On the other hand, if you have an engine that does take into account fuel supply, then such an option is much more easily modeled. This would mean that you would need to introduce a special rule to handle oil facilities being destroyed. Assume that an engine does not model fuel availability, but relies on a simple movement value calculation. It becomes a branching point that must be handled in its own right, or at least handled in such a way that the results can be merged into the game engine or scenario. Of course, that puts an additional burden on the designer, especially any game which relies somewhat on scripted events.
(another branching point could have been Anglo-American relations, where Churchill had never become PM or had died of the flu in North Africa, and a person less keen to work with the Americans could have become PM in his stead) Example - should a Pacific War game include the possibility of striking the oil storage facilities during a Pearl Harbor raid? The Japanese certainly could have done that, and it would make sense to include it as a player option, but I can't recall games which allow this as an option over simply striking ships at port and hoping for the best. From there, the conflict travels a path of almost infinite possibility and outcome, as long as it's consistent. In other words, the starting point of any conflict becomes the "base case," or "starting node" or whatever language makes sense. Those are not rhetorical questions, but things which need to be answered in a design.
#THE OPERATIONAL ART OF WAR IV COUNTERS DIAGRAM FREE#
Was it likely that the war played out the way it did? Was the historical outcome an anomaly, and thus it becomes hard to design a game which can lead to a historical outcome? Does confirmation bias alter the design of games in such a way that they become design for effect, regardless of how hard a designer tries to make a game that is free of that bias? I'd point to the many WW2 games which have been created that all suffer from the same issue of trying to find the balance between giving players freedom to change history, but of also making the historical outcome possible. This is true, although the same issues crop up with games based on historical fact. You can make a fun game- which is a fine thing in its own right- but I don't think you can truly simulate the conflict. Absent those outcomes you can't test the design decisions and it's at most an educated guess. Yes, you can probably put together a TO&E for a Russian mechanised brigade or whatever, but all the other innumerable factors that go into scenario design are unknowns because these conflicts haven't played out.ĭesigning a scenario which, as you suggest, can contribute to our understanding of conflict, requires testing the design against real-world outcomes. The trouble is that we really don't have enough information to make such a scenario about a current conflict. I know there is always some distaste around that, but the study of conflict via simulation is of considerable value, both for understanding from an academic point of view but also raising awareness and public understanding. Would be interesting to see a scenario covering a NATO-Russian war, with modern boundaries and troops.
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