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Hypnobeard posted:I think it's probably the latter. GDW did produce an actual wargame for WW3 (called, appropriately enough, The Third World War), but that was more tank-pushing than political maneuvering. GDW made a lot of wargames- their most notable probably being the WW2-set Europa series that could be combined into a monster game. Their Tunisia game is actually reputed to be quite good. Some of the GDW designers went on to make other wargames, the most recent effort being Thunder in the East, which went from Victory Point Games to GMT. If wargames are allowed I might have to do a review of the ludicrously bad Vietnam: Rumor of War Panzeh fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Feb 6, 2021 |
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Feb 6, 2021 18:39
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Vietnam: Rumor of War, Session 0 A rumor of quality(and player agency). Published by Compass games, this is the second of Adam Starkweather's OSS(Operational Scale System) series of games. The first was Korea: Fire and Ice, which had a rulebook so bad it had to be completely rewritten and put up online. This rulebook is also full of holes though not as bad as that. Starkweather also did some work on Multi-Man Publishing's GTS(Grand Tactical System) and Compass' CSS(Company Scale System). You might say that's a lot of systems, which is true, because (cardboard) wargamers like systems. The games themselves are complicated as is, so anything that eases the learning curve helps. It also helps sell games, as wargamers are quite hide-bound and will flock to seeing new conflicts in an old system, even if the system isn't suited(See the COIN series trying to model hotter conflicts). Let's get back to the game at hand. The first half of the rulebook or so is the OSS system itself, with a few allowances for the differences between Vietnam and Korea. The second half are rules about the campaign, victory points, and an enormous amount of chrome. You can follow along by downloading the rules here. Most hex and counter games have their rules online, though sometimes they hold back the scenario book. This is helpful both in trying to gauge a game, as well as trying to play it online on VASSAL. So, next update, we'll open the book and gawk in amazement at the game's mission statement and marvel at a game that allows the US to invade North Vietnam which can trigger a PRC intervention with troops, but US troops are committed on a fixed schedule and have to adhere strictly to corps boundaries. A game that has an incredibly detailed air system that gives the F-4 and A-4 very different capabilities but has no ability for VC main force units to actually evade attacks.
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Feb 7, 2021 13:44
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By popular demand posted:That poorly repurposed photo is setting a high bar for rushing ahead with no editorial oversight. You've got Compass down to a T(There are some good games published with Compass but this ain't one of them)  Here's a taste of editorial quality.
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Feb 7, 2021 14:26
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Vietnam: Rumor of War, Page 1: A Wargame's Thesis Statement In many ways, wargames are kind of a way to present someone's take on a war, not by writing long paragraphs in books but by trying to drill down the different elements into a simulation, and hopefully a fun game as well. Not every entry here will be a single page, but I think this one's important. Let's begin with this beginning paragraph. Adam Starkweather posted:Welcome to the second game in the Operational Scale Series I really question the notion that if you have a system, it should work for World War III in 1985, the Korean War, the Arab-Israeli Wars, and the Vietnam War. Such a system would either be wrong for some of them, or so high-level and vague as to barely resemble the thing. OSS manages to be both of those things. The underlined sentence is telling, because as we see later, Starkweather likes the air war. He likes it in all his games, and Vietnam is no exception. For what it's worth, operational literature about the war in Vietnam is sparse, especially outside a few specific topics- Ia Drang, the air war over North Vietnam, and Tet. Better works are coming out on a wide variety of topics, but it's coming slowly. Thankfully, modern works are better able to use Vietnamese archives and have a better handle of Vietnamese operations and strategy throughout. I think Starkweather chose the literature that excited him most- the air war. It's not a bad thing to simulate the air war in some detail, but it always comes at a cost in weight, and if one has to choose important elements in the context of the passage i'll get to later, I would probably leave out detailed simulation of different aircraft types' capabilities or even worry about basing. There's also nothing in this game that really resembles coalition warfare. The SVN politics is non-existent, reflected only vaguely through entries in other mechanisms. There are no coups, no overall leadership. There's also no simulation of divergence between China and North Vietnam. It all just comes out as switches in reinforcements, reduction of a few supply points here and there based on politics outside the scope of the game. There's only one major strategic divergence the US player can make from historical, and it just feels like fanfiction. That will come later. Adam Starkweather posted:The general mission for this series is to fill a niche that I hope First of all, almost nothing for this game is designed from the ground up. Much of it feels like kitbashed Korea mechanics begrudgingly adapted to a much larger map. In fact, its scale is exactly the same as Korea's in terms of units, but with smaller generic units available for the Communist side. The air mechanics are also identical. And this game is not fast. If you want fast, play Hearts and Minds, a game that somehow goes more quickly and feels less scripted than this(and H&M is quite scripted). And I suspect this note will get a lot of people here, but I'll let it pass. Almost every Vietnam War game is two-player. In portraying this war, it ultimately did become about what Johnson and Nixon wanted, what Mao wanted, and to a lesser extent what Le Duan wanted. While many modern overall studies of the war I think take an over-focus on the RVN's appeal to the detriment of the interplay with how NLF semi-conventional and conventional forces played into the government's ability to even try to garner support, this game seems uninterested in either. In fact it seems not very interested in what's happening on the ground in Vietnam at all. Almost every complex element of the war- this game sidesteps.  So, at first, this cardboard chit depiction for units is rather normal for wargames but Starkweather has decided to be very clever and try to find a way to depict units on the counter while having very little game information about the different kind of units on the counter. Normally, the advantage of a wargame chit over a miniature or say, a cube or disc is that you can put a bunch of information on a counter like this:  Depicted: A much older and better game about the war. Starkweather has decided to aesthetically improve his counters by having unit emblems on them... except this has a great many implications on the design. By not putting any information on the counters, this imposes many mechanical limitations, some of which are really crippling in trying to show land warfare in any kind of detail at this scale. The implications will come fairly clearly in the next few pages, but i'll give a little tease of one of them. The 11th Armored Cavalry regiment was one of the last US units withdrawn from the theater. While the Pentagon at first thought that armor would not be of much use for US operations and adjusted the composition of divisions it sent to Vietnam with this in mind, they learned after a year or so that armor was useful as the roads proved to be conduits for both sides, and armor was quite useful when fighting along these paths. The 11th ACR proved to be a valuable reserve rolling column during the 1972 NVA offensive. It does not exist in this game. It could not exist in this system, because it really has no way to differentiate an armored regiment from any other regiment or unit. Armor is ephemeral and vague in OSS. Much like much of the rest of this system, especially when it comes to ground combat. Yes, this designer wants to make the system depict the Arab-Israeli wars and a 1985 World War III but has no way to have armored divisions or brigades running around. Good luck.
