Unaufgeklärt

Tags

1984, Back to the Future, Dark, Germany, netflix, Stranger Things, timelines

Much as with The Accursed Kings, I feel cheapened by the way I found the TV series Dark. It was recommended by a Facebook friend as a new Stranger Things. Albeit, he said, a more “adult” version.

The similarities are there. Even if that worm hadn’t been put in your ear, if you were a fan of Stranger Things, you would probably immediately start to make a connection. Dark is a show set in the 1980s*, with a number of the main characters in their teens and younger. The show has them attempting to unravel the mysteries of and then save themselves from some kind of supernatural happening caused, or perhaps controlled by, a nearby government facility. Finally, of course, they were both created as Netflix Original Series.

To view this new show that way is to cheapen it (and to cheapen myself, having only been drawn in with the gimmick). Dark is no knock-off of Stranger Things. Beyond the similarities stated above, it is a very different story and experience. Dark is a German-language series created entirely for Netflix distribution. Fortunately, when it came to the language, forewarned is forearmed. Netflix supports user-selected combinations of language and subtitles, so I was able to reconfigure my options right at the beginning to use the original dialog subtitled in English. I firmly believe that re-dubbing film in different languages detracts from the original’s quality. I want to hear what the actors are actually saying, not substitute actors reading some translators lines, none of whom are the original artists.

Dark a show with solid acting, well done mystery elements, and plausible science fiction. I was also particularly pleased with the soundtrack. The way the show uses songs helps to orient the viewer relative to the time-travel aspects as well as occasionally hinting at deeper meanings in the plot. It is also a nice mix of classic American/British 80s music with (perhaps equally well known, if you are German) German language songs. This is a well put together series from end to end. I’d be pressed to identify any weak links.

One last bit of similarity between the shows. November 12th, in each of the years of Dark‘s story, is the key and final date of the supernatural occurrences**. In Stranger Things, the climactic shows of season 1 all take place on November 12th, albeit in 1984. In Back to the Future, November 12th (1956 this time) is the date of the dance and the night that the town clock is struck by lightning. The connection hadn’t occurred to me before, but it seems to me that both shows were deliberately referencing the Back to the Future timeline with the dates, if not (more roughly) the years. The “present” of Back to the Future (1985) sits midway between the two presents of those series.

I’m sure its obvious, but I’m glad I watched this one. As much as I complain about the Stranger Things -based marketing, I have to admit that without some kind of hook, I would probably would not have chosen to take a chance on a German-language show, particularly when it is Netflix streaming -only. In the early days of Netflix original content, they had an extremely high batting average, but these days I’ve come to see the “Netflix Original” tag as a somewhat negative indicator. Without the ability to look up ratings and reviews on other sites (and, for me, the Netflix DVD rankings still seem to be the most accurate indicator), you’re stuck going out on a limb.

This time the climb was worth it.

*By even trying to discuss this, I risk ruining several of the “reveals” of the show. Don’t read on if you’re planning on a viewing experience that remains uncorrupted. The show starts out in 2019 and for some time, while there is reference to happenings in 1986, remain set firmly on that date. There are children who have gone missing in the here and now of 2019, despite the foreshadowing of links to the past. Eventually the show makes the better case is that 1986 is the “present” and 2019 is the “future” (of course it is, right? It’s only 2018!).

**Yes, I’m trying to be deliberately vague.

My Gypsy Road Can’t Take Me Home

Tags

CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, Germany, global thermonuclear war, Russian, World War III

Part 2 of a 3 part post. See Part 1 here.

Having failed to find any historical meat to chew on in my strategic-level games, I will instead look at two different CMANO scenarios set in 1961 and 1962. These specifically deal with nuclear weapons. The first of the two scenarios takes place during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and involves positioning a nuclear armed submarine. Think of it as a CMANO-as-subsim scenario. The second is an imagining of a World War III nuclear scenario, circa 1962. It is an equivalent of the WarGames first strike/defense scenario, except set in a time when strategic bombers were still the core of the both sides’ nuclear capabilities.

A little CMANO aside, first. Matrix/Slitherine has been regularly updating the core program along with their DLC mini-game releases. That’s a good thing. What’s not a good thing is that every time I try to update, I manage to mess up my installation. It all seems to trace back to the fact I have two versions installed from my original disk. There’s the version as it first was delivered. Then there is a second version, the Wargame of the Year edition, which was a (free) upgrade from the publisher. It is that second installation that seems to be the operative one, and yet it is the first installation that seems to have a hold on Windows’ fiddly bits. Ultimately, I have always been able to go to the Slitherine website, download the updates directly, and manually correct the mess I’ve made with the auto-update program. Probably, if I remembered everything that went wrong, I’d also remember not to get into the same problem the next time. But by the time I’m ready to update again, I’m sure I will have forgotten what happened this time.

That IS an improvement!

So back to that first scenario, called Regulus, after the nuclear weapon featured therein.  It isn’t quite the “subsim” that I alluded to above. In the scenario, you actually command three different boats: one, the Growler, armed with Regulus nuclear missiles and two GUPPY class (1960s versions of the World War II Tench class), armed with torpedoes. The three need to maneuver through Soviet-patrolled waters in order to threaten Soviet land targets (with the nukes) and Soviet launch platforms (with torpedoes, one presumes) in the international, but isolatable, waters near the Kuril Islands. So commanding three subs simultaneously is not exactly subsim territory, it is still a game of slinking along blind and listening for signs of threats from the enemy.

Still playing, as I am, Bioshock, I can see some real contrasts between these two game styles. I consider both Bioshock and CMANO to be great games; the state-of-the-art for their genre. However, those genres are very different.

As I said in that earlier article, one of the tricks of the First Person Shooter genre is to take a linear game and present it in a way so that it feels non-linear. Bioshock does a good job with this. The world is fairly open, you can ride around in the underwater Metro going visiting any of the locations that you’ve discovered so far. However, the story moves you forward through the locations and through key events that are structured and preprogrammed. To put it another way, you are free to go backwards to previous levels in any way that you choose to do so, but you cannot skip ahead. The game has various artifices, a broken transport system or a locked door, that help to keep you on track without necessarily seeming like it does so. In this way, you are at almost any time facing exactly the environment that the developer intends for you to face. He has prepared you in both (player) knowledge and (in game) capabilities for the challenge you are about to face.

Contrast that with a military simulation. In the game engine as a whole (distinct, for the moment, from scenario design) you want the player to be free to take nearly any action. The program’s job is to simulate the “world’s” reaction to the player’s moves. The more varied its response, the more unpredictable (while still remaining effective), the better the simulation for most purposes. Of course, that unpredictability can be programmed in from the start – think of scenarios with triggered scripts – but the best of CMANO‘s genre stand out in their ability to handle the widest variety of situations and hold up throughout gameplay, whatever the player decides to do.

When it comes to the generic “sandbox” style wargames, the onus for a good battle will tend to fall onto the scenario designer. If the game can take an arbitrary pair of adversaries and reasonably handle one of them under a multitude of conditions, then obviously that initial setup might well be a bad one. One side or the other could have an edge that makes the game unwinnable (or unlosable). The forces could be so far out of contact that the game times-out before they get a chance to fight. Or perhaps it is just the that choices that you are required to make, while all reasonable, aren’t particularly fun within the parameters of how the game plays. Good scenario design is required to balance all these things that could go wrong in the hope that it will all go right.

Again, focusing on the sandbox games, the developers often depend on the the user community to develop such scenarios in order to fulfill the value proposition of their game, a proposition for which quality control becomes nearly impossible. So for a game like CMANO, there are a handful of scenarios (plus DLC add-ons) from the developers themselves. With those the customer might expect a certain quality. But developer-designed scenarios can’t possibly, of course, cover the whole range of the capabilities of the engine. So for a particular era I’m interested in (say, a war going nuclear circa 1961-2), I probably have to rely some hobbyist about whom I don’t know anything and who probably didn’t have me in mind when he made his scenario. Will it be too easy? Too hard? Focus on parameters different that the ones I’m interested in?

One example, I recall a CMANO scenario I played years ago where the key to it was organized around choosing the initial load-out for your attack aircraft. Perhaps an interesting question to some. But what if you don’t know and aren’t particularly interested in solving that puzzle? Does it leave the scenario unplayable do you? And when do you find out – how many times through the scenario might you play before you realize you are doing it all wrong(ly).

Approaching one of the possible passages through the Kuril Islands through to the Sea of Okhotsk. It’s going to take the better part of the day to approach the “hot” zone.

Going back to the top. Let’s say you’re playing a shooter that wants to choose between one of three approaches. That choice is probably presented, you take it, some cuts scenes might explain your choice, and then you’re in the action. It is also unlikely that, by making the wrong choice, you automatically lose the game. But it any case, you would expect the decision to take you right back into the action. Compare and contrast with the Regulus scenario. As the commander, you need to choose between several different passages where Russian patrols and minefields may lurk. Some are less heavily guarded and others have more natural advantages (e.g. deeper water or wider channels). So which do you take? What if many of the answers are outright wrong?

