait for high command's permission to act) allow them to out-react their adversaries, forcing confusion, panic, and defeat.  Also emphasized are adaptability to circumstances and initiative by small-unit leaders.  This allows a smaller force to defeat a larger one by capitalizing on failures in enemy command and control.

Which sounds a lot like the sort of thing a human force in Domains at War could use to defeat the numerically-superior orc force in Battle of the Teeth, for example.  Create and exploit weaknesses in their formation as a result of their poor command and control, punch through, kill their commanders and force morale collapse.

Some of the small-unit fire-and-maneuver examples also had me thinking about Stargrunt again (where suppress-then-assault is king), though to some extent using ranged units to disorder troops in Domains at War is similar, and the section on never doing the same thing twice reminded me of the Starmada metagame of old (and that one time I cloaked ships but didn't move them, because my opponents were used to cloaked ships reappearing on their flanks and rear and had started turning to counter).

There was an excellent line about how attrition-warfare forces seek to engage and destroy the enemy "where and whenever" possible via superior firepower, which reminded me of 3.x gamers and how hard it is to get them to refuse a battle when they start playing ACKS.

One thing that I haven't gotten much sense for while wargaming has been friction (and in general properly confusing fog-of-war), though.  To some extent Starmada's written orders created some of this, because it was easy to goof and put your ships out of position.  Unfortunately, that's about as far as serious fog-of-war and friction can go without becoming a huge pain on the tabletop.  Computers could handle the sheer volume of chaos required better, but most computer wargames these days are not for audiences interested in unpredictability (to the point where some players argue that a good competitive RTS should have no randomness).  Perhaps I ought to write one.

In any case, pretty good book.  Very to-the-point!

Mechmusics, OGRE, Morale

If I were going for postcount, this could probably be multiple (unrelated: initially typo'd "multiple" to "mule pile")

Point the first: some decent background music for SF ground combat.  Gave me the "tech-heavy military SF" itch again.

Which OGRE sort of fills but also sort of doesn't.  The only design is in defense force composition, which while still an open problem is a very different animal from Starmada, Battletech, or Traveller-type design.  One thing I will say for OGRE though is that it handles attrition nicely - as soon as one side can't take an action, the game is over.  The nature of the battle between implacable machine and humans making a last stand mean that morale is immaterial, so you have neither forced actions ("failed morale, must retreat towards map edge") nor denied actions ("pinned, can't fire this turn").  In this way, it avoids complexity.

Admittedly, a lot of wargames ignore morale effects, but it's nice to have a reasonable excuse.  Should find more wargames with war machines and slavering aliens born to die ("this for the swarm!"), and I guess human troops either heroic, desperate, or hopped up on combat stimulants.  Maybe that's part of why 40k is popular; they have morale rules, but they're not nearly as central to gameplay as in (say) Stargrunt, and plenty of things basically ignore them.

Also wargames are problematic because of scalability (often hard for 4-5 players at once to play with quick turn lengths), tendency to minmax in competitive environments, and somebody always loses.  These are things which RPGs handle relatively well.  Do people play wargames in the 3+ vs 1 "coalition of players and a referee in non-competitive campaign" mode?

Of Strategy and Software Engineering

This post has nothing to do with gaming.  Probably.

I've been continuing to work my way through The Transformation of War, and hit something somewhat interesting last night.  Van Creveld commented on the traditional division between strategy and tactics, that tactics is the art of winning battles while strategy is the groundwork, to make sure that the battle will be fought under advantageous circumstances, that men and equipment will be in good order on arrival, and that victory can be capitalized on to achieve a campaign's objectives.  Further, he argued that much of successful strategy is working around three sorts of difficulties; uncertainty and friction (the tendency for things to go wrong and impede progress) were recognized by Clauswitz, while van Creveld also adds inflexibility.

This is probably not news to those familiar with Western strategy, but it did make an interesting connection with software engineering for me.  You see, software engineering isn't really engineering as one might use the term for, say, civil or mechanical engineering.  A mechanical engineer can look up the strength of various alloys of steel in reasonably reputable sources, crunch the numbers, and figure out what he needs in order to make the thing he's designing meet the requirements.  When he's done, he can be reasonably certain that the thing he's built will more-or-less work as intended if he has done his job properly.  Software engineers cannot do this.  The performance benchmarks available are gamed all to hell, the mathematics taught in school are primarily concerned with asymptotic behavior and completely neglect very substantial performance concerns, nobody outside of Intel and maybe some of the agencies actually knows the full instruction set most general-purpose computers are running, and next year that library you're using is going to break its interface out from under you with no warning.  Not only do we not know the 'laws of physics' of the area we're working in, but those laws are constantly changing, often adversarially.

