Books, History, WW1

Company Training by Gen. Haking

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When in Southport last week I found an antiquarian bookshop in a very small gap between two other shops. It was very much like the fabled ‘magic’ shops that when you go back to it isn’t there. (Although I hope it is if I get a chance to go back, it had a fantastic collection of books, archaeological artefacts and sea shells!)

General Sir Richard Cyril Byrne Haking, comman...
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I bought three books from there, but the one that intrigued me most was ‘Company Training’ by Brig-Gen R. C. B. Haking, C.B., p.s.c which looked like it had spent some considerable time in the pocket of someone engaged in using it (complete with underlined passages in pencil in places). I’m a sucker for infantry training manuals and this one was pretty cheap because of the battered nature of the cover (although internally it was fine, personally I view the pencil as adding to usefulness rather than damage).

Turns out, on a little googling, that General Richard Haking was also the Divisional commander for the first battle of Fromelles and then the Corps Commander for the second battle of Fromelles in 1916. I’ve been following the Commonwealth War Graves Commission‘s recovery of the bodies from that battle and the re-interring them in the new cemetery at Fromelles. I also recently bought a copy of Paul Cobb’s ‘Fromelles 1916‘ which covers both the battle and the recovery of the bodies and building of the new cemetery.

So I’ve got a couple of linked books, although a quick read through the contents and the preface etc, makes the Haking book clearly the work of someone who has seriously thought about soldiering and what it means. Looking at his service record, even by 1913 he was a combat veteran, including some very modern counterinsurgency in the Boer wars. I doubt he’d be very much out of place in today’s British Army and I’d think that his book would be worth reading by junior officers and NCOs (and even private soldiers who aspire to be career soldiers). I’ll write a proper review when I’ve read it all.

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economics, games, universe

Economics of New Colonies

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I often play in Jim Wallman’s hard SF games set in the universe he’s created. I’ve been thinking about how new colonies get set up and the sort of funding they need.

There is a lot of infrastructure required to build a viable colony on a new system. Firstly you need to survey it to find a good spot with a reasonable confluence of resources, mining sites, farming space, fresh water, building land and a suitable area for your drop zone and spaceport. Once you’ve done that some cheap housing, utilities, early resource processing plants and factories for essentials have to be built. Once you get to that point you might just start exporting valuable things, although you’ll still need to import lots of essentials, not to mention more people.

I reckon that it is a minimum of two years to get to the point where the exports cover the costs of the imports. At that point the colony investors are probably starting to think about seeing a return on their investment. Using the macro campaign rules as a guide a two year subsistence colony has probably racked up about 200 million credits in debt. The tax take of local government is no more that enough to service the interest and provide some basic leadership and policing. The overall economy of the colony is probably only a little bigger than the debt, perhaps 300 million credits a year. There are probably about 150,000 colonists on the planet (maybe more if there are many dependents with the workers).

So in the normal course of things one would expect the economy to grow with migration and in due course the extra tax revenue would pay back the capital and also provide the additional services that the colony’s people required. There may even be pump priming investment in infrastructure to keep things moving. That said, the people might not come, or the govt could make poor decisions, or there could be some natural disaster. If the colony collapses what happens then? In total failures the banks / investors will just need to write off the debt, while perhaps keeping a nominal ownership of the assets left behind in case a subsequent colonisation effort wants to take over.

There might not be a total failure, in which case a restructuring of debt would be required. Although depending on the reasons there might be difficulty getting more money.

Another thing that could happen is a conflict with another colony in the same planet, especially when better developed worlds realise that they would be better off as a large single entity in gaining access to trade agreements with other interstellar groups.

What happens to state debt when another state takes it over?