Suppose, too, that you’re not really up on the technology of this period. How easy or hard is it going to be to avoid detection? Is there a speed/depth combination that will outright kill you every time? And its not simply a case of knowing the technology (as big a hurdle as that might be itself). How “alert” is the enemy? How many assets are deployed looking for you? What kind of research, experience, pre-planning does it take to know what choices to make?

In the Regulus scenario, the way the choices are presented are by placing you far enough out, away from the action, that you can freely choose how you want to approach. So far so good. How could it be done any other way? CMANO simulates the details and that means approach. The problem comes is that your are at least a day away from whatever action might take place. So even running at 1 minute = 1 hour, that still a minimum of a half-hour of doing absolutely nothing except staring at the screen and waiting for something to happen. It’s made worse by the fact that you (or at least I) don’t know where that “action zone” is. And if things start happening while you’re running at 1 minute = 1 hour, you can suffer a whole lot of losses before you find the pause button*.

The reason I wanted to dig into this scenario in the first place is I remember when I saw the actual USS Growler. It is currently  (I think) on display in Manhattan along side the USS Intrepid floating museum. The boat has a Regulus missile on the deck. The Regulus is a design based on the German V1 rocket and was the first ship-based nuclear missle deployed by the U.S. Navy. I recall the protests in the early 1980s that brought the cruise missile technology into the public eye and, up until I saw the Growler, I associated the technology only with “modern” weapons. Just seeing the technology on display got me thinking about the differences between the nuclear age of the 1960s versus the nuclear age of the 1980s.

How about another genre comparison? Since my reinstall of Patrician 3, I’ve been playing it way too much. I’m in some 71 hours in less than two months can be explained, perhaps, because Patrician is a good go-to game when I want to engage in a kind of low-stress but non-trivial game/time waster. As I said, it is quite addictive, for what it is, which is basically a dynamic spreadsheet. It takes some time to learn the layout of land – where to buy, where to sell, and what are fundamentally good prices for each. After that, you’re engaged in a a repetitive cycle of small decisions that gradually build up your wealth and prestige. Each time you feed a town that has run out of meat or improve mood of the poor, it feels like a little bit of victory. It doesn’t take any deep analysis to make good decisions, and the nature of those good decisions are wide open. There are certain goods that I use to make most of my money, and others that I only trade to fill demand. Those decisions I can adapt to my own style while other players are equally (if not more) successful with a different set of choices. Regrets, I’ve had a few. But small mistakes are easily absorbed by all the good decisions you make.

Forward 950 years. For Regulus, it is the opposite. It seems that even one or two mistakes will spell the end of the game. Since you can’t make mistakes and learn from them, without restarting the scenario, you need to learn about the “right” way to do things (really) before attempting the scenario. If you don’t, you fail, and really have no way of knowing why.

An hour or so into the game, this is the first feedback of any sort I’ve received. Game Over, Man.

In the above screenshot, taken from my 3rd attempt at the scenario, I’m attempting to run my submarines deep through a channel between the islands. After painstakingly waiting for them to move into position, they are finally approaching the choke point. So far, I have no contact with any enemy. No sonar search, no depth charge patterns, no engine noises of the enemy moving about above. Then my first message appears – Boom! you’re dead. The scenario does not give any significant feedback about what went right and what went wrong. Likewise, while there is occasionally forum discussion on user-made scenarios, there is also often not.

With this one, I find it not fun and not educational. I think all my issues could have been solved, however, with a nice “debriefing” at the end. Making it dynamic (here’s what you did wrong) might be beyond the capabilities of the CMANO scenario creator, but at a minimum a set of hints about what you need to do right would be helpful. If indeed it is a scenario about how effective the anti-submarine warfare of the OPFOR was and, for even a good strategy, a bad “die roll” can kill you, then make that explicit. If there is a right way to detect when you are in danger of being detected, explain that.

During the development of this scenario, one user explained how he won. He waited for the hot war to start and then began nuking airbases, wiping out the capabilities of his enemy. I suppose that once you’re giving the “weapons free,” anything is fair target, but I would think I should be taking seriously the operational instructions which designate specific targets. Using nuclear cruise missiles as defensive, tactical weapons not only seems like bad form, but a quick way to end civilization as we know it.

(on to Part 3).

*As an aside, at some point (after I finished with this scenario) I finally realized that the Enter Key will shift you back to real time, which does give you a fairly good way to halt time compression in an emergency.

Wolves of the First Reich

Tags

Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, crusades, Field of Glory, Field of Glory - Unity, Germany, Holy Roman Empire, Neuchâtel, Oath of Fealty, Unity, Wolves from the Sea

The main reason I bought Field of Glory when I did was because Slitherine was preparing an additional module called Wolves from the Sea. That module is focused on the Viking Age armies and battles, expanding from the late-Roman Empire offered in earlier modules. At that time, I was indulging in the History Channel’s Vikings series, and was seeking wargaming tie-ins with that period. Outside of Medieval: Total War with some Viking oriented mods, I could not find a serious treatment of this at a tactical level.

Field of Glory, at that time, was going through some difficulties. The game was originally released in 2009, which isn’t all that long ago by the standards of many of the games I’ve been playing. Nevertheless, a couple of years after its initial release, there were issues. The original developer was no longer supporting the game, but it it remained popular enough and Slitherine was continuing to release new modules. I have this vague memory that there was a hard-core user who had taken on the original source code, but that would require searching back through the forums, which I won’t do. Whether a false start was abandoned, or never really took off in the first place, Slitherine ultimately decided that the source code (in Real Basic) was not maintainable.

By around 2012 another group of developers came up with a plan to port the system to the Unity gaming engine. The release of the Wolves from the Sea became tied to that project – that is, the new module would be released to run on the updated base game. Then the years began to go by and neither the new version nor the new module were available to the paying public.

I had been eyeing the product since it’s original release. I was deterred by lackluster reviews (particularly as a single-player experience) and one design flaw. I was persuaded by a particular criticism concerning the use of hexes versus squares – for the linear battles of the Roman era, the use of hexes for the map just seemed to throw things off.

Then a couple of years ago, I was (as I said) searching for a serious, tactical Viking game. That imminent Wolves of the Sea release popped up again. The situation at the time was that the Unity project was well under way and was trying to reproduce faithfully the original Field of Glory experience. That Unity version (Fog(U)) was available for download for FoG players in a beta form. I read that the beta included a (beta) Wolves of the Sea module. I decided that the combination was enough to put me over the edge and I bought the original FoG, discounted as part of that year’s Christmas sale.

By the time I got everything installed and working and was able to try out the combinations, the availability of the free Wolves of the Sea was no longer part of the package. The Unity version was available, but only to play modules that were duly purchased for the original game. Furthermore, the state of Fog(U) at the time was buggy enough that the best experience was to play in the original engine. And so I stuck with the old engine. Any experience up to this point focuses on that version.

The long delay in release bled much of the steam out of FoG(U)‘s engine. The delay certainly halted the momentum of frequent expansion modules, which of course will blunt enthusiasm for a game. Furthermore, as the development remained focused on getting a non-buggy reproduction of the original Field of Glory, but in the new engine, that meant work was not going into the improvements to the engine – the whole raison d’être for upgrading the engine in the first place. Finally, by the time FoG was released and moving forward again, Field of Glory II was in development. At least for me, FoGII looks to deliver much of the promise that FoG doesn’t fulfill.

Once again, however, it is time for the Slitherine/Matrix Games Christmas sale, and this time it finds me again dwelling on medieval fighting. As before, I am looking at the period leading up to the ascendancy of Charles V to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. This time, however, I decided to go way, way back to the chronological predecessor of Europa Univeralis. That is, Crusader Kings 2 ($10 in the Steam Christmas sale, I might add).

Crusader Kings was a follow-on to Europa Universalis, but its predecessor in terms of historical chronology. CK2 can start as early as the beginning of Charlemagne’s rule and lasts until where Europa Universalis takes over. There are several start dates scattered throughout that period. I was actually a little surprised that there aren’t mods out there to capture other snapshots of history. Maybe the sheer amount of work to research the name of every count, duke, king and emperor for a given date dissuades anyone who might decide to try.

I was hoping to target the ascendancy of the House of Hapsburg from mere control of a county to the control of the empire. Roughly, the mid 1270s. Within CK2, their main scenarios taking place around this time start at 1220 (titled Age of the Mongols) and at 1337 (focusing on the Hundred Years War). I went this time with the 1220 date. Further, I decided the emperor himself was a shaky play. The game warns that the Holy Roman Emperor is a “difficult” faction to play. Historically, the Hohenstaufens were a decade or so from being eliminated as a political power. Instead, I searched for a lesser title in the Empire that the game ranked as a little easier. I ended up settling on Ulrich III, Count of Neuenburg (or Neuchâtel from the French side of the border), who in CK2 is given a ducal title.

