in other words, suppose we want to war game a major maneuver based military engagement like Battle of the Frontiers or Brusilov offensive. Are there games / emulators in which something like that could be emulated / replayed realistically? What is the state of the art of such software that is available to the general public? Do we know anything about such emulators in the military that might not have been, for whatever reason, duplicated in the civilian gaming community?
Command HQ did a very good job of this, but I’ve never seen anything like it since.
A RTS game can’t replicate a major offensive without lasting for weeks, obviously. Turn by turn wargames have always been the most realistic (things like the Operational Art of War, for instance). Even though there’s no obvious reason why a somewhat realistic, somewhat real-time wargame couldn’t be created in theory. I guess there’s no market for it.
The closest to “real-time realism” I’ve seen was a game about Napoleonic battles, dating I think from the late 80s or somesuch (I played it only once at my brother’s place and don’t even remember the name). It wasn’t really “real-time”, a battle lasting maybe for 3 hours instead of a whole day. The main peculiarity it had that you could only know about the battlefield what you could actually see and the dispatches of your generals (that could be more or less accurate, delayed, etc…, and included request for support or such things). The only actions you could take was issuing orders to said generals (that could similarly be delayed, ignored by the commander on the field, etc…).
Interesting concept that I would like to see again in a modern game, but a long way from what you’re asking about.
And I don’t know anything about actual military simulators.
What scale are you talking about? There are several modern RTS games that boast of many hundreds of units in play at once if you’re trying to get down to the individual level. Most on this end will painstakingly model the details of the weapons and vehicles but virtually ignore any realism with respect to command structure. I don’t know that there are any WWI games there; plenty of WWII, though.
For something that looks a little more like traditional wargames but takes advantage of a computer’s ability, there’s the Airborne Assault series. This is at slightly higher scale, like an RTS but without necessarily the frantic micromanagement. The first games of this kind, the Command Series (Decision in the Desert, Crusade in Europe, Conflict in Vietnam) back in the 1980s, used ‘accelerated real-time’ as the term. The key feature is that it’s not turn-based; it’s more common to speed up and slow down time as the action demands.
At the highest levels there are the various Paradox games (Europa Universalis, Victoria, Hearts of Iron). Except for the last one, the combat model isn’t all that complicated but there is a lot of control of leadership and technology in the units. These are more management/economic/diplomacy games than straight-up military sims. These are also in the ‘accelerated real-time’ style.
Indeed, they aren’t really intended to simulate realistically a conflict/campaign (except for “Hearts of Iron”, which focuses uniquely on WWII).
It would indeed help to know what kind of game/simulation the OP has in mind exactly.
Sounds perfect for the Game Room. Moved from GQ.
samclem Moderator, GQ and IMHO
everybody, thanks for the interesting info.
To clarify my intent here, my question is not so much about specifically RTS or specifically about any other type of game. I am thinking about it more along the lines of “is there a game out there in which events of a major WW1 or WW2 battle can be reenacted realistically”. I.e. not the blind re-enaction type of representation (as in, let’s reenact the victory of the Silver Horde over the Agatean Empire’s combined military) but rather a game world where things that made sense on the historical battlefield would make similar sense. Where you move army units with realistic speed, the clashes between units or between units and fortifications have realistic outcomes in terms of casualties etc.
I gotta ask, what’s “RTS”?
I know of one or two good programs that were written for ground combat training to the Army/Marine Corps, which was later slightly modified for civilian Armchair General usage. It’s one of my favorite games, really.
Tripler
- King of Acronyms. . . except for one.
Care to share?
Have you looked at the Airborne Assault/Command Ops series by Panther Games? They are grognard-level RT wargames played at the brigade to corp-level. No little tanks or little men, just unit counters creeping across the map. It can be a little dry, but the realism is through the roof.
The Australian Department of Defence has licensed one of their games for use in command training.
If you’re asking this in general, and not what the OP specifically meant by it, it stands for “Real-Time Strategy”. The games are characterized by small-scale unit actions combined with some means of producing new units via limited resources, all executed simultaneously with enemy players in real-time. The traditional ‘strategy’ part is not so much military strategy as it is economic or technological; the military actions are almost always tactical. Each unit requires orders but there is often some autonomy in engaging the enemy - some people actually favor the rapid micromanagement type of game and some prefer the other style, where you’re simply organizing the types of units that are created and sending them off.
