Black powder weapons - simulations

As for the Boers, let's see what Wiki says:

The average Boer citizens who made up their commandos were farmers who had spent almost all their working lives in the saddle, and, because they had to depend on both their horses and their rifles for almost all of their meat, they were skilled hunters and expert marksmen. Most of the Boers had single-shot breech-loading rifles such as the Westley Richards, the Martini-Henry, or the Snider-Enfield. Only a few had repeaters like the Winchester or the Swiss Vetterli. As hunters they had learned to fire from cover, from a prone position and to make the first shot count, knowing that if they missed, in the time it took to reload, the game would be long gone. At community gatherings, they often held target shooting competitions using targets such as hens' eggs perched on posts over 100 yards away. The Boer commandos made for expert light cavalry, able to use every scrap of cover from which they could pour accurate and destructive fire at the British.

[...]

The Boer marksmen could easily snipe at British troops from a distance. The Boers carried no bayonets, leaving them at a substantial disadvantage in close combat, which they avoided as often as possible. Drawing on years of experience of fighting frontier skirmishes with numerous and indigenous African tribes, they relied more on mobility, stealth, marksmanship and initiative while the British emphasised the traditional military values of command, discipline, formation and synchronised firepower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Boer_War

So, the Boers were weak in hand-to-hand combat and instead relied on their superior range and accuracy to defeat their enemies. But this is exactly what you claimed couldn't happen. If what you said about "parade ground vs. battlefield" were correct, the Boers' line of sight should have been obscured by their own smoke, they should have been too terrified of the prospect of fighting men rather than eggs to hit anything over 100 yards away, and the British should have easily been able to close and defeat them in hand-to-hand combat.

Basically, you've been arguing that marksmanship training was unimportant because the British, who trained in marksmanship, lost a few battles... to an enemy who were better-trained in marksmanship than they were. I've no doubt you'll keep refusing to understand the point, but hopefully other posters should be able to spot the flaw in the argument easily enough.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Oh, here's something to discuss - fuzes.

As a couple of examples of what poor fuzes can result in:

The French in the Franco-Prussian War didn't have long enough time fuzes, so they couldn't fire shrapnel (spherical case) shot as far as the Prussians.
The Americans in the ACW era had a limited menu of time shells for their big naval shell guns, with the shortest being 3 seconds (only fuses on issue were 3.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 15 and 20 seconds) - so a shell would travel about 1,000 yards before detonating, and against a ship a few hundred yards away would be not nearly as effective since they had a distinct chance of going right through!
The British shells at Jutland often broke up when striking armour, instead of fuzing.

Conversely, other times and militaries had very good fuzing:

The French in WW1 had an excellent slight-time-delay fuze for their picrite shells, which would have just enough time to bounce back up into the air before going off - very nasty.
The British invented Shrapnel (Henry Shrapnel!) and refined it a lot better than most nations - their rifled guns had instant-fuze shrapnel, so they could do "cannister from a rifle" which other nations took longer to do. They also had slight-time-delay fuzing in the 1860s on their shell guns, which meant their percussion fuzes would hit a ship, penetrate the sidewalls, and detonate right there.
The Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War had percussion fuzes, which let them do a lot of damage to columns.


Again, a bear to simulate - perhaps a tech tree? - but fascinating.
 
I think fuses take it a bit far beyond what you can realistically simulate. Necessary to get some realism seem to me:

Unit type: Here it depends on details you want. unit size is a question. If your take realistic sizes of battles, not the reduced symbolic ones of Total War: Companies and batteries (platoons, sections even more so) allow for a lot of details, but would mean a lot of units to control, if you go for larger units you quickly get disparate unit types/equipment. Compromise could be to have battalions/regiments as primary manouvre units that can detach and attach subordinate companies. Fundamentally Cavalry, Infantry and Artillery need to be distinguished. But those too can be differentiated. As mentioned the US had no real heavy cavalry or lancers in the ACW, otoh other armies did not train cavalry (or only part of it) as dragoons. Which brings me to the second neccessary element.

