Subject: [Consim-l] NATO hybrid game experiment From: "John Best" Date: Thu, February 23, 2012 11:12 pm Dear Wargamers, From time to time I like to create what I've referred to as "hybrid" games, by taking elements from different games (counters, maps, some rules, and other mechanisms) and mashing them up to create an effect that I'm looking for. I'm especially likely to do this when the playing of some particular game tickles my imagination for whatever reason, and makes me wonder what might happen if I tweaked things a little. In the case at hand, it was my playing of the old Jagdpanther game "Warsaw Pact" (which I wrote about in 2011) that got me to thinking about logistics and supply in WWIII games. Warsaw Pact was originally published in Jagdpanther #14, July, 1976. To start this hybridization up, I took the counters and basic rules from the old SPI game "NATO" (1973). I set them up on the map from the S&T #220 (Jan/Feb. 2004) game "Group of Soviet Forces: Germany" (GSFG), which itself is presented as a "remake" of NATO. (Just as an interesting aside: the existence of GSFG seems to suggest that 31 years after "NATO" we were still interested in the military possibilities of something that had never happened, and wasn't going to happen. I suppose it's no worse than all those Harry Turtledove books). Here are some points regarding the set-up process before I go on to talk about some of the other conditions of the hybrid game (and if the whole concept strikes you as a bizarre Frankenstein type of experiment rather than being a "real" wargame, I understand. If that's you, you might not want to read any more of this; it gets pretty strange.) 1.. Setting up: you can actually "recalibrate" the hex grid from the NATO map onto the GSFG map pretty easily, and find the corresponding set up hex from NATO. This is because in certain ways, the GSFG reproduces some of the exact relationships from the NATO map. For example, Hamburg consists of exactly the same number of hexes, arranged in exactly the same relationship to each other, on both maps. You'll have to fudge a couple of locations because the GSFG map doesn't extend as far north or south as the NATO map. There also are not enough territorial units to fully "staff" all the city hexes as required in the NATO rules, because the redesigned map (GSFG) has so many more city hexes than the original NATO map has. 2.. It's kind of shocking to see how the initial set up looks. Far from having overwhelming force at the start, the Pact really has much less force available than NATO has! In fact, it's not until Turn 4 of a 25 turn game before the Pact has a much combat strength on the board that NATO has at the start. To adjust for this, I used a die roll to "mobilize" NATO units. NATO units are automatically mobilized in the turn following their contact or attack by a Pact unit. For all other units on the map, they are mobilized by rolling a single D6 and hitting the game turn or less. So for example, on game turn 2, each NATO unit rolls for mobilization at the beginning of its turn, on a roll of 1 or 2, the unit is mobilized, and can move and participate in attacks. Once mobilized, the unit stays mobilized. Supply units are exempt from this die roll process (they can move from the start of the game, in their second movement impulse, as per the NATO rules. In the original NATO, the Czech units are not allowed to leave Czechoslovakia, but I decided to let them come out and play in West Germany. I also decided that there would be no tactical nukes, no Chinese intervention for the Soviets to worry about, no NATO nations ditching out of the alliance, and no political unreliability from any of the Pact units. In setting up the game this way, I wanted to eliminate as many of the variables that could affect the outcome as I could, in order to isolate and study the effect of one variable. And that main variable that I wanted to study was supply, specifically, Warsaw Pact supply. In the original NATO game, both the Pact units and most NATO units must trace a supply line (that is, a path of hexes free of all the typical impediments to supply) to a slow-moving supply counter. This part of the supply process was limited by length-6 movement points from the unit to the supply counter for the Pact and 8 movement points for NATO units. The supply counter itself must then be able to trace supply back to a supply source (usually a hex on one side or the other of the demarcation line between W. and E. Germany). The kind of two-step supply process is something that is familiar to all of us I'm sure, although I hadn't quite realized that this mechanism is as old as it is (almost 40 years old). Supply comes into play to enable full movement (everybody has two movement phases), attack, and defense. In NATO, the supply counter seems to represent an amalgamated dump of ammo, other munitions, POL and maybe even food. Here's how it works: To move, the Pact unit must trace to a supply counter in range. In combat, if a Pact unit simply traces to a supply counter in range, it can attack, but only at half strength. If the Pact unit wants to attack at full strength, it can do so by tracing to a supply counter within range, but at the end of the combat phase, that supply counter is removed from the board. If you were counting on that supply counter to supply your guys for their second movement phase, you are out of luck. And if NATO comes attacking in their phase, which they will, you are out of luck again without any traceable supply for defense. And the supply counters are really slow moving too; it takes a long time to get one up to the front lines, especially as the Pact advances. So as the Pact player, you need to think in terms