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Winter Wargaming 2019: Rule the Waves 2

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The nights are long, it’s cold outside, and I’m almost done with my Christmas choir obligations, so it’s time for some winter wargaming.

This year’s selection is Rule the Waves 2. We’ll be playing France, for its interesting position astride the border between Europe (where Germany and Britain vie for naval supremacy) and the Mediterranean (where there are a bunch of second-rate powers to beat up on), and the chip on its shoulder in re: Britain and naval matters.

I like to do some audience participation in these, so I’ll bold occasional decision points throughout posts.

My plan is to post one update a week, each covering about two years of game time, which means a full game (from 1900 to 1955) will take us into summer. I’ll aim to have the updates posted on Thursday, so I can play a little over the weekend and write in the evenings thereafter.

intro
Vive la France!

In Rule the Waves 2, France has neither serious perks nor serious drawbacks. We do get two bonus techs (Hardened AP penetrator, which just finished researching, and Quadruple Turrets, which is a decade or two down the road—bonus tech just means we have a good chance of getting it early). Our budget ranks third or fourth, after Britain, Germany, and sometimes the US. We have a moderate budgetary edge over the Italians (but more overseas colonies where we’ll have to station creaking, dilapidated armored cruisers years past their best-by date), and a serious edge over the creaking, dilapidated Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Looking north, we come to the Germans, among our historical foes, and the English, also among our historical foes. In the real-world timeline, England began making overtures to France not long after the present game date, as a way to counterbalance Germany. An alliance north of France, one way or another, might keep us safe from the other party, but might also drag us into wars we don’t really want.

I guess Russia is also up there, but in a game about naval warfare, European Russia might as well be on the moon. (In the real-world timeline, France and Russia are allied, so they aren’t among the six opponents the game chooses to simulate for us.)

Looking west, we have the United States. We don’t have any reason to mess with them, and the only place where we have the bases to plausibly do so is Southeast Asia.

Speaking of which, looking east, we have Southeast Asia, where we’re a major player. Japan is an obvious threat out that way, given that Southeast Asia is their backyard. The Americans, who hold the Philippines, also have interests out there.

Time for the first decision. Where do we focus our strategic interests? In the Mediterranean is my preference, but I could also see convincing arguments for expanding our presence in Africa or the Far East. Relatedly, how hawkish should we be? In Rule the Waves as in real life, it’s much easier to get money appropriated for the Navy when using it is in the cards, but actually having to use it means we might lose parts of it, and if the part of the

Before I get too far ahead of myself, though, let’s take a look at our starting fleet, custom-built according to the theory that France has historically produced some unusual warships.

ships-in-service

under-construction

If you don’t want to zoom in on that, it’s four battleships of the La République class, four armored cruisers of the Gueydon class, five light cruisers of the Tage class, and 16(ish?) destroyers of the Fauconneau class in active service. Under construction, we have another La République, another Gueydon, three Tages, and two Fauconneaus.

Because our ships are built nearly to the limits of our dockyards’ capabilities, we have fewer of them than other nations. We have four battleships, while Italy has seven, Britain has nine, and the Germans have 10 with another four under construction. Our four armored cruisers put us ahead of the Italians, but we lag them in light cruisers and destroyers, although the Tages under construction will change that.

The Austro-Hungarians have less than half the battleship tonnage we do.

la-republique

The La Républiques (Les Républiques?) are fast by the standard of pre-dreadnoughts, at a design speed of 20 knots, and well-armed with 13-inch guns. That’s enough to outrun and outshoot their historical British counterparts in the Duncan class, although they give up a bit in terms of armor.

gueydon

The Gueydons are oddball ships. They’re relatively fast at 23 knots, and their range and internal accommodations support colonial operations. They have about the armor you would expect for the class and era. The strange part is the gun layout. Rather than the usual four 9″ or 10″ guns and broadside casemate 5″ or 6″ guns, they have an all-medium-gun layout: twelve 7″ guns in six double turrets, with a broadside of 8 guns and a fore or aft throw of 6. They also feature three torpedo tubes underwater.

