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116-508: Steel Panthers III is a wargame that simulates combat scenarios around the world between 1939 and 1999. The game covers six primary conflicts—such as the North African campaign and Vietnam War —across 40 individual scenarios. A map editor enables the player to create custom scenarios. Steel Panthers III was designed by Gary Grigsby and Keith Brors. The game reuses the game engine from Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles , and

232-458: A bad strategist into a good one—is difficult to measure because officers use many tools to hone their decision-making skills and the effect of wargaming is difficult to isolate. In this context, wargames are used to help players understand the decision-making process of wartime command. Wargames can help players master through practice certain routine skills such as how to discuss ideas, share intel, and communicate orders. Wargames can present

348-615: A better term. In the US Army, many preferred the term "map maneuvers" (in contrast to "field maneuvers"). At the US Naval War College , some preferred the terms "chart maneuvers" (when simulating campaigns) and "board maneuvers" (when simulating battles), although the term "war game" was never officially proscribed. Professional wargames tend to have looser rules and simpler models than recreational wargames, with an umpire arbitrating situations based on personal knowledge. If

464-490: A cavalry squadron, etc.), were little rectangular blocks made of lead. The pieces were painted either red or blue to indicate the faction it belonged to. The blue pieces were used to represent the Prussian army and red was used to represent some foreign enemy—since then it has been the convention in professional wargaming to use blue to represent the faction to which the players actually belong to. The game used dice to add

580-570: A degree of randomness to combat. The scale of the map was 1:8000 and the pieces were made to the same proportions as the units they represented, such that each piece occupied the same relative space on the map as the corresponding unit did on the battlefield. The game modeled the capabilities of the units realistically using data gathered by the Prussian army during the Napoleonic Wars and various field exercises. Reisswitz's manual provided tables that listed how far each unit type could move in

696-475: A game at all! It's training for war. I shall recommend it enthusiastically to the whole army." The king decreed that every regiment should play Kriegsspiel , and by the end of the decade every regiment had purchased materials for it. By the 1850s it had become very popular in the army. Kriegsspiel was therefore the first wargame to be treated as a serious tool of training and research by a military organization. Aside from official military venues, Kriegsspiel

812-522: A good understanding of what submarines could do. Unlike the German navy, the US Navy had no significant experience with submarine warfare. Most of the time, the players used submarines as a screening force that sailed ahead of the main formation. Players rarely used submarines in independent operations, and never to attack commercial shipping as German wargamers were doing at the time. For a few years after

928-613: A hypothetical war in the Pacific against Japan. Another example is the Sigma wargames played in the 1960s to test proposed strategies for fighting the Vietnam War. Battles are resolved through simple computation. The players concern themselves with higher-level, strategic concerns such as logistics and diplomacy. In comparison to field exercises, wargames save time and money. They can be organized quickly and cheaply as they do not require

1044-540: A larger board position, providing an extremely abstract strategic model in which the determinant of victory is a generalisation of territorial control and influence projection. Contrarily, in wargames counters typically represent decidedly more concrete and internally quite complex entities (companies, battalions, etc.), with detailed interior state (stat blocks and tables of troop numbers, equipment, operational readiness, artillery charts, etc.), often with convoluted rules governing how they operate and interact, and furthermore

1160-408: A lot of wargaming experience (it is usually considered a hardcore hobby), so learning a complicated new wargame is easy if it is similar enough to ones they've already played. By contrast, military officers typically have little or no wargaming experience. A second reason is that the technical data required to design an accurate and precise model, such as the performance characteristics of a fighter jet,

1276-449: A modern JVM , while the other three are Microsoft Windows programs. Wargames were played remotely through the mail, with players sending lists of moves, or orders, to each other through the mail. In some early PBM systems, six sided dice rolling was simulated by designating a specific stock and a future date and once that date passed, the players would determine an action's outcome using the sales in hundreds value for specific stocks on

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1392-617: A player to find opponents with a computer game: a computer game can use artificial intelligence to provide a virtual opponent, or connect him to another human player over the Internet. For these reasons, computers are now the dominant medium for wargaming. In the recent years, programs have been developed for computer-assisted gaming as regards to wargaming. Two different categories can be distinguished: local computer assisted wargames and remote computer assisted wargames. Local computer assisted wargames are mostly not designed toward recreating

1508-480: A real historical era of warfare. Among recreational wargamers, the most popular historical era is World War 2. Professional military wargamers prefer the modern era. A fantasy setting depicts a fictional world in which the combatants wield fictional or anachronistic armaments, but it should be similar enough to some historical era of warfare such that the combatants fight in a familiar and credible way. For instance, Warhammer Age of Sigmar has wizards and dragons, but

1624-680: A regular tool of instruction there. Wargaming was brought to the Naval War College by William McCarty Little , a retired Navy lieutenant who had likely been inspired after reading The American Kriegsspiel by W.R. Livermore. Livermore was stationed nearby at Fort Adams, and he and Little cooperated to translate the ideas behind Kriegsspiel to naval warfare. After World War I, the Navy suffered severe budget cuts that prevented it from upgrading and expanding its fleet. This limited its ability to conduct naval exercises. Wargaming thus became

