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ColinWright -> RE: Pre-WWI Possibilities? (9/16/2007 9:30:28 PM)
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quote:
...Nonetheless, the exercise, futile though it is, got me thinking. what other battles or campaigns of the 1792-1904 era can TOAW handle? Are there campaigns even earlier it can manage? If someone could come up with a weapon stat for things like muskets and pikes, would Thirty Year's Wars campaigns be possible? what about certain ACW campaigns like the ones that led up to Shiloh and Antietam? would the March Through Georgia be a viable scenario? what about the Franco-Prussian war that humiliated and finally deposed napoleon III and set the stage for modern Germany?
I'd wanted a Napoleon's Art of War or Grant's Art of War game for some time. Might this, with some tweaking, be it?
I don't think OPART can work very well for anything prior to World War One. It fails on the following counts.
1. The player has perfect knowledge of where his own forces are and what their condition is. Rare in the pre-modern era.
2. He is able to issue orders to them and have them obeyed -- all with no delay and with complete certainty of correct execution. Also rare in the pre-modern era.
3. The supply system is almost completely irrelevant. What killed Napoleon on the retreat from Moscow wasn't the inability to rail more shells up from Paris. It was the lack of local forage.
4. The densities are completely off.
5. The defender receives an advantage that just didn't exist in the pre-modern era. You're the Russians at Borodino? Why, just entrench: the French would be mad to attack you.
6. In the modern era, the campaign arena and the size of the battlefield are such that they can reasonably both be portrayed on the same map. Similarly with the time scales. The Eastern Front is a thousand miles long and was a serious contest for about three years and Kursk and the associated battles spanned perhaps a fifth of that and lasted a month or two: you can represent both the large and the small view at once. Go to Napoleon's invasion of Russia and Borodino: a potentially decisive battle occurs within an area that would be at most one hex on the campaign map and is settled in at most one turn. In the pre-modern era, the difference in scale between the campaigns and the battles tends to be much to great to allow both to be simulated on the same screen and at the same intervals.
Now, 4 and 5 could be dealt with fairly easily, and some campaigns could be modeled in spite of 6, but 1, 2, and 3 are killers. If you're going to attempt to model pre-modern warfare, OPART III is only slightly more appropriate than 'The Sims.' Both will give you equally valid simulations.
That said, by all means go ahead if you've got nothing better to do. You may even produce a scenario that is of limited validity. However, I have little patience for the argument that OPART is really the appropriate tool for the pre-modern era. It obviously isn't.
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