It is another lesson in the illusion of detail within the Paradox engine. So much is modeled within the engine, it is sometimes a shock when things are not. From 1152, the house of Zähringen had been granted a duke-level title (Rector) over the former Kingdom of Arles or Kingdom of Burgundy. That dynasty ended with the death of Berthold V, and the duchy was divided rather than assumed. At the start of the game, Ulrich III held county titles to Neuchâtel, Fenis, Aarberg, and Strassberg, as well as lower level titles. Bern, by contrast, become a Reichsfrei, a free imperial city beholden only to the Emperor himself. CK2 discourages flat hierarchies and, for example, an Emperor directly controlling a city would cause problems for the algorithms that are their to penalize the unwillingness to delegate. Although technically Ulrich was not a duke, within the game it probably makes sense to set it up as such.

Besides being ranked as “average” difficulty, this duchy for the Kingdom of Burgundy has some other appeal. Historically, the lands became part of the Hapsburg holdings, and so fit in with the theme I’m trying to follow. Also, I can perhaps aspire to uniting the French and German Burgundian holdings into a single, perhaps independent, Kingdom and elevating my faction to the global stage.

Unlike EU, CK2 does not have the driving set of historical events behind it. While the first decade or so of game play has a chance of resembling history, the game is most likely to rapidly veer off from the historical path. So it was in my game. Initially, the game begins with an active call for the Fifth Crusade and I so sent off some of my soldiers. My armies were soon overwhelmed the vast Muslim armies and I was forced to disband my crusading force before the war’s end, leaving them to return from Jerusalem on their own. And that end was not a successful one for Christianity, either, with the crusade ending in failure. Shortly thereafter, Ulrich’s death resulted in a lot of bellyaching from the other counts in his domain and several small wars were required to keep them all in line. By the time another (the Sixth) Crusade was called, I was in debt and suffering from depleted manpower as a result of my own succession struggles and so I did not participate.

As to the Emperor Frederick II, despite his German titles he considered himself to be a Roman Emperor in the historical sense. His focus was on uniting Sicily and Italy to Europe so as to recreate the reach of ancient Rome. Indeed, in the game, Frederick finds himself fighting wars in Naples as he deals with Italian rulers reluctant to conform to his plans.

The departure comes in the mid-1230s. Historically, Frederick was friendly with France, helping them to quell a succession war over Champagne (although the intervention probably had more to do with the succession fights in Germany than the actual politics in France). In the game, however, Frederick challenges France over territory in the low countries. Sensing an opportunity to further ingratiate myself to the emperor, I sent my soldiers to help in his fight.

It’s hard to read, but a French army of just over 20,000 is attempting to lift the Imperial siege with its roughly 23,000 soldiers. The timely arrival of my own Burgundians tilted the numbers to Germany.

In the above screenshot, the king of France has fielded an army of over 20,000 men and is leading it to lift the siege of the contested province. My own army, of some 4,000, has just arrived from the south putting the besiegers at a slight advantage.

Give Me Unity or Give Me Death

This battle is close enough to make it interesting as a tactical fight. So back to Field of Glory – Unity and my new Christmas purchases (namely the Oath of Fealty module). First order of business is creating the above army in Field of Glory‘s Digital Army Generator.

As I began building the armies, I see that one of the criticisms I had of Field of Glory has been corrected in this version. Specifically, I complained that the only choice in the random skirmish mode was to create two evenly-matched armies. The FoG(U) interface now matches up two entirely pre-built armies, one for each side. So I can construct exactly the match-up that I desire. The downside to that is, unlike Pike and Shot (and, indeed, the original FoG), you cannot leave the computer opponent to generate their own army given the number of points. It became an easy shortcut in the other games to a) not have to build an enemy army in addition to building your own and b) give some random variation – you couldn’t know exactly what you’ll face. However, in using the engine to match up specific armies (either historic or generated by a strategic engine), you are probably given the makeup in advance, so it really isn’t that much of a loss.

In this case, I did not dwell on the detail. While CK2 breaks down the armies into different troop types, I did not try to match what was in CK2 with what I created in FoG(U). In fact, an army of 23,000+ men is about double the size of the armies that come with the modules, and so the choices when filling out the large army become limited (without some off-line modification of the army data.) In most cases, I’m not sure the detail is all that important, but I’ll put some more effort into it another time. In this case, I was able to narrow in on a suitable match-up very quickly. The experience was much more like the positive Pike and Shot games than my previous FoG games.

We move forward to battle across an open field. On the third turn, our skirmishers meet. I’m not sure why the setup forced me to have only a single unit of skirmishers ahead of my army, but I make do with what I have.

The interface for FoG(U) largely reproduces that of FoG. You can see some upgraded look-and-feel in the main menu and some of the quirkiness of the original unit interaction has been improved. In other cases, though, it seems to have regressed. In the above screenshot, note the brown box in the lower left. It’s title is a “=>”. I don’t know what that means here but, in fact, there is some ample use of animated ASCII graphics to convey information, particular combat details. Some of the screens look more like a error log dump than a circa-2015 user interface. For some other features that seemed better the old way, I do wonder if that’s just because I got used to the old way.

I ran into a couple of bugs, but nothing too significant. The worst of them were when I tried to run the game in full screen mode. In full screen certain UI functions were just not working. Those problems seemed to go away when I windowed the game. However, for the window size that I’m using, the design doesn’t seem to account for the Windows tool bar. This means that the last line of the unit reports (brown boxes, again) is obscured and unreadable. While slightly sloppy looking, it isn’t show-stopping. Between this an other minor issues I’ve come across, there is nothing that says I should prefer to use FoG when both are available – with one exception. As far as I can tell (and I haven’t tried very hard yet), the user-made scenarios for FoG don’t automatically carry forward to Fog(U).  I am assuming that to play the scenarios which I’ve downloaded, I’ve got to load them in the version for which they are made.

The lines are becoming fully engaged. We’ve run off each others skirmishers, which is a big advantage to me as I only had the one unit.

Having created French and German armies of approximately the right size, I loaded them on to a battlefield. The field of battle is picked randomly from pre-built choices. I honestly don’t know if FoG did it differently, but clearly there is no such thing as a randomly-generated terrain in this version. Once begun, the battle should not be in doubt. Unless the AI has made huge progress since the earlier version, I’ll always have an advantage over the computer in an even fight. And this fight isn’t even. The Empire is starting with a sizable 15% force advantage.

I’ve broken the enemy’s left and center. I would probably lose my own left in the process, but the enemy army is about to collapse before that can happen.

The enemy is fairly aggressive, perhaps more so than I remember from FoG. Having run off my lone skirmisher, they hit my main lines and hard. In many cases, though, I have heavy foot defending against assaults from lighter units and skirmishers. My little men aren’t about to be chased off and give more than they take. On top of that, of course, I just have more men on the field. The early momentum continues to build inevitably towards…

A substantial victory. Probably a forgone conclusion given my initial advantage in numbers.

… victory.

The fact that the Germans were victorious, as well as the size of the victory, is consistent with the results back in Crusader Kings. But I’m not sure if that says anything useful given the circumstance.

In contrast to earlier versions of the Paradox engines, and even EU4, the Crusader Kings 2 engine works to simulate the battle at a higher fidelity. I’ll dwell on this more in a future post, but it does question the desirability of fighting a battle off-line in a “tactical” engine when the battle tactics are portrayed for you right on-screen. Furthermore, the CK2 detailed battle is generating the results needed for the operational layer of the game. As units break away from the fight, distinctions are made between casualties, desertions, and just broken morale such that when the losing army retires from the field, it has some substantial portion of its force ready to reform and perhaps fight again. Can a table-top style simulation of that battle add anything that would justify changing these results?

The Battle of Cambrai. This is going to cause 680 years from now when historians want to talk about the First World War battle.

In the end, either way you look at it, the Holy Roman Empire was victorious in battle and picked up a county from France. History is off and running down an alternate path.

Kollektivschuld

Tags

bad blurb, Germany, Phoenix, World War II

Just before it came off of Netflix, I caught the 2015 German-language film Phoenix.

When I watch a move or read a book, I try to avoid reading the cover blurb or its online equivalent. First, the blurbs tend to give away plot points that are intended to be discovered through the consumption of the media. Spoilers, as we all call them. Secondly, those blurbs often seem to be written by someone who never actually watched the entire film. They are superficial conclusions drawn from, perhaps, bits and pieces of the work. Mystifyingly, many of the blurbs indulge in both sins simultaneously.

Such is the case with Pheonix. The blurb summarizes the plot by, basically, revealing the film’s ending. It left me waiting for a “reveal” that the film was trying to slowly illuminate over its course. Thus my experience was that it plodded towards an inevitable conclusion, which probably shouldn’t have seemed all that inevitable. Furthermore, by identifying the “reveal” as the narrative throughout the movie, it completely mischaracterizes the motivation of the main character.

But what can I do? When a movie is being pulled off of Netflix streaming, I often have no idea whether it is something I’d like to watch or not. I try to use the viewer rankings (still available for DVD rentals, although removed from the streamed offerings) and reviews, which tend to be a little more careful about spoilers. But just because the film is considered good doesn’t mean I’ll be in the mood for the subject matter, so the Netflix synopsis becomes a necessary part of the decision in whether or not to let a film drift away unviewed.

