With additional comments in
blueby Alan Emrich and others
With additional comments in
blueThe Road to Lisbon
In the big picture of the Totaler Krieg! game design, the Western Allied Strategic Hex at Lisbon represents one of "The Four Corners of the Earth" (well, "Game"), a concept I used to "frame" the map for the Axis. Locally, having Lisbon as the Western Allied Strategic Hex means the Axis player must get across all of Iberia in order to score for any of it. This also raises the stakes in the longer term by putting the Axis Strategic Hex of Madrid into play when the Axis opt to go for the Western Allied Strategic Hex in Lisbon.
The Element of Supplies
Simplest rules and effects were the twin goals concerning supplies in Krieg! So you should know going in that means compromise. You can always second guess the designer and say "just one more thing and it'll be just right," but you also have to say at some point "just one more thing and it'll be twelve too many." The main choice I made with supply was whether or not to impose an out-of-supply payment in steps. I chose not to because the main effect was worth the side effects. That is, the main effect I wanted was to have players not fear tucking into each other -- i.e., getting into a one-up clinch until somebody folds.
With a step cost imposed on unsupplied units, there are side effects that I didn't like. Imagine one player shuffling a few empty shells around the tabletop and saying, "Ha!, remove one step each from all those units please." True, you can always find "one more thing" to fine tune the out-of-supply effect, but it looked like an awfully long line of "one mores" along that route before we could see the logical end of that row. I would ask myself: Can I really kill seven steps hundreds of miles away if I place this one corps just so?
Because of the time/distance scale and the interlinked mechanics, I see pockets where there aren't any, and no pockets where there appear to be some. That is, some of the operational front line pocket stuff is built into the combat system. When I rack up a retreat in such a way that a couple units die of overstacking at the end, I assume that bunches of those guys probably bought it in a pocket at the front of the battle or in the middle of the retreat. The system imposes the cost at the end of the battle, but only because it's easier on the players to implement all the results of that month-long battle covering a hundred miles of ground that way. You don't actually see the pocket form and collapse there on the map given the time/distance scale; we've abstracted out the swirling micro-events of the battle(s) and simply assessed the damage at the macro output end. This is what I call "slop-down design," but it works for me. So what you end up with is same-hex pocket combat without the messy stacks (see Mason-Dixon for a Messy Stacks version of this effect).
Now, consider a surrounded army. Again, given the time/distance scale, an army (particularly a big German army) isn't necessarily just sitting there in one hex throughout the turn. That front line may be in motion throughout the turn (beneath the detectable level of actually moving from hex to hex), or may be a static front that looks like the situation in front of Moscow throughout most of 1942, described as looking like a map of the fjords of Norway -- i.e., fingers going both ways below the hex scale, both sides gripping each other on the death's edge.
So, I have no problem with the portrayal of isolation on the front line of combat -- nothing happens until you make it happen within the combat parameters. Two German armies with an empty hex between them is actually a continuous front, but it's a vulnerable one if the enemy has the strength to prove it in combat. Poke a finger of units through the "gap," and if that finger isn't strong enough, it's the poker whose fingertip is really isolated, not the pokee. Like the Delay Box, you don't know until you roll.
The part I DO wish I had a good answer for concerns the question of isolated units waaay beyond the line of action. I can't think of a simple way to clear that up that isn't exploitable as a new gimmick where we don't want it to happen. For a Soviet army that gets bypassed in the Carpathians or the Pripiat, I can imagine that it turns into an active partisan zone. But a German army still sitting in Kharkov while the Soviets are pounding into the Reich. . . I don't have a good cleanup idea for something like that. Everything can be turned into a ZAP! somewhere else and/or involves special calculating to determine that the story has passed these guys by and it's time for them to head for the history books. Either way, it's not elegant, so it's not in Totaler Krieg!.
Some things I've thought of and rejected -- allow a "Support Nationalist" result to 'ping' a step from a thoroughly isolated unit too far from home instead of a replacement step; allow you to exchange a replacement step for a 'ping' against a thoroughly isolated enemy unit far from home in your homeland; allow you to use your luck marker to 'ping' a step etc; just do some cleanup 'pinging' at the beginning of your seasonal turns; . . .something that happens once in a while and gradually clears up that far from home stuff. It almost has to be something where BOTH players can look at a guy on the map and agree that yup, he no longer exists. Way back when I envisioned that fairly tight force pool limits might encourage a player to voluntarily pick up and recycle his OWN withering-on-the-vine guys back into useful replacements -- that's the ideal kind of answer, attrition naturally occurring in the course of playing with the top-stops, but that particular scheme has problems elsewhere.