Time will tell if the unusual armament layout is a success or a failure.

tage

The Tages are also strange, with turreted 5″ guns fore and aft, and broadside 4″ guns in casemates, along with torpedo tubes. They’re lightly armored, and only slightly faster than the Gueydons at 24 knots. (That’s still faster than contemporary light cruisers, though.) Their armament is a bit lighter than their peers’, but their armor is heavier.

fauconneau

The first and only one of our starting ship classes which is notably slower than its contemporaries, the Fauconneaus make up for it with a few extra torpedo launchers.

Decision point #2: where do we focus our shipbuilding efforts? Is France to build a mighty battleship fleet to crush the Italians and the Austro-Hungarians? Should we focus on cruisers to scour the trade lanes in the event of war? Are submarines, destroyers, and torpedoes worth our time? Is there anything in particular we ought to build right now, or should be build a nest egg for when research begins to pay off? Bear in mind, building a battleship is about a two-year endeavor.

That decision also influences our research priorities. Should we change any of them for now?

research

Finally, finances and diplomacy. Tensions are low right now, and our budget is in near-perfect balance. At 6%, our research spending is a little low. It might be wise to increase that, as ships come off the ways and money becomes available.

finances

That’s all for this first update. This being Christmas week, I’ll plan to do the next update the first Thursday in 2020.

Some brief thoughts on game design: make the player earn it

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Among the many things parvusimperator and I chat about on our coffee breaks at work are video games, and in particular those we’re playing at any given moment. For me, for now, that’s BattleTech, the recent turn-based entry by BattleTech (the miniatures wargame) creator Jordan Weisman. For parvusimperator, it’s been Resident Evil 2 2, PS4 boogaloo. That is, the recent Resident Evil 2 remake1. The two are very different games, but in the end, they do make the player earn it.

BattleTech: mercenary life, paycheck-to-paycheck edition

In BattleTech-the-setting, mercenary companies are undisputably the coolest way to play. The meta-story around the battles writes itself—dragging damaged mechs back to the dropship, patching them up as best you can, sending them out again to pay the bills.

A lot of BattleTech-the-setting PC games have only partially delivered on this promise in the past. The majority of them have been mech-piloting games rather than mech-management games, which makes it more difficult to come up with an AI that properly challenges the players. Too, it takes a more serious masochist to pilot a degraded mech in first-person than it does to manage some other poor shmuck doing the driving.

BattleTech, on the other hand, leads hard into the mercenary-life-is-painful trope. Not quite as much as Battle Brothers, but not too far behind it, either. In particular, early in the game, you’ll find yourself barely getting by, scrabbling for easy money wherever you can come across it, and cursing the moments when your intel misses some key piece of information about the strength of the opposition.

Eventually, things get better. You hire a few more mech pilots, so that losing one to injury doesn’t put you so far behind the curve. You salvage a few more mechs2, so you can field more weapons or sub in a B lance if your A lance is in for repairs. I’m in the early midgame now, and have a few months of salary cushion and close to a second lance. Things are still tight, though, and unlikely to get very much less tight until I can bulldoze missions with maximum firepower. One or two bad drops, and I’ll be right back where I was, only getting along by the skin of my teeth.

What you get over time is resilience—the game itself doesn’t get any easier, but setbacks get smaller proportional to what you’ve attained.

Resident Evil 2: the cool toys are for closers

My thoughts on this one are less my own and more parvusimperator’s transcribed, but he’s working on defense commentary articles, and we all want him to keep working on those, so here we are.

I’d wager that many of the people playing the Resident Evil 2 remake have fond memories of Resident Evil 2 the original. The other side of the coin is that those same people remember how Resident Evil 2 went. So, in addition to the variations present in the original (that you can play from the perspective of both main characters), it adds a few more wrinkles, which I’ll leave parvusimperator to expand upon in a comment, if he wants3.