This may be one I would have just as well off forgoing. My opinion of the film, of course, irreversibly tainted by the bad blurb. Would it have still felt so slow to move forward without the plot having been spoiled? I can’t say for sure, but I except it would. The film got some great professional reviews, but I felt it was trying to be artistic for artistry’s sake and profound because, you know, Holocaust. Maybe I’m being a bit to critical, but I feel like it is getting a good chunk of its credit via its pretentiousness.

One Netflix reviewer suggested that this is a (poor) remake of the 1965 film Return from the Ashes, a film I’ve never seen or even heard about before. However, the synopsis of that film does seem to bear out the suggestion. Indeed, there seems to be more there, there. Specifically, the older film ends with the story completely resolved, with the villains having been arrested or worse. In Phoenix, we’re left to imagine the ending. Perhaps even the beginning – the motivations of the characters are heavily implied but never confirmed.

It’s a strange way to structure a film and, while not a terrible experience, not a great one either.

 

Ball Walking

Tags

Germany, renaissance

I think I should start ball-walking as a matter of course, at least at those times when I’m not wearing soles.

 

O Tannenberg, o Tannenberg

Tags

A Storm of Arrows, Christmas music, Field of Glory, Germany, Lithuania, Pike and Shot, Poland

When looking for the defining events of 15th Century Germany, one stands out.

The Battle of Grunwald, or the (First) Battle of Tannenberg, or the Battle of Žalgiris – all depending, I suppose, on whether you are Polish, German, or Lithuanian-  is not only one of the most important 15th century battles for Poland and Lithuania, but (for them) one of the most important in history. In Poland, Lithuania, and (to some extent) Ukraine, it is a triumphal example of a population throwing off its foreign oppressors. The victory marks the peak of power of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which by mid-century was (at nearly 1 million square kilometers) the largest state in Europe. To the Germans, it came to represent a defeat by the forces of chaos over Western, Christian values. Thus, in the narrative of the 20th century, the Second Battle of Tannenberg was deliberately woven into the historical facts (and fantasies) to portray the Hindenburg’s victory over the Russians in August of 1914 as a continuation of a conflict of civilizations from 504 years earlier.

The battlefield was between the German villages of Grünfelde, Tannenberg (Sztambark in old Polish or Stębark today), and Ludwigsdorf. In Poland, the victory over the Prussian Crusaders was foretold by St. Bridget (of Sweden, not Ireland) and thus, shortly after the victory, King Władysław II Jagiełło ordered that a cloister and church be built near the battlefield and dedicated to the saint. He said it should be at the place called Greenfield. He was speaking in Latin; Grunenvelt. As time went on, the Polish historians assumed that he was speaking German and meant to say Grünwald, and thus the town became Greenwood rather than Greenfield. The Lithuanian, Žalgiris, also assumes this version of the name. The Germans avoided all such confusion by associating the battle with Tanneberg rather than Grünfelde.

So in honor of the release of the new Field of Glory II, I fired up my Field of Glory and the user-made scenario for the Battle of Tannenberg.

The Teutonic Knights engage some ‘Lithuanian Negative Points’ in the opening stages of battle.

My experience reminded me once again why a Field of Glory II will be so welcomed.

The complaints here are many and interconnected, but focusing the blame for them proves difficult. The scenario I played was user-made and some of these problems were added at the discretion of the scenario designer. I hate to be too critical of a fellow player and enthusiast. He created a scenario (many, actually, over the years) to share with the rest of us, and that deserves my thanks. The decisions are well documented, and I’ve seen it both in Field of Glory and in Pike and Shot, as a way to force the game’s AI to make certain historical decisions. In that light, the criticism may be due the game engine itself, if it is unable to do what users desire without the creation of odd terrain and nonsensical units.

The reason I bought Field of Glory, after years of hesitation, was because I had grown frustrated with (this should sound familiar) the Medieval: Total War modelling of the battles within its timeframe. I was particularly interested, at that time, in Viking Age battles. Field of Glory did not have a module out for that era, but had one in the works – I think it was in a form of beta when I was looking. Instead I picked up the expansion module A Storm of Arrows, covering Western Europe during the latter part of the Medieval period, a period that has the same Total War issues.

Some general background. Field of Glory is a computer version of the table-top rules of the same name. For those who play, fidelity to the tabletop version seems paramount. From comments, I suspect many have purchased this product for use when playing a miniatures game simply isn’t practical. This allows one to play without setting up a table, with armies which are not in your collection, or remotely with someone anywhere in the world. Of lesser importance is the fact that you can play alone against the computer opponent.

The original game, and each add-on module, ships with a number of historical battles. For A Storm of Arrows there are six such battles, from Scotland, the Hundred Years War, and the English Civil War. The modules also contain army setups for the various nationalities of the time period. The point of this is that players can create a variable yet historically plausible battle using a point system that tries to balance the advantages evenly between the two players. In this expansion package, there are dozens of “army lists.”  Beyond that, Field of Glory has an editor that allows a user to create a map and place armies and that tool is not limited by the modules purchased. As an example, whatever module might be appropriate for a “Tannenberg” scenario, there is no need to purchase it in order to create or to play a user-made scenario for this battle.

What it does mean is that you are reliant on the community to model your favorite historical battle, hopefully doing so to your liking. This problem is further exacerbated by a change in the way Dropbox hosts files. The Field of Glory system was released in 2010 (or thereabouts) and much of the scenario development took place years ago. Earlier in 2017, the file link system for Dropbox was changed and many of the stored files are no longer reachable. For a newer player looking for battles today, it can be hit-or-miss as to whether you can still find them.

So back to that Tannenberg scenario… My first and biggest complaint is that it didn’t give me a good sense of “re-living” the battle. Between the unreal looking terrain, the artificial units, and the channels created to delay units entry on to the battle, it was difficult to connect to the actual battle.

A Google Earth view of the battlefield, taken from the monuments. Somehow it is hard to reconcile this with the great field of triangular ponds, as presented in the game.

Part of the confusion is that the scenario doesn’t attempt to simulate the entire battle. It is designed to capture a particular moment of it – right at the time when history could have been changed. The scenario author describes his design in a forum thread. Essentially, the scenario starts after the attack on the German left has been chased off and the commander of the Teutonic knights is about to capitalize on his position by leading a charge into the Polish line. As described by the designer, if the charge succeeds, he wins, but if the assault begins to peter out, eventually the enemy numbers will overwhelm and carry the day.

The center of the German assault. It just doesn’t feel like a center.

As I alluded to at the beginning, this style of scenario bothers me. I don’t find it enjoyable to play a game that doesn’t “look real,” because the terrain or the units have been so heavily modified. The “hacks” bother me while playing, and it makes it that much harder to “relive” the battle in question.

In this case I did, apparently, break the enemy center with sufficient alacrity to carry the day. But with the context of that obscured, it wasn’t a very satisfying win.

Compare and contrast with another user’s scenario design for the same battle.

Now this battlefield and army array feels just about right.

This scenario takes the traditional design route of trying to recreate the armies, formations, and terrain to match the historical situation. For me, it comes out as a much better experience.

It also produces, again as far as my uneducated eye can tell, results in line with historical expectation. In playing this scenario, I did have the advantage of “lessons learned” in my previous attempt, and that probably impacted how I approached this one. As the scenario opens, the computer player’s Lithuanian attack comes as historically happened – on my left flank. I rapidly dispersed it without inflicting any significant losses (or taking any, for that matter). One deviation from reality is that I advanced my entire line so as not to expose my left flank to an enveloping counter-attack from the enemy center. Part of me wanted to hold back and let the Poles take the initiative again, but I wasn’t sure they would. Computer AIs are notoriously weak when forced to coordinate an attack.

Coming right down to the wire, both armies are about to break. On both sides, our right flank has caved, and it is just a matter of who loses heart.

As a result, I fought much of the battle too far forward, over river obstacles and in within the trees. Other than that, the result seemed passably historic. I was overwhelmed on my right and I failed to break the enemy center.

Unlike Pike and Shot, this game does not try to translate the final positions into a casualties screen. What is shown, rather, is simply the point loss, which could be killed, injured, retreated, fled, or surrendered. The heavy losses suffered by the Teutonic Knights may well have been mirrored in this battle, if the end game were played out. As my lines collapsed and my forces were swept up by the enemy, my losses would surely escalate. As a result, any objective evaluation of historicity based on casualties is probably out of reach. This did, however, feel like a nice representation of the battle and, incidentally, a well balanced challenge for the (German) player.

This also got me back to thinking about one of my main criticisms of the game, as far as its usefulness to me. That criticism is how I am hemmed in by the “points” system from using the random scenario function to create a historically-based scenarios. Or perhaps, as I was looking at before, creating battles encountered within a strategic system. In fact, the solution I came up with in Pike and Shot, which is to edit the armies which are fed into the part of the program that randomly generate battles, may also work in Field of Glory. The one additional caveat seems to be that, whereas Pike and Shot allows the points of each army to be selected, Field of Glory requires that the points of the two armies match. What this means is that the player side of a battle can have less points (by leaving points on the table when creating the army) than the computer opponent, but not more.