(And of course, the client wants it done yesterday with a completely different set of requirements than they asked for six months ago, but I figure that's probably normal for most engineering disciplines)

At the end of the day, software engineering has more in common with art and alchemy than with traditional mathematically-rigorous engineering approaches.  The proof of this, I think, is that we see reflections of strategy's aims and obstables in modern software engineering practices.  Waterfall has fallen by the wayside because its timetables failed to account for friction.  Its fixed requirements led to inflexibility and may have been wrong or useless by the time the project was brought to completion.  Test-driven development makes a tradeoff between flexibility and friction, as codified tests somewhat reduce your ability to adapt to changing requirements but also reduce the impact of random failures.  The Agile family of methodologies seems focused on flexibility to changing requirements and reducing uncertainty about customer requirements through communication, which is good, but may come at the cost of a flavor of friction as developer-time is lost playing Meetings & Metrics (have you heard of my new game?  Best-selling the world over...).

(Exercise for the reader: commission a civil engineering firm to design a highway suspension bridge using Agile.  Be sure the change the requirements regularly to keep them on their toes.  Record the stand-up meetings and put them on youtube.)

Anyway: at the end of the day, software engineering is about establishing a context to programming, where the unpleasant, messy work of one's developers can actually achieve the objective despite uncertainty and both human and machine failures.  In this it is like strategy.

Card-Driven Morale

I was thinking about morale systems (particularly Domains at War's) in the shower this evening and it occurred to me that the primary culprits in terms of lag and friction from morale are table lookups and adding situational modifiers.  I don't have a solution to situational modifiers yet, but one solution to the table lookups problem would be to use a deck of cards with the same probability distribution as 2d6.  Each card, in addition to its face value, has a small, basically pre-calculated table, to the effect of "if the checking unit's morale is +3 or better, it rallies.  0-+2, stands firm..." and on down the list.  This removes the table lookup.  Depending on how often you reshuffle drawn morale cards back into the deck, it could speed things up with multiple draws per turn.  This would drive the result towards the mean (in that once you've drawn one extreme, your odds of that extreme again are low or nil until reshuffle), but that might be acceptable.  You could do the same thing for shock, too - this would remove all uses of the d6 from DaW (I think?) and then it could be run on pure d20+cards.

I do not yet have a solution to the conditional modifiers problem.

Inside the Soviet Army

From Suvorov's Inside the Soviet Army:

Only three forces are active in the Soviet political arena-the Party, the Army and the KGB. Each of these possesses enormous power, but this is exceeded by the combined strength of the other two. Each has its own secret organisation, which is capable of reaching into hostile countries and monitoring developments there. The Party has its Control Commission-a secret organisation which has almost as much influence inside the country as the KGB. The KGB is a grouping of many different secret departments, some of which keep an eye on the Party. The Army has its own secret service-the GRU-the most effective military intelligence service in the world.
Each of these three forces is hostile to the others and has certain, not unreasonable pretensions to absolute power but its initiatives will always fail in the face of the combined opposition of the other two.
Of the three, the Party has the smallest resources for self-defence in open conflict. But it has a strong lever at its disposal-the appointment and posting of all officials. Every general in the Army and every colonel in the KGB takes up his post and is promoted or demoted only with the approval of the Administrative Department of the Central Committee of the Party. In addition, the Party controls all propaganda and ideological work and it is always the Party which decides what constitutes true Marxism and what represents a deviation from its general line. Marxism can be used as an additional weapon when it becomes necessary to dismiss an unwanted official from the KGB, the Army or even the Party. The Party's right to nominate and promote individuals is supported by both the Army and the KGB. If the Party were to lose this privilege to the KGB, the Army would be in mortal danger. If the Army took it over, the KGB would be in an equally dangerous situation. For this reason, neither of them objects to the Party's privilege-and it is this privilege which makes the Party the most influential member of the triumvirate.
The KGB is the craftiest member of this troika. It is able, whenever it wishes, to recruit a party or a military leader as its agent: if the official refuses he can be destroyed by a compromise operation devised by the KGB. The Party remembers, only too clearly, how the KGB's predecessor was able to destroy the entire Central Committee during the course of a single year. The Army, for its part, remembers how, within the space of two months, the same organisation was able to annihilate all its generals. However, the secret power of the KGB and its cunning are its weakness as well as its strength. Both the Party and the Army have a deep fear of the KGB and for this reason they keep a very close eye on the behaviour of its leaders, changing them quickly and decisively, if this becomes necessary.
The Army is potentially the most powerful of the three and therefore it has the fewest rights. The Party and the KGB know very well that, if Communism should collapse, they will be shot by their own countrymen, but that this will not happen to the Army. The Party and the KGB acknowledge the might of the Army. Without it their policies could not be carried out, either at home or abroad. The Party and the KGB keep the Army at a careful distance, rather as two hunters might control a captured leopard with chains, from two different sides. The tautness of this chain is felt even at regimental and battalion level. The Party has a political Commissar in every detachment and the KGB a Special Department.