In the case of a hostile takeover (either a war or a share buyout) there will be an expectation that the structural debt will be taken on by the new management. The banks will insist on this, and if the new management doesn’t agree then they will treat it the same was as defaulting on the loan payments.
Refusing to make payments against a loan has serious consequences and it is to be avoided. If times are difficult it is expected that the colony management will talk to the banks and/or investors to either extend the payback time or raise sufficient funds through other means to ensure that they continue to properly service debt in an agreed fashion.
Any colony that defaults can expect the following to happen:
  • no further lines of credit will be opened, so all capital expenditure will need to be paid for up front, also future interest rates will be higher to represent the increased risk of default
  • imports may not be possible, except perhaps at black market rates for items
  • prices on exports may be lower than expected (and indeed cargoes may be seized in lieu of debt interest and/or capital)
  • Enforcement action may be taken to seize colonial assets, especially movable ones (although a colony with strong armed forces may find this won’t happen)
  • Other colonies in the same system may come under pressure not to co-operate, similarly trade agreements may be suspended or even revoked.
  • In extreme cases an interim management may be installed, possibly by a major polity if the colony is sufficiently well off to have attracted attention.
  • Immigration is likely to slow down, and colonists are more likely to leave the colony

 

 

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Books, History, Iraq Wars

The Defense of Jisr Al-Doreaa

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This is an excellent update of an old classic.

Two books in one, the author’s have brought Swinton’s Duffer’s Drift and re-written it for the modern conflicts (which bear more than a passing resemblance to the Boer War). Swinton’s book is in the second half of the volume.  The basis for Duffer”s Drift (if you aren’t familiar with it already) is that a young officer en route to the Boer War has a series of dreams about his first independent command. In each dream it all goes horribly wrong, but on waking he learns some lessons which he then takes with him into the next dream (without remembering the details of the previous dream). Over the course of six dreams he manages to learn enough lessons for a successful outcome.

The scenario is well set out, with appropriate maps and there is a good logical flow through the dream sequences where the young officer progressively learns from the situation. Although the situations and capabilities are not identical, you can easily compare the Boer War situation to its more modern counterpart about a century later. The lessons are broadly similar, and for those interested in how to train young officers or soldiers then it makes a worthwhile read.

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Ars Magica, games, roleplaying

Ars Magica – Lumen

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Recently Lumen has been on a trip to Waddenzee with several of her friends from the covenant at Triamore. (See myweb.tiscali.co.uk/thelemur/ars/ars%20wus/1224b_april_wu.html for the write up).

From her perspective the journey was mostly uneventful apart from:

  • premonitions of the attack on the ship they were using (during which she mostly made attackers fall asleep);
  • some searching on a swamp near Waddenzee where she realised that she could spontaneously cast to power the punt they were using; she also made a bird;
  • the visit to Waddenzee itself, where she rescued one of the local women from ill use, employing her as a second maid;
  • a night excursion just on the mainland on return where a lot of time was spent searching in the dark for a particularly unpleasant creature, which was later found to be called a Lamia.

So what does Lumen take from all that experience? Before she went off she had a desire to learn to read Greek, she also had some fondness for getting out and meeting people between her winter study sessions. So she has spent the journey up getting to know something of the places she has been. A little of that will also have been reflection on her Parma as she was going to visit a covenant that may have been unfriendly. She also spent a three encounters searching for things (two of those in the dark) and she spontaneously cast at least three spells. On the way back she spent some significant time trying to communicate with her new maid, so some language skills there. She also used her second sight.

So her autumn/winter study priorities are likely to be:

  • learn to read greek;
  • read some sort of bestiary to find out more about lamia (and similar sorts of creatures);
  • read up on parma magica, ignem and terram (in that order)
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CLWG, design, games

The Other Side of the COIN

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Today was the September CLWG meeting. My game used the whole session and was looking to explore some of the things that might drive farmers to becoming insurgents in modern Afghanistan. I’m not quite sure that I achieved that, but it was a fun session and mostly worked as a game, although the economic model was quite broken. I’ll leave it to some of the players to tell us the story of what happened. I had Jim, Mukul, Dave & Daniel as ordinary farmers, John R was the leading farmer and the acting Governor of the valley (not that he managed to persuade the others to do what he said much). Nick Luft was the local Chief of Police and Rob Cooper was the local cleric, and also a Taliban representative.