of two supply counters, one to enable full movement allowance, and a second nearby one to possibly burn for full combat strength. I should also mention that you can really ramp up your attack as the Pact player and get double the combat strength on your units, but only if they are actually adjacent to a supply counter (not just in range), which is then consumed at the end of the combat phase. In the hybrid game I played, I kept all of these elements, and added one more: Instead of the possibly infinitely long trace in the second step of the supply process, I stipulated that the Pact (but not NATO) had to trace supply from one supply counter to another supply counter in range, (that is, within a range of 6 movement points) thus creating a daisy chain of supply counters back to East Germany. I wanted to see what would happen if the Pact had to create and operate within a logistical network that would function like a pipeline system, instead of functioning simply like a slow-moving conveyor belt of consumable supplies (although the hybrid game still had that effect too). In addition to these effects, I borrowed a concept similar to the "friction point" concept that appeared in the SPI WWIII games "Hof Gap", "Fifth Corps", and perhaps other games. In the original NATO game, the counters were not backprinted; there were no step losses, and the CRT offered basically Avalon-Hill derived "whole hex" results (like "DE" "Exchange", that sort of thing). Instead, in my hybrid game I used step loss markers to lower the unit's combat strength by one for each hit point taken on the CRT. For example, a Soviet front line tank division has an attack-defense-movement rating of 5-2-6. If the unit takes a hit in combat, it becomes a 4-1-6. The next hit lowers it to a 3-1-6. No unit's defense strength was ever reduced below 1 by combat, but each unit had as many hit points as its single largest combat value (whether that was attack or defense). For the 1-2-8 units (of which the NATO allies have a few), this meant that they have only two steps, and that their first loss would reduce them to a 0-1-8 unit, but I thought that was ok. Finally, I thought I needed a very noisy, hit-intensive CRT to go along with this system. I looked no further than the CRT from The Gamers WWI game, Operation Michael. Oh, and I also put a little replacement point schedule in the game too: Both the Pact and NATO could roll a single D6 for replacements beginning with Turn 4. Each pip on the die represented a strength point loss on an eligible unit that could be built back up again. For NATO, at least of the available points rolled each turn had to be spent pulling guys back out of the dead pile. The other half of the available points could be spent on units on the board, and could be spent on units in a ZOC. For the Pact, the repple points could be used only to rebuild units that had been pulled out of the line, and were not in a ZOC. Further, for a Pact unit, once it was dead, it stayed dead and could not be rebuilt. Ok, that's the backstory; now, how did it play? The Pact rolled forward pretty smoothly at first, cutting off Hamburg by the end of turn 3 (6 days of simulated time). NATO was rocked back on its heels for the first 5 turns. At that point I noted that the Pact line was running from west of Bremen down the Weser River to the Fulda Gap, which was being contested. Then the front line ran more or less along the Main-Danube Canal, until it intersected with the Danube and then along the Danube and off the map. The vast majority of the Pact attacks were made with no attack supply, that is, simply attacking at half-strength. This meant that most of the attacks were going off at 2:1 odds, which is simply not a very winning proposition on the Operation Michael CRT, but the Pact was getting more and more guys every turn. The combat became very intensive around turn 8 or so. Let's drop in on my actual "field notes" that I made at the time I was playing: 10/15/2011: Beginning with NATO Turn 8. NATO attacking north of Kassel, some American brigades, plus a German PG division. They attack at 3:1, rolling an "11", D3r1, blowing away an intact Soviet motor-rifle division. Then two American divisions plus the helicopter element of a Tri-Cap division, which has infilitrated around a banged-up Soviet tank and motor rifle stack. Attacking at 3:1, rolling a "10, D3r1, blowing them away after they try to retreat through the ZOC of the helicopters. But a French attack south of Wurzburg fails terribly, and they recoil with losses. The French are definitely getting shot up. But the Soviets don't have that much to throw at them either. Turn 9: Soviets scrape up some units, no supply to attack at full strength, attacking at half strength, on the 2:1 column, rolling a "12" and blowing away an almost intact French mech division!. Then a Dutch division is blown away in Paderborn. Breatkthrough for the Soviets! Finally, the Soviets eliminate a German PG division that has been holding out in Hanover. So, as you can see it was punch and counterpunch through this part of the game. I noted that the Pact was beginning to really put the pressure on NATO, even though only a few attacks (like maybe 5 attacks total) had been made at Normal supply, which consumed the fuel/ammo supply counter. However, the Pact was definitely having a hard time exploiting any breakthrough that they made (the supply net was just not extensive enough to support the second movement phase of very many units.). I played it out to the end of Turn 13. Here's how it looked it terms of losses: Dead pile: Divisional units subdivisional units NATO 6 (12 vic points) 13 (13 vic points) Pact 18 (36 vic points) Losses on board: The Pact had 28 