Originally the label applied to this particular style, the most famous of which is Starcraft. The term has expanded to cover a number of games, including those without the resource conversion & unit production aspect. It is now usually used for what I above called “accelerated real-time” even though that style of game was developing alongside the RTS. Despite the name, those involve a slower pace than the traditional RTS, because they are usually on a much larger scale. The key feature of all these games is that you’re issuing commands and units are following them as the battle unfolds.
The traditional RTS often has something of a rock-paper-scissors aspect in which you attempt to manage the resources to build units that will counter the enemy’s units, without much regard to military realism. Its roots are in games like Rescue Raiders (aka Armor Alley) although it really is considered to start with Dune II (or Command & Conquer since few people played Dune II). The other style goes back to the Command Series & Command HQ already mentioned in this thread. ‘V for Victory’ was in this vein as well, though it came after both of those.
To bring this back to the OP:
Myth, which came later, was the first “RTS” to focus entirely on unit tactics and detailed modeling of the battlefield. The influence of this, combined with all the work done with 3D graphics has led to some modern games keeping track of such details even if the player is not directly controlling them, allowing for a high degree of realism in physical terms. Thus instead of, say, calculating damage directly the damage done by a soldier throwing a grenade at another soldier, the game will model a small object flying through the air (and maybe it hits a wall or bounces) and then an explosion when it lands, which will affect all units around it.
The start of the art involves how effective this modeling is, and is mainly in trying to bring more and more units into play. Right now, it’s probably too big a task to have an entire battle calculated this way and display it in real-time[sup]*[/sup], so games might cheat by only working it out for on-camera units or by setting a unit cap.
*There are the Combat Mission games, which instead of ‘real-time’ go to the other extreme: each minute of the battle is carefully planned, although you only get the first person view of one soldier at a time. Once you’ve set it up, it’s all rendered very precisely, showing you the effects and then you proceed. The result is that an hour of game time can take many hours of real time to play through, though the battles are all small engagements that don’t always last that long.
Actually, I was interested in what it stood for, but your explanation gives me a much better understanding of it. Thanks you!
I wonder if you’re talking about the same Combat Mission-brand I’m about to link to below. . .
Drach, my favorite is TacOps. It was written by an USMC Major, and I’ve been playing it since '96. The graphics are not what most modern ‘first-person-shooter’ games would even look at–but that’s awesome. It’s meant to simulate a Battalion-level conflict, and frankly, if you’re in the CP, you’re going to be staring at a map or Blue Force Tracker the whole time.
Turns are carefully planned out, and executed on minute time-scales. You take your time, submit your orders, and then one turn of game time is implemented in four 15-second ‘mini-turns’ (i.e. for units firing at each other). The Major has been keeping up with the game by patches, but to date, there haven’t been any major revisions in years since v4–doesn’t need it though. The game has a pretty active mailing list and several websites to us fanatics. Frequently, someone will set up a CPX and several players on each side will connect in, to take a geographical region or a smaller unit in a larger command and fight. They’ll communicate with each other over email, IRC, whatever. Usually, it simulates pretty close to the style and comms I’ve been exposed to IRL.
A ways back there was a discussion on using the game to model a corps-on-corps, but I don’t think it was tried. Most of the interested Armchair Generals had full-time jobs in the real world, and couldn’t afford to take vacation to simulate the weeks-long game.
Good times, good times, though.
Tripler
Hell, I’m always looking for PBEM players on TacOps.
R.U.S.E, which is coming out in September, have you commanding divisions instead of single units, but I am not sure if manuevers play a big part in the game.
Combat Mission, which has a few WWII versions and a near-modern NATO vs Syria version, plus an updated WWII version coming out soon, might fit the bill.
Tactical level, so you can’t recreate a whole battle of Kursk or anything (something like 10 tanks and 150 infantry is reasonable; more if you don’t mind stretching).
It’s also not completely real-time.
But very dedicated to making sure that the tactics that were actually successful in real life are the tactics that will be successful in the game. So in that sense, you can very well simulate small-scale battles.
Combat mission is great. One of the key features for me is that it also models morale. So squads tasked to do the impossible or facing horrendous losses will break and run rather than die needlessly.