On the whole the things I learnt from today were:

  • this is a game that probably works better in an annual turn basis rather than trying to do monthly real time, the agricultural decisions can be made quite rapidly and it is just a distraction to try and string it through the game. Also the turn based structure makes it easier for a single umpire to keep everyone at the same point in time.
  • – I need to indulge in quantitative easing, or alternatively sort the economic system to make it easier to scale things up from basic subsistence farming to full on agriculture. So things to look into are the rate at which more land can be brought into production, and reasons why the level of productive land is so low. I also need to look at a valley wide weather effects as well as the localised stuff. That way there is a higher community effect as all the agriculture is co-dependent.
  • Another things is looking at the relationship between the town and the farming hinterland. There needs to be a a two-way relationship, the town needs the food the farms grow, and the farmers need the services the town provides. Some thoughts in the post-game discussion were around levels of infrastructure in the town being necessary to support some of the things that the farmers might want. e.g. needing mechanics to support tractors.
  • consumption from the farmers could be delivered by a range of quality of life indicators, perhaps allowing for a tension between the Islamic and non-Islamic natures of some of them. So there could be an ‘easy’ western track and a more ethical Islamic track. Either way some sort of geometric progression would probably do it and also give the players some sort of indication of how well they were doing compared to the others.
  • there is probably a triangle of technology, belief & opium that can be used to give specific flavour to the game, and perhaps also draw out the conflicts in a more three dimensional way.
  • – I could also give players a qualitative objective or attitude to help them along with decision making and getting into character. E.g. go on the Haj, or an admiration for motor vehicles.
  • – there need to be more women to make more scope for marriages to take place.

Generally there is a lot of streamlining that I can do, which will improve the game. Much of this is pretty obvious from the tryout and not much needs to be said, stripping out some of the layers of complexity and perhaps ignoring the task allocation part of the game except for those that have roles that might change during the course of the game. Also perhaps having a slightly different family tree style approach to the record keeping. You’ll see how it changes by the bits that get posted up on my website at http://www.full-moon.info/doku.php/rules/clwg/coin

And a final governing thought in streamlining things is to keep Jim’s question in mind. “Why is this Afghanistan rather than Ambridge?”

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History

Kings of War

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Kings of War is a blog written by faculty and research students at King’s College War Studies department. A very interesting blog with lots of articles on a variety of different aspects of warfare, both modern and historical. I came across it when looking for things to help develop my insurgency game. I am enjoying reading it.

 

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CLWG, design, games

Thoughts on an Insurgency Game

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An article I read in the New Scientist on why people got involved in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia triggered some ideas about trying to run a game about the locals caught amidst an insurgency campaign.

Farming Today, Fighting Tomorrow?

This is a game to explore why people become insurgents (or perhaps not). Most of the players will be tribal elders leading their group of peasant farmers and directing their decisions about what to grow where and making sure that they can feed themselves and afford to buy the things they need to improve their lives and farms. Loosely set in modern Afghanistan I’ve taken huge liberties with the agrarian system and abstracted it to a level that can play through years in minutes. However I want to play on an event based accelerated real time basis through a period of a few years with a semi-kreigspieled combat system (should that even be necessary).

I think it would work best with about four local players, plus a couple of military players (1 ANA & 1 NATO) and perhaps another umpire to assist. At a minimum we can probably do with three players and me and I’ll plumpire the military side. If turnout was good I think that it could absorb a couple more players, so 3-10 people plus me. Minimum time is probably a couple of hours and we could probably play/discuss all day if no-one had any alternative sessions.

Locals operate on the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend“. Each tribe is its own group and works on a very tight knit basis, all of them having the same broad allegiance. Some sample briefing and objectives below.

Example Briefing

Your land is a war-zone. You want this to end at the earliest possible time, ideally without any further loss to your people. In fact there might well be some way that you can profit from the chaos and the reconsitrcution and aid budgets of the foreigners helping your national government. However, you need to remember that you will continue to live here with the people once the foreigners have gone home, and you need to make sure that you avoid making enemies of those that will also remain here as much as possible. If you do make some enemies, then you need to either make amends, or get some powerful allies.

 

Objectives (in order of importance)

·        maintain the prestige and standing of the tribe

·        be pious and well respected in the community

·        add to the holdings of the tribe and their prosperity

·        increase your tribe’s share of local position

 

Some mechanism ideas

There needs to be a table showing the contribution to being self-sustaining from the point of view of livestock owned, fields farmed (depending on size and crop grown), and cash spent. If there is insufficient food then accrue a hunger marker and if too many hunger markers then someone may die. This might well be in the gift of the player controlling, but perhaps not.