units on the board with at least one hit point; their total on-board losses were 50 hits. There were 25 NATO units on the board with at least one hit, totaling 55 hits. Pretty even in that sense. The Pact also held 19 city hexes that had belonged to NATO (including 7 hexes for Hamburg), so that's 95 more victory points for the Pact. Figuring the victory point total according to the rules, the Pact had a total of 120 victory points minus 36 points for their losses = 84 point differential in the M + 1, conventional scenario means a Warsaw Pact marginal victory at this point. Neither NATO nor the Pact get a lot more reinforcements from here on out, so I don't think the line in Germany is going to change much. The Pact could go back to the Hamburg vicinity and try to get some points by killing off the Danes, but that seemed a little gamey to me. Overall, it was an interesting experiment, but I noted two main problems: 1. The Op. Michael CRT was just too punishing for this game. There weren't enough retreats, and the Pact had a hard time getting better than 2:1 or 3:1 (which is the break-even point on the CRT in terms of attritional combat losses). Also, as we have spoken of before on this list, the Op Michael CRT represented a kind of "experimental" CRT in its own right in the sense that it was very noisy, such that poor die rolling even at reasonably favorable odds (in the vicinity of 4:1) could put a way bigger hit on the attacker than it did on the defender. 2. The replacement roll (one D6) should probably more favorable for NATO than it is for the Pact. After all, NATO's doctrine is the one that was apparently supposed to emphasize battlefield recovery of equipment, and continual replacements to keep units up to strength. So I decided to set the game up again, and retry the hybrid version. But I made some changes for this go-round: 1. For this game, I switched back to the original NATO game map. The NATO map has a lot more hexes to it (in raw terms, NATO has about 39 X 54 = 2106 hexes (minus hexes for Austria, Switzerland, the Baltic Sea, etc). GSFG has about 33 X 44 = 1452 hexes (again, minus some small areas for the CRT, and the turn record track). The initial appearance is a lot different on the original NATO map than it is on the GSFG map: NATO has a much "open" appearance, and the NATO units themselves are farther back from the front line (relatively speaking). I decided I could dispense with the "mobilization" roll I used in the first playing. No doubt, the GSFG map is a lot nicer looking than the old NATO map. 2. I also switched to the CRT from another Gamer's SCS game, Gazala. The Gazala CRT has a lot more retreats than the Operation Michael CRT has, and it's a lot friendlier to the attacker at relatively low odds. It seemed that many attacks were made at 2:1 or 3:1 odds in the first playing, and I thought using the Gazala table might help the Pact out a little more. 3. Also, in resetting the game, I decided to use a supply range of 4 hexes (rather than 6 movement points) for the Soviets. 4. For this version of the game, I also decided that the replacement rate would be a D6 for the Soviets, and a D6+3 < 6 (I thought it seemed reasonable that the NATO replacement network would be better than the Pact one. I'll describe how this version turned out. The Pact came roaring through the Fulda Gap on turn 1, but I noted that even by turn 3, the attenuated range of the supply depots was putting a damper on the Pact's ability to blitz. NATO had begun its counterattacks by turn 4 and was already pushing back in the Fulda Gap area. By turn 5, I had noted that the Pact had already lost something like 27 strength points (although their deadpile losses were minimal) vs. only about 14 NATO strength points. I was thinking then that maybe I had imbalanced the game too far in the NATO direction. By turn 9, the campaign, while still overall very linear, and attritional, had devolved into three separate "clumps" of activity. The composition of the units in these clumps was very predictable too. First, in the north, most of the category 1 Pact forces were pushing against the West Germans, British, Dutch, and Belgian forces. In the middle, around Frankfurt, another, smaller, group of Pact forces was contending against mostly American units (one West German panzer division found itself there, and there was a German supply dump that was responsible for providing attack supply). Finally, along Danube, the Pact forces consisting mostly of Czech, Hungarian and category 2 Russian units fought against the French with German support. These clumps were dictated mostly by the NATO attack supply requirement (they have to have a supply unit of their own nationality in order to have attack supply). And there aren't that many supply units for NATO. The Pact built pressure over the next couple of turns, but the line didn't move much. Here's a quote from my "field notes" again after turn 11. "It's interesting to see how WWI-ish this game is. I'm going to compare the CRT of the actual game to their old game 1918". I actually did that later and found, to my surprise, that the CRT, and the system of NATO is virtually identical to the SPI Operation Michael game of about the same vintage, "1918". That's worth a discussion in its own right, but let's keep moving. By the end of turn 12 (about halfway through the game), there were 31 Pact units on the board that had some number of hit points attached to them (I didn't count the number of hits, but I estimated it at the time to be something like 60 hits.) The Pact had 7 divisions in the dead pile; NATO had one German airborne brigade in the dead pile. Around that point in the game, the Pact redirected their forces toward a