Unit quality: Here I like your basic concept of drill, training and experience as described. I might add doctrine as a factor to determine what a unit can do. Even well trained units in an army are not easily able to form a square if the training does not include that. Line infantry in one army might be trained for skirmishing, another might learn it through experience and in another it might be a strictly separate role for light infantry. Then again maybe doctrine should be kept separate from the individual unit quality since it goes beyond that.

Doctrine has a lot of impact beyond the abilities of single units. Austria might receive a bonus for bayonet fighting since their doctrine concentrated on it, the Boers have basically no ability there, but are trained and experienced skirmishers. Leadership organisation (if you want to include that) is another part of doctrine. The Prussian system might reduce the leadership impact since staffs can compensate a commanders weaknesses and Auftragstaktik means a lot of junior officers act independently. Thus individual ability of commanders is not unimportant but less so. Other systems centralise far more and a commanders ability influences the course of battle more (within his immediate control) for good or bad. And some organisations hamper the efforts even of good commanders (Austria 1866 comes to mind). Logistics are related to it but a separate field - though that comes into play more for campaign level simulation. The US for example developed a very good logistics system for all the weaknesses the armies in the field had (and no I don´t want to discuss it again). The French otoh had a decent army in combat, but sucked at rail-based (or more general land-based) logistics despite experimenting with it early. They did better in supplying their colonial forces than those going for the Rhine in 70.

Equipment: Here again is the question which details you want. Infantry: Rifled or smoothbore? Breech or muzzle loader? Even specific types? Bayonets? Grenades? Even uniform visibility and shoe quality? Artillery: Rifled or smoothbore? Breech or muzzle loader? Again: specific types? Ammunition types? Range? Reliability? Cavalry: Long guns? Pistols? Sabers? Lances? Horse quality and breed even?

Beyond the armies a good simulation needs to include at least terrain and weather. For the terrain I can think of these basic determinators: Flat, hilly or cliffs; Built up, wooded, bushes or no cover; dry or wet; elements on that terrain like fortifications, trenches (dig them yourself?), walls/hedges for cover, roads, bridges, fordable creeks and deeper rivers. Lines of sight of course. More details get probably too confusing. Weather is unless you go for campaign level probably best determined either for the entire game or "by turn" (every x minutes in RTS) on the entire map. And could influence the terrain by making fords harder to cross, slowing movement or freezing over a deep river.

Some elements which occassionally are simulated are morale and fatigue. Rarely well simulated though. Both have an important role, are influenced by unit quality, but extremely hard to quantify.
 
Leadership organisation (if you want to include that) is another part of doctrine. The Prussian system might reduce the leadership impact since staffs can compensate a commanders weaknesses and Auftragstaktik means a lot of junior officers act independently. Thus individual ability of commanders is not unimportant but less so. Other systems centralise far more and a commanders ability influences the course of battle more (within his immediate control) for good or bad. And some organisations hamper the efforts even of good commanders (Austria 1866 comes to mind).

You could model commanders' personalities in a similar way. E.g., Napoleon was loath to allow his subordinates much autonomy, so his personal command qualities would have more of an impact, whereas with a more hands-off leader like Kutuzov the effect would be less pronounced.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Doctrine is an excellent point - I'm wondering about perhaps a kind of multiple-tree system, where e.g. the cost goes up exponentially as you purchase or develop more "tricks", and where it gradually goes down as the years pass, and then that's applied as a modifier to unit training and pay.


e.g. having Schwarmm tactics in 1840 would be costly enough to make it hard to sustain a large, well-trained army, but by 1870 it's easier to pull off and you can combine it with a big box of tricks. And it's relatively cheap to have an army which specializes in just one specific way of doing things (e.g. "melee only" - the extreme case being the Zulus, which have only melee skills) but it's got the problem that you're basically building an army that's Rock - while a generalist enemy can try to find what's "Paper" to you.
(This Zulu army wouldn't be incapable of using firearms, artillery or cavalry - it's just that it would be very basic "point in direction and pull trigger", "smoothbore cannon firing rocks" or "men on horse charging pell-mell".)


