Chapter 2 - How to Play Wargames - Overcoming Math Anxiety

The most efficient way to approach it is by analysis. This does not involve a lot of mathematics or numbers crunching. It's simply a question of knowing what to look for. The things you look for are "adjusted ratios."

Since any game is a question of numbers, to analyze the game you can perform three or four basic calculations.

The first one you want to collect is the total combat strength of the two sides. This will not be as easy as it sounds because in many games there are reinforcing units so you must adjust the number of strength points to the number of game turns that each strength point is in the game. The easiest way to do this is to simply multiply each strength point by the number of turns it will be in the game (you assume the unit will not get destroyed, but we'll get into that later).

Game Turn	# units	Raw Str	Str x Movement	# units	Raw Str	Str x Movement
1.	20	57	415	12	24	155
2.	20	57	415	15	37	265
3.	20	57	415	18	51	335
4.	24	74	585	19	55	355
5.	25	75	590	21	65	455
6.	25	75	590	25	81	535
7.	26	77	600	26	87	595
8.	29	86	680	28	92	620
9.	29	86	680	28	92	620
10.	31	90	700	28	92	620
11.	31	90	700	31	103	695
12.	31	90	700	31	103	695
13.	32	92	710	31	103	695
14.	32	92	710	33	110	750
15.	32	92	710	33	110	750
16.	32	92	710	33	110	750
17.	32	92	710	34	114	770
18.	33	94	720	34	114	770

Str = Combat strength. Chart shows cumulative number of units in game each turn as well as total combat strength with and without adjustment for movement ability.

This, strangely enough, will give you numbers for the two sides that are not too dissimilar. If the numbers are quite different this is probably mitigated by other elements such as terrain or, perhaps, an enormous discrepancy early in the game (meaning that at that point many of the defender's units would be almost automatically destroyed) or other elements having to do with the set-up of the game and so forth. As this game proceeds, the Germans are forced to attack in order to achieve their victory conditions. As always, the defense is easier than the offense and, as the Americans get much stronger

as the game goes on, eventually it is the Germans who are at a large disadvantage.

If you really want to get into it, you can extend this analysis to a turn-by-turn basis. Indeed, many of the techniques I am describing here are the ones I use in designing games. When I play them, I must confess, I tend to play them as a historian. As with many gamers, I use the games to gain an insight into a situation, not to improve my won/lost record.

In addition to being modified by the number of turns a unit is present in the game, combat strength is altered by other elements (primarily the Terrain Effects Chart, or the type of terrain the defender would be in). At this point, your analysis will not be so cut and dried since the player who is defending may choose to defend any number of places. It is up to you to examine the defender's situation and, in light of the victory conditions and the lay of the land, determine what the most likely defending positions would be. The average of their additional advantage to the defense would then be added to the amount of strength you have already calculated for the defender.

Not all games are that simple. In fact, the games that are most in need of this type of analysis often have other complications such as weapons that fire over a number of hexes or games in which air power and naval power are also included. Other elements which complicate your life are games with command control rules (the player is not in complete control of all of his units all of the time) or rules for such things as disease (units will more or less randomly disappear as a result of disease or other types of noncombat attrition). It is things such as this that keep the games from becoming stereotyped. As you can see, a player can devote considerable time to the studying and analyzing of a game as a game. However, no matter how much you analyze the game from a technical point of view, you are still analyzing the historical situation since, when the designer put these pieces together, he was doing it consciously (or unconsciously, as the case may be) with the intention of achieving a desired historical result with what seemed the appropriate historical effects. Any good game, by definition, will not only have a historical outcome, but also will use historical effects to achieve that result.

Analyzing the value of a unit when the unit's capabilities are more than simply a number printed on it is the same type of problem that has faced military commanders throughout history. To give you a current example, you have the problem of determining whether American or German or Russian tanks are superior to one another. None of the tanks have in common any one factor which will guarantee accurate prediction of the tank's relative strength over another tank. There are several major elements: mobility, armor protection, fire control, effectiveness of the

main gun, size, tactical deployment, mechanical reliability, etc. The contemporary military, faced with this problem, have no better techniques to solve their problem than you have to solve yours. Note that several wargames on the 1991 Iraq war were designed and published before the coalition counteroffensive commenced on January 17th, 1991. I was involved with one of these games (Arabian Nightmares) and that game did accurately resolve the problem of whose tanks were better and to what extent.

To sort out all the possibilities in a game on a battle not yet fought (as in Arabian Nightmares, which was completed by early October, 1990) you simply play the prototype game to evaluate the various elements in the game. Before you start, you take the latest historical information (that is, anything that has happened up to the present) and assume that the troops won't perform much differently tomorrow. Of course, this gets shakier if you are fighting a battle ten or more years in the future. But when we were doing Arabian Nightmares, we knew where the coalition and Iraqi forces were in terms of track record and capabilities.

This still leaves the problems of how new technologies have changed the way these future battles will be fought. A game set in World War I (where radio communications were scarce and air power weak) would have to deal with the situation differently than in World War II (where both items were much improved). The 1990s brought us satellite communications, precision bombing and invulnerable US tanks. What we had to do was figure out what effect the new technologies had on the standard wargame elements (combat power and mobility, for starters).

To sort all this out you simply make some top of the head estimates, put together the prototype game and then play it to determine which elements was critical and to what degree. While you are going through this trial and error process, you constantly rank the critical elements in order of criticality. Eventually it falls into place. In the case of Arabian Nightmares, it fell into place within two weeks. The game worked, and it works the same way whether you are using a historical event or a future that you had to write a projected history for.

This trial and error method is one of the main attractions of wargames. It's what I call the puzzle-solving attraction. You are initially interested for the historical situation. The game explains some of the historical situation, but it also tends to uncover even more questions than it answers. For example, a game involving tanks leaves the players wide latitude in determining what combination of tanks and other weapons will be the most effective. You analyze as much as you can, but the remaining questions can be answered only through play.