warspite1
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quote:
ORIGINAL: fbs
This thread took an interesting turn: people are listing odd accidents and odd hits as examples of freak events, and that is fine. But nobody has come yet with a truly freak battle result.
I think that's hindsight in play. Battles are analyzed to exhaustion, and historians yearn for an explanation for what happened - they will always come with some. So Tsushima for example can be explained by A, B and C, and people come to believe that whenever A, B and C are in place then logically the battle can only have that particular result -- even if the particular A, B and C combination never happened again.
The way I see it, a battle has a freak result if both sides expected a range of outcomes, and yet got something completely unexpected. Fact that the unexpected will always be explained by someone does not mean that people can predict unexpected, strange results.
Consider Malaya: the speed that the Japanese advanced, with units surrendering to recon forces, surpassed both Japanese and British predictions. The Japanese probably would win at Malaya anyway, but I'm not so sure that the results in Malaya were anything you could call average or expected.
My point is: battles are very complicated and chaotic system with many hidden variables, and as in any chaotic system it is very difficult to predict their evolution precisely. The only recourse we have is to use dice rolls to model probabilities, and that is fine. My problem is: we take historical outcomes as being matter-of-fact, average results that a game/simulator should reproduce in average -- when in fact historical outcomes may have been just lucky incidents coming out of those hidden variables.
Pearl Harbor is a good example: perhaps we shouldn't take for granted that 18 ships sunk/heavily damaged should be the expected, average result. Perhaps the average result should be no battleships sunk (or something else that the subject matter experts can come up with), and the historical results should be a lucky break given by a particular alignment of improbable conditions.
Thanks,
fbs
Warspite1
FBS you make a good point, but I think its difficult to analyse what was freak result or what was "average" etc. But its fun to hazard a guess.
Gut feel says that given the surprise advantage and the aircraft available, what the Japanese achieved at Pearl Harbor was less than optimal in real life and in any wargame, the Japanese player would expect to do better. Launching a third wave for example.
I think given the inexperience of all of those who took part - and all other factors - the Coral Sea and Midway operations could both have resulted in major victories for Japan, although I would say that if that had happened, that would have represented a freak result given the US intelligence, their damage control procedures etc etc. But if a game produces this result, its not "broken".
Savo Island produced another sub-optimal result for Japan. Having done the difficult bit, Ozawa had the transports at his mercy. I don`t think that a game that has the ability to reproduce this battle resulting in a major victory for Japan would be "broken" therefore.
Interesting stuff.....
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RE: Game is not broken, History is! - 
and his fellow destroyer captains and the inexplicable performance of the two German captains - Lutzow`s in particular - largely thanks to Hitlers contradictory orders. 
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