As of late, I've become more and more interested in how wargames depict command control--how the player, nominally representing some kind of supreme commander, gets his subordinates to do things.
In many games, the commander is an omnipresent, omniscient puppet master. He has complete knowledge of the battlefield, and is in continuous, instantaneous contact with his subordinates, who live only to carry out their commander's will. Maybe combat rolls don't work out, but hey. They moved when you told them to move, and fired when you told them to fire. And you always knew where they were, in relation to all other units, friendly and enemy, on earth.
Increasingly many games change this up in one form or another. A great many games have at least limited fog-of-war; the other guy's units are facing away from you in block games, for example. Many games have variable reinforcements now, so that's out of the player's control and knowledge. With the "card revolution," games restrict the kinds of orders you can give your units, a way to represent friction outside a player's control. Some clever games make you write orders and send them by courier to units, which carry them out n turns after you write them, depending on how far away you are. Assuming the orders don't get lost.
A toughie, though, has been the independent-minded subordinate. Many games restrict when you can give an order, or what kind of orders you can give, but at the end of the day your loyal (if laggardly) brigadier will salute and march his men over that hill. Back in Real Life, this was often not the case.
Monday afternoon, I was hanging out at Metagames (No! Yes! It's true!) and I got to watch the Battle of Bussaco reenacted using the free miniatures ruleset Fast Play Grande Armée. This handled giving orders in a very clever way, I thought.
At the beginning of every turn, the overall commander rolls a number of d6 based on his quality rating. Let's say he's an average general, and rolls 2d6, getting a score of 8. He then gets eight "order dice," which can be used for many things during the turn, such as giving (or, rather, amplifying) orders. Every "pulse" of a turn (there is a variable number of pulses; if you're familiar with the Area-Impulse games like Breakout: Normandy, it's a similar concept), every subordinate commander rolls two dice, plus any dice that the overall commander chooses to add from his stash at the beginning of the turn. The overall commander chooses any two of the rolled dice, adds them together, and compares them to a chart; let's assume that the subordinate unit is near the enemy:
≤ 3: Withdraw"Active" means that the subordinate actually comes under the control of the player. "Withdraw" means that he quails from the enemy; "Hold" means they do nothing, and "Attack!" means that--by golly--they move towards the nearest enemy, regardless of whether that's a good idea. Furthermore, one's subordinates have personalities. Marshall Ney, for example, gets +2, while Bernadotte gets -2.
4-6: Hold
7-9: Active
10+: Attack!
It's a simple and clever way to get players to say, along with their historical counterparts, "Oh God, why is he doing that?"
It's possible to avoid this kind of disconnect if one's scale is appropriate--on which more in a little bit...In the meantime, I have to give some careful consideration to investing in some Napoleonics.
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