Eventually, after you’ve beaten the game with a given character in a given manner, you can go back and play with all the toys from the get-go, infinite ammo, and suchlike things. You know, how you would approach a zombie thing if you knew one was coming, rather than (like the characters) you’re surprised by it.

What you get over time is ease—the game gives you tools to beat it more readily.

Conclusion: winning easily is more fun if it was hard at first

In both games, the end result is positive feedback loops. Play well? The game makes it easier for you to win later. Put another way, the difficulty curve is a hill: it starts on an upslope and ends on a downslope.

“I should make my game easier just as people are getting better at it” sounds like a questionable design choice, but it makes a lot of sense in both cases. In BattleTech, the change in difficulty curve is subtler, but important nevertheless. If the game was so finely tuned that no matter how impressive a mercenary company you put together, you’re always just barely getting by, it wouldn’t feel at all rewarding.

In Resident Evil 2, the change is more obvious. “Here’s infinite ammo!” is not sneaky. At the same time, though, it makes sense. Why are you replaying the game? Because you enjoyed it the first time through, and want to see it again. Do you want to do things the survival horror way? Maybe you don’t. After you’ve seen it how you were supposed to, the game ceases to care if you want to play outside the boundaries.

So there you have it4. Make your game get harder at first, then sneakily (or not, depending on your goals) easier later on, so that your players can properly experience gaining mastery.

  1. I’m going to bury this tidbit to see how closely he reads my articles: Resident Evil 3 is reportedly getting the same treatment. ↩
  2. And that’s your only option. Nobody sells fully-functioning mechs—why would they? They’re difficult or impossible to make. If you have a working one, you keep it. If it breaks down and you can’t fix it, you sell the bits on and use the money to buy bits to repair your other mechs. ↩
  3. There’s a lot of creativity in how many New Game+ options you have. ↩
  4. It’s something I’ve been thinking about with respect to tabletop RPG design, too, and why perfect balance is not necessarily desirable. If you get more powerful, but your foes also do at exactly the same rate, what have you accomplished but for reskinning the fight against six rats at the very start of the campaign? ↩

Fishbreath Plays: Armored Brigade Review

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As the annual treachery of daylight saving’s close casts its pall over Many Words HQ here in Western Pennsylvania, we turn our attention to another hilly part of the world of somewhat greater interest to wargamers and the broader defense affairs community: the Fulda Gap.

Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm is my current recommendation for the definitive Cold War armored combat command experience. Can Armored Brigade unseat it? Read on to find out!

Continue reading →

Parvusimperator Reviews: Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

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Remaking movies is a terrible, terrible idea. Remaking video games can be a great idea, and Resident Evil 2 is a good example of a remake done right. The original was made in 1998 on the original playstation, featuring PSX graphics, fixed perspective cameras, and the sort of “tank controls”1 that only die hard purists and masochists enjoy.

Modernizing the game was done with the help of the engine from Resident Evil 7, giving modern controls and excellent modern graphics. Interestingly, and unlike Resident Evil 7, the remake of Resident Evil 2 has a third-person perspective. It’s a well done third person, and I’m ok with that.

Some of the structure of Resident Evil 2 remains intact. You can choose between one of two characters, Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield for your playthrough of the story, and then you can opt to play as the other character for a complimentary story. Leon and Claire have some different boss fights, different weapons, different collectibles, go through different areas, and even work with different NPC helpers. There’s plenty of replay value to be had here.

There’s more fun to be had in the extra modes. There’s The 4th Survivor, which changes the formula by giving you an inventory full of weapons and healing items, but has nothing for you to pick up to restock with. Then there are some DLC scenarios which add some new zombie types, lootable backpacks, explosive backpacks, and vending machines. The vending machines are a neat twist, with each one featuring three items, but you can only pick one of them.

If you’re a fan of survival horror, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.

