SeaQueen
Posts: 1451
Joined: 4/14/2007
From: Washington D.C.
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It depends. In a scenario involving a small number of units, direct control is probably pretty realistic.
As the scenario gets larger, direct control becomes less realistic in some cases. It also depends on how you think of things.
There's a ton of other "unrealistic" things which occur in Command even if you rely entirely on the mission planner and the AI because in real life things which would be handled by an entire staff of people are left to one person. The functions of dozens, possibly hundreds of people are consolidated into one person. The person who decides where the aircraft carrier is going to set up station, isn't the same person who does the strike planning. They aren't the same person who manages the transiting of submarines, and they aren't the same person who manages the ground battle. Those people spend a lot of time talking to each other, though. Sometimes it's more, sometimes less, depending on what's going on.
In Command, it's never really reasonable to think of yourself as filling a single person's role in a command structure unless a scenario is specifically scoped to reflect that position. It's better to think of one's self wearing many different hats. In some cases you might be performing the role of someone quite high up in the chain of command, fulfilling some joint role (e.g. someone on the Air Component Commander's staff). In other cases you might be filling in for someone relatively low on the totem pole, fulfilling a role that a captain or one of his crew members might perform (e.g. Commander Air Group staff member or squadron commander, maybe even individual pilots). Sometimes you're performing the role that an Air Battle Manager performs by directing the air battle. Other times you're the Naval Component Commander, moving ships and submarines around the map. Are the results of this necessarily unrealistic? It's safe to say that all of these different staffs of people constantly exchange information, while there are certainly delays, quantifying these delays is often difficult. At best they'd be represented by some sort of random variable. Many of these delays might not really matter because they're captured by other things in the game (aircraft turn around time, for example). The game displays areas of uncertainty, so it captures the age of a contact quite well. Much more important is the "flatness" of the chain of command, and the broad scope of one's decision making.
If you want to limit the scope of your decision making, you can do that by making a bunch of AI controlled allied sides representing other organizational units beyond your command. A good example of that might be controlling just one tank company team in a larger battalion or brigade sized operation. You could make the other units in the battalion allied units and part of your job is just to keep up with their advance. Another good example might be make you control just one SSN while allied MPA search adjacent areas.
The thing is, in real life, on a local scale, coordinating units would be able to talk to one another. Would they have perfect information? Probably not, but it's not clear how imperfect it would be either. While much has been made of submarines inability to communicate, we also live in an era of underwater telephones, data links, floating antennas, radio masts, signals, burst transmissions and other technologies. Local, short range communication between coordinating units is probably quite good. In that sense, being "god" will probably produce more realistic outcomes in many ways than a strictly limited scope case, because in spite of the problems of communication, the two units would still be able to react to one another's efforts.
In large scale scenario, involving multiple carrier strike groups, submarines, land based aircraft and what not, you run into other problems. ISR systems like satellites or aircraft like the SR-71 or U-2 might provide information about enemy forces far outside the strike range of the forces under your command. That's okay, though, because for a realistically scoped scenario involving such forces, one ought to have to maneuver their forces into range to strike those targets. Along the way the contacts will age, or be updated and refined. One might assume that in spite of the delays between the national level assets which would be informing your decisions while wearing your "Joint Force Commander's hat" and the more tactical level commanders while wearing your "Carrier Strike Group Commander's hat," sometime during the hours or days which pass as the strike forces get into range, the proper information will be transmitted and received by the appropriate forces so that you can switch hats and act accordingly.
All in all, I don't feel bad about the lack of communication delays. For closely coordinating units most capable of acting on information those sorts of delays are likely short and information, while certainly flawed, probably isn't too terrible. For information passed down from satellites, U-2s, SR-71s or what not, in any realistic scenario, by the time forces were in the area to act on that information it's been aged and refined accordingly. While Command's representation of communications isn't "exactly right," by assuming it away it avoids the problem of being, "exactly wrong" and produces a good enough solution that is probably more realistic overall than attempting to obsessively account for every detail of communication and miscommunication.
< Message edited by SeaQueen -- 10/13/2016 9:01:03 PM >
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