Slitherine

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Fog of War is a joke in games.

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ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

A "Control Roll" that, if failed, would give control of your forces to the AI until contact is re-established would be more realistic.

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ORIGINAL: Elessar2

Is Simulations Canada still around? They specialized in the messy side of war, imperfect information in almost every realm.

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

Not really in agreement with this.

Wargames do have Fog-of-War such that players may not know much about their enemy.

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And wargames have reorganization - either via combat or via shock. That means that they don't have "Total Control" of their forces. Reorganizing units don't follow players orders. And, while they may know which of their units are reorganizing on any given turn, they probably don't know which will be so any number of turns in advance - impacting planning. So players may not even have full knowledge of their own forces abilities for any decent interval.

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Then there are some games with Aide-de-Camp rules - further impacting control and knowlege of one's own forces.

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And I've played plenty of wargames that didn't result in total destruction of one side or the other.

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Finally, rear-area elements can be modeled if designers want to. Certainly most games do model engineers of various sorts. However, most players don't want to be forced to perform quartermaster duty. Luckily, that task can usually be abstracted without too much loss of fidelity. But most Pacific games do hand it over to players - for the good reason that sea lanes are especially vulnerable to poaching.

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ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

However, few wargames have fog of war on your forces (another one that comes to mind is Harpoon 3/ANW).

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First, not all of them. Second, "total control" doesn't exclude the fact that, every then and now, some units are in need of reorganization. This is a fact of war and it would be unrealistic not to include it. You still have total control on the reaction to such an event, in a way that real military commander seldom have.

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This applies to WitP:AE without doubt. However, you just made the video's point: seldom rear area units and many other factors are portrayed - because, at the end, the aim of any commercial wargame is to have fun while getting a reasonably good understanding of how a war was fought and why.

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My personal opinion is that, if a game is successful like WitP:AE or Grigsby's WitE/W, by the third match historicity goes out of the window: players start having from turn one, the kind of knowledge that both sides, in real life, couldn't possibly have: what troops can and cannot do against a new enemy in a new environment, which strategies look promising but end up in little or nothing, and so on. The game, by then, becomes his own thing. For sure Guderian and Rommel couldn't plan the crossing of the Meuse after "playing" it ten times: they had to get it right on the first attempt.

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

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ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

However, few wargames have fog of war on your forces (another one that comes to mind is Harpoon 3/ANW).

In case you missed it, I'll repeat: reorganization (especially random reorganization as from shock) fogs which friendly units the player can expect to control in future turns.

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First, not all of them. Second, "total control" doesn't exclude the fact that, every then and now, some units are in need of reorganization. This is a fact of war and it would be unrealistic not to include it. You still have total control on the reaction to such an event, in a way that real military commander seldom have.

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This applies to WitP:AE without doubt. However, you just made the video's point: seldom rear area units and many other factors are portrayed - because, at the end, the aim of any commercial wargame is to have fun while getting a reasonably good understanding of how a war was fought and why.

That wasn't the point as I understood it. He wasn't saying SOME wargames fail to do such and such. He was claiming they all fail on such and such. WitP-AE is an exception that counters his claim.

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First of all, historical commanders did wargame their operations - giving them some idea of what should concern them. Second, a really complex, detailed wargame is very difficult to exhaustively test to absolute certainty about more than just some generalizations.

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ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

You don't read the whole post before answering it, do you? 😂

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"C&C issues" go from lack of communication/loss of relative position to a definite status of the units involved. Knowing current discipline, preparation and morale, OOB and current status, exact position relative both to the map and to other units, and the exact status of these allied units is not "C&C Issues": it is a hopefully temporary unavailability. Lack of total control means that you haven't a clue about what the units near the ones "under shock" are doing: are they engaged too? did the local commander decide to deviate from the plan and move to assist? is "shock" not a shock at all but a temporary loss of communication from an otherwise fine unit who is following the plan - compounded by panicked reports from your staff? These are the real C&C issues that prematurely age the commanders at any level.

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WitP:AE, if anything, is the game that proves a lot of this video claims - unless you are telling me that Nimitz was micromanaging TFs' operations in the Coral Sea, down to search arcs, from Pearl Harbor, with the exact coordinates for every ship, air unit and land unit in the whole PTO.

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BTW, the video never says that the mentioned issues are found in every wargame.

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Exactly. Which is what instead what computer and tabletop wargamers are allowed to do.