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Feb 8, 2021 00:34
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kommy5 posted:Those are certainly some choices in designing a game to encapsulate the Vietnam War. It's kinda hard to single out the kind of war McNamara thought it would be. Yes, there is in fact a body count track but it only increases US military victory slowly. They get a small trickle from controlling certain lines of communication but it's much easier to go down than up. The US immediately wins if it can get its military victory meter up to 31, but this is rather difficult. Unrest will go up more quickly and has threshholds that once it passes, it can't return back from, whereas military victory does not. Unrest reaching 31 means a Communist victory. Night10194 posted:I see we're starting right off the bat with 'btw I don't care about the politics of the regime the US was intent on propping up and whose actions and situation were absolutely critical to any understanding of the war', huh.  This is a game made in 1984. While this is probably the heaviest depiction out there, even lighter games do try to capture it to some extent.
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Feb 8, 2021 01:13
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Wait, in this infinitely asymmetrical war between a modern high-tech mechanized army and a guerilla insurgency with conventional but less high-tech support, military land units are only differentiated by size...? Yep. If you want to make an abstract game, you can absolutely go that way. Starkweather does not want to make an abstract game, though he makes one anyway. One of the big critiques of the Vietnam CDG(Card-Driven Game) Hearts & Minds is that units are generic. Sure, there's infantry, armor, and artillery and such but there's no 1 ID or ROK Capital Division, etc. Unfortunately for people looking to this game, while it has nice pictures on the unit, they're also generic in function. For US brigades and regiments, the only difference between them is whether they're airmobile or not(which reduces the cost of airmobilizing a battalion when they send one out) as well as which corps they're assigned to. Neither of these things are actually put on the counter. A grog might remember that the 1 Cav, 101 Abn, 82nd Abn, and 173d Abn Brigade are all airmobile units(though the regiment of the 82nd sent to Vietnam was not actually airmobile, it was simply part of the US strategic reserve and sent in to stabilize things after Tet). You can make your units cubes or miniatures if you want, but they come at a significant cost- if you don't want to be looking things up all the time, the units themselves and their relationships have to be pretty heavily simplified to accommodate this.
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Feb 8, 2021 14:08
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Vietnam: A Rumor of War, Page 2 - Movement When you teach somebody a wargame, or when you're playing it, it's good to have the sequence of play out- it helps keep you on track and make sure you know what you're doing. Not everything is particularly involved, but making sure everything gets done in the right order is important.  The focus in this post is going to be on the activation phase, as this is where most of the player agency and game action is. In it, the Communist player will activate as many HQs and move units as they please, then the US player will do the same. During the other player's turn, you will get a chance to engage in reserve movement if you have a fresh HQ with which to do it. HQ activations are fairly simple. You pick an HQ, flip it to spent, and choose four units. In the Korean game, some theater commanders allow HQs to activate more, but in this game it is always up to four units. Blue capitalist HQs can activate anyone, US HQs can activate US units, Royal Lao and Cambodian army HQs can activate their respective national units(same for Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge). For the communists, PAVN and PRC HQs can activate anyone, but VC HQs can only activate VC units. One at a time, each unit moves, and they move 5 MP- units always have five movement points, no matter what kind of unit activates. If the unit ends its move without being adjacent to an enemy unit, it can move another 3 MP before anyone resolves any combats. Once a unit is done moving, it can spend remaining MPs to attempt to attack a hex with enemy units. Choose the type of attack(better attacks cost more MPs) and lay down a combat chit. Combat- i'll get to that in another part of this review. For now, let's look at how Starkweather chose to give the sides asymmetical movement capabilities. First of all, for the Capitalist player, ARVN divisions and US regiments can, instead of moving their base unit, can spawn an ARVN regiment or US battalion respectively, leaving the larger unit behind. This is how Starkweather gets by the problem with the way the map is huge compared to the unit scale. Even with this gimmick, the US and ARVN simply don't have enough troops to guard the major provincial capitals(so the game doesn't actually value them much in consequence), instead they're rather unrealistically concentrated, which makes for an uninteresting experience for both sides. The Communist player has more strategic freedom but operations are just so unrewarding. Oh, and here's the other side of his attempt at asymmetry in movement- an asymmetrical TEC:  At first glance, it seems reasonable- the Capitalist units, being generally heavier have trouble moving through the worse terrain. However, it makes things a bit of an unwieldy mess trying to reference this and remember it's different for both sides- for example, the US gets half-movement on roads, towns, and cities, but the NLF does not- though the NLF does get half-movement on the trail. Worse, it's actually not very historical, either. Both sides fought heavily over transport routes. Even worse, as the war went into the 70s, PAVN troops relied on these routes more, as their artillery was motorized and they featured more armor. However, the TEC does not change to reflect this. A better wargame would probably look to differentiate between unit types for MP costs per terrain, but Starkweather just isn't interested in distinguishing between units if they're not airplanes. The differential defense factors are even worse(why are the Communists better at fighting in cities than the Capitalists? Remember, these are 10 mile hexes.), but more on that later. Also, just as a note for you reading before, yes, this game includes a very vague representation of the Laotian and Cambodian civil wars, but it's completely uninterested in them- the only rewards are a few VPs for holding the capital hexes and the units have no real detail to them. To be fair, lots of Vietnam games include these wars but give them no detail. They mattered to the Vietnam War, but very few games really get at exactly how they mattered, and the dynamics of each. The Pathet Lao was a very different group than the Khmer Rouge, and the countries were very different. I think it does a disservice to those conflicts to include them in such poor detail. It's very hard to make a Vietnam game without some reference to Sihanoukville and the Lon Nol coup's effect, but it isn't that hard to include these without trying to model the whole conflict. Next up: Combat, or Schrodinger's artillery and armor.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:30