Ideally, the Prussian doctrine switch in the Franco-Prussian War (deemphasize close infantry tactics, emphasize artillery) should be possible but not trivial.
 
One problem I always see with such technology trees is that we know what worked and thus can easily avoid dead ends - unless they are for a while the right track and become worse later. OTOH forcing the player down the wrong road by restricting choices isn´t a good idea either.
One possible solution could be to add two other factors: "Army conservatism" and "foreign powers pull".

Army conservatism would simulate that institutions prefer to keep things as they were, thus - as you already proposed - refining known doctrines is cheaper than adding/changing to new tracks. To your idea I would add the possibility to lower said conservatism. Combat experience - and defeats more than victories - show mistakes and thus lower the cost for changing doctrine. Also institutions (war academies) or even doctrines (promotion on merit, not by date of rank or buying it) can lower that factor.

The "foreign powers pull" would simulate that all armies observe what other powers do and react to it. Relation to other powers, distance to each other, technology levels, relative strength, success in combat all would determine how much each power pulls into its direction of doctrine, but by going too far against your local norm new doctrines become more expensive. Thus you can start focusing on skirmishing in the 1840s, but when your neighbours and potential enemies all prefer bayonet attacks (which still have advantages at that time, not so much two decades later) it is more difficult to go against that norm.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
We know what was adopted OTL - by different countries, at different times. It does ultimately look like the best approach (the one most likely to succeed) was lots of intensive training and drill, lots of hard work, and regular equipment purchases - in other words, to do everything the Way Most Likely To Work is very costly.

That's probably the best balancing factor - you can't do it the Right Way with a large army unless you're obscenely rich. That means basically... you have to pick where to specialize. (Perhaps a small force of skilled light infantry, a small assault force and a large "mass" whose job is to hold the line?)

Similarly, for naval weapons - a large-bore smoothbore is easier to make than a smaller-bore high velocity rifle, but it's less effective. Laminate armour is much less costly and quicker to make, but it's not as good. And so on... cost-benefit analysis is probably a major key here.
 
Now that the forum is back up, one thing I'd like to see is much bigger map sizes. A major part of generalship consisted of figuring out where the enemy army was actually located, but this is almost entirely missing in Total War and similar games.

Plus, it could introduce some interesting new tactical/strategic options -- e.g., you could send a few units forward to trick your enemy into thinking that you're in a certain location, and then move your main force somewhere else entirely, say. Like the Germans did at Tannenberg in WW1.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Yes, that kind of uncertainty is a tricky thing to show. I've seen some games which handle it alright on the very small or very large scale (thinking of Space Hulk, which shows you "blips" which could turn out to be nothing or a large number of aliens) but it's hard to show otherwise.

Well, that said, Total War Rome 2 is okay at that (in that you have to have a line of sight on a unit to know it's there) but you do know which few square miles the battle has to be in.
It's not impossible to have a huge map - Supreme Commander has very big ones, albeit partly because trees are like matchsticks on that scale...
...okay, how about this idea. Three scales, not two.

1) Strategic. This is where you move troops from Britain to Canada, or from Virginia to Tennessee. Strategic movements. It's also where you train troops, steer fleets, and so on - could be turn based.
2) Operational. This is where you play out the operational moves of the army. You can move the army as a unit or split it into divisions, and it happens at accelerated real time (e.g. one hour every ten seconds?) as you try to get your forces into a position for The Battle - or avoid it. (Whoever's turn it is controls which potential operational theater is resolved in what order, but they all have to be done). On this level the fog of war is prevalent.
3) Tactical. Once the manoeuvre on the Operational stage has either resulted in the two forces forming up or an unexpected meeting engagement, this is where you control the troops and so on. Real time, with a speed-up button and (in SP) pause.

A tactical battle tires your troops out, but if the victor still has some energy they can launch another operational campaign - the ideal is that one side can pin the other, then win the resulting battle (and hence force their wholesale surrender).
 
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