1740-508: A round according to the terrain it was crossing and whether it was marching, running, galloping, etc.; and accordingly the umpire used a ruler to move the pieces across the map. The game used dice to determine combat results and inflicted casualties, and the casualties inflicted by firearms and artillery decreased over distance. Unlike chess pieces, units in Reisswitz's game could suffer partial losses before being defeated, which were tracked on

1856-410: A scale model of the battlefield. At the operational level , the scenario is a military campaign, and the basic unit of command is a large group of soldiers. At this level, the outcomes of battles are usually determined by a simple computation. At the strategic level , the scenario is an entire war. The player addresses higher-level concerns such as economics, research, and diplomacy. The time span of

1972-434: A sheet of paper (recreational gamers might call this " hitpoint tracking"). The game also had some rules that modeled morale and exhaustion. Reisswitz's game also used an umpire. The players did not directly control the pieces on the game map. Rather, they wrote orders for their virtual troops on pieces of paper, which they submitted to the umpire. The umpire then moved the pieces across the game map according to how he judged

2088-558: A specific date and then dividing the NYSE published sales in hundreds by six, using the remainder as the dice result. Nuclear Destruction , by the Flying Buffalo , was an early PBM game in 1970. Origins Award Hall-of-Fame member Middle-Earth Play-By-Mail is still active today. Reality Simulations, Inc. still runs a number of PBM games, such as Duel2 (formerly known as Duelmasters), Hyborian War , and Forgotten Realms: War of

2204-491: A tactical-level wargame. The wargames of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (see below) were also tactical-level, simulating submarine attacks on a merchant convoy. In a strategic-level wargame, the scope of the simulated conflict is a campaign or even an entire war. An example is the "Chart Maneuvers" practiced by the US Naval War College during the 1920s and 1930s, which most often simulated

2320-451: A tool and a chore, and players are often bluntly obliged to use whatever is provided to them. Professional wargames that are arbitrated by an umpire or the players themselves (manual wargames) tend to have simple models and computations compared to recreational wargames. Umpires may even be allowed to make arbitrary decisions using their own expertise. One reason for this is to keep the learning curve small. Recreational wargamers tend to have

2436-419: A tool and a chore, and players are often bluntly obliged to use whatever is provided to them. The term "model" can mean two things in wargaming. One is the conceptual models that describe the properties, capabilities, and behaviors of the things the wargame attempts to simulate (weapons, vehicles, troops, terrain, weather, etc.). The other meaning, from miniature wargaming (a form of recreational wargaming ),

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2552-556: A vital means of testing hypothetical strategies and tactics. Another problem was that by the time America entered World War II in 1941, none of the Navy's senior officers had any meaningful combat experience because the Navy had not been involved in any war for over 20 years. However, almost all of them had participated in wargames at the Naval War College, so they had plenty of virtual combat experience. The fact that America defeated Japan in World War II despite these shortcomings,

2668-613: A wolf-pack attack to be coordinated by a designated command submarine rather than a commander onshore. He also concluded that Germany needed 300 submarines to effectively destroy British shipping, and that Germany's existing submarine fleet would at most inflict "pin-pricks". After World War II, wargaming ceased in Germany, as well as in the other Axis powers. Germany didn't even have an army until 1955, so they saw little need to wargame. When West Germany established its new army in 1955, they had so few officers with wargaming experience that

2784-494: Is a look at the constant design and development of new types of tanks during World War II. The most successful card wargame (as a card game and as a wargame) would almost certainly be Up Front , a card game about tactical combat in World War II published by Avalon Hill in 1983. The abstractness is harnessed in the game by having the deck produce random terrain, and chances to fire, and the like, simulating uncertainty as to

2900-495: Is about decision-making, not about learning the technical capabilities of a particular weapon or vehicle. Therefore, a well-designed model will not describe something beyond what a player needs to know to make effective decisions. Players should not be burdened with cumbersome calculations, because this slows down the game and distracts the players. If a player makes a bad decision, it should only be because of poor strategic thinking, not some forgotten rule or arithmetic error, otherwise

3016-481: Is common terminology for a military's field training exercises to be referred to as "live wargames", but certain institutions such as the US Navy do not accept this. Likewise, activities like paintball and airsoft are often classified as combat sports . In contrast however the War Olympics also calls itself “the international army games” and often is referred to as wargaming colloquially. Modern wargaming

3132-593: Is evidence for the value of the wargaming. After the war, Admiral Nimitz said that the wargames predicted every tactic the Japanese used except for the kamikazes (a somewhat hyperbolic assertion). The Naval War College organized two broad classes of wargames: "chart maneuvers", which were strategic-level games; and "board maneuvers", which were tactical-level games. The chart maneuvers were about fleet movements, scouting and screening operations, and supply lines. The board maneuvers simulated battles in detail, with

3248-463: Is less concern regarding "balance" when determining each player's armaments and strategic advantages. In a commercial wargame, the rules are usually designed to ensure that the players' armies are of equal strength to ensure fairness, but professional wargames will tailor each side's capabilities to the scenario to be investigated, and warfare in the real world is rarely fair. As professional wargames are used to prepare officers for actual warfare, there