Sounds pretty gameable to me...  There were a lot of other interesting tidbits as well, though I'm nowhere near finished with the book.  Soviet doctrine on the deployment of nuclear weapons was sensible but unsettling ("strike first, because you never know when the enemy will go for his nukes...").  Doctrine on the allocation of brigade resources was remarkably pragmatic (if you have three battalions, one of whose advance is stopped, one which is advancing slowly, and one which is broken and retreating, you throw all of your higher-level reserves and artillery in support of the one battalion which is advancing, however slowly, because offense is king and you want a strategic breakthrough).  Anti-tank guns were intentionally almost never self-propelled, both for simplicity of construction and so that their crews could not retreat.  Optimism about the future of the tank in the pre-drone / ATGM era (though it also makes sense here, since one of the postulates of Soviet doctrine was that advanced manufacturing was going to get wrecked harder than it did in World War II via nukes, so neither side was going to be able to continue producing advanced guided weapons in any volume).  Doctrine regarding rifled vs smoothbore mortars and volume of fire was simple but sensible:

But what about accuracy? you will ask. It is of no significance. Soviet commanders have chosen a different way of approaching the problem. If you have to pay for accuracy with complexity of design, you are following the wrong path. Quantity is the better way to exert pressure. Since two simple, smoothbore mortars can do the work of one rifled one we will use the two simple ones, which will have the additional advantage of producing a lot more noise, dust and fire than one. And this is by no means unimportant in war. The more noise you produce, the higher the morale of your troops and the lower that of the enemy. What is more, two mortars are harder to destroy than one.

Helicopters viewed as lightly armored flying tanks instead of as aircraft, vehicle crews don't have Need To Know regarding the specifications or type designations of their vehicles, weird variations in shell calibre so that it's hard to confuse different types of ammunition in writing or speech, troops not provided rations or bedrolls but to spend no more than five days at the front at a time, and all kinds of just foreign concepts.  Promotion among officers was determined both by time in grade, but each command had a maximum rank that could command it - if at n years in service you hadn't acquired command of a larger force by impressing your superiors and being given command of a force above your rank, you were stuck at your current rank (a surprisingly meritocratic and very gameable arrangement).  I'm fairly impressed by the degree of focus on combined arms, with both air and land armies under the command of a single Front Commander, and necessarily cooperating. In any case, a very interesting read.

The High-Low Mix

I've been reading some criticism recently about US aircraft acquisition policy which is sort of interesting from a wargaming perspective.  The opposition allege that the Air Force has a problem where it tries to construct a fleet solely of maximum-capability airframes with stealth and mach 3 and all the bells and whistles required to fight an adversary with advanced air defense capabilities while making cuts to areas like close air support and aerial reconnaissance that don't require the same degree of technological sophistication and are much more useful against technologically inferior opponents.  As it turns out, these sort of high-tech aircraft are really expensive and hard to manufacture and maintain in large numbers, leading to numerical inferiority and either reliance on old models for pedestrian missions like bombing guerillas (for which all the bells and whistles are not required), or extreme maintenance costs for those missions if advanced aircraft are employed.

The opposition further argues that the Air Force should strive for a "high-low" force mix, with 20% of the force consisting of highest-end specialist hardware designed to punch holes in technologically advanced adversaries at any expense, and the other 80% consisting of less-expensive, less-specialized, general-purpose aircraft capable of performing a wide variety of missions at lower costs.

This reminds me of a time when someone tried to build an all-cataphract army - it was very strong on paper, but availability was low and they weren't good at going in and digging lizardmen out of caves.

This discussion is also interesting in light of our Starmada games.  I think part of the reason we didn't really see mission-specialized ships was that basically all of the Starmada victory conditions boiled down to "destroy the enemy fleet".  It probably didn't help that some scenarios banned Cloaking, Hyperdrive, and other options which would permit the construction of specialist ships for those missions.