  1. Amusingly, while I love tanks almost as much as the Stavka, I do not enjoy classic Resident Evil “tank controls” at all. ↩

Parvusimperator Reviews: Ace Combat 7

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My first flight gaming love was, like that of many youngsters, something very arcade-y. Namely: Rogue Squadron. Recently, I decided to return to my arcadey roots and pick up Ace Combat 7, the latest entry in a series that I had last played on the Playstation 2.

To repeat, this is an Arcade Flight Game (TM). Your plane carries over one hundred missiles, and you’ll have targets for all of them. If you’re expecting realism, go look up some DCS reviews.

Ace Combat 7 is set in the fun Namco-created world called “Strangereal” which was probably made by someone cutting an existing world map into pieces and then playing around with them. All the country names are fake and any resemblance to actual countries is purely coincidental by design. So we don’t have to argue about how many planes some country really has. Oh, and everybody gets to mix types, because engaging a flight of Tu-160s escorted by Mirage 2000-5s is awesome. You also have a big tree of unlockable aircraft and parts to buy with points earned from missions. Those missions are graded, of course.

The missions themselves are a pretty solid grab bag of types, though the escort ones are a hot mess. Par for the course, really: escort missions are always made of suck. Missions where you have lots of targets to destroy are a good time, as expected. There are also a few missions where you have to work on your target identification. You won’t know whether a target is hostile or not until you get close enough for positive identification. Shades of Vietnam there. And of course, there are ‘boss fights’ with either giant enemies with lots of sub-components or fancy plot armor. Again, nothing too fancy or out of the ordinary.

Overall, Ace Combat 7 is an excellent entry in a field that doesn’t have a lot of recent games. If you like lobbing lots of missiles at things, give this one a try. It’s loads of fun.

Uncharted Questions

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A classic question for fans of the PS3 was “What’s your favorite Uncharted game?” Back then there were 3. Of course, we also have a PS Vita entry and the fantastic finale on the PS4. Today, I’ll look at the original questions. I love Uncharted 4 to death, but it has a huge leg up on the rest, being on a newer console with notably better graphics and an improved engine.

Of course, we have engine improvements in Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 as well, but they’re all on the same hardware, so it’s something we can adjust a little better for. Uncharted 3 has the nicest unarmed combat system, featuring attacks, blocks/counterattacks, and grabs. It also lets you throw grenades back. Of course, this ended up leading to a ton of grenade spam fights, and that’s honestly entirely too obnoxious. There are also a number of really frustrating encounters, moreso than in either Uncharted 1 or Uncharted 2. Uncharted 3 also loads up on the gimmicky characters that take away the efficacy of some of your toys. It has the highest number of fights that I found annoying.

From a story standpoint, Uncharted 3 also has story issues stemming from a rewrite necessitated by Graham McTavish, the voice actor for Charlie Cutter, getting a significant role in The Hobbit. This ended up pulling him out of the production of Uncharted 3, forcing a number of story changes. Part of the reason I play the Uncharted games is for the story, and this doesn’t help things.

I really want to love Uncharted 2, because it has some of my favorite set pieces. But it also has a super obnoxious boss fight, and that is some bullshit. And then there’s this guy.

Jeff. Elena’s cameraman. His role in the story is to prove that Nate loves Elena, and then to get out of the way. By dying. After being shot but not before you have to endure an excruciatingly aggravating sequence where you have to carry Jeff through a running gun battle. Have fun trying to play a cover shooter when you can’t use cover. In the finest tradition of Galaxy Quest, we can see that Jeff’s only role is to die to prove that the situation Nate’s love for Elena is serious because he doesn’t have a last name.1 We know everyone else’s last name.

It’s also one of the less well done parts of the game, frankly. I get that Elena is Nate’s true love. And I get that they’re right for each other. Sure. But the way that gets presented in Uncharted 2 isn’t all that great. Honestly, Chloe seems like the better choice for most of that game. It would have been better to explore Elena’s character more. More time building that, less time carrying some idiot who’s going to die in the next scene.