All-in-all, fighting this battle has renewed my opinion of Field of Glory a tad as a quick simulator for historical battles (assuming the right person has stepped up and made a good scenario for it) and perhaps for what-if battles, at least for the Medieval time frame. I may have to come back to it.

Ni Saint, ni Romain, ni Empire

Tags

Disciples, Germany, grammar, Heroes of Might and Magic, Holy Roman Empire, Legends of Eisenwald, Max Muller, Sigismund, Thomas Carlyle, Voltaire

The Holy Roman Empire confounds one who wants an easy narrative of Medieval history. To the west of Germany, the fifteenth century saw nation building and the assembly of the world empires that would dominate the globe, well, until today really. A potential monarch could lay claim to a title and, with the right combination of bribery, warfare, and politics, become God’s designated rule of an empire. The ending of the Hundred Years’ War saw the consolidation of England and France into unified empires and in Spain, the Moors were expelled and the kingdoms united.

But what about Germany?

There was still warfare, bribery, treachery, and politics; and history is still the story of the rise and fall of dynasties, but the the story seems so much more complicated. The electoral nature of Germany’s kingdom adds a layer upon Feudalism that resulted in one modern European nation that remained a confederation of independent states, almost until the start of the First World War.

Voltaire’s remark was made much later than the fifteenth century and the reign of Sigismund, but the observation was not unique to his time.

Speaking of quotations, the one posted early from Sigismund earns some further commentary. When I googled the phrase to make sure I had my Latin right, I encountered a number of possible translations for the famous phrase. The most common one, and as far as I can tell, the one accepted as definitive, is “I am King of the Romans and above Grammar.” It is written this way in Thomas Carlyle‘s History of Freidrich II of Prussia.

But in the internet age, where anyone can be a medieval scholar, the translations and interpretations of the phrase are many and varied. One of the more common mistranslations, for example, seems to mistake the origination of the phrase for a similar story involving Roman Emperor Tiberius, and assumes that “rex Romanus” is the Roman emperor. But among those variations, one stuck in my head. The translation read “I am King of the Romans and above Grammarians.” I haven’t taken a Latin class since 8th grade, but I don’t really see how you can get there from the actual Latin quotation (which was included with the translation, and matched Carlyle’s version verbatim). Further, given that the “source” material includes the phrase in both English and Latin, it is difficult to try to legitimately read a different meaning into the text.

However, a bit later I came across another telling of the same story, from a version nearly contemporary to Carlyle’s (1858). A book, The Science of Language, published in 1899 was created from from the lectures of Max Müller from 1861 and 1863. Müller tells the Tiberius story, “Caesar, thou canst give the Roman citizenship to men, but not to words” as well as a different version of the Sigismund one. In his version, the original mistake (with the Emperor calling to eradicate the Hussite heresy);

Videte Patres, ut eradicetis schismam Hussitarum.

and the correction;

Serenissime Rex, schisma est generis neutri.

are given in Latin. The remainder of the story is told in English. Sigismund asks the interrupting monk (apparently a Bohemian schoolmaster),

‘How do you know it?’

The old Bohemian schoolmaster replied, “Alexander Gallus says so.’

‘And who is Alexander Gallus?’ the emperor rejoined.

The monk replied, ‘He was a monk.’

‘Well,’ said the emperor, ‘and I am emperor of Rome; and my word, I trust, will be as good as the word of any monk.’

The story is generally told as one of hubris. The King who believes that, by decree, he can change the rules of language to match his own whim. The other lesson in the retelling is an example of the the modern understanding that the rules of language are driven by their usage, and not the other way around. That is, a dressing down of Grammar Nazis.

Müller‘s telling actually sounds a little more realistic than the “the rules of grammar don’t apply to kings” version of Carlyle. The king is not, necessarily, arguing the grammar but rather arguing the the standing of a mere monk, expert or not, to correct a king. In Müller‘s lecture, he goes on to suggest that Sigismund’s line was delivered for the laughs that it generated. In other words, his criticism, although directed at “Alexander Gallus,” was really for the lowly schoolteacher who thought he should interrupt a king.

For a man who was king for half a century (crowned King of Hungary in 1387), isn’t it ironic that perhaps his most memorable act was a grammar argument with a teacher?

…and it’s not even the real HRE

Set around this same place and time is the game Legends of Eisenwald, or at least sort of. Or maybe not. It is hard to nail down, exactly.

The game has the trappings of the 15th century Holy Roman Empire in terms of architecture, weapons, and armor. The location is a mix of real place names and made-up (but plausible) names in a anywhere-and-nowhere map of something that could be located in eastern part of Germany. Likewise the year of the game is left vague. Mentioned is the “fall of the Teutonic Knights” which could refer to either the Peace of Thorn (1411) or the Second Peace of Thorn (1466), or even something else entirely. Likewise, the personalities are fictional, depicting some minor nobles and knights within some obscure Duchy. A number of battles preceding the 1411 date are mentioned as a background for some of the characters, but the game narrative also makes a passing reference to the Battle of Brunkeburg (1471). While this potentially nails down the timeline to the the last quarter of the 15th century, it could also be a simple mistake (or even part of that real-place-names in made-up-locations).

Glancing through some of the developer blogs, the goal was to put effort into providing a historically-correct look and feel into the game. It is not, however, meant to be a simulation of history or of medieval combat. The developers, themselves, describe it as reality as the people of that time would have perceived reality. Thus, the blessing of priests and the healing of herbalists are truly effective in battle. Sorcerers and witches may channel the powers of evil or cause the dead to rise.

The graphics are a nice, and believable, depiction of 15th century Germany.

The game is by no means breaking new ground. It borrows heavily from the fantasy strategy games of years past. It is a product of a small development team in Belarus and is their second game. Their first effort was called Discord Times and was released in 2004. They describe Legends of Eisenwald as both an evolution and a rethinking of that earlier game.

Reviews of the game almost always mention Heroes of Might and Magic as the comparison for this game. In part, that is because HOMM itself was originally to be a hybrid strategy game derived from an RPG and that role-playing focus is clearly a part of Legends. The comparison may also come from the fact that Discord Times looks very much like a Heroes 2 game.

To me, however, the first comparison for this game is Disciples (particularly Disciples 2). While the battle is a hex grid, and thus comparable to the later games of the HOMM series, functionally it is a lot closer to the Disciples model. While the figures, which unlike HOMM represent individual characters, can move around the battle map, movement is restricted. If there is an enemy in front of you, you are often required to attack that present threat rather than maneuver about the field. Likewise, it seems that, given two possible foes, you are required to deal with the more threatening (the guy with the ax or the spear) rather than the easy target (the archer or the healer). It is therefore similar to Disciples, which freezes the positions of all its units, but with a bit more tactical nuance.

My fellas will quickly dispatch this group of bandits.

That includes additional complexities. The facing of the characters is meaningful when it comes to calculating damage. There is also a fatigue factor – the effect of a healer’s spell is dependent on the remaining “spiritual” strength of that healer. Ranged weapons’ effectiveness is dependent on the range. All of these complexities, however, seem mitigated by the tool tips that tell you how much damage each unit will do. A player can calculate each factor and craft the perfect strategy based on the units involved, or just hover-choose whatever looks like it will be effective. Those results, like Disciples, seem to be a fixed quantity. I don’t see the use of “die rolling” in this game. Variation seems to depend purely on the choices the player makes, rather than having him hope that “critical hit” will pull him through a sticky situation.

The character and army management screens are very much like Disciples II, and then some.

The strategic level, also, has improved upon the good old days of Heroes III and Disciples II. I have not kept up on the state of the art, so I can’t say what is innovative in this particular game versus other twenty-teens offerings, but the state-of-the-art has certainly come along well. The strategic map is very attractive with nice 3D animated terrain, which can be displayed without bringing my aging computer to its knees. The “fog of war” concept has been greatly improved. Instead of blacking out areas of the map the player hasn’t been, the game uses a clever combination of the mini-map and main map. Anything the player doesn’t know is there will not show up on either map. Once something is spotted on the main map, you can see parts of it, but if you haven’t come close enough to identify it, it will still remain hidden on the mini-map. Getting close enough to identify it places the name on both the main and the mini-map. The mini-map also tracks moving characters and colors them according to disposition, but again only if you can see them. It probably sounds complicated as I describe it, but it has a very natural feel. I can enjoy the view of the 3D terrain and do occasionally have to hunt through it for hidden artifacts, but for the most part I can just watch for the approach of the little red icons on the mini-map and thus avoid being surprised by my enemies.

The game also cycles through day and night, and that transition can be important in terms of game play. The aforementioned line of sight changes depending on whether the sun is up. Also, certain enemies (and, perhaps, friends) only come out at night. The “clock” can be paused, so that time only passes while your character is executing an action, or it can be left on continuous, so that the hours while away as you stare at the screen. It does seem a bit strange that you never sleep. An occasional event aside, you have no down time. Day and night, you move about the map, fighting and conversing and then hitting up a church for some healing whenever you get worn down.