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Vietnam: A Rumor of War, part 3 - Combat So, we just finished discussing activation and movement and I briefly mentioned combat there, but we'll dig into it here. Combat is part of activation, and either happens in the middle of a move(meeting engagement), or after all units have moved. Due to this implication, there is always only one attacking unit(though other friendly units adjacent to the battle hex provide support). The unit activates, and if it has enough MP remaining for the attack type, it can put down a combat chit.  The chit has a bunch of things that affect the combat, from the attacker's die roll, to whether a random event happens, to how much the winner(if the attacker) gets to advance, and how effective support is. Generally, the better the attack type, the better these tend to be(not all the chits of a type have the same numbers). For a game going with not-busy counters, these are awfully busy in a way that seems bizarre. Essentially, the attacker rolls the dice+mods listed on the chit, then the defender rolls a d6 if spent, or a d10 or d6 if not spent, though if they choose to roll a d10 the defending unit(s) become spent. Both sides are modified by many factors. The first is unit size(A,B,C).  Is this anywhere on the unit counters themselves? Of course not. This is the US troops' main advantage in the game- their battalions are class B units while other battalions are class C. In fact, other than airpower it's their only real advantage. OSS does not like different units being different. Once you get class differential and terrain(see the last update), we go into support. Support is awful. Each side has a universal artillery, armor(and for the US, air) support value. The planning type determines how much you subtract before you get the raw support available, and then the terrain determines how many points of whatever support it is needed to get a single DRM. The VC has seperate artillery value from the PAVN, though I assume VC units can't use PAVN tank support, though this is never stated in the rules. ARVN has their own artillery and tank support values. Who the hell knows what the Cambodians and Laotians of either side use? It's nowhere in the rules. The support value doesn't actually go down- it's basically just available every combat, the only way it gets reduced is if you use a special tank bonus to get the road value instead of the defending hex's terrain value, or if a unit using the support retreats, in which case the support rating drops one for every hex the unit retreats. Air support for the US is a value, but when you spend points, you have to roll for planes on ground support to stay on station with a rating equal to what was spent. It's finicky and odd, and really out of line with everything else, but that's how airpower is in this game. So, basically, every unit has the same access to artillery, armor, air support, etc. There's some specifics about ARVN support during the Westmoreland period but it doesn't add much and honestly doesn't make a lot of sense. The differences between the armies involved don't really come out, and this seems to be a testament to a system that had almost no thought put into it. Indeed, there's not any real flavor with this, either. You don't get the feel of the firepower of the US side or the craftiness of the NLF forces. There's no real flow to the battles, either, despite all the map space compared to the units. Anyway, there's a few other modifiers, and once you've rolled dice and added everything up, you get a differential. This is modified by the leader(the US and PAVN do not get corps leaders for some reason, but the Pathet Lao do), and the loser has to satisfy the differential in losses. Only the loser takes any losses, though the winner can lose a single tank support point if they took the road bonus. To satisfy losses, the loser can do each thing once: - add 1 to the body count/casualties to satisfy 1 point of differential - use 1 replacement point to satisfy 1 point of differential - retreat 1-3 spaces to satisfy 1-3 points of differential, with units taking further penalties for every retreat hex beyond 1 - destroy one losing unit to satisfy 1 point of differential(this will increase the body count/casualties based on the unit class) - destroy all losing units to satisfy all differential(this will increase body count/casualties based on the dead units) It's actually kind of hard to attrition anyone down in this system, oddly enough- your best bet sometimes ends up being to surround a hex entirely and pound it. The winner taking no losses is also bizarre. I have no idea what Starkweather was doing here. It's neither accurate, nor quick and easy, nor is it particularly flavorful toward anything. Every unit has equal access to tank and artillery support based on their side. There's absolutely no feeling of the conflict here, especially given how sparse the map is.
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Feb 10, 2021 15:08
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wdarkk posted:It's a weird mix of abstract and fiddly. It doesn't seem to give any sense of what or who is actually fighting. There are much better games at modelling the US, ARVN, and NLF forces' various strengths and weaknesses. I kinda feel like it suffers a lot from the design constraint of having the unit counters not actually have numbers on them. Victory Games' Vietnam, for example, does a pretty good job of showing the differences in styles. The way firepower works to both improve one's own strength and the enemy's casualties in that game while VC units get to roll to just completely avoid an operation targeting them does a lot more for showing things off. ARVN units unaugmented are significantly weaker than PAVN units, and the PAVN can augment their units, making them mechanized but this also makes them significantly more powerful than ARVN's. Also, in operations, for example, the US player can call in additional reserves after a round of combat, while the NLF player cannot- they have to allocate everything they want, whereas so long as the US side can stomach one round of combat, they can always bring more stuff in if need be. This reflects their superiority in communications and operational mobility. It means the NLF player's conventional offensives are different from the US player's, as well as their own less conventional offensives.
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Feb 10, 2021 20:36
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Loxbourne posted:I was expecting an uncomfortable display of politics, but instead the game just seems to be an incredible mess in every area. The system is fairly original, it's just awful. There's a game with a combat system that has somewhat similar bones but seems more thought out with it(it's also a lower level game). The standard wargame combat mechanics, such as they are, are kind of tired and have flaws that have been known since the 70s, but Starkweather is pioneering new ground in bad mechanics.