So in my view, the debate whether unsupplied and/or isolated units should suffer step losses has shifted away from the area where things can look funny to the area where I think we're already covered.
What "No Retreat" Means To Me
Renown game designer Mark Herman wrote to us: "My question it not a rules question per se, but I don't understand the intent of a rule. It concerns the No Retreat marker. I am confused about why I'm doing it. I understand the procedure, but what is being simulated here? As the actor said to the director, "I don't understand my motivation in this scene."
During the development of Krieg!, Alan asked for a way to mark the Axis 'High Tide' for victory determination purposes. Rather than simply recording it when it occurred, I made the Axis player have to decide when he had all he thought he could get, and made him sweat the timing a little so he couldn't be completely opportunistic about it. And 'High Tide' sounded too historical hindsight, so I called it 'No Retreat' for more immediate narrative flavor. So it simply marks a third phase in the game for the Axis -- he's got Limited War, Total War 'the Quest for Lebensraum,' and Total War 'Festung Europa.' It also marks that shift in the German war economy from Guns 'n' Butter Total War to More Guns 'n' Ersatz Total War.
No Retreat's counterpart came from when Totaler Krieg! was just an expansion kit of counters and cards. At Origins '96, Alan and I tried to shortlist nine new cards for each faction, and one of the new German cards was 'Lebensraum' for times when 'Festung Europa' just wasn't the way you wanted or needed to go at that decision point, plus it filled in a lot of the blanks on the half countersheet that we needed to come up with. :-)
[Alan Emrich interjects:] Good answers, Kos. Allow me address the SS Europa Marker story.
The SS Europa Marker came from the concept of "do whatever it takes to win this war." Not the game, damn it, but the war. In other words, take those "defensive resources" of forts, Festung Europa Replacements, the Night Fighter unit, and the High Water Mark VP protection and trade them in for some Reich 'n Roll offensive stuff such that a player might be able to make a "last push" with and be able to go for the Automatic Total Victory (or bust). The script for that came down as fortresses for SS units (but no real beefy 3-steppers -- the regular German Army is still a burden on Himmler's military-within-a-military ambitions), a real airplane for Night Fighters, drafting all friendly minors into the SS (i.e., no more minor replacement steps -- they're conscripted into the German armed forces now), and SS "colonizing" via their HQs (i.e., working as replacements sites while on their 2-step, 0 movement side). Story-wise, this set of toys and rules really worked well together.
The cherry on top was adding the Allied Objective Marker. Basically, Hitler makes the speech to the Generals and then to the world that he's committing everything and everyone to winning the war -- now. He announces the annexing of territory into the Reich, etc. and declares some place or other (the Allied Objective Marker) to be his PROOF of German invincibility -- because he plans to take it and announces to the world that no one can stop him. Suddenly, a hugely important political location has been created as the Axis make a final great push to go for a total of 15 Strategic Hexes and win the game outright. If they fail, well, the bigger that bubble gets, the more places there are to pop it. The Allies might not be able to collapse Germany by VE-Day (the SS Europa 'Mark IV' German army has got some impressive attack and counterattack viability after all), but they'll sure be running roughshod over what the Axis have on the map if there are no fortresses to slow them down at key locations.
And ask Kos what a morale buster it is for the allies to see a big pile of SS armies trapped in front of Moscow and facing certain death. It's much worse than watching an equivalent number of Wehrmacht steps die. ;-) That's the other bit of SS Europa that you can't write into the rules. The Axis player must assume a truly different mindset toward the 'end game' than Festung Europa provides. It takes that "come and get me" mindset where you're prepared to take losses and make the other guy pay for every inch of ground (knowing you have VP insurance) and flips it to, "you're toast man" (knowing that if he's not, you will be!).
Mark Herman answered back: OK, if I got the gist of that, the no retreat marker represents the point when the German government decides its bitten off as much of the world as it wants to chew and it has now shifted into a defensive mode to hold onto what it has. That helps a lot. Thanks, Mark
Russian Casualties Meet the Combat Results Table
"On the Combat Results Table, the attacker usually never loses more than one step. Where are the huge losses suffered historically by the Russians in the assault? Even as late as the final assault on Berlin, the Russians lost about 500k-1m casualties. A better approach to putting more Russian casualties on the CRT might be to 'charge' the Russians attrition losses in some reasonable way when they are on the offensive."
