|
SeaQueen -> RE: Largest known scenario in Command history? (5/9/2018 9:21:35 PM)
|
It is true, one can wear many hats at once, but there are limits.
Unless you're President Johnson (which I don't encourage), the job of a diplomat, politician and military officer of sufficiently high rank is sufficiently different from the kinds of things portrayed in Command that they're really beyond the scope of the game. There's many levels of warfare, and they interact with one another. On the highest level, you might not really be concerned with striking targets at all. You're creating facts which shape the underlying conditions in which one might potentially strike targets if it comes to that, or reacting to the unanticipated consequences of the conflict.
Do you really think Command has an accurate portrayal of electoral politics or the kinds of behind the scenes negotiations that effect things like overflight rights, basing options? In Command, that's all an assumption. In Command you wouldn't care how Madeleine Albright convinced the Bulgarians, Romanians and Hungarians to close their airspace to Russian overflight, you'd just assume that she did, and draw a big red blob over them. Once you get to a high enough level, essentially you're not playing a Command scenario anymore so much as you're helping to create the facts around which one might write a Command scenario, only it's in an adversarial environment, your opponent gets to create facts too. In that sense, Command is just the game within a larger game.
Command also doesn't do stuff like answer questions about things like how does striking targets and moving things around (e.g. things Command portrays) interact with Dept. of Treasury officials freezing the financial assets of the opposing nation's leadership? Command does not, for example, have any way to represent what happens when Slobidan Milosevic's wife can't go shopping in Paris anymore. If the Israelis enter into a conflict will it fragment the alliance? What kinds of facts can one create in order to minimize that possibility? If I move an amphib over the horizon so the people in Monrovia can see it, do the rebels pull back because they don't want to fight or do they attack the embassy? In Command you might be clever and script a course of action, or even a few different ones, but you wouldn't really be able to make an argument why it'd go one way or the other. That has to come from somewhere else.
There's other kinds of wargaming that deals with that kind of stuff. Effectively the end state of those kinds of wargames would be a set of facts which might shape a Command type scenario. Depending on what your interests are, there might be reasons to struggle for realism. For me, the entertainment value of the game lies in the way I can use it to think through real problems and gain some insight into some of the things which shape international security, either historically or in the near future. Because of that, realism is important to me.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Cik
ah, one can wear many hats at once. in the same way that nudging a tanker to a new orbit requires being a mission planning man, a tanker man, a radio control tower man or what have you, you could play the diplomat and the commander at the same time.
when you are playing this sort of game, you are wearing many hats already considering you can nudge the planes around (pilot) nudge the missions around (planning) or nudge the objectives around (political guy) there is no reason to struggle for absolute realism in this way imo.
|
|
|
|
