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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Game Mechanics

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

A constant problem with games is trying to reflect real events without complicating the rules so much the game becomes unplayable. This results in a number of very odd events happening in the course of playing games.

Simulation Publications Incorporated produced a game about individual soldiers fighting in Urban Terrain (I no longer remember the title for sure, but I believe it was Sniper!). One of the failures of the game was that, bluntly, machine guns did not work. A machine gun was reduced to being nothing more than a "single shot weapon" with a high probability of killing the one target it shot at (sub-machine guns were treated in the same way, albeit with a somewhat lower probability of killing the one target). The result was that if you needed to move a squad of men across a street that had a machine gun firing down its length, you simply accepted that the odds were that the first man you moved into the street would probably be hit (there was a chance the machine gun would miss). But once the first man was hit, the rest of the squad could "stroll" across the street as if the machine gun was not there.

The game system did not really allow for suppression fire, and had no apparent concepts for "area fire" or "grazing fire". As a representation of combat on the level of the individual soldier, it was basically a complete failure. (Did not stop us from playing it, of course.)

The result of playing that game, however, was that I began building up an attitude about games and machine guns. The result was a true shock the first time I ever played Avalon Hill's Squad Leader. The first scenario in that game was "The Guards Counterattack". Essentially you have 121 Russian Guardsmen, and across the street is this building with 31 Fascists in it. There are German light machine guns positioned to put a cross fire between the building the Guards are in and the building the Fascists are in. The obvious solution, "CHARGE". The Germans are outnumbered better than three to one, and have no chance, right?

That solution delivered me 121 dead Russian Guards, and the shocked statement (literally) "Machine guns work!?"

This is not to say that Squad Leader did not have its own problems, i.e., a lot of things were grossly simplified and could get you results that did not really make sense. But from the standpoint that you could set up machine gun positions with interlocking fields of fire, and could spend time studying the map-boards to develop the best possible defenses for the numbers and types of machine guns, and other weapons, you had available, and figure out how to crack those defenses. Suppressive fire and grazing fire were very much a part of Squad Leader.

Next to SFB, it was probably the single game system I played more of than any other, and this was certainly so in College and after I was commissioned. The basic tactics I knew and understood worked in Squad Leader, more than any other tactical game I had ever played to that point.