No argument from me, that's a very reasonable and viable design approach. History being dynamic and variable, and Games fixed and predictable, turning one into the other is always a series of choices amongst "lowest common denominator" compromises. Some perspective on the chosen solution, so that you can compare and contrast with alternative Roads Not Taken such as the one you outlined above.
Totaler Krieg!'s perspective is from the smoke-filled room on down, rather than from the smoke-filled trenches on up. There is no real universal equivalence in the game between steps or strength points and tube or bayonet counts -- it's all very relative to the time and the place in the game, since we're covering a large theater over five years of rapid tactical and technical advance. With only three steps in a German army, for instance, I was working much less in terms of "x" number of men and tanks and guns, and much more in terms of an effectiveness level -- sort of a more colorful version of "Off/On" switches. Add in variable Delay rolls, weather, and blitz/non-blitz sequence, and I had a system where the relative value of a step could combine with the constant values of the Combat Results Table to generate reasonable effectiveness results. In other words, "Smoke & Mirrors;" you can get to the same place in a different way by making the CRT results relative and the step values constant, as you suggest.
So what we now have is a system that doesn't really care whether your 2-2-4 panzer corps is composed of panzer divisions with 160 early war models or 60 (if you're lucky) late war vehicles.
For the Soviets in particular (and, by the way, I'd buy a million for ALL the fronts in that final time period -- throw in East Prussia and the Danube/Bohemia front -- but believe about 300+k for the Berlin op): from late '42 right on to the end, the Soviets show a pretty constant front line strength of 6 million plus, all the while continuously evolving in effectiveness relative to their opponents (and to their earlier selves). What the game tries to foster is a campaign-oriented view from above -- the focus is not on individual units and casualty rates in individual rolls of the die, but on groups of units over a season. How far can I get in two or three turns with this card, how many fronts can afford to actively participate, when should I break it off and catch my breath.
As you point out, there are other equally good ways to get there. You can add more units/steps and have a bloodier CRT, but at some point we all still have to draw a line somewhere on that continuum and say how many. The line I drew sure isn't the only possible one -- I guess you could say that my "player" side voted for the level of putting pieces on the map and taking them off again that I was most comfortable with in terms of play-work.
Opening Strategy: East First vs. West First
How Much Risk Should the Axis be Facing?
Actually, both East First and West First should be, in this designer's mind (Alan Emrich's), about equally "risky." Which is "very," in both cases. Remember, for the Axis it's all a high wire act until either France of Russia collapses. With East first, perhaps the greater risk is that it takes longer to bring Russia down than France, and it's not a sure thing (you have to make a couple rolls to collapse them, where Case Yellow puts France's neck neatly in the guillotine). You're exposed to an unwanted two-front war for about a year longer.
Although the Stalin Challenges ploy to break the Pact can really hammer the Axis with some hoped for certainty (thanks to Political Die Roll Modifiers) and at a prescribed cost (look at all the steps it costs in the long run) and time (when the Soviet player deems to play it), the Churchill Pressures Neutrals "counterpart" move to end Appeasement is nothing but a pure crapshoot. There's no cost to the West (except for changing their governments and having their hands tied for several turns while doing so), per se, but it's also largely out of their control, too. All they can count on doing is an Operation Jupiter and praying for some hot Colonial Disputes rolls (if they go that route).
The extra year of exposure it takes to bring down Russia weighs against the "lightning bolt" requirement for the Western Allies to end Appeasement. The Allies need more time to throw more lightning bolts, so it all comes out in the wash (at least in my mind).
My design goal was simple. It wouldn't matter much if you went East First or West First by the time the Axis hit their High Water Marker (circa Winter '43/Spring '43). I wanted a player to be able to look at a game in progress around that time and not be able to easily tell which way the Axis went first. (An ambitious goal, but I don't think I missed by much, if at all.)
Bottom Line: Either way the Axis go, it's risky. West First, the duration of risk is shorter, but the buttf*cking the Soviets can give Germany is worse (in my opinion). East First, the duration of risk is longer, but what the Western Allies can do to Germany is not nearly as bad as what the Russians could do were the situation reversed. (The Western Allies are just not that strong during Appeasement and the Axis Siegfried Line card can really bottle things up. Even if it doesn't, the Western Allies are very exposed after they cross the Rhine and pretty easy to kill in a counteroffensive if you can live with a suppressed Axis Tide long enough.)
