Controlling Command

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
4-6: Hold
7-9: Active
10+: Attack!

"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.

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.

Books, Books, Books

I have a few "real tasks" to get done this summer. I have to move--as mentioned earlier--and I have some academic stuff as well. I have to turn my thesis into an article or two, I have to get advised for the Fall semester, do a little meet-and-greet at Penn State, that sort of thing. Still, this is a period when I can do a fair bit of "pleasure reading." I can read any old thing I want! Naturally, I chose history books. I'm one of those guys who takes "work" with him on vacation, I guess you could say.

I decided to take Gibbon off the shelf. I picked up an unabridged set of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire some time ago, but never got around to starting it. It had mocked me for too long.

There are better books, with newer research and techniques, on late antiquity. When an historian (or, for some of my expat readership, "a historian") reads Gibbon, he or she reads him not to learn about Rome, but Gibbon. Sometimes annoying people call this "interrogating the text." As I read Gibbon, I ask myself: What does Gibbon think about gender roles? (When he describes a nation as "masculine" or "effeminate," what does he mean?) What does he think constitutes nationhood? What are his categories? What does he think a "republic" is? (He considers the Emperor to be the head of the Roman Republic; does this add to our understanding of late 18th Century concepts of "republicanism"?) What is "virtue" in a ruler, according to Gibbon? What is he trying to tell his own generation about power, virtue, judicious behavior?

Many people know that Gibbon rips into Christianity in Decline and Fall; Christianity (upsetting the (supposed) universal, unifying nature of polytheism, etc) and the Germans are his prime suspects for the decline of the Empire. The thing is, great chunks of his own evidence don't support that. Most of the book describes a whole raft of institutional weaknesses within the Empire itself, that no emperor was really able to solve and few seemed to even recognize. A question, then: Why did Gibbon not emphasize those? It's more than just the Enlightenment talking--Gibbon's attitude towards religion qua religion is interesting in and of itself; he's not opposed to it per se.

Getting deeper and deeper into the glorious historiographical and literary thicket that is Gibbon, I started looking for some background reading on Gibbon's style and rhetoric. I settled on Peter Gay's Style in History. This book studies four of the titans of 18th and 19th century history: Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt. Gay doesn't just discuss their literary style--although it's certainly present--but also their working style. What kinds of sources did they prefer? Furthermore, what does all this tell us about culture, about ideas? It's a fascinating, short book--only occasionally marred by excursions into psychoanalysis...

I've found that historiography is a subject that many students hate taking and many professors hate teaching. I eat it breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What is this thing that we do, and how do we do it? I love it.

Poking around for Gibbon stuff, I found a recommendation for another book--Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha. It seemed to have a fairly small [English-speaking] following, but the following it had was quite devoted. I'd never heard of this book, but any history book described in the glowing terms Rebellion has garnered deserved my attention, I figured.

Holy moly. This is one of the best books of anything I've ever read, never mind one of the best military histories. Boiled down, it's about a brutal campaign by the early Brazilian Republic against an isolated religious community in 1896-7. It's about way the heck more than that, though. It begins with a long discourse on the geography of the region, the Brazilian desert backlands. One gets the feeling that da Cunha was a civil engineer or a geologist; a bit of biographical checking proves one correct. It's tempting to skip over it, but one should persevere. For one thing, there are some fascinating glimpses into 1890s ideas about climate and whatnot. For another thing, his point is that geography is extremely important to history--and much of his history won't make any sense unless you have a good idea about the ground. One also, reading this section, gets the feeling that the desert also symbolizes other things, in Brazil and the world--and one would be correct.

Da Cunha then sets the human drama. He begins very broadly, and narrows down to this community in the desert. Da Cunha is a liberal of his time, which did not make him immune to believing the dominant racial theories of his day, sadly. At any rate, the structure of this section is excellent; it's a masterpiece of making a relatively small event very relevant and significant.

The story of the rebellion, and the succession of brutal military campaigns to put it down, is harrowing. The rebels started with a city of 5200 or so buildings and 30,000 or so people...and, by the end, were left with no houses and maybe 300 captives alive. They fought virtually to the last bullet. The brutality is almost, but not quite, numbing. Here's an extended excerpt. This is the very end of the third expedition; the rebels have, after being pushed right to the brink, fought back like demons and have killed most of the Army and sent the rest running into the hills.

This was the end. Captain Salomão now had about him barely half-a-dozen loyal men; the enemy closed in upon him and he fell, cut to pieces with the blows of a scythe, beside the cannon which he had never abandoned. The catastrophe was now complete.

Not long after this, as he was galloping along the ravine to "Angico," Colonel Tamarindo was knocked from his horse by a bullet. He was still alive when the army engineer, Alfredo do Nascimento, reached his side. Lying beside the road, the old commander whispered his last order in his comrade's ear: "Get Cunha Mattos."

That order was a difficult one to carry out.

The jagunços [rebels] took the four Krupps back to the settlement, their front-line fighters now equipped with formidable Mannlichers and Comblains in place of the ancient, slow-loading muskets. As for the uniforms, belts, military bonnets, anything that had touched the bodies of the cursed soldiery, they would have defiled the epidermis of these consecrated warriors, and so the latter disposed of them in a manner that was both cruel and gruesome.

...

Having concluded their search of the roads and trails, and having gathered up and brought in all the weapons and munitions of war that they found, the jagunços then collected all the corpses that were lying here and there, decapitated them, and burned the bodies; after which they lined the heads up along both sides of the highway, at regular intervals, with the faces turned toward the road. Above these, from the tallest shrubbery, they suspended the remains of the uniforms and equipment, the trousers and multicolored dolmans, the saddles, belts, red-striped kepis, the capes, blankets, canteens, and knapsacks.

The barren, withered caatinga now blossomed forth with an extravagant-colored flora: the bright red of officers' stripes, the pale blue of dolmans, set off by the brilliant gleam of shoulder straps and swaying stirrups.

There is one painful detail which must be added to complete this cruel picture: at one side of the road, impaled on a dried ancigo bough, loomed the body of Colonel Tamarindo.

Fans of Mario Vargas Llosa may have read his novelization of the event, The War of the End of the World. I haven't read that yet, but it is certainly my intent to do so...

Three books, three hearty recommendations. Not a bad record...

Hully Gee, It's June

Yikes--it's been...it's been a lot longer since I posted than I thought. Many thanks to Yehuda for reminding me...

So, what have I been up to?

I've graduated, for one thing. In about two weeks, I take possession (if that's the word) of my State College apartment in Pennsylvania. It's advertised as being a very safe neighborhood; I imagine that that's due to the local security system, as discussed in a recent newspaper article:

Patton Township police report that a black bear has been seen over the last several days near the Woodledge Circle area of Toftrees.

They are urging individuals not to engage the bear or feed it.

So that'll be fun. I'm in what looks on the maps like a valley, with hills and woods (aka "bear country") right outside my back door. Will report back later.

Besides that, I've spent a lot of time trying to think of something other than moving. I mean, boxing up my books and games...man, I don't want to think about it. Didn't I just do that?

So, instead of putting the books and games in boxes, I've been reading the books and playing the games. I'll have more on the books, at least, in just a little bit...