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Since I opened up the First Silesian War, it only felt right to continue along with it. Horse & Musket continues with a scenario for The Battle of Chotusitz. Not much to say about it except that, along with Mollwitz, these are battles that were amazingly evenly-matched in terms of fielded force. They were also particularly (perhaps even peculiarly) non-definitive. Although Frederick is surely considered to be one of the victors in the Silesian war, that victory was not through a decisive result on the battlefield. Rather, it was through the wider politics that he prevailed (a negotiated peace favorable to Prussia allowed Austria to divert her forces to other fronts).

In any grand strategy game, you never want to subject yourself to an even fight if you can help it. You pick your battles to gain a decisive advantage whenever possible and you build your nation so as to assure yourself those advantages. Odd gestures of chivalry aside, one imagines that historical rulers would strive for the same. What, then, was the driver for these evenly matched battles?

Without any historical evidence or even any investigatory effort on my part, I’ll expound upon a theory. I suspect the closeness of the numbers is precisely because the opposing generals knew what those numbers were. If you are opposed by an army numerically inferior to you, the incentive to collect more forces dwindles. On the other hand, if you are stalking an enemy force that you know outnumbers you, you will endeavor to collect up a couple of additional regiments to make up the difference. This assumes that opposing generals knew the count of the forces opposing them which, particularly in the case of Germans fighting Germans, seems reasonable to me. Frederick would have known how many regiments Maria was fielding and could make an educated guess of which ones opposed him in Silesia, wouldn’t you think?

It makes me wonder about most implementations of fog-of-war in strategic and operational level computer games. Hiding enemy information results in either invisible enemy “stacks” or a method of obscuring what is actually contained within a stack. For the First Silesian War, though, I wonder if the content of the “stack” may have been known with the mystery being just how well or poorly your own inexperienced forces might stack up against the equally-green enemy. “Researching” those metal ramrods and “infantry drill” may have proved decisive, but that was hardly knowable ahead of time.

Forming up at Chotusitz

On to Chotusitz. In this scenario, my result was ahistorically good. The actual battle was indecisive but I was able to seize a decisive victory, which in Horse & Musket is calculated purely from victory locations held. I’m not sure my score says much of anything. Chotusitz, like so many battles, is going to encounter difficulties when being designed as a scenario within the context of a “generic” engine. The extent of my win probably owes much to the difficulties of working with a programmed AI.

Since I spend all my time wishing for better, I’ve been taking a look at some table-top systems. What is it that board games have right for the Horse and Musket period? With all these thoughts in my head, I’ll set down a rough-and-tumble summary of what I’ve learned. First, though, I’ll warn you about what this is not. Don’t think of the following list as some kind of review of the games in question. The fact is, I have almost no experience with any of these games and have absolutely no idea how they are to play. Instead, I’m looking at the design to help to bring together my own ideas about what seems to be missing with what is actually out there and, presumably, is tried and true in terms of modelling the period.

Prussia’s Glory

I’ll start out here with this series. Prussia’s Glory currently consists of two parts, each containing a handful of battles from the Seven Years’ War. The rulebook states that GMT intends to make it a three-parter with that third game covering the War of the Austrian Succession.

GMT has become my new touchstone for basic quality in board gaming. Their product line shows a predictable combination of quality components, well-organized rules, and (presumably) decent designs relative to the goals of the game (balancing historical fidelity and playability). It also helps that they support the community of gamers with on-line materials, designers notes, and an active communication, often from the respective development team. Because of this, I now look to GMT’s treatment of any period in the way I once might have looked to Avalon Hill.

Having set such high expectations I’ll say that what I like most in this design, despite my focusing on tactical-level battle simulations, is how it approaches the army-level factors. Prussia’s Glory‘s scenarios are designed either to be played as “battles,” with the armies starting the fight from their historical position, or as a “main” scenario, where the pre-battle maneuvering is an important part of the game. In the latter format, there are rules that consider command and control at the army and wing level. Or perhaps more relevant, the lack of command and control which allowed one side (often the Prussians) to steal a march on their enemy. Portions of your army might begin the game unusable and they may well again end up that way if the tide of war turns against you.

But this is not to miss the focus of this game, which is a brigade-level simulation conducted in up-to-one-hour turns. It’s a coarse simulation relative to Horse & Musket, but perhaps has a few things to teach about not getting too deep into the weeds. Its method for converting the hexes and brigades into line-of-battle is instructive. Frontage is considerably less than the “stacking” limits, allowing an abstraction of things like support, refusing the flank, or forming squares. Again, this may be counterintuitive to someone whose thinking is in terms of tin soldiers, but it makes a lot of sense given the unit and time scale being represented.

