Reality versus Game Reality.
This is Steven Petrick Posting.
One of the things about games is that your own knowledge of "reality" can intrude and make playing the game very difficult until you can figure out the "game reality".
An example was the original tactical game "Panzerblitz", which became known euphemistically as "Panzerbush".
In the game, any unit that was in a "woods hex" could fire on anything that it could see (i.e., anything not in another woods hex or behind such a hex, or behind a hill or in a town or etc.). But NOTHING could shoot at a unit in a woods hex unless it was directly adjacent. The game made no allowance for things like "return fire" at a hex where the enemy was shooting at you from, much less putting "searching" or "suppressive" fire on such hexes.
When I first got Panzerblitz my then most constant opponent, Jeffrey Sagor, was constantly pounding the heck out of my Russian troops. This happened scenario after scenario, until we came to the one where I "cracked". I could not stand being picked off by the German guns anymore, and by Stalin, I was going to kill at least some Germans. So I massed all of my T-34 tanks and charged, expecting to be shot to pieces but hoping to destroy at least some of the German units.
The Germans fled (at least those that could).
It was only then that I realized that the game was won by essentially putting more targets into the enemy's kill zone than the enemy could kill. Rushing a stack of two 88mm batteries with six companies of T-34s would perhaps cost me up to four companies of the tanks, but the 88mms would be destroyed (and there was a good chance that I would actually only have one company destroyed, and at least a chance that I would lose none of them). But if I rushed the 88mms with six companies, I was guaranteed to kill them even if they were in a woods hex.
So flank attacks worked (massing my forces to hit one flank of the enemy so that less of his total firepower could be used to repel that attack allowing me to roll up his line), and given enough force a frontal attack would work. All was right with the world.
Then a new game, "Squad Leader" was released. By this time I was so fixated on the tactics I used in "Panzerblitz" that in the first game of "Squad Leader" I ever played I calmly sent 121 Russian Guards to attack a building held by just 31 Germanskis. "Squad Leader", however, had figure out that there was this thing called "Grazing fire", and I found I now had 121 dead Russian Guards in the streets. Something that brought the exclamation from my lips "Machineguns work!" (The rules for machine guns in all the previous tactical games I had played made them pretty much nothing more than a rifle that did more damage with its one shot than other rifles. In "Sqaud Leader" the ability of a machinegun to hit more than one hex in its line of fire created the "interlocking fields of fire" that made them so dangerous in real life. It was the most impressive thing about squad leader that you could actually lay out a defense based on machineguns and their fields of fire. In that, its "game reality" for how tactics worked was closer to "reality" than "Panzerblitz" had been.)
One of the things about games is that your own knowledge of "reality" can intrude and make playing the game very difficult until you can figure out the "game reality".
An example was the original tactical game "Panzerblitz", which became known euphemistically as "Panzerbush".
In the game, any unit that was in a "woods hex" could fire on anything that it could see (i.e., anything not in another woods hex or behind such a hex, or behind a hill or in a town or etc.). But NOTHING could shoot at a unit in a woods hex unless it was directly adjacent. The game made no allowance for things like "return fire" at a hex where the enemy was shooting at you from, much less putting "searching" or "suppressive" fire on such hexes.
When I first got Panzerblitz my then most constant opponent, Jeffrey Sagor, was constantly pounding the heck out of my Russian troops. This happened scenario after scenario, until we came to the one where I "cracked". I could not stand being picked off by the German guns anymore, and by Stalin, I was going to kill at least some Germans. So I massed all of my T-34 tanks and charged, expecting to be shot to pieces but hoping to destroy at least some of the German units.
The Germans fled (at least those that could).
It was only then that I realized that the game was won by essentially putting more targets into the enemy's kill zone than the enemy could kill. Rushing a stack of two 88mm batteries with six companies of T-34s would perhaps cost me up to four companies of the tanks, but the 88mms would be destroyed (and there was a good chance that I would actually only have one company destroyed, and at least a chance that I would lose none of them). But if I rushed the 88mms with six companies, I was guaranteed to kill them even if they were in a woods hex.
So flank attacks worked (massing my forces to hit one flank of the enemy so that less of his total firepower could be used to repel that attack allowing me to roll up his line), and given enough force a frontal attack would work. All was right with the world.
Then a new game, "Squad Leader" was released. By this time I was so fixated on the tactics I used in "Panzerblitz" that in the first game of "Squad Leader" I ever played I calmly sent 121 Russian Guards to attack a building held by just 31 Germanskis. "Squad Leader", however, had figure out that there was this thing called "Grazing fire", and I found I now had 121 dead Russian Guards in the streets. Something that brought the exclamation from my lips "Machineguns work!" (The rules for machine guns in all the previous tactical games I had played made them pretty much nothing more than a rifle that did more damage with its one shot than other rifles. In "Sqaud Leader" the ability of a machinegun to hit more than one hex in its line of fire created the "interlocking fields of fire" that made them so dangerous in real life. It was the most impressive thing about squad leader that you could actually lay out a defense based on machineguns and their fields of fire. In that, its "game reality" for how tactics worked was closer to "reality" than "Panzerblitz" had been.)
posted by Federation Commander at 1:28 PM
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