Uncharted 1 has the least graphical polish, and the least nice fight mechanics, but the best story by far. Really the only annoyance is the sixaxis system, which is forced into it as an early PS3 title. While these are annoying, they’re not a huge deal, and it’s the one problem that gets completely rectified in the Uncharted HD Collection. Fixed grenade controls make Uncharted 1 a joy.

And of course, the other reason to leave out Uncharted 4 is that it’s really the best of the lot. Better controls, nice combat, stunning vistas, and a fun story.

  1. Apparently you can find one in the asset files if you dig around in the HD collection on PS4, but those are hardly called out in the narrative/dialog/anywhere you might actually notice. ↩

Parvusimperator Reviews: Marvel’s Spider-Man

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I am sick to the back teeth of giant ensemble cast superhero movies, and I’ve played a ton of bad superhero games in my youth. For a game to stand out, it needs to be amazing. Spectacular, even. Insomniac Games has stepped up with their take on everyone’s favorite web-slinging hero in Marvel’s Spider-Man.

Things the game does right: damn near everything. First, pitfalls avoided. It’s not a rehash of the origin story, thank God and Stan Lee. We’ve got a somewhat-experienced Peter Parker here who doesn’t have to “learn how to be Spider-Man” for the millionth time. It’s not a redo of any other story either. They’ve gone and made their own story for you to enjoy.

Let’s talk about that story some more. It is brand new, but it checks all of the boxes that you would expect from a Spider-Man story. We’ve got complications. We’ve got good characters who are going to TURN BAD. We’ve got touching moments with MJ. We’ve got financial woes. We’ve got perpetual tardiness. We’ve got Spidey Quips. We’ve got famous villains that you know and love to hate. We’ve got J. Jonah Jameson (now with a radio show) calling you a MENACE and accusing you of being in cahoots with various evildoers. We even have a cameo appearance from the late Stan Lee himself. And there’s a brassy, awesome soundtrack that feels very ‘comic book movie’.

Being a Spider-Man game, this is set in New York City, and the devs at Insomniac did a great job of giving you a lovingly recreated Manhattan to play in. Thanks to modern processing power, you can web swing from Harlem to Wall Street without any loading screens. There are tons of recognizable New York City landmarks for you to see, plus a whole bunch of appropriate Marvel landmarks, like Avengers Tower. And you get around via web-swinging, which is the right mix of simple controls, dynamism, and just a bit of imprecision to be tremendous fun. It’s very easy to get the hang of, and it looks right out of a good Spider-Man movie.

On to combat! Combat feels like a somewhat more refined version of what we see in the Arkham games. More refined in the sense that Spidey’s gadgets are a lot better integrated into the fighting. It’s a lot easier to select gadgets, and they fit into your other attack and evasion work really nicely. Another nice feature is the combo bar. Fill it, and you get a finishing move, but you can also use it to replenish your health.

I would also like to praise the randomized minor crime mechanic. In each section of Manhattan, there are various factions who might do some crimes like try to hijack an armored truck. And, of course, you can go stop them. The timers are such that I never felt that I was overwhelmed by crime, or had somehow gone back to pre-Giuliani New York. Plus, after you stop a set number of crimes (five per faction, usually) those stop. Which is nice, because I get really sick when those become never-ending like the dragon encounters in Skyrim.

And now, things I don’t like. Happily, it’s a short list. First, there are sidequests that seem to require more precision in the web-swinging than the system is capable of delivering, which makes them a giant pain. Those quests were both frustrating and verisimilitude-breaking, as I felt like some sort of useless tetherball, not an amazing superhero. Happily, those quests are both few and number and entirely optional. The other annoying bits are the parts where you’re playing as Peter Parker (i.e. not costumed) and you have to walk around between cutscenes. With the exception of the bits in the lab, where there are plenty of things to mess around with, these felt entirely superfluous. Just work it into one cutscene, guys. It’s ok.

Overall though, it’s a great game. Highly recommended.

Fishbreath Plays: Sengoku Jidai: Shadow of the Shogun

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The clunkily-named Sengoku Jidai: Shadow of the Shogun is, at its core, a turn-based tactical wargame set on the battlefields of Asia during the Sengoku period, developed by Byzantine Games and published by Slitherine.