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Feb 11, 2021 01:02
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Hopefully this evening i can drop the next part, where i'll digress and get into the game's air system.
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Feb 12, 2021 15:27
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Heeey, Starkweather actually added differentiation for units for his cold war game: Anyway, next entry in the review comes today.
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Feb 13, 2021 12:33
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Vietnam: A Rumor of War part 4 - Airplanes go zoom zoom Tired of generic ground units? Step right up, to the system where Starkweather probably did read a book or two. Part of this certainly is carryover from the Korea game but it's definitely more interesting for him than the other aspects of the war by far. Each aircraft type has a rating for each kind of mission. No, it's not on the counter, you have to look at this not-particularly-readable table. Some of them are bizarre, for example, the B-52 being an incredible CAS aircraft in the Vietnam era. The Communist player also has a much smaller table, as they only launch Downtown missions(the one place for fighter combat) with their aircraft. Downtown is the big fighter combat over North Vietnam, the one that's had books written on it because it's technical and interesting. There have, in fact, been games made about the air war over North Vietnam. If the Communists are the only ones to commit fighters here, they get to take a crack at anyone on a strategic mission, otherwise, they have to fight whatever US fighters show up there. If they do send all the US fighters back, they reduce the US military victory value by 1. The mechanics of air combat(and all air missions) are simple. Roll a d10 and try to get under the aircraft's value on that mission to get success. For fighter combat, that means you pick an opponent and roll to try to reduce and send them back to available. Reduced aircraft have a rating one lower, and are eliminated if they're hit again. After resolving all air combat in the downtown missions, the communists can try to fire SAMs to get at any aircraft doing any of the strategic missions, with an ARM modifier based on what turn it is. The missions themselves are pretty self-explanatory, targeting airbases(this reduces the amount of planes on offer), infrastructure(reduces next turn's supply), SAMs(reducing SAMs), etc. Tactical missions, likewise, allow the planes to contribute air support points, do the funky special forces missions, interdict(a weird interruption system on activations), or trying to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail to reduce its length. Air missions are very, very chromey in this game. The location of the 7th fleet determines where the carrier planes' tactical missions can go and whether they can partake in strategic missions. US losses in strategic missions contribute to the Hanoi Hilton track, while special forces wings can try to conduct raids to rescue them. It's all very pop media-centric(the other very notable pop media-centricity of this and many vietnam games is an emphasis on tunnels, as though the VC were xenomorphs that moved around primarily underground, but i'll get to that later) It's really not that interesting- the Communist player seems to have planes mostly to provide props for the US fighters. If you were trying to model this conflict and wanted to abstract parts of it, the air war would definitely be one of the first choices, but Starkweather, driven by OSS's air system just soldiers on through. A lot of it is just a solitaire game for the US player, really one of the few things they get to do that isn't heavily scripted. At least they're not stuck with ARVN corps boundaries for air wings. The looking up for airplane ratings is really awkward and symptomatic of Starkweather's refusal to put stuff on the counters. Next up - Politics: Cambodia, Laos, PRC intervention
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Feb 13, 2021 16:01
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Vietnam: A Rumor of War Update #5 - Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam.. why bother? Many Vietnam strategic games consider the civil wars in Cambodia and Laos part and parcel of the war in South Vietnam. A couple even include North Vietnam to add the possibility of a US invasion. Rumor of War includes all of these, and none are done any justice at all. Cambodia and Laos are done with the lacksadaisical thinking more or less typical in designs, and North Vietnam comports to Starkweather's desire to design a Korean War game. The significance of Cambodia and Laos to the war is that the main landward supply route for the NLF forces ran through border zones in both countries, attracting the interest of both DRV and US operations, some covert, some overt to close or maintain the supply lines. Unfortunately, the games that try to model these do not really do anything to try to show the dynamics involved in both conflicts, and tend to just make them samey generic factions. Laos  The Sleepy Royal Lao Army Laos had, from the outset of independence been roiled by factional infighting between warlords, the government, and the Pathet Lao, with ethnic minorities in the country oscillating in their allegiances along with everyone else. As the conflict in Vietnam escalated into the 60s, the border zone and trail became important to the DRV, and the DRV began to be directly involved in protecting its supply line. After that, the CIA, and later less subtle covert programs sought to disrupt the trail running through Laos. In game, there is absolutely no reward for the DRV gaining a communist victory in Laos. In fact, there's really no reason for the US not to fling the Royal Lao units toward the trail and hope for the best, as they guard nothing. Maybe you can stick a few HCM trail interdiction markers down. In reality, the Royal Lao army had enough problems as is in the north of the country, and had no appetite for moving south and risking more direct confrontations with the NVA. Most activity like this was run by Vang Pao's Hmong troops, which tangled with the Pathet Lao most of the time, and occasionally challenged the NVA. These Hmong troops do not exist in the game. Nothing meaningful happens in Laos in game. In reality, the DRV was content not to expose US covert operations because it would have exposed that they were violating Laotian neutrality themselves. In game, Laotian missions add to the 'covert missions' track that the DRV can roll to expose at any time. There was no research done at all. The Laotian civil war could be its own game. It probably should, and this map could be a lot smaller, though I think the appeal is that since Vietnam is a long and thin country, it doesn't cost a whole lot of table space to add Cambodia and Laos, but I feel like if you're going to simulate a conflict, simulate it. Cambodia  WTF In 1965, the Khmer Rouge was small. They were determined, but a division and two battalions is insane before the civil war. Sihanouk's neutralist position still reigned, and he had a relatively stable government. Cambodia was not in the midst of civil war. In 1966, there was an uprising which started to put pressure among the urban elites and military officers to do something about the KR, and also the Vietnamese military presence on the border. During that time, Sihanouk had opened a port for the DRV to receive military supplies and a southern