I’m also pondering the details of how Prussia’s Glory deals with losses. As I said in my original post, one of the things I’d personally like to see preserved from Horse & Musket is its separate tracking of casualties, disorder, and morale. In Prussia’s Glory, damage (given a full brigade as a starting point) is in four distinct steps, with morale and strength dropping in tandem. This makes sense as a game mechanism. As far as battle tactics go, it doesn’t matter whether a unit flees the field without firing a shot or is cut down by close-range canister fire – the unit is removed from the battle. The difference is in the aftermath. Does an army end the day largely intact or with substantial losses that need to be made up with new recruits? Prussia’s Glory, like most of these board games, does not say.

DBA / WGR 1750-1850

I dug out the 50-year-old rules from the De Bellis Antiquitatis folks specifically because it has a model for casualties resulting from musketry and cannon. Yes, they’ve been superseded many times over; reading through the ruleset I can see why. However, these rules are free. It’s also often the case that “modernization” also means “simplification.” Newer games want to work with fewer details, not more. If nothing else, players don’t want to be tracking data that don’t drive the game’s outcome.

And yet, I want to know the body count.

On this topic, I was reading an interesting discussion on-line about the rather low kill ratio (comparing bullets fired to casualties) in the Napoleonic era. Counterintuitively, as weaponry has improved, that ratio has become worse. It took millions of bullets in Vietnam to do what thousands did in the Seven Years War. Yet, as I pointed out in the last section, that death count doesn’t matter to the game*. A battalion doesn’t retire from the field because it is in danger of running out of men. It’s the reality of your seeing friends die horribly that, first, degrades the individual soldier’s ability to fight back and then leads to him collectively figuring that discretion may be the better part of valor. Even a volley that doesn’t hit a single target can be unnerving enough to make a man think he does not want to still be standing there after the reload.

So WGR remains a rare attempt to quantify where those bullets actually wind up. Unfortunately for my purposes, the WGR numbers seem awfully high for musketry. Their computations for artillery make some sense to me, but the musketry tables are just so deadly, and more deadly than artillery – contrasting with assertions that the majority (maybe even the vast majority) of casualties-by-enemy-fire in the Horse and Musket era were caused by cannon. As another point of reference, WGR figures are far more deadly than those in Horse & Musket. My time spent with these tables has also disabused me of the belief, supported by rumors from dark corners of the internet, that WGR (in contrast to rule modernizations) used some kind of advanced-statistical methodry in determining combat results. To me, the math looks fairly simple and mostly linear, despite the table itself being really, really big.

Freeman’s Farm

If you’ll recall, part of my goal here is to look at the question of linearization as a way to portray the era’s battles as a far simpler game. My first two sections look at games which go the other direction, emphasizing the manipulation of units on a 2D map. But what if I like the map, but don’t just want to concern myself with pathfinding and opportunity fire and all that jazz? Freeman’s Farm isn’t the Seven Years War, but it is close enough. It is also a groundbreaking (to me, at least) solution to the fact that real armies in real battles don’t have complete freedom of movement.

Small by European standards, The Battle of Freeman’s Farm is but an opening clash in the Battle of Saratoga. Strategically, one must credit the personalities of the generals with determining the outcome of the battle, the campaign, and maybe even the war. On the American side, there was conflict between Benedict Arnold’s brilliant aggressiveness and Horatio Gates’ cautiousness. As a compromise of sorts, Arnold fought at Freeman’s Farm without the support of the rest of the army causing the rebels to miss an opportunity for a decisive win. As to the shortcomings of John Burgoyne, he missed the opportunity to follow up with a second day of battle – a fight that may well have gone his way. Instead, his hope that Henry Clinton was near with reinforcements (Clinton’s effort was a classic example of too little, too late) led him to hold off fighting until operational concerns all-but-guaranteed his defeat. Freeman’s Farm, itself, was a largely indecisive battle remarkable mostly for what was not achieved.

Freeman’s Farm takes place on a historically-flavored map using wood-block pieces in the style of Napoleon’s Triumph (and I’ll revisit this again in the next section). The difference is that the positions allowed for Freeman’s Farm‘s block, as drawn on the map, restrict free maneuver. Each “formation” has a limited choice in actions, influenced both by previous choices and the movement of the enemy. One might (although I didn’t try to do it) represent the game as a simple flowchart or state diagram rather than units on a map. That would be considerably less aesthetic, of course, but wouldn’t change the actual game.