That sells it short, though.

The Sengoku period is a fascinating time in Japanese history, familiar to anyone who’s played a Total War game with ‘Shogun’ in the title. Competing daimyo fought for the title of shogun, de facto ruler of Japan. Usefully, at least for wargame designers, it was a century or so of near-constant war.

Sengoku Jidai has a number of expansions which extend it well beyond Japan in the 16th century, to China and Korea in the same era, all the way back to Japan in the 12th and 13th centuries. With the exception of gunpowder, warfare in those eras was broadly similar, so I won’t make too much of the differences. (Also, my interest in the era mainly runs toward the Sengoku period, and that’s what I’ve played extensively, so I’ll stick with talking about it.)

Gameplay

I can’t find a solid source to confirm or deny that the battlefield rules in Sengoku Jidai are based on a tabletop wargaming system, but it feels like they could be. They’re clean and simple.

Movement is on a square grid. Combat is pretty mathy, but comes down to Points of Advantage which affect the result, and which are gained or lost based on many of your typical wargame conditions. (Think spears against horses, rough terrain and disorder, morale, and so on.) Turning units is hard, as is shifting them long distances; they’re fairly slow, and 45-degree turns are about as much as you can manage without running out of action points. Units outside of their generals’ command range are even less mobile, an unusual but sensible design choice. Rather than stack up more combat modifiers, generals simply yield a more flexible, better-coordinated force. Works for me.

When units get into melee combat, they usually stay there for a few turns, wearing each other down and slowly inflicting losses until someone breaks. Once units get into close combat, you lose control over them, and even if your unit routs its opponent, you may not get control back—units automatically pursue routers, and may charge enemies in their paths.

There are good tutorials, both in the sense of tutorial missions and in the sense of tutorial popups explaining events as they happen, and between those and the elegance of the rules, it’s easy to get to grips with the system and start with the generalship.

Finally, for the cost of entry, you get a random map generator, a random battle generator, some historical scenarios, and some dynamic campaigns (simple ones, but enough to contextualize battles). Even the base game gets you the Sengoku Jidai campaigns and the Imjin War, I believe. If you enjoy the gunpowder- and artillery-heavy armies of the latter, I’d recommend picking up the Mandate of Heaven DLC, too, which buys you expanded Chinese factions and four more dynamic campaigns.

Presentation

I don’t have a lot to say here. The sounds are competent but uninspired, though the music is pleasantly atmospheric. The unit graphics are little groups of men and horses, more in the vein of counters than anything else. The landscapes are quite pretty, to the extent that they can be given the square grid they have to fit, and have a whiff of Japanese landscape painting about them in color palette and design.

One notable trouble spot is the lack of anti-aliasing, which is a bother for a game featuring spearmen aplenty. Another is that units don’t shrink as you batter them. A 1500-man unit of yari ashigaru looks the same at full strength as it does after losing 600 men, the only difference being a more tattered flag. As far as I’m aware, there’s no game mechanic which requires easy knowledge of a unit’s original size, so I count this as a flaw.

Verisimilitude

If you’ve read any of my previous wargame reviews, you’ll probably remember that verisimilitude is just about my favorite word in this kind of article. The point of a wargame is not to simulate every arrow and every man down to the smallest wound. The point of a wargame is to evoke a sense of place.

So, what is evocative about Sengoku Jidai’s gameplay? What puts me in the mindset of a field commander in 16th-century Asia?

First: deployment is crucial. On the scale of a battlefield, infantry is slow. Even cavalry takes a while to get where you want it. If you deploy your main body poorly, you can easily lose a battle you should have won. If you deploy your main body well, taking advantage of the terrain and the strengths of your units, you can win battles you might otherwise have lost.

Second: loss of control is rapid. Once the lines crash together, the outcome is largely out of your hands, except insofar as you contribute to key points with flanking maneuvers. As the general in command of an army, your responsibility is to deploy your forces well and, on the approach, meet weak points in the enemy’s deployment with strength. That seems accurate to me.