3364-403: Is longer than a sub-machine gun, due to the differing ammunitions) and thus preserve some verisimilitude, all the while compressing the battle to fit the confines of the table. Additionally, the ranges are multiples of 6, which makes them easier to remember. In real warfare, commanders have incomplete information about their enemy and the battlespace. A wargame that conceals some information from

3480-454: Is longer than most game tables. If model soldiers could shoot each other from opposite ends of the table, without the need to maneuver, the game would be very monotonous. For example, the miniature wargame Bolt Action solves this problem by reducing a rifle's range to 24 inches, a sub-machine gun's range to 12 inches, and a pistol's range to 6 inches. Even if these ranges are not realistic, their proportions make intuitive sense (a rifle's range

3596-603: Is naturally a strong emphasis on realism and current events. Historical wargames are wargames set in the distant past, such as World War II or the Napoleonic Wars—; simulating these wars realistically may be of interest to historians, but are of little use to the military. Recreational wargames may take some creative liberties with reality, such as simplifying models to make them more enjoyable, or adding fictional armaments and units such as orcs and wizards, making them of little use to officers who must fight in

Steel Panthers III: Brigade Command 1939–1999 - Misplaced Pages Continue

3712-489: Is not a specific flaw. Another issue that can produce "wrong" predictions is that a commander may do things differently in the field precisely because he was dissatisfied with the decisions he made in the wargames. Wargames are a cost-effective way of giving officers the experience (or something resembling experience) of making decisions as a leader in an armed conflict. This is the oldest application of wargaming. The actual effectiveness of wargaming in this regard—turning

3828-470: Is often classified. The exact definition of "wargame" varies from one writer to the next and one organization to the next. To prevent confusion, this section will establish the general definition employed by this article. A wargame must have a setting that is based on some historical era of warfare so as to establish what armaments, unit types, and doctrines the combatants may wield and the environment they fight in. A historical setting accurately depicts

3944-432: Is physical models, i.e. sculptures of soldiers, vehicles, and terrain; which generally serve an aesthetic purpose and have little if any consequence on the simulation. Professional wargames rarely use physical models because aesthetics aren't important to the military and the scale at which professional wargames typically play make physical models impractical. Therefore, this article will focus on conceptual models. A wargame

4060-460: Is sometimes tricky as they are typically used to simulate hypothetical future scenarios. Whereas the rules of chess are relatively simple, and those of Go even simpler, with the complexity of these games an emergent property of the evolving strategic state of the board, wargames contrarily tend to have very sophisticated rules as a matter of their commitment to representing the concrete realities of (various kinds of) warfare. Generally speaking,

4176-399: Is substantial historical evidence to support this particular assertion). For instance: In the 1920s, American military planners believed that America could win a war with Japan quickly by simply sailing an armada across the Pacific and knocking out the Japanese navy in a few decisive battles. But when this strategy was tested in wargames, it routinely failed. Japan held off the assault until

4292-443: Is that as it gets better at fighting the enemy, the enemy will adapt in turn, modifying their own armaments and tactics to maintain their edge. Live exercises have a similar weakness as the enemy can spy on them to learn what is being tested. But wargames can be done in good secrecy, so the enemy cannot know what ideas are being developed. Wargames can help a military determine what armaments and infrastructure it should acquire (there

4408-502: Is that the referee must be very knowledgeable in warfare and impartial, else they may issue unrealistic or unfair rulings. Another way to address complexity is to use a computer to automate some or all of the routine procedures. Video games can be both sophisticated and easy to learn, which is why computer wargames are more popular than tabletop wargames. Every wargame must have a sense of scale , so that it may realistically simulate how topography, distance, and time affect warfare. Scale

4524-414: Is usually expressed as a ratio, e.g. a scale of 1:1000 indicates that 1 cm on the game map represents 10 m (1,000 cm). In miniature wargaming, scale is more often expressed as the height of a model of a human measured from the base of its feet up to the eyes or top of the head (e.g. 28mm). Military wargames typically aim to model time and space as realistically as is feasible, so everything in

4640-454: The tactical level , the scenario is a single battle. The basic unit of command is an individual soldier or small group of soldiers. The time span of the scenario is in the order of minutes. At this level, the specific capabilities of the soldiers and their armaments are described in detail. An example of a tactical-level games is Flames of War , in which players use miniature figurines to represent individual soldiers, and move them around on

4756-649: The Fog of War is built into the game by representing units with upright wooden blocks that are marked on only one face, which is oriented towards the player who owns the block. The opponent cannot see the markings from his position. The first such block wargame was Quebec 1759 by Columbia Games (previously named Gamma Two Games), depicting the campaign surrounding the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Because of their nature, cards are well suited for abstract games, as opposed to

Steel Panthers III: Brigade Command 1939–1999 - Misplaced Pages Continue

4872-407: The 1990s. A professional wargame is a wargame that is used by a military as a serious tool for training or research. A recreational wargame is one played for fun, often in a competitive context. Recreational wargames can cover a wide variety of subjects, from pre-historic to modern – even fantasy or sci-fi combat. Games which do not include modern armaments and tactics are of limited interest to

4988-565: The American armada exhausted itself, and then counter-attacked. The wargames foretold that a war with Japan would instead be a prolonged war of attrition, and America would need advance bases in the western Pacific where its warships could get resupplied and repaired. Such an infrastructure would require making alliances with friendly countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the British Empire. Wargames can also be used to develop