This is obviously not any kind of medieval battle simulator. In fact, even more so than its spiritual ancestors, the game functions as much or more as a role-playing game than as a “strategy” game. Taking your “army” into battle occupies much of your game time, but the questions of battle strategy and tactics don’t seem to be the main drivers in the game’s narrative. Instead, the key to advancing is the completing quests, usually involving more than just “defeat all the enemies.”

The marketing blurb calls the game “an adventure game with tactical battles, RPG and strategy elements.” The more I play it, the more I understand and appreciate that description. Despite the trappings of strategy and tactics, the purpose of the game is the story narrative. I’m not going to analyze how much the story branches – that is, if I chose not to ally with a particular character, could that dramatically change where the story goes? Or, do you simply get some minor side paths leading you back to the story’s main road? Gut feel says the latter because otherwise the player is going to miss out on the game’s content.

All in all, this is an unexpected, in more ways the one, addition to my game playing. It really combines tactics, history, graphics, and an engaging story to combine the familiar into something fresh and new.

What’s In A Name?

Tags

citron, Denmark, Germany, lemon, netflix, World War II

Coming off of Netflix this week is a film I’ve had in my queue for quite some time. Flammen & Citronen is the story of Danish resistance fighters during the German occupation during the latter part of the Second World War.

It got in there back before the ratings were eliminated because it has been highly regarded by critics and viewers. But I really had no idea what it is about*. Like many of the foreign-language films I’ve watched before, there were two big deterrents.

First, the cover art. On the Netflix menu (which I also hate with a passion, I might add), it uses the box art from the DVD version. But, because the pictures are in landscape rather than letter format, the picture is much more focused in. Online, it is just two rather unique looking characters, young and well dressed. What is missing is the background of that picture from the box cover, where they are in front of an image of German troops marching through Copenhagen. Without that background image, the picture tells nothing about the film.

Which brings me to the translation of the title. In Danish, the code names of the two main characters may well be known to the potential viewers. They received posthumous awards for their wartime activity, and are part of the national identity. Thus the title may actually tell many that they are going to see a film about a story that they already know. For American, the title is translate to Flame & Citron, which really threw me.

To me, Citron is a Swedish word. I learned if from the Absolute ads. I also had a Venezuelan acquaintance who opened a nightclub of that name in Caracas, naming it after the Vodka. (As a result, I assumed that Citron was also “lemon” in Spanish, but that’s neither here nor there). In English (and Spanish for that matter), Citron is the fruit from Southeast Asia.

The use of Flame and what I assumed was a foreign world, combined with the cover art, made me assume this was some kind of gay thing. Like I said, I don’t read the blurbs.

Without that misdirection, the code name Flammen was in fact fairly obvious. Flammen, whose real name was Bent Faurschou-Hviid, had bright orange hair, and is portrayed as such by the actor and on the cover art. This feature was well known to the Germans, even though they didn’t know his true identity.

Citronen (real name Jørgen Schmith) did not look like a lemon.

Helpfully, the Wikipedia article linked above warns us that Citron is “not to be confused with Citroën.” Indeed, it is this play on words that gave Schmith his code name. He firebombed of a Citroën garage destroying six German military cars and a tank. The name of “lemon” (he does seem somewhat sour in the movie’s portrayal) is a reference to that incident.

Flame and Lemon would have been better, although not as catchy. Flammen and Citronen would have worked, as it is just as obvious to English speakers (at least those that go to see subtitled movies) what that means. Flame and Citron just sucks lemons.

To the film itself, it is a pretty decent watch. It does an excellent job of showing the chaos of a society in civil war.

“Civil war?” you say. But this is about the Second World War, the largest of international conflicts?

Yes, but Denmark was never a front in that war. Denmark was captured with little resistance, with barely two dozen killed on each side. The Danish government negotiated terms of the occupation to leave much control in the hands of Danish civilians.

Thus, many (if not most) citizens were willing to cooperate with the Germans with the hope of being left alone. Even decidedly anti-Nazi government officials were actively cooperating in the hope to preserve some part of Danish democracy in what had the potential to become a German-controlled Europe. It is likely that there were others who were pro-Nazi who were enthusiastic supporters of the new reality.

Resistance took many forms. The film takes place in the months leading up to, and immediately following, the allied invasion of Normandy. The communist resistance is shown as a significant force, motivated by Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. After the institution of martial law in August of 1943, factions within the Danish government itself began to organize resistance. The film follows the group Holger Danske (named after a Danish hero of the time of Charlemagne), a group formed by veterans of the Winter War in Finland.

It is with this background that the film focuses on issues of trust and betrayal. One never knows if a fellow countryman is a collaborator, working for the official government, working for the British, or driven by ideological or even personal reasons (a major plot point involves using the resistors to assassinate so as to cover up financial indiscretions). When one doesn’t know who will ultimately “come out on top,” the issues of trust become more complex. Fighting side-by-side with communists will only last until the Red Army enters Denmark from the east, at which point the resistors become the collaborators, and vise-versa.

The film uses the speculation that the Faurschou-Hviid was turned in by a girlfriend, and fellow resistor, for the Nazi reward. And while Faurschou-Hviid killed himself to avoid capture, said girlfriend survived the war and lived to old age. It is speculative, but when survival depends on trust, ultimately (it seems so often) that trust winds up broken.

One final thought on the film. Having recently watched a Norwegian film, I was surprised with the comparison between spoken language. In The Heavy Water War I often picked up on short phrases here and there, where I could understand the Norwegian speakers. With Danish, it was rare I could pick up on a single word. “Thanks.” Also “Flammen,” and that’s almost it. Giving the similarity between the two languages, I found that odd.

*I try to avoid reading any of the summary blurbs, either online or on Netflix dust jackets, because they are apt to either give away plot points or completely misrepresent the content of a film. In fact, doing both simultaneously is pretty common. In many cases, it seems unlikely that the person who writes the summary even watched any of the movie itself.

NATO versus Warsaw Pact, Vol. II, Part 1

Tags

Cold War, Command Ops, Conquest of the Aegean, Fulda gap, Germany, Highway to the Reich, Red Devils Over Arnhem, Steel Panthers, The Operational Art of War, wargames, World War III

There were any number of triggers that could have started World War III, but didn’t.

In the mid-1950s, Western Germany was released from its occupation by the Western Powers, became an independent country (from the East), and joined NATO. The Korean War threatened to escalate beyond the borders of that peninsula. Throughout Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, independence movements hoped for Western intervention that might help them in facing down the Soviets.

Of course, Western leaders were well aware of the risks. While working to check Soviet aggressions, they still tried to tread softly so as not to launch a Third World War, probably nuclear, just when the world was struggling to recover from World War II.

The flashpoint of any confrontation between the two superpowers was between East and West Germany. Having crushed the Germans in their “Patriotic War”, the Russians believed that they had earned German spoils of war. They also believed that, were the promise of a democratically-driven reunification of Germany honored, they could win the political game and install a Socialist government in a combined East/West German vote.

Throughout the duration of the Cold War, the parameters of armed conflict remained the same. The forces of the Warsaw Pact had the advantage in numbers, but not in time. If the Soviets did not win World War III in a quick strike, they would be drawn into (at best) a conflict of attrition with little to gain at the end of it. The United States would be able to shift forces to Europe to bring the conflict back into balance, and in the long run, would bring to bear its massive industrial capacity that supplied the Soviets in the second world. If truly threatened, the West might respond with its nuclear capability.

Given the numerical superiority of the Soviet ground forces, the location and nature of the initial battles also remained constant. The West would have been foolish to assault a numerically superior force, so one imagines the opening of the war with NATO on defense. The heavily mechanized forces of the Soviet Union would need suitable terrain if they were to rapidly advance across Germany. Two likely avenues of advance presented themselves, the flat areas in Northern Germany (North German Plain) and the area of woods and farmlands near Frankfurt, called the Fulda Gap.

Fulda Gap

I start, as I so often do, with a TOAW scenario. In this case, the Fulda 55 scenario that shipped, again, as part of the original TOAW package.

At first glance, the scenario is pretty much a reprise of the Patton 45 scenario that I wrote about earlier. The size and scale are identical; 5km hexes and 1 turn per day. While the location, obviously, has moved, the terrain itself is similar; farm and forest land broken up by some cities and rivers. But at this scale, it’s mostly a large, rectangular map with scattered terrain features. The similarities should probably not surprise – both scenarios were designed by the same person, Doug Brevard.

As war breaks out, the Soviets easily dominate the skies and are on the attack with a huge force superiority. Playing, once again, as the U.S. (NATO has U.S. and West German forces, the latter using U.S. equipment), the play seems to be to strategically give ground while waiting for reinforcements. For the player who is really into the “study” of a hypothetical battle between Fulda and Frankfurt, the fine details of the terrain may add to the experience, but as a one-off the difference between Germany and Czechoslovakia are not game-changing. The “flavor” is the possession, by both sides, of both chemical and nuclear weapons and the possibility that the “high command” will bring those into play. Of course, given that, to the modern mind, any use of weapons of mass destruction is a loss for mankind, this too doesn’t seem a huge factor.