A drawback, from the design standpoint, is that a considerable amount of research and creative decision-making is required to compile the structure of the game. You need to know not only who did what to whom in the actual battle, but analyze the decision points where the historical commanders might have deviated from their path. In a hex-and-counter game, we leave that to the player – which can then leave the players having too much freedom; far more than commanders could have had in reality. Freeman’s Farm demonstrates an interesting, alternative way to go about designing a game. I wonder how far it can be taken.

The Battle of Blenheim, 1704

We’ve traveled, here, a little bit too far forward in time so let’s compound our error by going back, back in time – again too far. Unlike the American Revolution, one might argue that the War of the Spanish Succession was fought with a different level of technology (making it appropriate as a Pike and Shot simulation perhaps?). I am pretty sure, though, that we can go back to the turn of the century and still find modeling techniques close enough to be instructive.

This is the first in what is offered to be a series of games called the Seven Hex System (SHS). The obvious special selling point of the SHS is its seven-hex setup. What makes the SHS approach special is its minimalist method of configuring the force disposition on the board. As the designer explains, the typical Avalon Hill / SPI design would use a plethora of status counters, set upon the main fighting counters, to show the details of unit positioning and status. Maybe even the facing of the counters or their stacking order would be critical to determining the outcome of a combat. The resulting teetering stacks of cardboard squares distract from gameplay, and that’s before the cat pounces on the board and runs through your army faster than a bad bout of dysentery. Of course, none of this is a problem for computer games, which can easily store all kinds of information without burdening the player.

As unique, and perhaps even odd, as this layout seems to be, I would consider it a somewhat simplified version** of what is used in the likes of The Guns of Gettysburg or Napoleon’s Triumph. The designer writes that his design goes back decades, which would have it predating the appearance of Bonaparte at Marengo (from 2005, the first in its series) by 25 years – meaning that the two designs were conceived of independently. Despite lending its name to the system, however, the seven hexes are not the most interesting innovation of this game design. At least, not to me and not in terms of this conversation.

From my perspective, it is the designer’s assertions about the accuracy of the modeling that piqued my interest. As always, I’m taking his word on this one – I have no way to test his accuracy against the Battle of Blenheim or against the period. One of his ideas is that the details of the units – weapons, “elite” status, etc. – are fairly irrelevant when it comes to results. As such, all (for example) infantry are given equal strength ratings of 5. The variation, he says, comes with his version of the stacking limits (a variation which doesn’t exist in Blenheim, so we can’t see it in action yet.) To put it another way, what makes an elite unit elite is its ability to execute orders in conjunction with other units, not its mysterious élan or its access to better equipment.

This design element has its caveats. For example, the presence of battalion guns or the use of volley-by-platoon add combat modifiers which are, essentially, modifications to strength values. Nevertheless, the philosophy – and the resulting simplifications – hit me as both different and counter-intuitive. The more I thought about it though, maybe not so much. Let’s go back up to Prussia’s Glory, which does use uniquely-numbered counters for each force. Here, the primary factor which determines a unit’s strength is the number of battalions in the unit. Three four-step units are, often, superior to four three-step units because those twelve battalions are better organized to coordinate attacks. I won’t go so far as to say the systems are equivalent but these two, seemingly contradictory design philosophies have more common ground than they might initially appear.

Friedrich

Although not really fitting into this post’s subject, I happened to take a good look at Friedrich because it is a highly-ranked Seven Years War -themed game. Had I been more coordinated, I might have instead concentrated on Maria, a follow-on to Friedrich which goes back in time to encompass the First Silesian War and, therefore, the battle at Chotusitz. Maria also adds more of a strategic layer to Friedrich‘s design elements which, while making it all the more interesting, doesn’t make it any more applicable to this post.

Now, Friedrich is an operational exercise. It hit me, as I read through the game’s mechanics, that I can clearly visualize the descriptions of operations from Frederick the Great: A Story of the Seven Years’ War. In particular, it is the supply trains. The book had multiple references to the maneuver of armies relative to their own and to enemy supply depots. It was an obvious focus of generals that rarely makes it, substantially, into games.