5104-574: The Avatars. Professional wargame A wargame , generally, is a type of strategy game which realistically simulates warfare. A professional wargame , specifically, is a wargame that is used by military organizations to train officers in tactical and strategic decision-making, to test new tactics and strategies, or to predict trends in future conflicts. This is in contrast to recreational wargames , which are designed for fun and competition. The exact definition of "wargame" varies from one writer to

5220-949: The German War College asked the US Air Force to provide it an officer with wargaming experience. In January 1942, the British Royal Navy established a naval tactical analysis unit called the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), which was tasked with developing ways to counter the German submarine "wolf-packs" that were devastating shipping convoys in the Atlantic. It was based in Liverpool , directed by Captain Gilbert Roberts , and staffed mainly by young women from

5336-465: The German military used wargaming more heavily than any other in the world. By the time Germany began openly rearming in 1934, its officers already had fairly well-developed theories on what armaments to buy and what organizational reforms to implement. German wargaming at this time was restricted to tactical and operational-level play. Hitler discouraged strategic-level games, as he was confident enough in his own ability to make strategic judgments. Over

5452-439: The German navy developed the "wolf-pack" doctrine by which German submarines would attack convoys in groups to confuse and overwhelm the escorts. These ideas were tested in a combination of wargames and naval exercises. Karl Doenitz , who would later command German submarine operations during World War II , organized a series of wargames held during the winter of 1938-39, and from the results he concluded that it would be best for

5568-458: The US Navy didn't imagine getting into any sort of serious naval conflict in the Atlantic with anyone, and that it simulated wars against Britain simply because it saw the Royal Navy as its role model. A war with Japan, on the other hand, was a real concern, and as the years passed the wargames were increasingly played against ORANGE. In case of a war with Japan, the US Navy's grand strategy

5684-657: The United States, Charles Adiel Lewis Totten published Strategos, the American War Game in 1880, and William R. Livermore published The American Kriegsspiel in 1882, both heavily inspired by Prussian wargames. In 1894, the US Naval War College made wargaming a regular tool of instruction. The US Naval War College is a staff college where American officers of all ranks go to receive postgraduate training. Since 1894, wargaming has been

5800-600: The World Wars. In World War I, submarines were a new thing and nobody knew how best to use them, and Germany developed its submarine doctrine on the go. The German navy at the time did not use wargames and tested new ideas immediately against the British. Consequently, for every incremental innovation in submarine warfare that the Germans deployed, the British quickly developed a counter-measure and kept pace, and this limited

5916-432: The aid of model ships. Most of the wargames were played on the floors of lecture halls, as they needed more space than any table could provide. The two most frequently played scenarios were a war with Japan and a war with Britain. Japan was code-named ORANGE, Britain was code-named RED, and America was code-named BLUE. Neither the students nor the staff at the Naval War College expected a war with Britain. It's possible that

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6032-481: The army. The grid forced the terrain into unnatural forms, such as rivers flowing in straight lines and bending at right angles; and only a single piece could occupy a square at a time, even if that square represented a square mile. In 1824, a Prussian army officer named Georg von Reisswitz presented to the Prussian General Staff a wargame that he and his father had developed over the years. It

6148-617: The battlefield are represented by miniature models, as opposed to abstract pieces such as wooden blocks or plastic counters. Likewise, the battlefield itself is represented by model terrain, as opposed to a flat board or map; naval wargames are often played on a floor because they tend to require more space than a tabletop. Most miniature wargaming is recreational because issues of scale get in the way of realism. Miniature wargaming can be more expensive and time-consuming than other forms of wargaming. Furthermore, most manufacturers do not sell ready-to-play models, they sell boxes of model parts, which

6264-413: The battlefield inside computer memory, but employing the computer to play the role of game master by storing game rules and unit characteristics, tracking unit status and positions or distances, animating the game with sounds and voice and resolving combat. Flow of play is simple: each turn, the units come up in a random order. Therefore, the more units an opponent has, the more chance he will be selected for

6380-529: The best war games running on any operating system." Following Steel Panthers III , Gary Grigsby and Keith Brors entered a contract to create several new projects for the wargame company TalonSoft . At the same time, GameSpot ' s Alan Dunkin reported in January 1998 that the two were working on new Steel Panthers titles for Strategic Simulations, beginning with an add-on for Steel Panthers III . A fourth Steel Panthers game, programmed for Windows 95 ,

6496-407: The combat is mostly based on medieval warfare (spearmen, archers, knights, etc.). Some are also set in a hypothetical future or counterfactual past, to simulate, for example, a "World War Three" or rebellion of colonists on Mars. A wargame's scenario describes the circumstances of the specific conflict being simulated, from the layout of the terrain to the exact composition of the fighting forces to

6612-530: The complexity also makes wargames difficult to enjoy, but some players enjoy high realism, so finding a balance between realism and simplicity is tricky when it comes to recreational wargames. One way to solve the problem of complexity is to use a referee who has the discretion to arbitrate events, using whatever tools and knowledge they deem fit. This solution is popular with military instructors because it allows them to apply their own expertise when they use wargames to instruct students. The drawback of this approach