half of the Ho Chi Minh trail. As the years went on, he began to regret it, perhaps under pressure from his military. He began to soften his stance on US and ARVN incursions, though he didn't want to use the Cambodian army to try to enforce Cambodian neutrality or risk provoking the DRV or China by closing Sihanoukville. In 1969, Nixon decided that part of his strategy of Vietnamization, buying time to complete the development of ARVN, would be to try to disrupt NLF logistics, and he thought he had an opportunity when he backed Lon Nol's coup of Sihanouk. Lon Nol might've done a coup anyway without the US sending its approval, as Sihanouk's straddling the line infuriated the nationalist sensibilities of the military officers but we'll never know. Almost immediately, the US begins bombing intensely and Lon Nol takes the opportunity to engage in some low key ethnic cleansing of the Vietnamese population on the way to trying to drive the NVA out of the country. Initially, things seem successful- the NLF is reeling after Tet, and a US incursion in 1970 closes off what's left of the trail into IV corps, bagging enormous amounts of military supplies and destroying much of the infrastructure. However, the NVA retaliates by launching an offensive into Cambodia with Khmer Rouge support, effectively destroying Lon Nol's professional army. While Le Duan was not particularly interested in handing Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, he also wasn't willing to allow Cambodian troops to threaten the NVA base areas or the Vietnamese population in general. During this time, Sihanouk arrives to lend his popular support to the KR, and the DRV begins training Khmer Rouge troops to garrison areas after it withdraws. This is a decision both Le Duan and Sihanouk would later regret. Once the NVA troops withdraw in 1973 to focus on Vietnam again, the civil war goes badly for Lon Nol. His armies just couldn't handle the beating the Vietnamese gave them and he struggled to form garrisons around his cities, even with the meager US support he had. The Khmer Rouge would overrun the country in 1975, and the rest is well known. In no way does Rumor of War simulate this at all. The idea that the Vietnamese reduce the US 'military victory' track by having the Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh is absolutely absurd. As the years go on, the KR gets gradually stronger while the Cambodian forces stay the same, and eventually they'll be able to attack. If any US, ARVN, or NVA unit crosses into Cambodia or Laos from the border zones, they take a huge unrest penalty(either US unrest decreases or increases depending on who invaded). The US took an enormous amount of flack for invading the border zones in Cambodia, while Campaign X, where the North Vietnamese army left the border zones, did not galvanize the US people or administration behind further involvement. Worse, Rumor of War has a high intensity conflict starting from 1965, which comically undersells the state of Cambodia at the time. Even Hearts and Minds managed to leave Cambodia closed to civil war until 1969. The Cambodian Civil War alone could be an interesting game all on its own accord, but being a underdeveloped side show in Rumor of War serves nothing, and just adds bloat to the game. There's a few units laying around, you could fight i guess if you want, whenever. North Vietnam  Please, no, get me out of here. The US takes an invasion penalty for invading North Vietnam, just like the other countries. There's not much there to gain, but hey there's a 1 in 5 chance every turn that the PRC will invade and every subsystem in the game will turn to maximum tonk offensive mode. Half-baked, not even thought out, that's pretty much how this stuff goes.
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Feb 25, 2021 18:49
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By popular demand posted:This gross and wrong oversimplification of a vastly complicated series of conflicts makes me wonder what this asshat would've made of the wars of Israel. Judging by The Doomsday Project, he's decided to not make long multi-year games where political stuff might need to be more complicated and focused on a more granular, operational-ish game. It's probably for the best. For reference, Vietnam: A Rumor of War has seasonal turns, Doomsday project has daily turns.
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Feb 25, 2021 19:43
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Xiahou Dun posted:Hey, Panzeh. Absolutely legit. DRV- Democratic Republic of Vietnam(North Vietnam) NLF- National Liberation Front(The term the North used for its southern elements, though they would later end up using Viet Cong as well) PAVN/NVA - People's Army of Vietnam/North Vietnamese Army(The DRV's regular forces) KR - Khmer Rouge(Cambodian Communist insurgency) RVN - Republic of Vietnam(South Vietnam) ARVN - Army of the Republic of Vietnam(South Vietnamese Army) PLAF - People's Liberation Armed Forces(It's what the Communists called the 'Main Force' Viet Cong units, could be confused with the Chinese army, though. The VC military units could be divided into three categories fairly broadly- Local Forces, which are the part-time soldiers, guerillas and such. Regional Forces which are full time local militia, and Main Forces which are regular type military formations) PL - Pathet Lao(Laotian Communist organization) I'll work to introduce someone if they're not someone obvious like a US president as well. For example, Le Duan was the main decisionmaker in North Vietnamese politics, though the US government had no idea about this at the time. Much of this knowledge comes about with the gradual opening of Vietnamese archives in the late 90s and 2000s. If I bring in a new acronym, i'll try to explain it. Part of my approach in this part of the review was to try to explain how much history there is here compared to what the game actually has. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 10:41
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JcDent posted:And you're doing a fairly good job of it, I went from knowing poo poo all about Laos to wanting a game about Laos. The biggest difference is in MTOEs(modified table of equipment- what's in the unit and how is it organized) for the units(the VC main force units were designed to be supplied by pre-placed caches and lacked towed artillery as well as much of a logistical tail)- the uniforms won't look all that different. As the war went on, the units became more and more formed by Northerners anyway and by 1972 the VC Main force units were indistinguishable from the PAVN. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 12:28