Playing through, the result was much as I expected. The game play was very much a repeat of the Patton 45 result.This time, the position of the rivers made my strategy work a little smoother. I blew all the bridges, defended the river crossing, and waited for reinforcements to arrive. At that point, I had air superiority and was able to isolated and eliminate the enemy.

The tide is about to turn

I’ve said it before, I’ve nothing against an easy scenario. But also as I talked about before, it was the lack of unique features that made this one fall flat. At this scale and time frame, I don’t see much game play difference substituting M46s for Panzer Vs.

Regarding that air superiority, I did throw together a IL-2 scenario and, even accounting for my own incompetence behind the stick, I don’t see how the Western forces could gain air superiority fielding F89s and F94s against MiG 19s.

Again, a present-day map of the area depicted in the scenario show the landscape has a little more character than what you might get from the game.

Tank Tactics

Also, as before, it’s the Steel Panthers scenarios that provide the fun.

First, at this level, there is a unique feel to the time period. It is definitely different than World War II, matching Soviet and U.S. Technology of the 1950s. It is also not Korea. The Communists, here, have access not to surplus, but the best technology that they can field (arguably superior to what the U.S. is fielding). A very different feel than the numerically superior but technologically inferior Koreans and Chinese.

The most obvious to me was the vulnerability of armor to infantry at close range.

I think I messed up. I quickly advanced into this village to grab a good defensive position and, instead, ended up getting my armor into a knife fight with the Soviets. Just look at that mess.

In this scenario, I made what was probably a major mistake from the get go. It was a meeting engagement so I moved my (roughly a) company-sized mechanized infantry unit, with one platoon of tanks in the lead, into the village (pictured) to try to establish a good defensive position. I was a bit surprised by, and quickly suffered heavy losses from, the superior capabilities of the Soviet tanks and the effectiveness of the RPG teams. Having pretty much lost all my armor, I was forced on the defensive, where my own bazookas took out all the Soviet armor. The battle resulted in a draw.

As a note of comparative interest, the equipment is very different when comparing the TOAW scenario to the Steel Panthers scenario. Most obviously, the German mechanized infantry in TOAW are outfitted with M59 APCs and Saracen armored cars, not the halftracks and M8s of Steel Panthers.

It’s Medium, but is it happy?

One of the more innovative and intriguing games of the last decade is the Command Ops engine from Panther Games. The system made its debut in 2002 with Airborne Assault: Red Devils Over Arnhem. The game, as indicated by the title, allowed the player to assume command of the British airborne forces (The Red Devils) in the fight to take and hold the Rhine bridge at Arnhem during operation Market Garden. The scale was operational, but much finer grained than the typical hex-and-counter operational game, although still not down in the well-trodden weeds of tactical combat simulation.

Amid much consternation, the game moved from Airborne Assault publisher Battlefront to Matrix Games where it was enhanced and re-released as Highway to the Reich (HTTR) in 2003. While purchasers of the original game were angered about having to rebuy the game they already owned, the new title was both improved and expanded. Playable forces now included American, British, and German ranging the entire length of the contested route and multiple river crossing that characterized that battle, and included both paratroop and armored forces.

Under the Matrix banner, Panther continued releasing follow-ons in the series. 2006 saw the availability of Conquest of the Aegean, looking at some neglected battles. In particular the game modeled the German airborne assault on Crete and conquest of Greece. In 2010, Panther returned to the tried and true, releasing Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge (BFTB). With the amount of improvements that had gone into the engine, they re-released their original two games as expansions to BFTB.

The system broke new ground with regards to AI, particularly for the player’s own side. Commands could be given at the highest level, leaving the AI to plan and execute using available forces. The game could be played either with such minimal, top-level interaction or commands could be issued at the company level (the individual icons) for a more traditional interaction. An innovative “fog of war” system, which allows the player no information about enemy units not spotted also added to the unique feel. Finally, rather than a hex-and-counter system, the game uses an extremely fine grid and clock to approximate continuous time and movement. With that, the units are represented by square icons, but their actual battlefield footprint is simulated.

Another notable feature of BTFB was that it was released with virtually every aspect of the game open to the user. Previous version had limitations which restricted modding or user-made scenarios to similar locations and/or forces as the released game. In BFTB, users could add any map, any set of forces, and any timeframe. The limitation of its modelling capability was only the scale and the scope of tactics within the game. User-made scenarios appeared across the spectrum of the War in Europe, notably adding modelling of the Eastern Front.

Livin’ in the 50s

One obvious route for expansion for user-mods is into the early years of the Cold War. The U.S./Russian or NATO/Warsaw Pact forces are largely upgraded versions of what used in the Second World War. Particularly as this game’s events, in both BFTB and HTTR, occur late in the war and, for the British and American forces, already represent end-of-war development. For the Soviet side, the Eastern Front mods have been created. It should be a fairly straightforward exercise to meld the two together, eliminate the Germans, and create a U.S. versus Russia, or some combination of their client forces.

As I said, the limitations on modding are that straying outside what the core engine can do means that the modelling could well fall apart. Obviously recreating recent battlefields would be a problem – helicopters, drones, and real-time satellite imagery weren’t part of the World War II battlefield. Another area, though, that has been a problem for the system is mechanized operations. The original game was designed for paratrooper battles and all three iterations focus on major airborne battles. Initially, this meant that neglecting the finer points of mounted infantry wasn’t an issue.

I’ll expound briefly. In a more traditional operational game, motorized or mechanized infantry can account for the transports simply as modifications to the movement factor (and maybe combat as well, depending on what’s modeled). No need to think in detail about the transition from mounted movement to deployed combat, except possibly to model the reduced effectiveness during transition. Where are all those trucks when the infantry is dug in and defending a position? Somewhere else in the hex, one would imagine. It isn’t that important. In a tactical game, the transports are included explicitly. You dismount your soldiers, and then actively must move the transports to where you want them. Want to use transports again? You’d have to move them back. But this series has a problem. The individual position of the troops are modeled, but not explicit. So where are those trucks? It became a very tricky simulation problem within the engine.

In any case, one would expect to be able to find battles worth modeling (either real or imagined) in the first-or-second post-WWII decades that are close enough in tactics to be doable.

While there was and continues to be expressions of interest in both Cold War Europe and the Korean War, concrete effort has been a bit thin on the the ground. The one exception is a BTFB scenario with mid-1950s “estabs” (the available order of battles for included forces) for both the U.S. and Soviets.

This is Belgium, not Germany

The scenario’s designer used the Onhaye map. In the context of the original Bulge game, this is a hypothetical scenario that imagines the Germans have advanced so far as to establish a bridgehead across the Meuse River, and the allies must push them back. In a 1955 scenario, one might imagine a similar struggle over river crossings taking place in Germany or Czechoslovakia. Similar battles happened in my TOAW game, above, although the Meuse is a considerably bigger obstacle than the Fulda.

Without digging into the details with the scenario editor, the point of this scenario seems to be roughly-equal forces fighting over the center of the map, with plenty of time to duke it out. The upgraded equipment isn’t terribly noticeable, although it probably shouldn’t be at this scale.

This is a game that really combines the big picture with the details. Terrain, timing, distance – these things are all critical. It’s not like the higher operational scale where the difference between a “clear hex” and a “rough hex” are the combat and movement factors. This makes it great for fighting specific historical battles where the significance of these features are known. Of course, a tactical level game could be the same way. The difference is, this game won’t tally up the score after 45 minutes. Being able to rest your troops over the day/night cycle, keeping appropriate reserves – these are the factors you need to be thinking about. An attack may be planned and executed over several days, if that’s what it takes to get all your forces into position and ready.

Defending the Meuse, or Fulda, or some River, in any case. It’s just after midnight, and the Russkies have squeezed into a gap in my lines with 15 T-54s. This is going to be a long, unpleasant night.

This is both a boon and a curse when trying to play a pure hypothetical engagement. Yes, the level of detail will let you look at true what ifs, with some sense that the emergent details have meaning. On the other hand, without an actual historical account to guide you, where do you start with a battle location. Game maps are on the order of a couple hundred square kilometers. But why would the U.S. forces decide to face off the Soviets in this particular map square?

The questions become important because, with the required detail of these maps, it is quite an investment to realistically model your selected battlefields. Conversely, with the modeled terrain being such an important factor, fighting on “generic” terrain is going to be less than satisfying.

Overall this level of play is a more satisfying experience than the next level up Operational Game (the Fulda 55 scenario in the first part of the article). I’m not sure I’ll want to dig too deeply into this mid 50s timeframe, but I may find another excuse to come back to this game and its editors. While the NATO/Warsaw Pact technology is probably quickly racing ahead of the engine’s bailiwick, there may be some scope going forward for the 2nd and 3rd world conflicts, such as the Middle East.

Continue on to Part 2 of 2 here.

 

 

 

An Unpitied Sacrifice in a Contemptible Struggle

Tags

Armageddon, Burke, genocide, Germany, Ostkrieg, World War II

I’ve recently finished the second of two books on the Second World War. They both compliment each other and add to the understanding of that time in history, and what can happen when the world goes mad.