...  and now I have the itch to build a better (less complex) BattleTech on top of Starmada's chassis while avoiding Wardogs' mistakes.  Bother.

Starship Geometry

So...  what would combat vessels in the starry sea actually look and be shaped like?  I think most science fiction does a lousy job of this.

It seems to me important to ignore two things: first, atmospheric reentry capability, and second, any manner of warp drive.  Building major warships with atmospheric capability seems unlikely to me because putting large ships into space is ridiculously expensive in terms of rocket fuel.  I think space elevators and assembly in orbit are plausible within the next 200 years, at which point you never really need atmospheric capability.  If you need to put something on the ground from orbit, use a dedicated small reentry vehicle (dropship) with the knowledge that it's probably a one-way trip unless you're willing to drop a ton of fuel to go with it or unless you've captured an elevator.

(There are probably some good thoughts to be had on the strategic importance of space elevators in orbital war if they're an assumption you're willing to make.  I think, though, of all the possible means to make achieving orbit common enough for most science fiction, the space elevator is the most plausible / scalable)

On the flip side, if you prefer to assume Traveller-style "free" multi-g reactionmassless acceleration in any direction, then you still don't really need to take aerodynamics into account - just strap more antigrav plates onto a hull built in a configuration actually reasonable for use in space, disregard lifting surfaces, and vector your thrust however you like.  This does get harder on planets with higher gravity, though.  Maybe an aerodynamic 'spaceship sabot', like a pair of droppable wings... ?

Second, warpdrive.  Alcubierre drive nonwithstanding, if you're willing to assume warpdrive, you can use that as a justifying assumption for pretty much any starship geometry you like.  "Oh, warp drive only works on ships shaped like donuts because technobabble."  But if that's the case, optimal starship geometry without warpdrive will still be a worthwhile question, because you can build your interstellar carriers as toroids and then launch ships of more practical configurations on your arrival.

So!  Assuming rocket propulsion, orbital assembly / no atmospheric operation, and no weird warpdrive constraints, what's a reasonable combat starship look like?

I think the two main things to consider are moment of rotational inertia and target profile.  Assuming uniform density, a sphere minimizes rotational inertia and presents a uniform target profile from all incoming vectors.  If you're willing to put maneuvering thrusters out on extended arms or booms, you could get a lot of extra torque and a sphere could be very maneuverable (such booms do present exposed targets, though, and it's true that you could put boomed maneuvering thrusters on most any shape).  A sphere also gives you potentially pretty broad traverses on turreted weapons, and turrets on half your surface area can aim at any single point.  As you reduce your target profile in any single dimension by flattening / smushing the sphere, your moment of inertia starts going up if you want to maintain the same volume.  The classical "flying saucer" pattern presents a small target from two sides and a large target from the third, and has tolerable rotational inertia depending on how flattened it is.  Bringing weapons to bear from a large portion of your hull is tricky, though.  The cone deserves mention, because while it has a pretty bad moment of inertia, a narrow cone presents a small target from the wherever it's pointing at and also provides a nice sloped area where one could mount forward-facing weapons that do not block each other's lines of fire.  Conical ships are also susceptible to raking fire from the direction they face, though (depending on your assumptions about penetration capabilities of weapons).  Cylindrical ships have slightly better moments of inertia than conical ones and smaller target profiles in their favored direction, but lose out on usable surface area for mounting terraced turrets and remain susceptible to raking fire. 

Uniform density is a silly assumption, of course.  Armor is probably dense, so you're likely to have sort of "worst-case" moments of inertia.  Spheres still win, though.  There's also an interesting conundrum in terms of reaction mass, ammunition, and other expendables - if you put them near the outside of the hull, then as you burn through them your moment of inertia falls more rapidly than if they were closer to the center of mass, so you gain more maneuverability as you burn through them.  On the other hand, if your fuel is kept near the exterior of your hull, it's more likely to be hit and then you will be sad and/or dead.

Anyway.  Once aerodynamics are out of the way, spheres make a lot of sense for low-orbital environments, where orbital period is low and the horizon is relatively close so an enemy can approach from a wider variety of vectors with less warning, and therefore maneuverability and uniformly small target profile are useful.  Ships designed for intercepting in interplanetary space, on the other hand, might make more sense as cones - if the enemy is on a long trajectory that they can't really alter (or they'll miss their target planet), then you can reasonably make an intercept, but you'll spend a lot of time closing while both sides know where the other is, at which point having a small target profile in one direction is useful and maneuverability is less important.  Cylinders continue to make sense for missiles and other impactors intended for large, less-maneuverable targets.