How the Strategic Hexes Came to be Where They Are
(as Best as I can Remember it)
I knew going in that I wanted to use geographical victory conditions, for no other reason than that I find these the easiest to track and I'm ergonomically inclined (and, yes, by that I mean "lazy;" I'm liking that word more and more). I pegged pretty quickly that 24 or 36 would be about the right number of points to work with because they were big enough to allow a reasonable amount of swing and small enough to be grasped, especially when divvied up into chunks divisible by three and/or four (trust me on this). So I had the target number before I looked at where to start planting them on the map.
At the same time, some sort of victory tracking pendulum was on the To Do list. That's where the chunks of 3 and 4 came in, since I needed that track to be very manageable. (We didn't yet have the notion that the numbers of sets would make very elegant die roll modifiers, but we knew enough to know that when you keep things small and manageable, you leave yourself open for nice surprises later on.) Once I started looking at map and track boxes together, it was clear pretty quickly that I could easily use all 36 theoretical points to cover the storyboard, and that the division into 9, 9, and 18 was a good way to say "Germany has much to gain and everything to lose."
On the pendulum, using sets of three helped play out the rapid and enticing Outward Bound part of the program, while the Allies use sets of four for the slow grind back. In retrospect, it probably wasn't necessary to maintain both sizes of sets (3 and 4) -- I left it there as one of those things that would either reveal its own goodness or that we could exploit in some way when needed. It's still sitting there waiting to be more useful.
Gray hexes on the map: All cities in Greater Germany for sure -- everything counts once you're inside the Reich. That was a variable number as I wasn't counting population, but covering the geography (there are several unrepresentative cities with a greater 1938 population than Königsberg, for example). Rome, Budapest, and Bucharest looked like naturals to mark the southern Marches.
The Golden Triangle of Stockholm, Madrid, and Ankara: These sort of frame the Axis set. I like the way they mark outlying paths to elsewhere that the Axis player might like to take and I like that, in order to take those paths, the Axis player puts vulnerable spots in play. So instead of making them reward hexes in themselves, I made them risk hexes -- sort of a counter-intuitive approach that paid off with the right feel. (In early incarnations of Krieg!, it was all go go go, so this approach restored a realistic sense of limits, a sense that there are some places it might be just as well to leave neutral.)
Why Norway got One Each of Green and Gray: The storyboard said go there, so I went, but I wanted some of the accidental feel of that campaign. I put two there so that Axis players would pause to consider whether they really wanted to try for that shoestring op on the historical timetable. (I only go for Norway when I can ace it. It can always be picked on later -- say, when you've got Sea Lion lined up on the Channel coast.)
Metz and Warsaw were the back-and-forth sites--either could have been Green or Gray, or both, Warsaw could have been tri-colored. Posen, Warsaw, and Metz became all gray finally to put that Versailles Chip on Germany's shoulder. (Alan vetoed Metz; I forget why but it made good sense to me at the time.)
Green hexes were pretty obvious once Warsaw was Gray.
Red hexes were pretty clear too, and by now I had ideas like the Soviet Collapse die roll to help set the parameters. Kiev, Rostov, and Sevastopol to bracket the Ukraine and Donetz Valley. Minsk, Moscow, and Leningrad for Russia. Baku to let the storyboard and VP tracks combine to play the '42 campaign. Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk because that's where you'd go to put the nails in the Soviet coffin. They're icing. If you can get that far, you should get a double dip. Having that much Soviet terrain to play with, I did a lot of reading on the Russian Civil War to see what campaigns to the Volga and beyond might look like.
(Astrakhan is a geo-political dead end by the way if you're looking at Soviet Central Asia. The Tashkent Reds came up the Aktyubinsk line to reach the Volga via Kubishev, and that's the way you'd go to get there from European Russia.)
Why This City is a "City" and That One Isn't
Cities are relative Mojo Spots, storyboard smoke and mirrors. Moscow has 3.5 million folks in '35, Konigsberg 300,000. I looked at communication and administrative centers and didn't hesitate to go back to the system for feedback on such things as how many replacement sites should the Soviets have, how much should I stretch the German garrison as he (or IF he) takes enough sites to deprive the Red player of enough spots to put all the people he gets on his really good cards. In other words, where the cities are located is where some "steering" took place to keep the game focused and working right.