They are:

Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East, by Stephen G. Fritz and

Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945, by Max Hastings.

The titles, obviously, don’t entirely overlap. The first focuses on the War between Germany and Russia, although the impact of and on other fronts are included. The second deals only with the end of the war in Europe, starting of post D-Day and after the liberation of Paris.

Ostkrieg, perhaps evident in the title, focuses on the war from the German perspective. Recent access to the Soviet archives has prompted a wave of histories based on that new information. Fritz provides a counter point to that counter point, relying instead on secondary research as well as an effort by the now-reunited German government to document the war.

In Armageddon, the focus tends to lean a tad to the Western front, and even there a little bit toward the English (countrymen of the author).

Quality versus Quantity

Simply address the two books from a “rating” standpoint, both were worthwhile reads. Of the two, Armageddon does stand out for the quality of the writing. One frustration I did have with Ostkrieg is it had a repetitive quality, that may have benefited from a bit more editing. The presentation style was for the author to make a statement of opinion about a subject, and then back it up with quotations from (for example) someone present at the event in question. The problem is when there were multiple quotes on the same topic, the initial statement was often repeated. By contrast, Armageddon highlighted different points in paragraphs (or groups of paragraphs) and simply combined quotations on similar subject matter. It improved how easily the book read. Ostkrieg is also a rather hefty tome. I have to wonder if a little paring down might not have made the read a little quicker, but also shorter.

What it means to be “more evil”

Another contrast between the two books struck me as soon as I picked up Armageddon. First, I’ll take a step back.

The theme of Ostkreig is the centrality of the Eastern war to everything that Hitler did. Yes, the book details the battles themselves. This is the reason I picked it up in the first place; I was hoping for a overview of the war in the east that would help me put the battles, campaigns, and maneuvers into a larger perspective. The book does this well. But it actually starts at the very beginning, with Hitlers rise and rapid conquest in the West.

Another theme of Ostkreig is the limited prospects for the Third Reich in ever winning their war. From the beginning, the odds were greatly against Hitler. He was held up as a genius for his gambles that overcame those odds, but if eventually losing it all was inevitable, its not a mark of a genius to keep gambling until you’re busted. One of the first insights I gained from reading this book was about what might have been in Czechoslovakia. When Hitler threatened that country, Czechoslovakia was by many accounts an even match. While Germany’s armies were slightly larger, Czechoslovakia had the advantage of both a defensive fight and the ability to devote their entire force to that defense. Germany would have needed to divert some portion of its forces to protect against intervention by other powers, particularly France. When it came to it, Czechoslovakia may have been able to field a numerically-superior force, modernized to roughly the same level as Germany.

German generals were aware of the problems in Czechoslovakia, and there was a plot to, at the start of hostilities with Czechoslovakia, overthrow Hitler and make a deal with England. Unfortunately for all of Europe, England decided to ignore this avenue and convinced Czechoslovakia to make a deal with Germany. That deal ensured that they would be unable to resist the next set of demands from Germany and emboldened Hitler in continuing his expansion into Poland.

The book argues that each step in Hitler’s expansion was part of the larger plan to conquer the Slavic nations to the East. Austria and Czechoslovakia were needed to gain a strategic advantage over Poland. There is some evidence that Hitler expected Poland to ally with him in the fight against the Soviet Union, as their generational animosity towards the Russian empire should have overcome any indignities heaped upon them by the Germans. Likewise, invading the low countries, France and England were all necessary, in Hitler’s mind, to free his armies to conquer the Soviet Union. He seemed to be genuinely surprised at their declaration of war and expected that the West would probably look the other way as Germany expanded and purged the world of the communists.

Along with this story, the book details how the elimination of the Jews became entwined with everything Hitler did. The eventual genocide almost appears to be something stumbled upon by Hitler and his minions. Initially, the goal of the Nazis was simply to rid Germany of all Jews. An early plan was to transport them all to Madagascar. Once war broke out, Germany’s isolation by sea prevent such transport, the next idea was simply to move them out of Germany into occupied territories. As this became a problem, the slaughter began – perhaps even unsystematically. There is evidence that the killing of the native Jewish population in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia as the German armies invaded the Soviet Union may have been driven by local commanders attempting to impress their superiors (and ultimately Hitler) with ever greater anti-Semitic zeal.

Ultimately, and through the repetitiveness of similar stories throughout the Eastern Front, the book exposes the pure evil of the Nazi regime. Each new story of massive killings is shocking and horrifying. Even though we all know the numbers, as the details of the killings are explored, somehow the horror boggles the mind anew. Likewise, the large scale planning to simply wipe out as many inhabitants of Eastern Europe as possible, simply because Germans need the food and that takes priority, is unfathomable to modern sensibilities. And yet, this is something happened within the lifetimes of people still alive today.

Particular emphasis is made on the fact that no portion of the German military can completely detach themselves from the slaughter, enslavement, and genocide that was going on as the Germans rolled into Russia. While it became an common explanation that the German soldier was not the S.S. and only fought the war, evidence from the front suggests otherwise.

Regarding the purely military aspects of the German invasion, the book generally portrays an army doomed from the start. From a purely numbers standpoint (food, fuel and time), the conquest of Russia was never going to be very likely. Add to that many simply bad ideas emanating directly from Adolph Hitler, and the portrayal of the German fighting machine is mainly of vain attempts to avoid the disaster that ultimately consumed them.

By contrast, Hastings begrudgingly admires the Germans for their fighting ability, and that contrast with the utter lack of value placed on human life by the Soviets and the perhaps over-cautiousness from the West to risk more now to save later.

In that discussion, it also becomes clear that Hastings considers Stalin and his empire the pure evil actor in this war. He doesn’t line up the evidence, as perhaps Fritz would have, but it is certainly a combination of Stalin’s treatment of his own people both before and during the war, the systematic mass-rape of Germany after Hitler’s defeat, and the misery inflicted upon Eastern Europe for a generation (and beyond) following the end of the war.

While it is certainly hard to imagine a worse evil that the Nazi’s meticulous attempt to exterminate an ethnic group from the face of the earth, if one goes purely by the numbers, Stalin and the Soviet Empire do win out over Hitler. If for no other reason, Stalin could continue his reign of terror after Hitler’s death. Stalin’s callousness to the lives of even his own people seem to be unmatched even by Hitler’s own death culture.

Hastings also describes the lack of appreciation on the part of the Allies for the danger of that the Russian’s would be after the end of the war. The pact with the Soviet’s seemed necessary to save England and the free world, but as the ultimate defeat of German became ever more inevitable, the West and particularly Roosevelt failed to plan for the future.

The Allies went to great lengths to inoculate their public against the negative image they held of the communists, once those communists were needed as allies. The reality of kindly “Uncle Joe’s” soldiers behavior came as a shock to many Americans and British, but was anticipated by those in the East. A particular quote stuck with me, where the Soviet’s use of the word “Allies” clearly meant the Western powers, not the Soviet Union. They saw enemies not only in the Germans, but in the American/British at the same time.

Strategy and Tactics

Both books are obviously written for the war-history buff, but both try to tell their stories within the bigger picture of politics and civilian suffering. Ostkrieg illuminates many of the battles around the German’s high water mark when, at least at first appearance, they had the possibility of victory. As I mentioned before, it is often pointing out the places where German strategic mistakes cost them dearly.

Armageddon starts too late in the war for there to be any doubt in the outcome; the defeat of the Germans. Two operations are explored systematically; the Airborne assault to take the Rhine bridge at Arnhem in operation Market-Garden, and the German operation Wacht am Rhein, or the Battle of the Bulge. Both, incidentally, are analyzed for their strategic blunders, but they also resulted in the last two times when the Anglo/Americans and Germans were matched on the battlefield.

In the reading of military history, I’m often struck by the feeling that victory goes to the General who screws up not quite as badly as his counterpart. Dwelling on any particular historical figure and his moments of incompetence probably obscures that all figures have human frailties that are bound to shine through when illuminated by close study.

On the Eastern Front, the Soviet effort was massively mismanaged, but the willingness to expend an unlimited amount of human lives was as much a feature of their strategy as it was an error to be criticized. Like Grant against Lee, once the willingness to win at all costs was there, the final victory seems assured. By contrast, the Germans needed to get everything right in order to win. So analyzing where they failed to get it right seems particularly relevant.

On the Western Front, the failure of the Allies to get things right is probably gets its focus due to the emphasis on the image of American superiority from sources such as Citizen Soldiers and Band of Brothers. Hastings posits that a free and generally peaceful culture, such as America’s, can’t be expected to produce the kind of armies the the totalitarian states were capable of. In one passage, he speculates on the effectiveness of a Patton leading and SS Panzer Army rather than American soldiers. His frustration is that Western timidity likely cost lives in the long run by prolonging the fighting, and definitely sacrificed civilian lives by not saving them from first, the Nazis, and later from Soviet occupation.

Thumbs Up

At the end, both of the books are thought provoking additions to the histories written of the Second World War, and we absolutely worth the time to read. There is plenty in here to think about, not only in the conduct of the war, but in the generation of turmoil in Eastern Europe that was to follow.