6728-498: The concept of play-by-email gaming, however the presentation and actual capabilities are completely different. They have been designed to replicate the look and feel of existing board or miniatures wargames on the computer. The map and counters are presented to the user who can then manipulate these, more-or-less as if he were playing the physical game, and send a saved file off to his opponent, who can review what has been done without having to duplicate everything on his physical set-up of

6844-404: The course of the war, Germany fought well at the tactical and operational level but made many bad strategic decisions. During World War 1, the British learned to protect their ships from German submarines by moving them in convoys which were escorted by submarine-hunting ships. The convoy system proved effective against German submarines, which typically operated alone. During the inter-war years,

6960-472: The deck is merely one of the most important elements of the game. The term "wargame" is rarely used in the video gaming hobby; the term "strategy game" is preferred. "Computer wargame" distinguishes a game from a "tabletop wargame". Computer wargames have many advantages over traditional wargames. In a computer game, all the routine procedures and calculations are automated. The player needs only to make strategic and tactical decisions. The learning curve for

7076-501: The definitive wargaming statements made by Steel I or II ", he wrote. Writing for Computer Games Strategy Plus , Richard Lechowich was more positive, arguing that the game "continues the excellent system begun in the earlier games and builds on that foundation." In its 1997 game of the year awards, CNET Gamecenter nominated Steel Panthers III in its "Strategy/War" category, but the prize ultimately went to Age of Empires . The site's editors called Steel Panthers III "one of

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7192-425: The designer will have to juggle their competing demands. This can lead to great complexity, high development costs, and a compromised product that satisfies nobody. Commercial wargames are under more pressure to deliver an enjoyable experience for the players, who expect a user-friendly interface, a reasonable learning curve, exciting gameplay, and so forth. By contrast, military organizations tend to see wargaming as

7308-425: The designer will have to juggle their competing demands. This can lead to great complexity, high development costs, and a compromised product that satisfies nobody. Commercial wargames are under more pressure to deliver an enjoyable experience for the players, who expect a user-friendly interface, a reasonable learning curve, exciting gameplay, and so forth. By contrast, military organizations tend to see wargaming as

7424-430: The designers to acquire feedback. As a consequence, errors in wargame models tend to persist. Although commercial wargame designers take consumer trends and player feedback into account, their products are usually designed and sold with a take-it-or-leave-it approach. Professional wargames, by contrast, are typically commissioned by the military that plans to use them. If a wargame is commissioned by several clients, then

7540-437: The designers to acquire feedback. Consequently, errors in professional wargame models tend to persist. Although commercial wargame designers study consumer trends and listen to player feedback, their products are usually designed and sold with a take-it-or-leave-it approach. Professional wargames, by contrast, are typically commissioned by the military that plans to use them. If a wargame is commissioned by several clients, then

7656-450: The emphasis is on verisimilitude, i.e. the satisfactory appearance of realism. In any case, no wargame can be perfectly realistic. A wargame's design must make trade-offs between realism, playability, and fun, and function within the constraints of its medium. Fantasy wargames arguably stretch the definition of wargaming by representing fictional or anachronistic armaments, but they may still be called wargames if they resemble real warfare to

7772-564: The end of World War II, wargaming almost ceased in America. At the Naval War College, wargaming dropped to about 10% of its pre-war level. The Treaty of Versailles greatly restricted the size of Germany's armed forces and outright banned certain weapons such as planes, tanks, and submarines. This made it difficult if not impossible for the German military to develop their doctrines through field exercises. The Germans greatly expanded their use of wargaming to compensate, and between 1919 and 1939,

7888-400: The game is in the order of months or years. A wargame must simulate warfare to a reasonable degree of realism, though what counts as sufficient realism depends on the players. Military wargames need to be highly realistic because their purpose is to prepare officers for real warfare. Recreational wargames only need to be as realistic as it pleases the players, so in most recreational wargames

8004-406: The game will yield less reliable insights. If the wargame is computer-assisted, then sophisticated models are feasible because they can be written into the software and processed quickly by the computer. For manual wargames, simplicity is paramount. In a tactical-level wargame, the scope of the simulated conflict is a single battle. Kriegsspiel , the original professional wargame, is an example of

8120-429: The game, and respond. Some allow for both players to get on-line and see each other's moves in real-time. These systems are generally set up so that while one can play the game, the program has no knowledge of the rules, and cannot enforce them. The human players must have a knowledge of the rules themselves. The idea is to promote the playing of the games (by making play against a remote opponent easier), while supporting

8236-447: The global state of the game is often governed by extensive non-local rules representing exigencies like seasonal weather or supply lines. This makes wargames difficult to learn, as it can be difficult to simply begin playing without already understanding a great deal about how to do so. Even experienced wargamers usually play with their rulebook on hand, because the rules for most wargames are too complex to fully memorize. For many people,

8352-419: The hidden units were, and only placed their pieces on the map when he judged they came into view of the enemy. Earlier wargames had fixed victory conditions, such as occupying the enemy's fortress. By contrast, Reisswitz's wargame was open-ended. The umpire decided what the victory conditions were, if there were to be any, and they typically resembled the goals an actual army in battle might aim for. The emphasis