At first glance, however, it is the use of playing cards for a fast and simple execution of battles that causes Friedrich to stand out. What would appear to be a gamey simplification actually makes some historical sense. A monarch (who manages strategy and diplomacy) is not not going to be involved in battlefield tactics, and abstracting those tactics away becomes an asset. Of course, we have the real King Frederick not only managing grand strategy and diplomacy, but also on his horse, rallying the troops in battle. Nevertheless, in the broader context, it makes sense to set the player at one level of command or the other. Thinking computer game design, these kinds of abstractions help move one away from the Total War problem whereby a decent player can extract themselves from a strategic mistake by out-gaming a tactical AI.

The real appeal, though, is in the resultant simplification. Another Total War problem is that, once you’re fighting non-historical battles, the auto-generated battles will have little more realism (and probably less) than a well-designed auto-resolution computation. What Friedrich demonstrates how to streamline down to the minimum. According to the design notes (and, at this point, I’ll have to take his word for it) the game does a remarkable job of reproducing the feeling of the conflict. This extends, he explains, to the playing-card-based tactical resolution. His explanation is that it reproduces some of the trade-offs at the grand-operational level necessitated by fighting on multiple fronts against multiple nations. Once again, I’ll take his word for it.

The card mechanism might also force Frederick (or his counterpart) to make historically-relevant decisions about conserving forces. Do you go for the win or do you try to attempt to withdraw from the encounter with your army largely intact? While sometimes an army just slipped away without a battle, disengagement could also entail sacrifice beyond simply the lost ground. A rearguard unit might take substantial losses to save the main body. Baggage trains and artillery might be left behind for the enemy. Even in victory, a general must decide whether a bare win is sufficient or extra resources are worth a more decisive outcome. At Mollwitz and Chotusitz Frederick specifically did not follow through with his victory to the extent that he might have. Friedrich and its mini-game resolution steps the player a far cry away from the min-maxing approach that a more detailed battle resolution would encourage.

Misc.

I’ll also award the “FU, pay me” honor to the Battles from the Age of Reason series.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand the need to actually engage paying customers rather than lookie-loos like myself. And while the value I see in a board game may be in its box, the quality of the components, and the aesthetics of the map, to a designer it is his intellectual property – the months or years spent developing a set of rules that work just right – for which he wants to be compensated. I get that.

Furthermore, his rule book is a book. Just as I don’t expect the latest New York Times bestsellers to be freely downloadable for print-and-read – I know I’ve got to purchase what I want to own. That doesn’t stop me from using public libraries, reading excerpts, and consigning my experience for some books to the limits of the review I’ve read in The Wall St. Journal. I may be wrong, but I don’t think my attitude toward table-top games is out of line with all that.

The fact is, I don’t play much in the way of board games and, really, I never did. Given my playing habits, I think my purchasing rate is actually pretty high. However, that still means the vast majority of games that I “look over” by studying reviews, rules, and facsimiles of components will outnumber those that I actually pay for by quite a wide margin. I suspect even many avid gamers (excepting those who are stinking rich) have a similar experience, with a good chunk of the games under their belts having been experienced at a friend’s house, a gaming club, or a convention.

I might find myself itching to buy Clash of Arms’ The Battles of Mollwitz 1741 and Chotusitz 1742 some time in the future, but I’m not sure how I’ll know I want it.

*This was a point that a contributor to the discussion made so awkwardly, it took me 3 or 4 reads to figure out what he meant. In that spirit, I obscure my own assertion of the irrelevancy of musket lethality in game terms in a section where I attempt to find better ways of computing musket lethality. Enjoy.

**For those who’ve not looked at either of these game systems, and don’t particularly want to now, I’ll offer an ever-so-brief explanation. The SHS uses as its basic space a “mega-hex” formed with seven smaller hexes. These smaller hexes have two important functions. First, some of the traditional hex-side information can be moved to a border hex. Second, and more importantly, locating a unit-counter in one of the seven hexes is used to convey information about facing and posture (units in the outer hexes are in a defensive posture with a particular physical orientation). It’s a more generic implementation of Bowen Simmons’s system using irregularly-defined spaces, which she calls “locales”. In these games, the spaces can vary from 3 to 7 sides (called approaches in Simmons’s games), indicated by map-designated positions for the blocks (in this, it looks a bit like Freeman’s Farm). The advantage of the former is that it is a generic geographical system, imposing itself through the circular-approximation that is a hex grid. In the latter, the defensive positions are explicitly extracted per the terrain (and historical experience, one presumes), making it a more interesting approximation of the battle, albeit derived through a considerably more intensive design process.