drive on Munich, while continuing to put pressure on the Brits and Belgians in the north. Let's drop in again on my field notes for Christmas day, 2011: "12/25/2011. Merry Christmas everyone. On Turn 18, the Pact has finally busted open a flank and now their leading stack is only two hexes away from the eastern edge of the Ruhr cities complex. NATO doesn't have much to fight with. But the Pact has also outrun their supply lines at this point. I played out to the end of Turn 18. NATO did manage to come back and push the Pact back in front of the Ruhr cities. NATO is in retreat in northern Germany, but is fighting back on the southern end of the line. Beginning with turn 19 next time. Right now, it looks like this: Dead pile: Pact 16 divisional units, NATO: 19 brigades, 4 divisions, 23 units total." For the course of the rest of the game, the Pact continued to drive on both fronts (on the North German plain to the Ruhr cities, and toward Munich), but NATO relocated one of the pesky American "tri-cap" divisions to the southern flank with good effect for NATO. By the end of the game (25 turns), the Pact was not yet on the Rhine (but they were only a couple of hexes away from the Rhine in the area north of the Ruhr cities). Further south, they were on the outskirts once again of the Ruhr cities, and on the outskirts of Munich. The victory conditions for the M +1 Conventional scenario look like this: Controlling NATO cities: Pact is holding 12 hexes of NATO cities: 60 Victory Points. Looking at deadpile losses: Losses Divisional Units Sub Divisional losses Pact 25 divisions 0 units NATO 9 divisions 27 units = 45 points for Pact Total for Pact = 45 + 60 = 105 points, minus 50 points for NATO = 55 victory point differential for Pact = a draw according to the rules. In the deadpile: Strength lost (steps) Pact 92 NATO 87 Finally, looking at losses on the board Units with strength point losses Total strength points loss Pact 34 72 NATO 25 73 Really, the game was dramatically close. This hybrid version worked a lot better than the first version in my opinion, but both times I had a blast with the game. Let's conclude with some lessons learned: 1. The Gazala CRT probably did help the Pact out in attacking a little more than the Op Mike CRT did, but their shrunken supply range (4 hexes), and the NATO boosted-up replacement rate meant that the Soviets were like a big mean bear on a short leash. They could maul the NATO guys up pretty good, but they could hardly ever really bust out. And given a little respite, the NATO forces could rebuild to just barely hang on. Only on a few isolated occasions did either playing ever look like a WWII East Front game. 2. The Pact's short supply range, coupled with the necessity of having a daisy chain of supply depots, did create the logistical pipeline effect I was looking for. Even after the Pact refined the foci of their campaign down to two schwerpunkts (or should that be schwerpunkten?), they were nevertheless forced to maintain a set of "nodal" supply points with a spread-out network of supply depots between them to sustain their units all across their front and flanks. I wasn't sure that I always built (or moved) this network of supply depots optimally (in fact, I'm pretty sure that I didn't), but in its redundancy and convoluted pathways, it looked like an interesting neural network on the map. 3. I was impressed once again with what I have called the "malleability" of these old games: The apparent fact that you can build a Frankenstein mashup, and with only a little coaxing, the game comes to life and runs. It's true that I'm forever tinkering with these games; I hardly ever play them straight out of the box according to the rules. Accordingly, it may be the case that when I get to a little spot of some ambiguity in the case of a hybrid game, that I'm very comfortable just making up what seems like a reasonable and minimally restrictive rule and moving on. Others may not appreciate that. Finally, let me also note that it took me about 8 weeks to play the second version, plus about 5 weeks to play the first version. I had this on my table for the last part of September, and then all of October, November, and December 2011. As I mentioned, I had fun playing this, and writing about it; thanks for reading. John Best jlbest@advancenet.net _______________________________________________ Consim-l mailing list Subject: Re: [Consim-l] NATO hybrid game experiment From: bieksza@erols.com Just one comment, directed towards CONSIMers who might not be familiar with such an old game. > In combat, if a Pact unit simply traces to a > supply counter in range, it can attack, but only at half strength. If the > Pact unit wants to attack at full strength, it can do so by tracing to a > supply counter within range, but at the end of the combat phase, that supply > counter is removed from the board. If you were counting on that supply > counter to supply your guys for their second movement phase, you are out of > luck. And if NATO comes attacking in their phase, which they will, you are > out of luck again without any traceable supply for defense. And the supply > counters are really slow moving too; it takes a long time to get one up to > the front lines, especially as the Pact advances. The Pact had a workaround for the supply problem: use nuclear weapons. Nukes doubled attack strengths, so by using half-supply the godless commies could attack at face value and still preserve the supply units that had made it to the front. I now wonder if SPI assumed its customers would be so bloodthirsty as to always use nukes, so the supply situation would have less of a pinch. _______________________________________________ Consim-l mailing list