Like all the best wargames, when I get into the groove, it doesn’t feel like a game, in spite of the tabletop feeling of the rules. I give it my recommendation.

Miscellaneous

It’s available on Steam, but doesn’t work with Steam Play/Proton/Wine on my Mint 19.1 system, and as far as I know, doesn’t have high-DPI support.

Wargames I Would Play: Civil War Operational Logistics

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As regular readers may remember, I’m slowly slogging my way through Shelby Foote’s Civil War, and I’m struck by how little most Civil War wargames resemble the battles recounted therein, in two different ways.

First: movements in the field were often dictated by logistical concerns: I’m at the end of a tenuous supply line, and Jeb Stuart just cut it; Vicksburg is supplied over the railroad from Jackson, and Grant just captured Jackson. Wargames usually abstract supply to ‘in supply’ or ‘out of supply’, without regard to combat and noncombat supplies. It was entirely possible for an army to have plenty of food but no ammunition or vice versa, and in fact it was frequently thus. Wagons, horses and mules, forage for same, and rations or foraging for the soldiers were daily concerns.

Nor do the Civil War wargames I’ve played fully emphasize the crucial importance of railroads and river control. A torn-up railroad in your backfield wasn’t a minor inconvenience, it was a critical problem which could derail (ha) an entire offensive. Supply dumps were important, but so were the routes by which those supplies reached the front. See also Grant’s first few moves at Chattanooga.

Second: an army commander’s interactions with his troops were almost entirely through his corps commanders. He might shuffle a division from place to place, detaching it from one corps to reinforce another, but he generally wouldn’t dictate exactly how each division was supposed to be arrayed. His communications with his corps commanders would also often be over insecure or unreliable channels—letters entrusted to couriers, telegraph lines, or runners on the battlefield. His corps commanders might misapprehend his instructions, or those instructions might be rendered irrelevant or impossible to follow by changing circumstances or bad maps.

So, could a wargame simulate some of these snags? I think so, with some combination of the following features. I might work on this some myself, or leave it as an exercise for the enterprising reader. Either way, I lay no claim to any of the ideas here.

Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg is the obvious grand campaign for a game with a logistics focus: it lasted longer than any other in the war while taking place along one of the most interesting theaters in history, the Mississippi River.

Unreliable Maps

Unreliable maps are so common in war, and such a linchpin for the other features implied by the above and laid out below, that it’s surprising that no wargame I’m aware of has done them.

The primary kind of unreliability in the Civil War is missing features: maps which don’t show certain roads or certain impassable terrain features. Ultimately, this is just a different kind of fog of war, eliminated not by simply moving into it, but by dedicated scouting and mapping. It also seems to require different levels of fog of war, to represent easy or difficult features to uncover.

In the Mississippi campaign, Grant wasted a bunch of time on various canal-digging and river-diverting projects, in large part because his maps were no substitute for detailed local knowledge. Only by attempting those projects and failing at them did he eventually come to some workable solutions.

Detailed Terrain and River Systems

In the Mississippi campaign, high-resolution elevation data and a river level simulation are all but requirements, and probably the hardest part of doing a good wargame of this sort.

In the 1860s, the Father of Waters rose and fell with the rains and the seasons. A canal dug in November might overflow its banks when the spring flood comes, as the surrounding countryside floods too. A river passable by ironclad in late April might be entirely unnavigable by steamboats in late August. The ever-shifting terrain of the Mississippi basin makes for a fascinating battlefield, and one that isn’t ordinarily well-represented by wargames.