 

Tribes will have resources in the following terms:

·        cash (measured in dollars)

·        fields (different areas, but perhaps all a standard fertility level)

·        livestock (unspecified number of animals)

·        food stocks (unspecified but enough to negate a hunger marker per unit)

·        small arms (a measure of how many men can be equipped)

·        heavier weapons (RPGs, machine guns, etc)

·        vehicles (only motorised, ignore donkey carts etc)

·        men (probably in some broad age groups – teenagers, unmarried men, husbands, fathers, grandfathers)

·        women (unmarried & married is probably enough, but perhaps grandmothers also)

·        children (male/female in 0-5, 6-10, 11-14) – maybe too much complexity

 

Crops

very abstract, three types of growth

·        food (both human and animals)

·        cash crops (gives money rather than food, but could be food at a pinch)

·        illicit drugs (gives money, definitely not useful as food)

 

[poss crop yield of 5 tonnes of food per acre]

 

[poppy gives 3-5kg per acre, profit margin is 50-100 times that of surplus food, and about ten times that of other cash crops. In 2002 the farmer got $300 per kilo, the traffickers out of Afghanistan got $800 and it had a street value of $16,000 in Europe. Raw opium is bulky and jelly like, a basic lab (which could be in a field) can convert it into morphine base which can be dried and converted into bricks for easy transport and storage. ]

 

I need to go and do lots more reading around this to see if I can get enough info to run a realistic game.

 

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CLWG, dark ages, design, games, History, WW2

CLWG June 2010 Meeting

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What you missed at Sunday’s CLWG June 2010 meeting (unless you were one of those present) were some good conversations and two games:

  • Come One, Come Eorl – another megagame tryout from Andy Hadley; and
  • D-Day beach landing – an improvised game by Jim Wallman
We started with a chat as Jim, Mukul & I watched some of the Stalingrad episode of World at War which Jim had on DVD on his laptop. This while we cut out some of the cards for playing Come One Come Eorl. Once John Rutherford, Andrew Hadley & Brian Cameron also arrived we started playing.
Come One Come Eorl
This was another tryout of the streamlined rules using the Welsh part of the game. I found that it was relatively easy to pick up, although there was obviously come benefit to be had from having played in a previous version and understanding who all the characters were and what they were after. In all we had a very civilised approach, rapidly came to a relatively amicable settlement of power and lands and then attacked the English. We sent out two colums, with myself in charge of the Northern one and fought in three battles, being victorious in both the ones I was fighting in (not a coincidence I believe).
Overall I had a positive experience and think that this is probably more or less done from a mechanistic point of view. There needs to be a little more work on fleshing out the briefings, but Andrew already knew that as we were working off the previous set with hand-written amendments. The game pieces were good, and the suggestion there was around making each army easeir to identify by using flags stuck onto foamboard counters.
I look forward to playing the megagame.
D-Day Beach Landing
Dead and wounded infantry on Sword beach, on t...
Dead and wounded infantry on Sword beach, on the morning of 6 June 1944. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Seeing as it was 6th June we couldn’t have a meeting and not have a session about the Normandy Landings.

Jim had drawn a map of a typical beach sector on a large piece of squared paper. The Germans were pre-positioned and fired at the closest target they could see. There was also some random artillery/mortar fire using a couple of dice and the map grid to determine where it landed.
The attacking forces were two companies of infantry with some supporting assault pioneers and a mortar. Jim had found some generic ‘jenga’ blocks in a local pound shop and used these to produce a series of section level markers. The system was very simple, each section could take up to five hits (being eliminated on the fifth hit), had to roll 1d6 and score more than the number of hits sustained to leave cover, and moved 1d6 squares each turn. When being shot at hits were scored on a 6, or 5 & 6 if in the open.
IWM caption : OPERATION OVERLORD (THE NORMANDY...
IWM caption : OPERATION OVERLORD (THE NORMANDY LANDINGS): D-DAY 6 JUNE 1944. The British 2nd Army: Commandos of 1st Special Service Brigade landing from an LCI(S) (Landing Craft Infantry Small) on ‘Queen Red’ Beach, SWORD Area, at la Breche, at approximately 8.40 am, 6 June. The brigade commander, Brigadier the Lord Lovat DSO MC, can be seen striding through the water to the right of the column of men. The figure nearest the camera is the brigade’s bagpiper, Piper Bill Millin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I started as a company commander, but managed to get killed as I got off the landing craft. I then moved to being the senior platoon commander as the Company 2ic took over command. I then became the Coy 2ic as well as being a Pl Comd. We took about 40% casualties on the beach but managed to get mortars producing smoke to screen the closest bunkers from effective MG fire. The assault pioneers then blew a hole in the wire and I personally assualted a bunker because I couldn’t make any of the troops come with me. This proved decisive and we were then able to move more freely and outflank the central bunker and deal with it.