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Vietnam Rumor of War Season 6 - A really poorly improvised movie script So, if the neighboring countries are so badly handled, how about what the US is doing in Vietnam itself. I've made a picture illustrating the US strategic options and constraints, which I think will be very illustrative of the design here.  As you might know before, this game has scripted arrivals and withdrawals of units. It even has strictly required adherence to corps boundaries. But it lets you choose your strategic stance during a turn, right? Well, yes, you have choices. Unfortunately, this is a bandaid on a design that already failed. Because of the poor choice of map/unit scale, Starkweather has a very difficult time coming up with mechanics that reflect the things happening on the map very well, so to get the feeling of 'Vietnam' back, he tries to throw in these strategic stances. I'll get to the Communist ones in another update, but i'd like to dive into how the US options work because I think they're very emblematic both of how uninteresting they are design-wise and how ahistorical they are. One thing to note before I begin is that the main flaw with all of these is that they presume that the US will be doing the same thing with every unit throughout the whole country. In reality, almost everything simulated in these missions(except US offensives) happened at the same time. The US conducted search and destroy missions, counterinsurgency programs, and improved the ARVN all at the same time, and did it throughout the leadership of all of the commanders of MACV(Military Assistance Command- Vietnam, the overall US command for Vietnam). The Marines might be trying combined action platoons in Binh Dinh while the 196th Light Infantry Brigade conducts search and destroy in Tay Ninh while the ARVN 1st Infantry gets its small arms upgraded. I get what's trying to be done here with the choices, but they just don't map to much. Search and Destroy This is the primary US mission through the Westmoreland period. The option about detaching battalions is important because given the poor match between map scale and unit scale, it's the only way for the US to defend anything while attacking the NLF forces. Because of the game mechanics, it's very difficult to actually accomplish much with these ops, which is probably the only realistic thing about this. Search and destroy really was a flawed operational plan, based mostly on Westmoreland trying to accelerate the process that was happening. What typically happened is that the US forces would go in, clear some caches out, maybe engage NLF forces, but the NLF troops could easily avoid or disengage from these operations, and the cache finds were of fleeting use- while this might temporarily disrupt supply in an area, without getting at the units that were making the caches, these were replaceable. The times when NLF forces were actually vulnerable were when they were going on the offensive. Near Tay Ninh in 1966, the US almost caught one of the cache-laying units after a mis-timed offensive by the 9th VC Main Force division drew enormous interest from US forces that nearly cut off the retreat of the 82nd Rear Services group. Unfortunately, the US wasn't quite sure what they were after and this valuable unit slipped through their grasp. I don't think this option as far as the game is concerned is that flawed, except that it's exclusive with the others. Hearts & Minds I uh.. what? So the US and ARVN basically engage in an absolute ceasefire and somehow the VC recruits less and US unrest goes down. I think GMT's(the wargame publisher) COIN series of games has a flawed and simplistic model of insurgency, but this is much much worse. It barely even registers as anything real. I don't think Starkweather gave a poo poo when he farted this option out the door. So, there's a lot of speculation about whether the US could've pursued a more counter-insurgent approach during the war, and I think that's asking the wrong question. The US did pursue a variety of COIN approaches throughout the war, from Special Forces-directed CIDG(Civilian Indigenous Defense Groups, paramilitary formations made up of rural populations in Vietnam, often ethnic minorities) to US Marine Combined Action Platoons, where they would mix a squad with a Popular Forces militia platoon in a village. The problem is, these deployments are quite vulnerable to attack. The Marines were able to do what they did en masse because Binh Dinh wasn't under big unit threat, as such dispersed units would prove easy targets for large scale offensives. Vietnam posed a complicated question in terms of military/political approaches because it had aspects of both problems there. There was no shortage of literature on counterinsurgency, and the problem was not that the US didn't know how to fight insurgents, but more they weren't really sure how to fight the NLF effectively. It's quite possible they never really learned, and were fortunate that Le Duan, the leading figure of North Vietnamese politics liked to push the issue, and launch offensives himself, believing that victory was around the corner, with just one more good push(Sound familiar?). Offensive This is pretty much for if the Chinese intervene. There's not really that much of a reason to use this stance without that circumstance. Once the Chinese come in, the US is locked in this stance though it costs no supply any more. It's a full on shooting war, just like the Korea game and Fulda gap game. Yee haw. Vietnamization So, much like Hearts and Minds, this suffers terribly from being mutually exclusive with other options as well as being a misunderstanding of what Vietnamization really was. Vietnamization was a political approach to the war, not a stark change in US policy toward improving ARVN. It was Nixon's strategy of peace with honor, or barring that, disengagement with a good excuse. The first part is, as seen in the last update, an expansion of the war to cut off NLF supply lines in order to buy some peace and quiet to withdraw. Unfortunately for Nixon, what happened is that withdrawal of troops took on a momentum beyond his control and he felt the need to disengage more quickly than Abrams wanted. The US had been working to improve the ARVN since its formation in the 1950s. The idea that this should be locked to one option or have nothing to do with US troop withdrawal is absurd. The fact that Westmoreland can't do the option that improves ARVN is hilarious, too, though i guess somewhat forgivable if you try to look at his strategy in broad strokes, but the US was working on their forces regardless. It's just the assistance activities kicked into overdrive when the US stopped doing search and destroy missions in 1969. As I said before, I think a better game would look to put these dichotomies into the basic mechanics of the game somehow, the way Vietnam: 1965-75 did. Nick Karp added the actual pressures driving the US into Vietnamization without ever mentioning it anywhere in the game. That's what good game design looks like. There are significant flaws in that game, but there's a unified kind of systematic design that is completely missing in this thing. Instead what these strategic options are doing is force-feeding the flavor of the war onto basic game mechanics that don't suit it. It's a scripted game that doesn't even have the script right. There is in fact a game called Hearts and Minds, that while scripted, has a more accurate script than this game and takes about 4 hours between two knowledgable players. This game takes far longer and offers even less freedom than that game to enact a strategy. Oh, and the US does have commander in chief changes, though they're on a timeline by US unrest instead of the turn track. There's a slight amount of player agency here, but not much. It feels like a half-baked addition. There were changes between the approaches of these men, yes, but isn't it the job of the player to run things in a game? Remember, US and ARVN troop, air group, armor, artillery, and helicopter arrivals and departures are all on strict schedules in this game. The player has no input on this important facet, but they do get to decide when the C in C changes. Also, as a side note, HQ missions is a really weird term for these as they have nothing to do with HQs in game. Next up- Part 7, the NLF - What if I told you it could be even less interesting?