8468-581: The impact of submarines in World War I. During the inter-war years, the German navy experimented extensively with new submarine tactics in wargames (in tandem with field exercises) and developed the "wolf-pack" doctrine to defeat the anti-submarine counter-measures that had been developed during World War I (notably the convoy system ). The British, by contrast, did not experiment with submarines in their own wargames because they thought that their established counter-measures were sufficient. The Germans entered

8584-521: The industry (and reducing copyright issues) by ensuring that the players have access to the actual physical game. The four main programs that can be used to play a number of games each are Aide de Camp , Cyberboard , Vassal and ZunTzu . Aide de Camp is available for purchase, while the other three are offered free. Vassal is in turn an outgrowth of the VASL (Virtual ASL ) project, and uses Java , making it accessible to any computer that can run

8700-491: The information he judges the players should know. Some recreational wargames use a referee too, often referring to them as "the GameMaster" (e.g. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader ). The fog of war is easy to simulate in a computer wargame, as a virtual environment is free of the physical constraints of a tabletop game. The computer itself can serve as the referee. Miniature wargaming is a form of wargaming where units on

8816-429: The local conditions (nature of the terrain, etc.). Dan Verssen Games is a specialist designer and publisher of card games for several genres, including air combat and World War II and modern land combat. Also, card driven games (CDGs), first introduced in 1993, use a deck of (custom) cards to drive most elements of the game, such as unit movement (activation) and random events. These are, however, distinctly board games,

8932-422: The military, though wargames covering famous historical battles can interest military historians . As professional wargames are used to prepare officers for actual warfare, there is naturally a strong emphasis on realism and current events. Military organizations are typically secretive about their current wargames, and this makes designing a professional wargame a challenge. The data the designers require, such as

9048-417: The mobilization of thousands of men, their armaments, and logistics systems. Some wargames can be completed more quickly than the conflicts they simulate by compressing time. In a naval wargame, the players need not wait days for their fleets to sail across the ocean, they could just advance the time-frame to the next decision they must make. This is particularly advantageous for strategic-level games, in which

9164-543: The more realistic a wargame seeks to be, the more complicated its rules are. For example, chess pieces only have a few rules determining their behaviour, such as how and when they are allowed to move or capture based on their type and board location, providing a highly abstracted model of warfare which represents troop positioning and composition. Stones in Go have no properties, behaviours, or state on their own, and only potentially represent, relative to other stones, elements of

9280-520: The nature of potential conflicts. Many wargames re-create specific historic battles, and can cover either whole wars, or any campaigns , battles, or lower-level engagements within them. Many simulate land combat, but there are wargames for naval , air combat , and cyber as well as many that combine various domains. There is ambiguity as to whether or not activities where participants physically perform mock combat actions (e.g. friendly warships firing dummy rounds at each other) are considered wargames. It

9396-440: The next and one organization to the next. To prevent confusion, this section will establish the general definition employed by this article. Still, some professional wargamers feel that the term "game" trivializes what they see as a serious, professional tool. One of these was Georg von Reisswitz , the creator of Kriegsspiel and the father of professional wargaming, but he stuck with the word "game" because he could not think of

9512-448: The next turn. When a unit comes up, the commander specifies an order and if offensive action is being taken, a target, along with details about distance. The results of the order, base move distance and effect to target, are reported, and the unit is moved on the tabletop. All distance relationships are tracked on the tabletop. All record-keeping is tracked by the computer. Remote computer assisted wargames can be considered as extensions to

9628-496: The performance characteristics of weapons or the locations of military bases, are often classified, which makes it difficult for the designers to verify that their models are accurate. Secrecy also makes it harder to disseminate corrections if the wargame has already been delivered to the clients. Then there is the small player base. Whereas a commercial wargame might have thousands or even millions of players, professional wargames tend to have small player bases, which makes it harder for

9744-544: The player how to cope with an unpredictable foe who reacts intelligently to their decisions. Wargames can also help familiarize the players with the geography of areas where they might eventually have to fight in. This was an oft-cited justification for wargaming at the US Naval War College. Wargames can be used to prepare grand strategic plans and develop doctrine with a low risk of the enemy becoming aware of these developments and adapting. A problem that any military faces when learning through hard experience (actual warfare)

9860-423: The player is called a closed game. An open wargame has no secret information. Most recreational wargames are open wargames. A closed wargame can simulate the espionage and reconnaissance aspects of war. Military wargames often use referees to manage secret information. The players may be forced to sit in separate rooms, and communicate their orders with the referee in the game room, who in turn reports back only

9976-434: The player is smaller, as the game can be played without mastering all its mechanics. The gameplay is faster, as a computer can process calculations much faster than a human. Computer wargames often have more sophisticated mechanics than traditional wargames thanks to automation. Computer games tend to be cheaper than traditional wargames because, being software, they can be copied and distributed very efficiently. It's easier for

10092-503: The players are expected to assemble and paint themselves. This requires skill, time, and money, but many players like the opportunity to show off their artistic skills. Miniature wargaming is often as much about artistry as it is about play. A board wargame is played on a board that has a more-or-less fixed layout and is supplied by the game's manufacturer. This is in contrast to customizable playing fields made with modular components, such as in miniature wargaming . In block wargaming ,