The other company didn’t fare quite as well as we did, but it also managed, eventually, to get off the beach. What the game had going for it was the relative simplicity of the mechanisms and the realistic level of control (or rather lack thereof) of the troops. Once casualties had been taken it became harder and harder to make troops do what you wanted. Also the plan was what counted, and how troops landed in the wrong place interpretted it. We had a slightly better time than the other company simply because there was less ambiguity on the bit of beach we landed on, so the chance of misinterpretation was lower. Most of uor company ended up in front of the correct breach point, although a couple of sections went right instead of left.
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games

Siege Engines R Us

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Alexander got a new castle playset today, and on the front of the box were pictures of more things than were actually in the box. In particular there was a catapult (in the style of an Onager) and a few other siege engine type things. So in typical four year old fashion Daddy was asked to help with construction of a replacement. 

To start with we had some string and some lolly sticks, but those were just too difficult to work with, the lolly sticks were really too flat to be able to get the right sort of shape. Fortunately I remembered that we had some a load of wood left from an ash tree that I had cut down and that some of those were about finger thickness. So I popped out into the garden and cut some of the wood up to the right length. Five minutes later, with the aid of knots remembered from my Scout days, we had a working catapult!
It shoots one of the plastic balls that came with the castle playset about a yard or so (metre if you are metric). Best things about it are that Alexander played with it as much as the other parts of the set and that the balls are shot at low velocity so they don’t hurt when they hit you…
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alternative, games, History, megagames, WW2

War in the West: German Plan

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Alex Kleanthous, Trevor Duguid-Farrant and I got together a couple of weeks before the megagame to do the German plan.

At the planning session we had a discussion about the plan to use, we were constrained to the historical planning directive issued by Hitler, but not to the historical operational plan. After a debate we decided not to follow the historical plan as that would allow the Allied player the option to use hindsight against us. Instead we developed a different plan with some different groupings of forces, and also changed the positions of the Army Groups and Armies concerned.

In outline, the main thrust is against the Belgians and it is intended to push onto the Belgian coast west of Antwerp and then sweep down the channel coast to the west (destination Dieppe). The thinking is that the Allies will not allow the British to secure their flank on the sea in fear that they evacuate. This ought to leave the Belgians on the flank and we believe that they are easier to defeat. If they are pushed back then this is likely to cause the British to retreat in fear of their lines of communication and in turn the French also.

Across the remainder of the line there will be a steady pressure so that if the enemy retire we will be able to close up and take any ground that they cede. In the North there will also be a determined assault on the western Netherlands to secure their capital and major conurbations.

All the available mobile forces have been used, and we checked with Jim that we had them all (a few that existed on paper, still forming or training but which played no active part in the campaign have been omitted from the orbat).

The attached documents show the chosen groupings of forces and their tasks. There is a preponderance of mobile forces in the Pz Gp (9 Divisions, 6 Pz 3 Mot Inf) with another mobile corps (1 Pz & 1 Mot Inf) in the flanking Army to ensure that it can also make progress. The remaining 3 Panzer Divisions have been allocated one to each army to allow them to make rapid progress along their points of main effort. In total we have 14 mobile divisions and 11 of these have been assigned to the main effort and will be working in a relatively narrow front, so penny packets is not a suitable description of their employment.

Airborne forces have also been employed to neutralise a choke point 48 hours ahead of the panzer group advance so that they can remain mobile.

The key to the plan is keeping the panzers mobile. I am sure that people can appreciate the importance of this.

 

PS – have now re-posted this to the brand new Megagamer Forum that I set up for megagamers to discuss games, both before and after.

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