Orbital Bombardment and Giulio Douhet

There was a discussion the other week of what war in space will look like, and I have a number of follow-on thoughts to it.  This is one of them; others are probably forthcoming.

The general consensus was that if you can achieve orbital superiority over a planet, you've won.  You can bombard its population centers into glowing rubble with kinetic weapons, and there's jackall the defenders can do about it.  I voiced a minority opinion then, that the aim of one's campaign may preclude urban centers as bombardment targets, and that in order to conquer a population center one must necessarily have boots (filled with either flesh or sentient metal) on the ground for the messy work.  I'm also not entirely sure about the current state of antisatellite weapons, but I expect that at the very least you could fill the most likely orbits with shrapnel as an area denial weapon.

Further reading on my part has reinforced this suspicion.  I believe the predictions of Giulio Douhet are instructive.  Douhet was an Italian officer in the early 20th century and one of the fathers of Air Power Theory.  During the first World War, he advocated the construction of heavy bombers, which he believed could be used to bomb enemy population centers and cause the populace to revolt against their government.  He also pioneered the notion later summarized as "the bomber will always get through."  Douhet died in 1930, too early to see his theories tested during the second World War.

They did not stand this test well.  Extensive conventional bombing of civilian population centers was undertaken against Britain and Germany, and Tokyo was also bombed (with amusing preparations underway for further bombing).  Civilian morale did not crumble in any of these instances; in Britain "the blitz" as it was called strengthened civilian resolve, while the Germans kept fighting all the way to Berlin despite an absurd volume of bombs being dropped on them.

I think Douhet's theories about civilian morale were therefore misinformed.  The last half-century of guerilla warfare seems to agree that Douhet was mistaken.  As I mentioned in my previous short review of Fry the Brain, the essential method used by effective urban guerilla insurgencies is to incite security forces to inflict collateral damage on civilians, and thereby win the relatives of the injured to the insurgency's cause.  Indiscriminate bombing strengthens the morale of the enemy.  It lets mothers die in the arms of their sons, and there seems to me no surer way to make a devoted foe.  If you want to win by sapping civilian morale, you should instead strive to kill many sons in a distant land while leaving their mothers alive to lament over them.  Total war in practice relies on destroying the enemy's ability to fight, to resupply and reinforce (for which civilians are necessary), rather than his will to fight.  Infrastructure targets are still on the table, though, and pinpoint kinetic strikes against them do seem liable to reduce the enemy's ability to retaliate, but then you have the post-conquest problem of rebuilding all the dams and bridges you just blew up to make the conquered planet useful again.  So it seems to me that fixed military targets - command centers, missile silos, strategic fuel reserves, airfields, space launch sites - are probably the most promising for orbital bombardment.

Anyway, to return to Douhet - by the 1960s, "the bomber will always get through" had fallen by the wayside.  A British study in 1964 concluded that a strategic bomber inbound to the Soviet Union would meet on average six SAM/AAMs, each with a 75% probability of destroying it if countermeasures were not employed.

I think Douhet's case is much analogous to our own.  We see a novel means of offense, possible today but not yet deployed, and we cannot conceive of an effective/cost-effective counter to it.  We therefore are inclined to think that it will be an end-all-be-all of warfare to achieve orbital superiority over an enemy world, much as Douhet thought of air superiority.  But there is a concept in Filipino martial arts called tapi tapi; it means broadly "counter for counter".  There's always a counter, and for that counter a counter, and so forth.  We maybe haven't found the best counter to orbital bombardment yet, but I think we will.  Maybe we can't bury our command centers beneath any reasonable amount of concrete in the face of tungsten rods at Mach 10...  but such weapons are also fairly lousy for hitting moving targets.  Perhaps a widely distributed, redundant mobile command center is the answer (to the cloud!...  half-sarcastic, but half-serious).  If, as it is said, "fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity", perhaps fixed installations and formations are as well.  Welcome to the digital age!  Granted, you're not going to be able to get unenhanced humans to move continuously at such a pace in peacetime...  but that's what machines are for.  If your enemy has a big hammer, become as a swarm of flies; present too many targets, each of which is waaay overkill for a 12 kiloton kinetic weapon if you can even hit it with one.  And keep them in or near population centers, so you get some collateral damage morale out of them...

(As for the computer security implications of a cloud command center...  well, some might call that job security d: )