10208-466: The players with intellectual challenges that they cannot receive from books or in the classroom: an enemy who reacts unpredictably and intelligently to the player's decisions, Wargames train players to evaluate situations and make decisions faster. They teach players how to discuss ideas, and the protocols for sharing intel and communicating orders. They teach the players how to cope with incomplete, delayed, incorrect, or superfluous information. They teach

10324-420: The potential of new technology. In order to wield a new technology optimally, it is not enough for a military to merely have it, but also develop good tactics and know how to organize around it. If the enemy isn't exploring the same issues in their own wargames, then one can gain a significant edge over the enemy when war breaks out by deploying a more mature doctrine . An example is German submarine doctrine in

10440-402: The progression and outcome of a war as one might predict the weather. Human behavior is too difficult to predict for that. Wargames cannot provoke the anxiety, anger, stress, fatigue, etc. that a commander will experience in actual combat and thus cannot foresee the effects of these emotions on his decision-making. That said, no training tool can replicate the emotional experience of war, so this

10556-424: The real world. Military organizations are typically secretive about their current wargames, and this makes designing a professional wargame a challenge. Secrecy makes it harder to disseminate corrections if the wargame has already been delivered to the clients. Whereas a commercial wargame might have thousands or even millions of players, professional wargames tend to have small player bases, which makes it harder for

10672-451: The rules altogether and allowing the umpire to determine the outcomes of player decisions as he saw fit. Dice, rulers, computations, etc. were optional. This rules-free variant, of course, depended more heavily on the competence and impartiality of the umpire. The relative merits and drawbacks of rules-heavy and freeform wargaming are still debated to this day. Prussian wargaming attracted little attention outside Prussia before 1870. Prussia

10788-416: The satisfaction of the players. For example, Warhammer Fantasy Battle has wizards and dragons, but the bulk of the armaments are taken from medieval warfare (spearmen, knights, archers, etc.). Validation is the process by which a given wargame is proven to be realistic. For historical wargames, this usually means being able to accurately recreate a certain historical battle. Validating military wargames

10904-427: The scenario is imbalanced and urge players to switch sides and play again to compare their performance. It is easier to design a balanced scenario where all players have a fair chance of winning if it is fictionalized. Board wargames usually have a fixed scenario. A wargame's level of war determines to the scope of the scenario, the basic unit of command, and the degree to which lower level processes are abstracted. At

11020-507: The simulated conflict might last months. A tactical-level wargame that has very cumbersome computations might take longer to play out than the battle it represents (this problem afflicted the original Kriegsspiel ). Wargamers can experiment with assets that their military does not actually possess, such as alliances that their country does not have, armaments that they have yet to acquire, and even hypothetical technologies that have yet to be invented. For example: After World War I , Germany

11136-451: The simulation aspects of wargames. Traditional card games are not considered wargames even when nominally about the same subject (such as the game War ). An early card wargame was Nuclear War , a 'tongue-in-cheek game of the end of the world', first published in 1966 and still published today by Flying Buffalo . It does not simulate how any actual nuclear exchange would happen, but it is still structured unlike most card games because of

11252-463: The simulation conforms to a single scale. Recreational wargame designers, by contrast, tend to use abstract scaling techniques to make their wargames easier to learn and play. Tabletop miniature wargames , for instance, cannot realistically model the range of modern firearms, because miniature wargaming models are typically built to a scale between 1:64 and 1:120. At those scales, riflemen should be able to shoot each other from several meters away, which

11368-484: The umpire is highly knowledgeable about warfare (perhaps they are a veteran), then such wargames can achieve a higher degree of realism than wargames with rigid rulesets. In a recreational wargame, such looseness would lead to concerns over fairness, but the point of a professional wargame is education, not competition. Having simple, loose rules also keeps the learning curve small, which is convenient since most officers have little or no wargaming experience. Likewise, there

11484-502: The victory conditions of the players. Historical wargames often re-enact historical battles. Alternatively, the game may provide fictional "what-if" scenarios. One challenge in the design of historical wargames is that the scenarios may be inherently unbalanced and present one side with an unwinnable situation. In such cases, the victory conditions may be adjusted for the disadvantaged side so that they can win simply by doing better than what happened historically. Some games simply concede that

11600-411: The virtual troops would interpret and carry out their orders. When the troops engaged the enemy on the map, it was umpire who rolled the dice, computed the effects, and removed defeated units from the map. The umpire also managed secret information so as to simulate the fog of war. The umpire placed pieces on the map only for those units which he judged both sides could see. He kept a mental track of where

11716-541: The war with a whole bag of new tricks, and it took some time for the British to catch up. Around the turn of the 19th century, a number of European inventors created wargames based on chess. These games used pieces that represented real army units (infantry, artillery, etc.) and the squares on the board were color-coded to represent different terrain types (rivers, marshes, mountains, etc.). Basing these games on chess made them attractive and accessible to chess players, but also made them too unrealistic to be taken seriously by

11832-561: The wargamers at the College abandoned the old doctrine and instead developed a more progressive strategy, which involved building a logistics infrastructure in the western Pacific and making alliances with regional countries. By the mid-1930s, the wargames resembled very much what the Navy later experienced in the Pacific War . The wargames also produced tactical innovations, most notably the "circular formation". In this formation, as it

