The Operational Wargame Series: The best game not in stores now (2021)

Post by defsectec » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 11:37 AM UTC

livrem wrote: post #37

defsectec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that these days the more modern military wargames done by legitimate organizations, that aren't physical simulations (a.k.a. laser tag for grownups), do use computers and have integrations with full-size flight sims and data analysis tools. I play game called Command: Modern Operation ^¹ which can barely be a called a game, but rather a military command simulation at the operational level masquerading…

Played some Harpoon, the older series that Command: Modern Operations came from (long story: https://retroviator.com/harpoon/ ). Then I got hooked on Rule the Waves recently. Matrix games publishes the latest game in that series as well (from last year): https://www.matrixgames.com/game/rule-the-waves-3 It is a game mostly about staring at a spreadsheet, showing all the ships in your (usually early 20th century) flee…

Post by KineticLensman » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 2:25 PM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #65

KineticLensman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope that they at the very least use a computer to calculate the outcomes of a battle. From the article: The real core mechanic is how dice are used in the game. The dice act as an instant adjudicator and the system uses different sizes of dice that can be adjusted during game play. The map and counters also encode a lot of rapidly accessible state information. Using a computer would require all of this state inf…

This sounds extremely inefficient and even Luddite like. Having a computer involved wouldn’t reduce interaction. It would allow you to drastically increase the game speed.

Post by euroderf » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 9:44 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #63

michaelt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign. I think you might be under-estimating how long a 1500 hour game is. A person who works 8 hours a day works 2000 hours in the course of a year. And if the game's in-person, there's travel time - it's not like a computer game where you can do a 1-hour session every even…

The actual North Africa campaign lasted a little under three years, let’s round it to 150 weeks. So if you spend less than 10 hours a week playing CNA, your game will take longer than the actual military campaign.

Post by euroderf » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 9:47 PM UTC

fbdab103 wrote: post #61

JoeDaDude wrote: post #8

The military has a long history of using war games for training, going all the way back to Kriegspiel [1]. At least one history book [2], has been written about the topic. However it is rare that these military training games make it outside of their domain and become available to the general public. A rare exception may be the games designed by Volko Ruhnke [3], who designed games for training the CIA (though these…

The "Wrens" was a division of women Navy sailors who played WW2 war games to identify how German UBoats were so successful. Played many scenarios, and replayed events after attacks to understand German tactics. Would get called in to game out live events as they were happening to decide upon the next day's strategy. Arguably led to enormous increases in British naval effectiveness. One little writeup I could find on…

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:22 AM UTC

cl42 wrote: post #28

anigbrowl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't upvote this hard enough. I'm fascinated by large scale games of this kind and have a loose acquaintance with some people who run them, but it's a very tiny industry that's almost exclusively based around DC for obvious reasons.

If you're curious, here's a 165-page Taiwan war game run across multiple scenarios and events: https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargamin...