The (Unofficial) Great Battles of History
A Dissenting View
Markus Stumptner has given some cogent critiques of the GBoH system, which he has permitted me to reproduce below. They originally appeared on the CONSIM-L mailing.
While I don't agree with all of Markus's arguments, he does have a number of valid points, and I respect his willingness to discuss and critique the aspects of the system in a rational manner.
If you'd like to respond to the comments here (either pro or con), email me.
23-Sep-96
Main points:
1. The command system is based on start-stop movement - one order, one move. There is no concept of momentum, i.e., that units or wings sent off on a move or attack kept going without constant prodding by the top-level leadership. Units did not stop on the spot and light a campfire because the general had to look the other way as it happens in the game. Conversely, historically control over units was limited once they were underway, but the GBoH player has 100% control over the moves of individual units and can produce detailed maneuvers and unit-level envelopments that would have been impossible in practice. The game also has no concept of units moving under their own initiative, which happened all the time (regardless of whether this suited the overall situation or not).
2. Quick reactions and good decisions by leaders and well-trained troops are expressed as multiple movement (through trumping/momentum). That means the turn sequence doesn't represent the causality of events, and the game no longer follows the course or the reasons of history. Historically, there was a strong distinction between action and reaction. E.g., Alexander at Gaugamela and Hannibal at Cannae, to name my two standard examples, won these battles as the *reacting* side - striking once the enemy has committed his forces so that their momentum will move them out of the way as at Gaugamela or into the trap as at Cannae. In the game, the historically more flexible player simply moves faster, and is automatically cast as the "active" side, e.g., the Romans "standing still while Hannibal runs rings around them", as I've repeatedly seen the GBoH Cannae described. (Waiting makes no sense anyway, since there's no concept of momentum that would doom the Romans if they should decide to attack first.) What was a trap is now a straightforward envelopment of an immobile Roman army by the Racing Punic Brothers. Hannibal would rotate in his grave.
There are a number of other problems (e.g., with routing, rallying, phalanxes in combat, the fixed leader range, the ability to "borrow" leaders), but they pale compared to the fundamental problems with the command system. Which btw do not disappear by looking at the game from a more abstract or holistic perspective - you can't get any more abstract than saying "side A attacked first".
Summary: Historically, you had to worry about good deployment plus sending your troops off in a manner and with the correct timing that would see them doing what you wanted even after they were out of your control. In the GBoH series your decisions are instead centered on having your troops creep forward under limited command allowances, but under perfect individual control if they do move. The command system may be fun to game for most but does not represent or reproduce the constraints and dynamics of ancient battles.
22-Sep-94
Let me start out with what I liked. That, basically, is the combat system: cohesion hits, the attacker/defender superiority stuff, and also the idea of accumulating cohesion hits through movement). The first comment one usually reads is the "scissors-paper" view of ancients combat that the system represents, and the necessity to use combined arms correctly. I agree the system does a very good job at this. I'm also quite impressed by the orders of battle (the reason why I didn't sell my copy of GBoA). Btw, I have somewhat more experience with GBoA than SPQR, so my comments are mostly based on the former, but they still apply. I've played nothing in the series that came out after SPQR.
Many of the scenarios have minor problems (such as the fact that at the Granicus scenario, the Persian rout edge is directly behind their line, so that if a unit routs, it's gone immediately, while the Macedonians have some time to catch theirs), but I'll concentrate on the faults we found with the system.
The main annoyance, to me, was the movement system. The second was the rout/rally mechanism. All references to historical happenings in my elaborations include a huge IMHO. If one can convince me I was wrong and the historical battles did work this way, go ahead and restore my trust in the game.
The movement system has three goals: interactivity, to show the shifting initiative in those battles, and allow players to grasp those fleeting opportunities that arise during battle, restrictions to movement, because coordination on the ancient battlefield was not too good, and bringing out the quality differences between leaders.
Momentum and trumping are, to a degree, successful. However, the effectiveness of mechanisms that change movement order suffers if the scale isn't right. In West End's Tank Leader games (which have similar possibilities), "trumping" is OK, because longer weapons ranges and opportunity fire mean that it's not possible to provide completely unrealistic tricks through the resulting double movement rates. In GBoA/SPQR, a cavalry unit with perfect sight to all sides cannot react to meet a charge from head-on, because 8 movement points for cavalry means you can go from battleline to far behind the enemy lines in one turn - not much better than traditional move-fight. In fact, I've noticed a tendency of players to deploy cavalry in "fortress" patterns, to avoid its being taken in the flank. This is doable in the game, but appears ridiculous to me in historical terms. And momentum, in addition, means that a given unit can triple its speed in a turn, though why it's top speed should depend on the strategic ability of its general is not clear. OK, you say, that is supposed to represent reaction speed of the commanding general, not actual movement speed. But then why not simply provide for a true "interruption" mechanism instead of the trumping mechanism that allows changing the move/fight sequence only if the opponent "allows" it?