11948-423: The wargamers at the College used a battleship as the central ship, but this was eventually supplanted by the aircraft carrier. Chester Nimitz , who was a fellow student that same year, was impressed by what the circular formation could do, and Nimitz played a pivotal role in making it Navy doctrine. On the other hand, the wargamers at the Naval War College failed to develop good submarine doctrine. They didn't have

12064-414: The way it deals with its subject. In the late 1970s Battleline Publications (a board wargame company) produced two card games, Naval War and Armor Supremacy . The first was fairly popular in wargaming circles, and is a light system of naval combat, though again not depicting any 'real' situation (players may operate ships from opposing navies side-by-side). Armor Supremacy was not as successful, but

12180-630: The world now took a keen interest in German wargames, which foreigners referred to as Kriegsspiel (the German word for "wargame"). The first Kriegsspiel manual in English, based on the system of Wilhelm von Tschischwitz, was published in 1872 for the British army and received a royal endorsement. The world's first recreational wargaming club was the University Kriegspiel [ sic ] Club, founded in 1873 at Oxford University in England. In

12296-433: Was free Kriegsspiel , developed in 1876 by General Julius von Verdy du Vernois . Vernois was frustrated by the cumbersome rules of traditional rigid Kriegsspiel . They took a lot of time to learn and prevented experienced officers from applying their own expertise. The computations also slowed down the game; sometimes, a session would take longer to play than the actual battle it represented. Vernois advocated dispensing with

12412-491: Was a highly realistic wargame designed strictly for use as a professional tool of training, and not for leisure. Instead of a chess-like grid, this game was played on accurate paper maps of the kind the Prussian army used. This allowed the game to model terrain naturally and simulate battles in real locations. The pieces could be moved across the map in a free-form manner, subject to terrain obstacles. The pieces, each of which represented some kind of army unit (an infantry battalion,

12528-436: Was also in production. The add-on was soon announced as Steel Panthers III: Brigade Command Campaign Disk , which included a multiplayer mode with Windows 95 support. Wargame A wargame is a strategy game in which two or more players command opposing armed forces in a simulation of an armed conflict. Wargaming may be played for recreation , to train military officers in the art of strategic thinking , or to study

12644-689: Was also played in a number of private clubs around the country, which were mainly patronized by officers but also had civilian members, so Kriegsspiel was certainly being played in a recreational context. The first such club was the Berlin Wargame Association. In 1828, General von Moltke the Elder joined the Magdeburg Club and became its manager. Over the years, other officers updated Reisswitz's game to reflect changes in technology and doctrine. A particularly noteworthy variant

12760-480: Was considered a second-rate power and wargaming an unproven novelty. That changed in 1870, when Prussia defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War . Many credited Prussia's victory to its wargaming tradition. The Prussian army did not have any significant advantage in weaponry, numbers, or troop quality, but it was the only army in the world that practiced wargaming. Civilians and military forces around

12876-417: Was developed exclusively for MS-DOS . CNET Gamecenter noted that it would be "probably one of the last DOS-only games we'll see". It released on November 26, 1997. T. Liam McDonald of PC Gamer US enjoyed Steel Panthers III but considered it "a missed opportunity", as it did not significantly build on its predecessors. In Computer Gaming World , Jim Cobb concurred: " Steel III is not anywhere near

12992-506: Was forced to downsize its armed forces and outright give up certain weapons such as planes, tanks, and submarines. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for German officers to develop their doctrines through field exercises. The Germans greatly expanded their use of wargaming to compensate. When Germany began openly rearming in 1934, its officers already had fairly well-developed theories on what armaments to buy and what organizational reforms to implement. Wargames cannot be used to predict

13108-489: Was invented in Prussia in the early 19th-century, and eventually the Prussian military adopted wargaming as a tool for training their officers and developing doctrine. After Prussia defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War , wargaming was widely adopted by military officers in other countries. Civilian enthusiasts also played wargames for fun, but this was a niche hobby until the development of consumer electronic wargames in

13224-562: Was on the experience of decision-making and strategic thinking, not on competition. As Reisswitz himself wrote: "The winning or losing, in the sense of a card or board game, does not come into it." In the English-speaking world, Reisswitz's wargame and its variants are called Kriegsspiel , which is the German word for "wargame". Reisswitz showed his wargame to the Prussian king and his General Staff in 1824. They were greatly impressed. General Karl von Mueffling wrote: "It’s not

13340-485: Was to send an armada straight across the Pacific and quickly defeat the Japanese navy in one or two decisive battles. The wargamers at the College tested this strategy extensively, and it routinely failed. In 1933, the Navy's Research Department reviewed the wargames played from 1927 to 1933 and concluded that the fundamental problem was that the armada over-extended its supply lines. The BLUE armada would exhaust itself, and ORANGE would recover and counter-attack. After this,

13456-456: Was used in World War II , an aircraft carrier was surrounded by concentric circles of cruisers and destroyers. This formation concentrated anti-aircraft fire, and also was easier to maneuver than a line of battle because all the ships could turn at once with a signal from the central ship. The circular formation was first proposed in September 1922 by Commander Roscoe C. MacFall. Initially,

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