Orel and not Tula, and other 100k versus 200+k cities: At Totaler Krieg!'s scale I was really thinking more point-to-point than anything, I guess, though I'm not sure I really knew that at the time. Bryansk, Tula, Kursk, with Orel just about in the center (and the central anchor of the German line there for two years), so Orel it was. Manchester is a port because Liverpool is in that same hex at this scale. I've been on the other side of this too -- I sent a Paths of Glory playtest map back to Ted Raicer with other points and other paths, so I know where you're coming from. When it came to cities and ports, I picked the ones that I loved best. Those that are in the game are the ones that the storyboard told me I needed to help sort out the "whys" and "why nots."
I think of a game design as an experiment. This game isn't my only take on WWII; it's more "my take on WWII that happened to evolve that one time I actually sat down to do it." I had game questions as much as historical ones. What might happen if you cut up the storyboard and deal it out to the players? What if you deal out Random Event Tables to players? I really like that break down build up thing from SPI's old Grande Armee, what can I do with that? What if getting bigger is the goal but not the solution? How the hell do I know bauxite from manganese?
Anyway, that's all the background. It was more choices than answers where all those design decisions came from.
Another Explanation of Applied Combat Results
One TK! player wrote: "I have no problem with death by overstacking. My problem is with retreating units transmitting their combat result (like a contagious disease) to other units they happen to meet along the way. This might be reasonable in a tactical game, to represent a panic effect, but I can't see what it represents at this scale. In my example of a single corps retreating into a fully stacked Lisbon, OK, the retreating corps (or one unit in Lisbon) dies from overstacking -- that's fine. But why should the rest of the stack be destroyed when they were nowhere near the attackers?"
I don't know if I can de-bug (or feature) the 'zen' of this any further than I have in the Reference Booklet. The situation on the map before the die roll is the opening credits; the situation after the die roll and result implementation is the closing credits. In between is a two hour movie in which the British manage to lose Singapore and two battleships (or Lisbon, in this case). I really like the way it works, but not everyone will.
Consider the range of results in the drives on Paris of 1814, 1870, 1914, and 1940, and how to encompass them at a strategic scale (one month+ turns, 60 mile hexes) with a single die roll on a single table. That was the problem we faced, and the Totaler Krieg! Combat Results Table results is our proposed solution.
"I still wonder why the strength of the units in the rear (Lisbon, in my case) are ignored."
Alan Emrich offers the following: First, the units in the rear are not ignored in this way: when they’re retreated into/through they become available to take step losses. I’ve seen it more than once where this very situation prevented the Axis from gaining more exploitation hexes simply because the defending force consisted of more bodies to lose to slow down the attacker.
I might venture a guess as to what Kos might say about the strength of the guys in the rear not counting. This is a "defense in strength" game, not a "defense in depth" game like A3R. That 1-step unit that got slapped was the front line (i.e., where you should have been defending in strength). By the time the attacker rolled through there and onto the next hex (60 miles, mind you), you’re probably talking about a meeting engagement battle and the attacker’s "mo" (momentum) is represented by the Dr# result on the CRT. That’s how far they get to push before their "mo" runs out and it’s seriously time to recalculate odds (i.e., go on to the next Combat Segment).
Gary Robinson adds: I think the conceptual problem here is being caused by seeing units as filling a hex like they do on a wargame map, equally facing all directions and distinct from each other as discrete chunky units. In reality the units are a thin line of troops around the edges of the area facing outwards, not a solid chunk of cardboard filling the area; the Lisbon guys would most likely not have a line facing toward the friendly unit in the next hex. They would be counting on the non-Lisbon guys to defend that approach to their rear. It would be a continuous line facing out, linking hands at the corners where the hexes touch. This line would be much weaker in the non-Lisbon area in your example and here is the weak spot where it could easily be punctured. In effect the line is pierced in the non-Lisbon area and thus the attacking troops could get into the rear of the Lisbon troops, who do not have a line facing in the direction of the non-Lisbon troops.
Do you see what I am getting at? Think of the units as actually being colored lines around the outside (only) edges of the hexes they are in, with no line between friendly hexes (the inside edges) and it makes a lot more sense.
See y’all next time,
Kos