Another argument could be made: That momentum actually represents not greater speed of the phasing player, but instead slower reactions of the non-phasing player, whose units and commanders can't react in time because they are dumb with surprise (like the Greek mercenaries at the Granicus and the Spartan Allies at Leuktra, where Epaminondas introduced the oblique phalanx). Not unreasonable to assume, Mark Herman has used such techniques before (in Pacific War). But then, the designer's notes should really acknowledge that shifting timescale. They don't. And anyway, the temporal distortion such a mechanism produces is OK in a game where you are keeping track of a half dozen task forces spread over a huge map. Not in a game where you have a hundred or so units compressed in a narrow space. And in any case, the surprise at Leuktra or Granicus was due to the completely unexpected situation facing these units, not the fact that their commanders could not order more than three to move at one time.
Next, "orders" (including the # of orders meaning of the initiative rating). Worst aspect: A moving unit that does not get a new order the next turn stops moving. Good example: At Issus, the attempt to produce a cavalry charge with the right Persian wing has the cavalry leapfrogging in successive waves across the Pinarus because only five can be moved in a turn (well, more in theory, but Nabarzanes then needs momentum without being trumped by Alexander - not the most common turn of events). You need half an hour to an hour in game time to get all that cavalry moving. Now, this is weird already. But on the other hand, you can get them moving quite well by having Thymondas (the Greek hoplite commander!) and Darius visit Nabarzanes on the right wing to give him a hand in sorting out his troops. This is positively bizarre. By the way, the left wing at Gaugamela has the same problem. It's not that the Persian cavalry at Gaugamela did not get to attack in time - they did, but the attack was held off. Note that this has nothing to do with "slavish attention to absolute accuracy" - instead it's fundamental flaw in the way the battle develops, and what you spend your time concentrating on to be successful in play. Tricksing with your spare command allowances to get your charge across is a classic case of fighting the system, not the battle.
Last, individual unit control. I've already talked about the problem that in cavalry battles, whichever unit happens to move first once they get in range (eight hexes or more if you get momentum) will take the enemy in the flank, by moving around him. You get elaborate positioning of units to prevent/allow a maximum number of flank attacks, moving skirmishers around to capture defending units in ZOCs. Was this how those battles worked? Not to my knowledge.
I would liken this aspect to Wooden Ships and Iron Men. The latter is an incredible lot of fun (when I entered the hobby, I didn't play anything else for years). It has a quite successful combat system, and unless one used house rules or a large number of players, can lead to quite ahistorical courses of battle, because there are no realistic restrictions in terms of command control. Nothing keeps you from executing superbly timed complex maneuvers that would have been completely impossible for an admiral of the era to orchestrate, quite apart from the fact that the support of his captains decided the success of his plans. On both British and French side, the decisiveness of battles hinged on the question if individual captains or squadron leaders would follow the lead of their superiors or not - due to lack of initiative, aggressiveness, or just plain ignorance of what was wanted of them. The combat system of GBoA/SPQR is great. The Command/Movement system has a number of awkward abstractions that give battles a stilted, unreal feel and means that the way in which engagements come about is not realistic even if the net effect is the same.
OK. Routing/rallying. The effect of leaders with regard to this is the ability to remove cohesion hits away from the furor of battle, somewhat reducing the danger of routing (not too much, since a given column of the combat table usually will have only small differences between rolls of 0 and 9), and rallying troops *after* they've routed. The second is underrepresented, since the main activity of leaders at the time actually was keeping morale high *during* combat, which is why they usually led from the front (somewhat different for Roman times). Basically, it raised the troops' morale and being under the eye of their commander may also have made them less likely to flinch from entering the thick of battle. Once they *did* rout, and all the sources I've seen agree on this, the first thing they did was to throw away their weapons and shields to run faster, from which point they were worthless in terms of continuing the battle. Instead, here we have them running away at top speed, being intercepted by some leader to be moved at top speed back to the battle as soon as possible. Instead of forming a truly hardened point, units close to leaders are used in a kind of rubber- band process, to be slung repeatedly at the enemy line. Now, granted that you will lose a percentage due to failed rally rolls, but the weird part is that especially Alexander, who had virtually no routs/rallies in his battles, is the most adept at this due to his high initiative.
Command range plays a role in rallying too - Alexander can rally his troops by shouting at them at the range of half a mile, apparently. Some argue that's supposed to represent junior officers, but did those subordinate to Alexander automatically inherit his effectiveness as regards morale when 500 meters away? Hardly. But this, I concede, is a minor point.
Summary: Is there another game out there that addresses all these issues adequately? Not to my knowledge. Nor do I claim it would be anywhere like easy to design such a game - I am quite convinced of Mark Herman's ability as a designer, having probably spent more time on his games than any other single designer's over the last five years or so. But that no other game manages it doesn't mean that this series addresses them adequately by default. Ancient battles are very hard to simulate at a detailed level due to all the soft factors involved. The GMT games produce historical outcomes, but that I think one can get with more abstract games as well, without the distracting, inconsistent details. If units were moved in larger "lumps" and with less elaborate maneuvering historically, then larger scale and smaller movement allowances might produce quite good results. (Note to Jeff Kouba: this would in fact *increase* playability because the number of units is reduced.)
Anyway. This is my "not universally positive" view on the GBOH series as a vehicle for recreating historical battles. Your mileage may vary.