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Feb 27, 2021 01:09
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Maxwell Lord posted:The 'Nam game just makes me wonder what the designer's interest even was. Like- he didn't have to make a Vietnam war game, or he could just make one about the air war if that's the one thing he's interested in. I think he decided to make a Vietnam game long before he realized just what an undertaking that would be. The Korea game before this was half-assed, but at least it kinda had a way of working. The Doomsday Project, a series of games about a Cold War gone hot seems to be him doing something he's more interested in. You're right, though, that most of the mechanics that aren't air combat, land combat, and units moving around are very perfunctory- sometimes a few anecdotes strung together but they capture almost nothing but minutiae. The presence of US troops has no effect on the formation of VC units, but you can send in special forces to rescue POWs from the Hanoi Hilton. Picking a full 10 years of a complex war is an incredible challenge to model, and in almost every case, it seems Starkweather chose the most minimum possible thing that gets at the flavor. You'll see more of this in the next update when I talk about the Communist player's HQ stances. Yes, you will have to choose between having your troops able to evade and having them able to infiltrate for the season-long turn. Don't ask me why.
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Feb 27, 2021 22:43
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Part 7, the NLF - What if I told you it could be even less interesting? There's a lot of talk about reducing games to their interesting decisions. I think this is reasonable, though sometimes taken a bit too far. Adam Starkweather has chosen the worst of all worlds- a series of reductive decisions that don't reflect any of the genuine give-and-take opportunities either side had, and it comes up with as vengeance for the Communist HQ stances.  Much like with the US options, most of these things were not mutually exclusive. A good game would try to reflect the ability of main force VC units to recruit in the south, infiltrate, attack, and evade often during the same season. This capability could be degraded, and it was, but the game really doesn't have any kind of systematic mechanism for it. It's just if you do the Tet Offensive(that's what the General Uprising is representing), the VC units no longer spawn. This is historically accurate, in that the series of Tet Offensives, the attrition associated, and the Phoenix Program's targeted intelligence-gathering and assassinations did a number on the NLF's ability to put main force VC units into the theatre and have them be combat effective, but it just sort of happens, rather than being anything the US player has to do. I could go into each of the choices in detail, but i'll focus on the important aspects instead and focus down on some broken mechanics. For example, the infiltrate stance allows the Communist player to march VC units of any size in or adjacent to towns or cities and launch free airfield strikes for each unit adjacent. This means that it is quite trivial for the communist player to ground any air units trying to operate out of South Vietnam, which means the entire USAF except those flying from Thailand. This is a very clear indication that no one actually playtested this game. Any buffoon playing the campaign would've seen the trivial opportunity and there's simply not enough units on the map compared to the map scale to guard all the hexes that would need to be guarded. Because this game does very little to differentiate units, the VC spawns in based on random chance- do their cadres randomly spawn other cadres which drastically increases the rate by which VC units spawn in, or do things go slowly? The only concession to the Communist player needing to hold territory to be able to recruit for the main force units is that cadres do need to be in certain kinds of hexes to spawn random VC units unless the recruit stance is chosen. The worst aspect of this to me is that it really doesn't map to how things really worked at all. It's just a really simplistic system that Starkweather threw in to make them different. It is hard to model semi-conventional units in this kind of game, but if you're going to do the Vietnam War, you have to have some idea about how to do it.  Thanks, Adam. As for the offensives, they are the one thing that kinda do need to be there. NLF operations were somewhat cyclical and the nature of how main force VC and PAVN units worked meant that they needed to prepare for offensives. The need for preparation and to move supplies also meant they didn't do offensives during the monsoons generally, even if they would've reduced US airpower. Le Duan chose deliberately to engage in offensive action including large scale offensives until 1969, somewhat due to his own underestimation of the US position in the country as well as what the Chinese were asking of him. This came to a head in 1970 and he became much more gunshy about offensives, avoiding small scale operations like the "mini-Tet" attacks and focusing on huge, well-prepared pushes, culminating in the 1972 Easter Offensive and the 1975 Offensive. This, combined with the peace talks, did not please the Chinese. Unfortunately, most games do not generally do a great job of capturing this offensive spirit in the North Vietnamese government and mostly think of it exclusively in terms of Tet. Those of you who've preordered GMT's Vietnam: 1965-1975 may be a bit unpleasantly surprised by the old historiography on display, even though that game, I think, has a great sense of design and systems. As we get to the conclusion of this review, I hope the reader comes out with a good understanding of the missed opportunities to say anything, really, to have game mechanics for all of these things that get played at. It is very difficult to get all of these things in a game with a lower complexity and game length, but this game is much too long to say it's excluding things for brevity's sake. Even very complex games often miss these. There's a reason I don't think we really have a definitive Vietnam game to look at and easily recommend the way, say, Paths of Glory exists for World War I. The war was just too complex and the history is still in the process of being worked on.  The game has time for this, but can't figure out an interesting way for VC units to interact with the rest of the board. You've seen this image before, but it's just emblematic of a game that is designed with someone who is completely checked out on the subject. Next Up - Part 8, the Bitter end.