Detailed Supply

The wargame I picture is driven much less by combat than by supply. You can get away, then, with abstracting combat pretty heavily. (See below.) I don’t think you can get away with abstracting supply as much as usual. At the same time, you don’t want to get too deeply into the weeds. Some items you probably want to track separately:

  • Food: either bring it with you in your train, or forage from the countryside around you. The latter option requires constant motion, or else you run out.
  • Forage: distinct from food for the troops, forage is food for your army’s beasts of burden. It comes up a lot in Foote’s history. If you don’t have forage, you have trouble moving your train as well as your artillery.
  • Ammunition (small arms and artillery): you probably don’t need to track ammunition with more granularity than the foregoing parenthetical.
  • Environmental supplies: winter coats and boots, tents, and the like. Less a problem for the Union. More a problem for the Confederates.

You probably also should track things like pontoon bridges separately—their lateness to the battle was what torpedoed Burnside’s crack at Lee. (Well, that and Burnside’s decision to go ahead with an attack after it was no longer a surprise.)

Weak Command

An army commander’s experience in the field was generally limited to watching from a headquarters, receiving reports from the field, and hearing (or failing to hear) subordinates engaging in battle.

The extent of his command, too, was limited: ensuring subordinates are in the right place, ordering attacks at a given time, and shuffling divisions around.

I think the Command Ops approach is a reasonable one for a game of this sort, though likely with even greater obstacles between the commands you give and their execution by the troops. Your runners might be captured or killed, and in most cases your orders will move at the speed of horse. If a corps of yours gets into action elsewhere on the field, you may not even know about it before you get reports saying they’ve retreated. Certainly you’ll have a hard time exercising much direct command in battle.

Conclusion

The question, then, is would a game like this be enjoyable to play? It’s hard to say. Command Ops manages to make order delays fun, but I’m not so sure that they would stay fun when your duties are primarily ordering people to capture, repair, or tear up railroads, and you rarely have very much direct control over the course of a battle.

Like I said, I don’t have the time to make this a reality, not even at the prototype stage, so history may never know the answer to the question above. Still, I think it would make for a fresh and interesting take on simulations of the Civil War.

Parvusimperator Reviews Yakuza 6

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I picked this up mostly because I heard from a couple friends that this series was great. I only found out after the fact that it might have made more sense to start with the prequel Yakuza 0. No matter. I have Yakuza 6 and that’s where I started the series. So what do I think?

I love Yakuza 6.

There, that’s out of the way. Now, let’s get down to the why. Yakuza 6 is one part soap opera about criminals, one part fantastic beat-’em-up, and one part sort-of-open-world game. Let’s look at each of those.

The story is very much dramatic soap opera. I don’t speak Japanese, so I’m doing a lot of reading of subtitles. I don’t really mind. I think the story is loads of fun, mostly because it’s so different. It does have a bit of an anime feel to it in the ‘awesome drama trumps some realism’ department, but that’s ok. If you want to skip the cutscenes, you can. You’re missing out on some great story though. Just because it’s a little stylistically different doesn’t mean it isn’t well written. And fun. It’s lots of fun.

I also want to take a moment to commend Yakuza 6 for doing a great job of bringing someone totally new to the series up to speed with a minimum of fuss. And I didn’t feel like I was being lectured to. That’s rare.

Combat is pretty fantastic. There are some combos, but they’re pretty simple. It doesn’t feel like an old-school fighting game with giant lists of button press sequences to memorize. What sets Yakuza 6 apart from say, the Arkham games, is that the environment is full of weapons for you to use. There’s a lot of fun in picking up random things and beating your foes with them. Plus, there’s a “Heat Mode” which lets you power up, punch with awesome blue flames, and use larger blunt objects to smash people in the face. Things like mopeds.

There are also a good number of cool unlockable moves. Not so much that it ever felt grindy, but you can definitely unlock some fun extras.

Yakuza 6 has some open world elements in that there are a lot of optional sidequests and minigames that you can do. Some of these can get annoying, so it’s good to space them out. However, I never found them to be anything but fun. I think my favorite was running around trying to befriend stray cats by feeding them. Or perhaps the spearfishing rail-shooter minigame. In any case, these are all nicely optional.

Overall, there’s a good, fun story, an excellent combat system, and a solid grab bag of minigames. I give it a thumbs up. Definitely worth the asking price.