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Mar 1, 2021 01:22
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JcDent posted:I think there's a "not" missing somewhere in there, no? I do think that was an awkward paragraph, and probably should have gone into more detail about what I meant. "Yes, a prolonged war. You should prepare to fight a prolonged war, but isn’t it better if the war is shortened?" is a quote from Mao to Le Duan in 1970. Le Duan had been trying to shorten the prolonged war for the past six years at least and this discussion is a start in the strategic rift between North Vietnam and China. The NLF certainly didn't sit out the whole time before the Tet offensive, though there was an offensive lull in 1967 to prepare for Tet. Grab Their Belts is a good summary of what the NLF was trying to do in the first two years of US involvement in the war, and it wasn't laying low or slow infiltration, but they genuinely thought they were going to be able to inflict a serious defeat on US forces. Also the game incorrectly puts both Giap and An as leaders of the North Vietnamese war effort- Giap was a figurehead at this point, mostly marginalized from real power. An seemed picked out of a hat because he was present at Ia Drang and got a corps command for the 1975 offensive. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Mar 1, 2021 |
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Mar 1, 2021 12:03
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:That book looks really interesting! Any other recommendations for updated scholarship using Vietnamese sources? Hanoi's War is a good book, if a bit dry, about the political structure of the North Vietnamese government and how it went about fighting the war at a strategic level.
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Mar 1, 2021 12:36
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Halloween Jack posted:I accept that I could play GURPS and not use all those rules. But I could also just play a game that doesn't have them? Like, what's the draw of the core system? Is 3d6 roll-under the most elegant bell curve or something? It's reasonably elegant, the thing about GURPS is if you have something in particular that you want, it's more of an RPG construction kit than an RPG itself. It puts a lot of work on the person running it to really adjust things to what they want. It comes from an era when RPG designers tried to quantify exactly how a fight between Captain America and the Flash would go(please do not provide answers to this), and assign points to these things, and GURPS is a somewhat generic-fied version of that.
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Jun 25, 2021 14:37
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SkyeAuroline posted:You also don't even have to use all of one book! The earlier bare essentials is still more than the actual core; you have four stats, roll 3d6 to roll under your stats. Everything on top of that - even the player-facing point system, thanks to templates and lenses - is purely optional. Just because it exists in the same book as options you're using doesn't mean it has to show up. Yeah if someone wanted to do GURPS and wasn't very specific in what they were doing to the point of doing a lot of limiting in character creation, creating packages of advantages for things, etc, I would not do it. GURPS is a construction kit, imo, playing it straight out of the books is just boring a f, at that point yeah i'd rather play d&d where i can just pick 'elf' rather than working on the advantages/disadvantages of being an elf in GURPS.
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Jun 25, 2021 15:48
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PurpleXVI posted:My memory of GURPS is that 90% of the crunch is during chargen and figuring out all the derived values and what you can actually buy due to loving cost modifiers loving things up, but then if you actually manage to kick your way through that and have a sheet full of those values, the actual gameplay is notably less crunchtastic. It's a lot like Mongoose traveller in that regard. Chargen is practically a minigame in and of itself, but the way the game works is actually really simple. And yeah, GURPS can be even simpler if the DM does some homework before to make packages and structures for chargen for the campaign they're trying to make instead of having the players manage the whole catalog of things to buy with points. PoontifexMacksimus posted:In my experience, GURPS is never the best choice for RPGing anything, but sometimes for specific subgenres its the only choice And yeah, a friend of mine is working on a GURPS fantasy game that could probably be done fine in Worlds Without Number but he doesn't want to go through searching for the right retroclone type fantasy game for what he wants.
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Jun 26, 2021 11:21
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SkyeAuroline posted:See, that's all well and good. The UA combat intro is one of those RPG passages that if I played in person, I'd print off and include in a handout of "this is how my games work". Inherently unbalanced combat isn't a bad thing. Yeah, Traveller kind of has this problem, too. It's difficult to find a NPC statline that you can throw together if a group of PCs wants to, say, get in a shootout with the cops. Through experience i can rough up a 7s across the board, gun combat 1, etc to handle it, but yeah, it's a weakness in that kind of game not to have a bunch of good statlines to use for enemies. The problem with CR in traveller is basically the game can spit out supremely competent special forces operators as well as doofy ship crewman who can barely avoid shooting themselves with a pistol.
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Jul 8, 2021 23:00
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I'm pondering another wargame but i haven't decided what i want to riff on quite yet.
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Jul 26, 2021 23:53
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I think, ever since i learned GURPS and kinda know how it does things, i've felt it to be really good at cyberpunk type settings if you just work out exactly what cyber-augmentation is doing to use for advantages- it fits right in, and doesn't come baked with assumptions like the things sapping humanity or magic or whatever. And GURPS is really good for combat where people shoot guns at each other, especially compared to other games trying to be tactilol about it. This is probably a cliche, though. There are definitely things GURPS does badly, but a crunchy near-future game is not one of them.
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Jan 31, 2022 22:42
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Kurieg posted:The problem is that The Dunkelzhan's legacy thing is a loving goldmine for poo poo like that. "Oh welp you tripped some weird escape clause in the dragon president's will, here's 50 gazillion bucks to do that thing you've always wanted to do." But they've never really done that. Instead using it for just a bunch of vague references and digs at people. I think my main problem with Shadowrun is that they just kinda dropped the fantasy stuff into the real world so they could economize on a lot of world building instead of actually building a near-future version of a fantasy world, but that was how it was done in the 90s, i suppose.
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Feb 2, 2022 12:26
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't think that I like Warhammer for the same reasons Warhammer fans do. What I liked about WFRP is that it's consciously styled after the early modern period with a bit more social realism than your standard D&D campaign setting. I'm not one of those folks who thinks D&D is best when everyone is a Level 1 Shitfarmer with 1 HP who dies from eating a dodgy pie, but I do prefer a world populated with farmers and tailors and rag-and-bone-men, and so on. Yeah, this is a really good summation of my feelings about warhammer(and GW properties in general)- that's probably the better part of WFRP, not, the skulls, spikes, shoulderpads, and memes. But it's the latter that sells, i guess.
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Feb 17, 2022 18:22
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